Meeting room booking in MS CRM?

I have been moved to comment on this because I chanced across a couple of whitepaper downloads from Microsoft recently on the subject of Service Scheduling. It is suggested that even large scale companies can consider using MS CRM for their room booking requirements. You can find the performance testing results here. Please look at the type of high-performance hardware they deduce is necessary to meet their 'acceptable' response rates.

It took me back to a project we undertook for a global corporate at the beginning of the century(!). This large company was attempting to use Outlook / Exchange functionality for booking their 80+ meeting rooms. Finding problems, they first banned users from trying to book their own rooms because the network and servers began to get over-stressed with the loading, when in fact being a telecoms company their network bandwidth was enormous! Pretty soon this issue escalated to mission-critical when Exchange servers started dying all around.

So what we did was to decouple the two areas - we developed a web-based employee self-service application which is hosted within their portal, which is not that complex, and uses availability snapshots to present the user with booking choices. The user submits a request and if the resource is still available you get immediate confirmation. The design of the database and stored procedures means double-bookings are impossible.

But now of course there is the ever-present pressure to amalgamate applications with Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) arguments and the emergence of SOA. So what we have done is simply to make our room booking system accessible 'through' the MS CRM sitemap. Take a look at the first draft of a solution we can provide. And remember, you will not risk your CRM system becoming sluggish and unresponsive, but you will have an optimised solution for your business issue, which is accessible from anywhere and you won't have to buy user licenses just for users to access room booking.

If there is demand I can see a case for configuring the system using MS CRM entities, but I strongly believe that the 'booking engine' should remain optimised for its specific purpose. I'm looking to test the demand for a powerful quite inexpensive solution accessible through the add-in route, and would appreciate comments.