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Designing your floor plan

Build out your office's interactive floor plan with Calven's editor suite and wayfinding features

Table of contents

- editing desks

 

Once you’ve created an office in Calven, you can create a floor plan and add resources like desks, meeting rooms, or parking spots for employees to book through the Calven app.

To get started, select an office and navigate to the floor plan tab. Pressing the edit floors button will open draft mode for this office. Any changes you make in draft mode won’t be visible to Calven app users until you publish the draft. If you aren’t ready to publish your changes yet, you can save it for later by pressing close draft.

Creating a floor

When creating a floor, you’ll start out by giving that floor a name and entering the area metric.

Once you’ve created your floor, the next step is to upload a floor plan image - new floors can’t be published until you’ve added a floor plan image. Acceptable formats for a floor plan image include .png and .jpg - if your floor plan is a .dwg or .pdf, you can upload it to Calven by converting it to an image or taking a screenshot of it.

Calven will prompt you to measure a reference distance on the floor plan image in order to ensure that interactive objects you place on the plan (like desks) are scaled as closely as possible to real life. Measuring an accurate distance will help ensure an accurate scale for floor plan objects, and the accuracy of floor usage analytics later on. Measuring a longer distance will also help improve the accuracy.

After you’ve measured and uploaded your floor plan image, Calven will create a simplified digital floor plan to overlay it. Before the digital floor plan is ready, you can start adding objects and resources to the original image.

Editing Floors

At the top of the office draft editor, there are a set of dropdown controls to change the floor or choose which layers (desks, rooms, etc) are visible on the plan while editing. Within draft mode, there are two main ways to make changes…

  1. Visually editing the map

  2. Editing bookable resources via the sidebar

 

Visually adding objects to the floor plan

To visually edit and add objects to the floor plan, there is a separate edit map button. Once you’ve entered edit mode for the map, you’ll be able to place new objects and rearrange/delete existing ones.

In order for desks to be bookable, they need to be linked from the sidebar. See the next section for details.

When editing the map, there are a variety of objects you can add to represent real objects in your office. Desks and Points of Interest (POI) objects on the map can be linked to bookable resources - a Calven user can book a resource when selecting a linked object like a desk. To add an object to the map, simply click it, drag it to where you’d like to place it, and click again to place it.

Tip: when adding desks, drop them next to each other to group together and quickly create longer rows:

 

 

 

Configuring Bookable Desks

While editing floor plan objects allows you to customize the look of your office map, nothing on the floor plan will be bookable for employees until you’ve added and linked bookable resources via the sidebar. Adding desks and neighborhoods will allow employees to book from within the Calven app when they plan to work in the office. 

 

Uploading desks from a spreadsheet

If you haven’t added any desks to the resources sidebar yet, you’ll have the option to create a neighborhood and add each desk from scratch, or upload a CSV spreadsheet with a batch of desks and neighborhoods for this floor. 

If you don’t have a spreadsheet with all your desks yet, you can download the template to help get started. Once you’ve added the names of your desks, the neighborhoods they belong to, and whether or not booking is enabled for each to the spreadsheet, you can re-upload it to load your desks into the resource sidebar.

If there are already desks on your floor and you’d like to edit their properties in bulk, the easiest way to do so is by using the actions button to download a CSV of all desks on the floor, editing the CSV, and then re-import it. When re-importing a CSV full of desks, the Desk ID column is used to match a desk with the previous version and overwrite it. 

When uploading a CSV, you’ll be able to see whether a desk and neighborhood is linked to an existing resource or to create a new one upon upload. Issues with data in the CSV will also be highlighted with error icons:

There are 3 properties you can use to configure the desk from the spreadsheet:

  1. Assigned To

    • The email address of the person who is permanently assigned to this desk. Email address must match the one for that user in Calven. Leave blank if shared desk.

    • When uploading a CSV, you’ll see an error icon in the cell for that desk if the assigned to email address is an email address that does not match a user in the Calven directory.

