Looking for a web-based scheduler app to keep track of employee locations/tasks

May 20, 2008 10:13 AM

I know there have lots of previous threads regarding time tracking and scheduler apps, but I have a specific need -- we have multiple locations and a huge complex with mobile employees. We need to be able to pull up the web page and see a list of the employees and their status (In/Out/Lunch/Off-Site), and a notes and/or pull-down section that specifies location.

We had a very simple but effective webpage at work at UCLA and I thought it was really nice to see a status of where everyone was so I didn't spend time asking where someone went. I have a simple web-app developed to do this, but it's a little on the crude side and was wondering if there was a more simple and easy-to-use solution.

I don't really care about the additional features, to be honest, I'd like it as simple as possible. At most, a nice historical report by employee of status changes.

Thanks to the hive for any suggestions they can offer.

posted by superchicken to Education (6 answers total)

I'm not aware of anything off the shelf that would do this, but it might be a cool thing to do with Jabber/XMPP. Of course, I could be talking out of my bum because I've never built anything with either of these, but chat clients typcially support this kind of thing natively. Using PHP (and MySQL to log the changes in status) to tie into Jabber/XMPP could give you the output you're looking for.

This could be a good jumping off point.

I look forward to seeing where this goes.
posted by stuboo at 10:45 AM on May 20, 2008

Someone's post in the Favrd\Twitter thread yesterday led me to this article on using Twitter to help track status of group members. Maybe you could adapt this method for your own use?
posted by JaredSeth at 11:50 AM on May 20, 2008

@JaredSeth - Twitter was my first thought too, but it's just so dang unreliable that I couldn't offer it up as a recommendation. FWIW, Twitter apps are relatively easy to build and it could do what you want.
posted by stuboo at 12:55 PM on May 20, 2008

stuboo, funny you mention the unreliability...I've been trying Twitter as a time tracking application, and it just came back up after being offline for about an hour. I just figured you could use it as a proof-of-concept, and then roll your own if it suits.
posted by JaredSeth at 1:31 PM on May 20, 2008

If you'd like something like Twitter that you could host yourself, there's Prologue for Wordpress. It seems like you could relatively easily make a custom page that shows the latest posts for each user, and then do some kind of custom color based on the tags for the entry.

I think the most difficult thing about any kind of setup is actually getting people to constantly update their status.

Maybe find some way of integrating the tools they might already be using (AIM, for instance)?
posted by chimmyc at 8:28 PM on May 20, 2008

"I think the most difficult thing about any kind of setup is actually getting people to constantly update their status.
Maybe find some way of integrating the tools they might already be using (AIM, for instance)?"

Which is why I still think a Jabber/XMPP application is the best bet. Incidentally, 37signals just launched a new feature today called the Journal that can help with this kind of thing.

Please, keep us updated. I think this kind of thing will become increasingly popular in the coming months/years.
posted by stuboo at 8:19 AM on May 21, 2008