Hi Everyone - I guess some folks had some troubles opening the attachment. It's MS Word - I believe the 2000 edition. Anyway - here are the replies again - w/o attachment. Summary of Scheduling Software: http://www.greathill.com http://www.webevent.com http://www.math.utexas.edu/webcalendar/ http://www.linuxquebec.com/~nomis80/chronos/ http://www.neosystem.com/wcal/ There is a free site - www.calsnet.net - That has free web-based calendars, Very easy to set up and administer, and you even get to choose the name of the calendar, so it will "fit" your facility. You set a login name and Password, and can set whether or not you want users to be able to change all Or none of the entries. Also, you can choose to get emails when things are added/deleted/changed, so as to avoid those canceling at the last minute. Sometimes, you cannot access the server, a "problem" that would no doubt be rectified by purchasing a site from the company, but it happen infrequently, and we have not had to do that for our needs here. Of course, you could always use outlook calendar, but some people don't have this, so that is why we went with a web-based version. I found it very easy to set up and keep track of (and that says a lot coming from a computer dummy such as myself). I know a few of us are using a program from greathill calendars. I love it, as it allows me to allow only those people who I want to give access to the facility. The only thing is that currently is doesn't have a 'rolling' lockout function that lets you lock out, in your case, 5 minutes prior to the appointment. It does allow you to lock out the calendar at a specific time, like 8pm the previous night, or whatever you decide. You will have to either have a server to host it, have your institute host it, or pay to have it hosted through greathill. ($20/month) You can check them out at www.greathill.com Take a look at the software I use to schedule 6 machines. Go to www.greathill.com for their web-based calendar. We had a "lockout" feature added so only an administrator can delete times after a cutoff time - we use 12noon the previous working day. It is user password protected so only the user who schedules time (as well as the administrator) can delete/edit that time. It is very reasonably priced and the guy who wrote it is great to work with. I'll forward a copy of this to him so he will know that I sent you there. (I have no interest in Greathill - I'm only a satisfied customer). We use WebEvent (www.webevent.com) and are very happy with it. It comes with full source code in Perl so if you are real keen you can spend as much or little time as you want tinkering with it! I'm fairly sure it will do a "write once" calendar (I modified our copy so it lets users change appointments up to about 30 mins before they start.) It runs on Unix, Mac, and Windows web servers. It is a commercial program, but the licensing costs are not that bad. You could do multi-user authentication via the web server and just have one "calendar user account", if you wanted to implement a write-once system. I use Webevent to run our calendaring software. Up to 50 laboratories are able to individually sign up for each of our 4 analyzers and 2 sorters, each of which is given an individual calendar. The software can be configured such that for each machine individual users have read-only or write access such that for the sorters for example labs must call the facility to have me sign up for them. Otherwise users can sign up for access time anywhere they have access to the Internet. Individual users can only change or delete time they themselves have signed up for and if you have a facility that is only open during the day for example, then the time of sign-up can be limited for all or individual machines. We're very happy with it but it is pricey. It cost us $1200 for a 50-user site license but you can get smaller site licenses for considerably less. We wanted all labs to have unique access but I suppose you could share passwords among multiple labs if desired. We run it under MAC OSX server. You can view it at webevent.com We have a little section on "ISAC Core managers workshop" If you go to http://iacf.bsd.uchicago.edu/FlowHome/Flow_index.htm and click on the ISAC XX1 core managers workshop icon you can get there and check it out. It is in the section called scheduling tools. By Larry Arnold We use Calendar, which USED to be available from Netscape, but try as I might I can find no direct equivalent on their current web site, i.e. is appears to be no longer supported in the form we have, as a stand alone server, they want you to use their web based services. It's very convenient; just install a module for Netscape on any computer and they are away http://home.netscape.com/download/index.html -- Dägna Solveig Sheerar Manager Flow Cytometry Facility Robarts Research Institute PO Box 5015 100 Perth Drive London, Ontario N6A 5K8 519 663 5777 x 34042 dsheerar@robarts.ca
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