Transcript Schedule Viewer - People | UBC's Okanagan campus

Jacob Orr
Dr. Ramon Lawrence
Bachelor of Science Honours Project
ScheduleViewer
A Scheduling Tool for UBC Okanagan Administration
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
Database
UBC Web
SQL query
filtered timeblocks
schedule information
(as required)
Server
timeblock response
Simplified query
Outlook
(client application)
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?