Meeting Schedule Generator

Index:

Abstract
Calendar
Project Development
Findings and Contributions
Links and References
Return to Europa

Abstract:

Originally supposed to be simply an on-line program to generate convenient Europa meeting times, it was shown that its utility could be expanded slightly and serve a much broader audience around the university. This project is developing that generator to be easily used by individuals all over the university to aid them in scheduling meetings around the aggregate schedules of a group of people.

Calendar:

• 10:30 AM - 11:18 AM, Thursday, March 29, 2001: Europa Presentation

Project Development:

This project went through some rapid development in its beginning. The tool is available now and ready for use at:


http://www.tedpavlic.com/europa/schedule/

Major changes to the user interface were made after the first meeting. Its interface is pretty much finished, except that it ONLY WORKS IN MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER. More research needs to be done on what sort of hooks need to be added to make it work in Netscape.

It is currently being used fairly actively by the Freshman Engineering Honors program to schedule lab training times for FEH TAs and by Engineer's Council to schedule officer meetings.

Once it is fully functional in Netscape, it will most likely be adopted by Europa for scheduling of quarterly meeting times.

Documentation may need to be done, though the interface seems to be fairly intuitive in these field tests.

Findings and Contributions:

This has been a major exercise in on-line web user interface as well as calendar/scheduler design. At many points in the development of this tool, it was determined that perhaps some of my original design goals aimed to do far more than what was needed and would end up complicating the tool more than advancing its feature set.

Simply providing a tool which can organize information may actually be far better than providing a tool which can attempt to do all work for the user.

Links and References:

• The Scheduler
• PHP: The Language Used
• MySQL: The Database Backend Used

  Return to Europa