Rota system?

[invision2]

Hi,

I've been asked to look into building/installing a Rota system and wondered if I could get a few pointers.

I suppose it would work like a calendar, but with multiple categories for each day as there are many departments.
And each 'day' may have to include multiple entries(different people working at different parts of the day) .
Each entry may have to be categorised(urgent, high, medium, low).

Can anyone point me in the right direction for something that would work like this?

I'd prefer it to be a open source PHP, MySQL solution.

I probably could built it myself, but obviously it's sometimes quicker to just plug in and tweak an existing setup.



Thanks again.

[AnthonySterling]

Have you thought about utilising the Google Calendar API for this? It would make the scheduling a lot easier me thinks...

[invision2]

Hey Anthony, good call.

It's for a client which has multiple departments, and within that multiple employees. Only really talking 100 employees or so, but still fairly high volumes.

Is there much to doing it with the API? I'm guessing so

[AnthonySterling]

Is there much to doing it with the API? I'm guessing so

Certainly a lot less than doing it all yourself, plus you have the added benefit of being able to use an already existing library, say, Zend_G* for example.

I'm really 'genned-up' on it, but it's worth a look.

[invision2]

Yikes, looks pretty terrifying. I'm going to have a think over of it.

Thanks again for the helpers.

[Cups]

Some more questions really.

Is this rota meant to have 1 or more 'admin' -ers who set tasks and their priority levels?

Do they need Department only views? or global views?

Does it have to be shared amongst many 'users' who are supposed to access their own calendar view?

- are they all on an intranet with browser access?
- do they need/want mobile access to the calendar?

Are the users meant to be notified of when a task has been allocated, or do they nominate themselves for a task (or both)?

Nailing these questions, or coming out with concrete examples (however contrived) will help illustrate your challenges, and hopefully some solutions.

I'd agree with Anthony that Google Cal could have a place in your solution, even if its only to share the output with ical standard output - but certainly there is a plethora of solutions encapsulated into it.

Do your all your users have Google accounts though?

[invision2]

By the sounds of it, there will probably just be 1 or 2 who can add, edit and remove tasks.

I think it'll be a global view. And in each department you've got a few sub-departments e.g. Main: Cardiac(Theatre 1, 2, 3), Thoracic(Theatre 1, 2) etc...

It will be shared amongst many users.

Days of Week | Monday | Tuesday
Cardiac Theatre 1 | Pete | Dave
Cardiact Theatre 2 | Dave | Pete

No notifications needed as far as I know.

I don't imagine all the users would have Google Accounts. Could be that 'extra step' they don't want to do


Thanks for helping to drill down the spec. Oh, and congrats on creeping over the 4k posts mark Wait up

[Dr John]

You could look at a working rota system perhaps, to get ideas - www.dutyman.biz offers a free trial you could play with.

[Cups]

Did you try sourceforge yet?

www.sourceforge.net

Search for "Schedule" (~500 results) then choose "Filter" and adjust the form to say
require | programming language | PHP (93 results).

Make a shortlist of about between 3-10 which look hopeful, check the activity on the account, the last edits, if they have a site, look at the licence etc, and if cool - download them and see if/how they match your requirements.

On the face of it your requirements are pretty simple, am pretty sure we could help you with stuff.

Try and absolutely nail the spec before you go too much further, did you create a simple wireframe of the screens with the DMUs (Decision Making Units) yet? Have you spoken to one or two of the real users? [their POVs may not match].

Off Topic:

God, 4000 posts - a serious addiction. (thats not counting the old SP personas I dumped)

[invision2]

Hey Cups.

Tried SourceForge. There was one that seemed perfect for a Hospital in Thailand, but unfortunately it doesn't have an English translation and there's only so many re-runs of Sia Dai I can watch

This also seemed quite decent http://supercali.inforest.com/demo_calendar/ but I may need to tweak it to work.

Going to write a quick spec of essentials/desirables and see if I should build it myself


Thanks again for the help.