phpScheduleIt

At the J-School, we loan out tons of equipment to students and faculty – still and video cameras, projectors, laptops, minidisc recorders, microphones, etc. We’ve long struggled to find ways to keep track of everything, and to prevent items and rooms from being double-booked. There are a bunch of commercial apps out there (like ye olde Meeting Maker) designed for resource scheduling, but they’re expensive, and we’re dealing with a deep UC budget crunch.

Last week I went looking for open source solutions – just knew there had to be a free equivalent of Meeting Maker out there. Found and tried several, but settled on phpScheduleIt. We’re blown away. This app is of such high quality – cleanly designed, object-oriented, manages unlimited numbers of schedules (so we can have one for multimedia skills students, one for the radio program, one for faculty, one for booking classrooms, etc.), fine-grained permissions system… And because it’s written in PHP, I’ve been able to hack out a few features that didn’t suit our needs. Slowly but surely, I’m going to automate myself out of a job (yeah, right).

Students are back in full force and we’ve hit the ground running — yet another summer passes without touching 95% of my to-do list.

Music: The Pogues :: 5 Green Queens And Jean

5 Replies to “phpScheduleIt”

  1. hello … would be interested to know what sources you used in your search for open source … we recently set up dispatx art collective and as you can imagine are operating within standard budget constraints … any help would be appreciated

  2. Hi dispatx – I just went to sourceforge.net – the motherlode of open source projects – and searched on terms like “meeting” “resource”, “scheduler” etc.

  3. Hi, I’d appreciate a quick summary of how you approached the equipment borrowing setup of phpScheduleIt. I’ve configured (what is now) Booked Scheduler for managing our recording studio bookings and it’s great but upon attempting to incorporate our equipment booking process too I’ve drawn a blank.

    Are you using accessories? I’d hoped to have a different schedule which people could book accessories with but then only one person can borrow an accessory per day!

    Any help greatly appreciated, I’m not afraid of attacking the config file or modifying php but I’ve done this via trial and error so far rather than any skill base so if this required your php prowess to achieve I understand it was likely quite a task.

    Thanks,
    Chris.

  4. Chris, sorry, but it’s been 12 years since I wrote that post – ancient history and I’m sure it was a very different version from what’s available today. And my memory is hazy :)

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