[K12OSN] Slightly OT

[Tom Hoffman]

On Sun, 07 Nov 2004 20:00:22 -0500, norbert <bear2bar at netscape.net> wrote:

> Does anyone know of a good schedulling & timetabling software for
> schools. OSS preferred but options will be considered.

Actually, we've got money budgeted to write (or otherwise integrate)
open source scheduling and timetabling components for the SchoolTool
project (http://schooltool.org).  We've got some docs specifically
related to timetabling here: 
http://www.schooltool.org/bounties/timetabling/

Right now we're kicking around the requirements, which is going a bit
slowly because we don't have enough educators who actually do
scheduling and timetabling involved in the conversation.

We should have something written by spring.  If you're in a hurry,
there's also Tablix (http://tablix.sourceforge.net) and a couple
others.  The tricky part is that people tend to write these things to
handle specific contexts, but doing timetabling that will flexible
enough to work in a wide variety of schools without being very
complex, is difficult.

In an unrelated note, we'll be finishing a new version of SchoolTool's
shared calendaring system in a few weeks, which will be complete
enough to start testing in actual schools.  We'll work with Eric to
put together some RPM's that'll work with K12LTSP.

Tom Hoffman
Project Manager, SchoolTool