Schedule Viewer A Scheduling Tool for UBC Okanagan Administration Jacob Orr Dr. Ramon Lawrence Bachelor of Science Honours Project.

ScheduleViewerA Scheduling Tool for UBC Okanagan Administration

Jacob Orr

Dr. Ramon Lawrence

Bachelor of Science Honours Project

ScheduleViewer – Introduction

• Motivation

• Basic System Usage

• Meeting Time Usage Example

• Implementation Details

• User Feedback

• Demonstration

• Conclusions

ScheduleViewer – Motivation

• Faculty Scheduling

• Currently difficult and tedious

• Forced to sift through spreadsheets

• Manually pull information from internet

• Multiple Schedules

• Difficult to coordinate more than one schedule

• Necessary to schedule meetings or detect conflicts

• Solution

• Microsoft Outlook add-in

• Intuitive interface to access scheduling information

• Useful for faculty and administrators

ScheduleViewer – Main Form

• Allows the user to search for classes by professor, subject code, room number and many other criteria.

• In this example the user is checking when classroom SCI 396 is available during the week.

ScheduleViewer – Calendar

• Imported schedules are displayed as appointments in a Microsoft Outlook calendar.

• In this example blank spaces in the calendar show the times SCI 396 is available.

ScheduleViewer – Meeting Time

• Meeting Scheduling

• Inter-departmental meetings

• Challenging to find time for everyone

• Schedule Viewer provides an easy solution

• Example

• Meeting of all faculty in Computer Science and Psychology

ScheduleViewer – COSC Import

ScheduleViewer – PSYO Import

ScheduleViewer – Implementation

• Client Application

• Microsoft Outlook add-in

• Possible to add appointments and to edit shared calendars

• Query Building

• Client queries sent to server in simplified form

• Queries translated into Microsoft SQL form using a best path algorithm

• Data Retrieval

• Class data used to populate the database

• Data retrieved from UBC Student Services web site

• Screen scraper uses HTML parser to interpret information

ScheduleViewer – System Abstract

ServerServer

Outlook(client application)

Outlook(client application)

DatabaseDatabase UBC WebUBC Web

Simplified query

timeblock response

schedule information(as required)

SQL queryfiltered timeblocks

ScheduleViewer – Screen Scraper

ScheduleViewer – Database

ScheduleViewer – User Feedback

• Beta testers were a great help in developing the Schedule Viewer system

• Jan Paseska, Unit 4 Administrative Assistant:

“The Schedule Viewer program makes the viewing of multiple schedules a simple task.  It is a huge timesaver for someone in my position who is always juggling schedules and times in order to schedule meetings, speakers and other activities.  The choices given for determining the schedules are practical and allow for different uses of the program.  All in all I think it’s a practical program which will be very useful to support staff.”

ScheduleViewer – Demonstration

Demonstration

ScheduleViewer – Conclusions

• The Schedule Viewer System was constructed to provide a simple, easy to use scheduling solution for administrators at UBC Okanagan

• Benefits and Applications

• Classroom selection

• Meeting scheduling

• Course schedule planning

• Conflict detection

• Schedule sharing

• Future Work

• Class creation

• Build class planning spreadsheet

ScheduleViewer – Jacob Orr

Questions?