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Web-Based Employee Scheduling?
irksome asks: "I am looking to write an application to replace a legacy system of having people choose their own schedules. The current system involves a large board, with all the available shifts in blocks, and sticky notes with people's names on them. After everyone puts their stickies on the board, some poor soul has to go through manually and type it all into a spreadsheet. I'm wondering if anyone has any sugesstions for replacing this system. The ideal system would have a Web-interface, and it should also be able to generate a printable spreadsheet. Any ideas on how to implement this?"
The unix corollary would be CGI/PHP/JSP and a databse (for something simple like a timesheet a perl cgi system or PHP is probably the least pain, combine with free RDBMS like postgresql or mysql and yer done, with $0 software cost). Both perl and PHP have interfaces to PDF for printing out the final schedule (or just make a web page that views a table in the DB for sched, presumably your cow-orkers are smart enough to use a web browser instead of looking at a printed sheet).
I think the spreadsheet thing comes from the fact most office drones automatically reach for Excel when they're looking at tabular data, regardless if the data requires calculation. :) Of course if you _do_ need calculation (like salary byb hours worked or something), that's just a few more rows or maybe a new table and some simple programming logic to calc and then a bit more formatting to put the result on the output.
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Growth Sector did this a while ago. They have the demo up still. It's under the exhibition link. Pretty neat stuff.
I had thought about this for a class a couple of years ago. Because of other, more pressing demands, I never got around to finishing it. http://www.csee.usf.edu/~black/designs/scheduler.h tml