* NetSimplicity's Resource Scheduler
Scheduling resources in an organization is usually aggravating. Often there’s one person in each location who deals with conference rooms while another might manage equipment. So if your organization has, say, three locations arranging a series of meetings, spanning the locations to find available times could involve a ridiculous number of e-mail exchanges and phone calls.
The advantage of Web-based scheduling is that everyone can see and reserve resources from anywhere and the number of e-mail messages and phone calls can be kept to a minimum.
A promising Web-based scheduler is offered by NetSimplicity (see editorial links below) for deployment on your Web server. Called Resource Scheduler the Pro version allows you to view, search for, and reserve resources, send invitations to attendees, group and view all available resources by location, and select services related to a resource (such as maintenance or audio-visual setup) in the same reservation process.
You can let any or all of the people in your organization access the real-time scheduling and users can submit resource requests that you then confirm based on your internal priorities. You can define multiple staff access levels and monitor resource usage through built-in reports.
An optional form designer allows you to customize the entire scheduling process and reservation for your organization (NetSimplicity claims that this can be done without any technical or programming knowledge) with an unlimited number of categories (e.g., resource type, dimensions, weight, etc.) and create user-defined fields to capture specific information.
The Enterprise version includes the forms designer tool and support for Polyvision video conferencing. It also includes a Deployment Services Package that provides implementation, customization, and training, which is an additional purchase with the Pro version.
Implementation requires a server with a minimum of a Pentium III, 100M-bytes of available hard-drive space, 512M-bytes of RAM running Windows 2000/2003 Server with Microsoft IIS 5.0/6.0, Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 and SQL Server 2000.
This is another product that demonstrates Web applications vendors’ increased focus in creating good-looking, well-designed, and well-featured user interfaces as a central goal. And the sophisticated customization options makes it possible to modify the Resource Scheduler to fit in with the look and feel of your intranet or public Web server.
Pricing for the Pro version starts at $3,500. The Enterprise version is priced by quotation. Note that there’s also a desktop (that is, non Web application) version.
