Problem

Users who have the capability to edit Seminar events are able to create rooms and also publish them for reuse in other events.

This can lead to duplication of rooms which have the same name because there is no validation against the room name and causes problems when trying to locate the correct room when creating future events.

This means rooms can be overbooked without notice because two users may create the same room 'on the fly' which may cause conflicts.

Rooms can be deleted, but only if they are not linked to an event, which makes it a cumbersome task when trying to update events to the correct room and remove the duplicate ones.

User-stories

As a site administrator or user with permission, I want to to be able prevent users from being able to create an ad-hoc room in a Seminar event so rooms are not duplicated.

As an organisation we want to ensure only one version of a room exists within the platform so we can use Totara to manage room availability effectively.

Proposed solutions

Create a capability which prevents creation of ad-hoc rooms in Seminar events, which would reduce the risk of duplication. Rooms can be administered at a global level, which wouldn't remove the problem with duplication completely, however it would help reduce it because room creation is more tightly controlled due to users not typically having access to create rooms at a global level.

Highlight when a room already exists and present the user with the existing room to manually check if they are the same.