Online Coworking Spaces Management & Booking System

Abstract

Coworking spaces are an emerging trend around the world serving startups and companies that require a temporary or a flexible office space for a reasonable price. With the need for coworking spaces developing in Sri Lanka, this study is aimed to provide an online one-stop platform to book and rent out coworking spaces with ease. The study identified several problems with the prevailing booking system of the coworking space providers. Several companies which offer coworking spaces use a manual system to take bookings and few of the companies that have an online platform, do not have a well-organized system to manage their day to day activities. Furthermore, customers who want to book coworking spaces are faced with the difficulty of visiting each individual company websites to make their bookings as there is no one single platform for users to browse through all the possible spaces at once. With the objective to overcome the above issues and to increase the productivity of the existing systems, a detailed study was conducted on the manual system, and on the individual online systems used by some of the companies. Based on the detailed study, an online coworking space management and booking system was designed to address the identified issues. The system was developed using the CodeIgniter framework using PHP, MySQL and Bootstrap. Furthermore, this system adheres to the Xtreme Programming methodology, which was well suited for this project. Based on the post-development evaluations, the system received satisfactory client responses and clients were willing to go live with the website. Thus, the primary objective of the study was achieved successfully. The system facilitates the coworking space owners to advertise the type of spaces they offer along with a booking management system for their systems while customers can browse all the different types of spaces and book it for the day and time they want via single platform. However, the system requires further development in areas of performance and usability of the website and integrating an online payment feature to accommodate users to make payments with ease. These changes are expected to be done in sprints and can be released to live in the future, making the designed system on par with International Standards.