  2. Amenities

    • Any amenities or traits this desk has. If multiple, separate with commas.

  3. Desk ID

    • Only desks that have been previously exported from Calven will have a desk ID.

    • This is helpful if you need to download all desks on a floor, make batch changes to the spreadsheet, and then re-upload the spreadsheet. Existing desks on the floor will be overwritten by uploaded desks with matching IDs.

 

Neighborhoods

All desks are grouped into neighborhoods. Once you’ve created a neighborhood, you can add/edit the boundary on the map by selecting it on the sidebar and using the draw/redraw button:

Tip: If you redraw a neighborhood to include new desks, Calven will prompt you to add those desks to the neighborhood. If you redraw a neighborhood to exclude desks that were previously included, Calven will prompt you to assign them to another neighborhood.

Neighborhood Properties:

  • Bookings Enabled (on/off)

  • Neighborhood Name

  • Booking Level…

    • Individual desk (employees can book specific desks in this neighborhood)

    • Neighborhood (employees can book space in the neighborhood, but not specific desks)

  • Allow overflow bookings (on/off)

    • This determines whether people who are typically assigned to other neighborhoods are able to book desks here

Desks

To link a desk from the resource sidebar to a desk object on the map, click the link icon on the desk in the sidebar, then click on the corresponding desk on the map. If there are other unlinked desks in the same neighborhood, you will be prompted to link them to map objects as well:

Desk properties

  • Bookings Enabled (on/off)

  • Desk Name

  • Assigned to…

    • Shared - anyone can book this desk

    • Allocated - choose a specific person who will be assigned this desk permanently

      • No other users will be able to book an assigned desk

  • Amenities

    • Any amenities or traits that this desk has (Calven app users will see these)

    • Pressing enter after typing an amenity will save it

    • Saving an amenity will add it to a list of suggested amenities that appears when you’re editing other desk.

  • Neighborhood

    • Which neighborhood this desk is part of

 

Other Bookable Resources

There are several other resource types besides desks in an office. You can switch between resource views using the icons at the top of the sidebar.

Meeting Rooms

Meeting rooms can be added to the resources sidebar to allow employees to book timeslots in them during the day. Once you’ve created a meeting room, you can press draw to draw a boundary for it on the map just like a neighborhood. After publishing the office, Calven app users can select the room on the floor plan to book a meeting.

Meeting Room properties

  • Name

  • Type

  • Capacity

  • Description

  • Amenities

    • Press enter to add an amenity once you’re finished typing

  • Resource Calendar

  • Bookable (Yes/No)

    • If bookable is turned off, Calven app users can view this room, but will not be able to book meeting time in it

  • Minimum Participants Required

    • This determines how many people need to attend a meeting for it to be deemed an efficient use of the room’s capacity

    • For example, if a room has a capacity for 8, and its purpose is to host meetings for 4-8 people, then a smaller room should be used for a meeting where there are 3 people or less attending.

      • Therefore an admin would set the minimum participants to 4, so any meeting of 3 or less would be flagged as inefficient.

    • Users assigned as office managers will receive a monthly email highlighting room use efficiency

 

Parking spaces

Parking spaces are created very similar to desks - each parking space is grouped within a zone, just like desks are grouped into neighborhoods. When configuring a parking zone, you can customize “booking window days” - or how many days in advance employees can book spaces in that zone. Unlike neighborhoods, parking zones cannot be linked to objects on the map. Once you’ve published parking spaces, they will be bookable by users of the Calven app. 

Points of interest

Points Of Interest (POIs) are slightly different than other resources. Unlike the others, POIs can only be added via the POI dropdown in the map editor. There are a variety of different POI icons available, and once they are added as objects to the floor plan, they will appear in the sidebar. Selecting a point of interest in the sidebar will allow you to change the name or add a description for employees to see when they select the POI on the map.