At a meeting this last week, a coworker expressed frustration over how labor intensive it is to schedule student employees. You have to ask them to give you a printout of their class schedule, and then manually wade through them all to figure out who can fill what shifts. Then create a “pretty” Excel document that shows the schedule for everyone.
So, during that meeting while everyone was talking about something else, I started looking around for a good solution to this issue. The first thing I came across was Employee Scheduler. Which after setting up and testing, seems pretty cool. Biggest things would be:
Pros:
- LDAP access (though, doesn’t handle multiple LDAP uid’s correctly)
- Allows students to set preferences (say, they CAN work at 8am, but it’s not preferred).
- Self Hosted (php/mysql (AMP))
- Designed for scheduling student employees
Cons:
- Code hasn’t been touched since 2004
- No Timeclock functionality
The second one I came across, that I didn’t bother installing, was Employee Scheduling System (ESS). I attempted to install this, but got errors on the .sql import that I didn’t really want to pursue due to, like the above: the code hasn’t been touched since 2005.