Conflict detection & availability

Knowhere’s scheduling engine exists to answer one question before it becomes a problem at the booth: can this meeting actually happen? It checks every proposed meeting against your team’s real availability and warns you the moment something collides.

Who it’s for: everyone. It runs wherever meetings are created or moved. Managers see conflicts across the whole team, and team members protect their own time by keeping their availability current.

What counts as a conflict

When you create or edit a meeting, Knowhere checks the proposed time against:

Double-booked people: a team attendee is already in another meeting that overlaps.
Double-booked Spaces: the physical room is already taken. Virtual Spaces (Zoom, Teams) are deliberately exempt. Any number of meetings can share them.
Space capacity: more attendees than the room holds.
Personal availability: the time falls in a slot the person marked unavailable.
Arrival and departure: the meeting is before someone lands or after they leave. (“Arrives Tuesday” on a Monday meeting.)
Personal Time: the slot collides with someone’s travel, lunch, or break block.
Blocked external time: the slot collides with a calendar block imported from someone’s outside calendar (see below).

Warn, don’t block

Conflicts are advisory: event scheduling is messy, and sometimes the double-book is intentional. When a conflict is found, Knowhere shows exactly who and what collides, suggests alternative open times, and lets you either fix the time or schedule anyway, in which case the meeting is saved as tentative so it’s visibly unresolved on the schedule until someone sorts it out.

The one hard stop is Space capacity: Knowhere won’t book 12 people into a 6-person room.

Where conflicts surface

While you’re composing a meeting: the add/edit form checks availability live as you pick times and attendees, with one-click alternative time suggestions.
On the meeting itself: a meeting with an unresolved conflict shows a conflict card naming the clash, with a link to the other meeting.
On meeting lists: the event’s Meetings view counts and flags conflicted meetings.
Ask the Know It All: “any conflicts on Thursday?” gets you the day’s collisions in chat.

Setting availability

Each team member controls their own availability per event from My Availability: set your arrival and departure dates, then fine-tune with a per-day time-slot grid for anything else (early flights, dinners, booth shifts). Managers set their own availability the same way from the event sidebar.

Everything downstream respects it: manager scheduling, conflict checks, and your public booking pages.

Public booking and availability

Your public booking pages offer time slots computed from the event’s operating hours, the team member’s arrival/departure window, and their marked-unavailable slots. Incoming requests then get a full conflict check when a manager reviews and approves them. The approval form is the same conflict-aware form used for any meeting, so a request that collides with something booked in the meantime is caught before it lands on the schedule.

Blocking time from your outside calendar

Life doesn’t stop for the event: internal syncs, investor dinners, flights. To keep those from being booked over, forward the calendar invite (from Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar) to your Knowhere inbox address. Knowhere reads the invite and blocks that time on your availability:

The block is private busy time: it shows on your own Today timeline with an “External” tag, and scheduling treats you as busy, but it never appears as a meeting on the event schedule.
Forwarding an updated invite updates the block. Forwarding a cancellation frees the time.
You can delete a block yourself from your timeline.
Each forwarded invite blocks a single occurrence. Recurring series aren’t expanded, so forward the specific occurrences that matter.