Hello,
Thanks for your answers, some of which came to me directly and not the bb. I have made a digest of the various suggestions:

>>>Original mail:
Since we are now part of the "Facebook Generation" (or at least 10% of the planet is), it seems there must be a better way of distributing time on our various Aktas to an institute of scientists than our current system which involves a race for the paper booking sheet every Thursday morning. Inevitably people book in a speculative manner and time slots are not always used due to problems in preparative steps etc. Bits of paper in different buildings make it difficult to see who booked what and when.

Has anyone successfully implemented an electronic system, perhaps shared through the "cloud", that allows real time booking in a manner that can be revised easily and has worked well? An electronic calendar (Google..) would partially address this, but it seems some sort of social networking site/tool might be better for negotiating instrument time, swapping timeslots, reallocating unused time if the sample prep fails.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. If governments can be toppled through Facebook, I'm sure we can book our Aktas in a better way!

Darren

>>>Responses:

>>Hi Darren,

You might want to have a look at the scheduler developed by the Arizona Research Labs at http://schedule.arl.arizona.edu
I guess it does what you need and you'll probably be given permission to run a local copy.

HTH,

Pedro

>>Hi Darren,
In a windows based environment: if you already should have an MS Exchange server this would be the easiest way. Then everybody can book and check resources in outlook (or webexchange). You can also do it using the horde-groupware for linux (and there are way more opensource groupware linux based programs out) – it just needs a linux server and administration/setup-time. But it also works.
A little anecdote: I must say that I really like the idea of e-tools for booking instruments – but when I suggested this in our labmeeting years ago they all started laughing….. “too complicated, to much effort, you need your PC…”. Not even talking about the fact that it might be really easy to book instruments which are not next door. we have our crystallization facility in the basement and our labs are in the 4th floor of the building… but there was no way to convince my colleagues…
In the end we mounted a 1.50m x 1.80m whiteboard to the wall (the ones where you can erase the entries just by wiping with a piece of cloth) – created a large table with 2x7days for each of our 8 aektas and everybody can theoretically book a week in advance (and erase if not needed)…
This works really fine so far. Even though I would prefer the e-booking: my office is in the 5th floor..

Cheers
Gregor

>>this may be useful:

http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php

- it's a php-based web calendar system. As facility manager I use this system for reserving time on one of our x-ray generators. It's free, clean, easy to use, works in real-time, allows bookings to be removed, etc. and I also think it could be tailored to notify users when a particular time slot that has been reserved is no longer required. If you have say five Aktas you can colour code reservations for each and display as day / month view (screenshot attached).

Alternatively you can use the calendar to chart the downfall of various dictators!

hope this helps!

Mark

>> Hi Darren
We are using an ical server (Apple) integrated in a web server successfully for 3 years. We have a flexible and central system.
see attachements
Best regards
Jerome

>>Hi Darren,

Sunbird from mozilla is accessible in any computer running linux and windows connected to the home network (I guess it should be compatible with other OS systems as well) and it's free. The problem is that it's getting slow depending how many instruments you have for booking. To address however booking in speculative manner is more complicated than a simple electronic booking system.

cheers
Nikos

>>We use Google Calendar for booking our X-ray facility.

Klaus

>>Hey Darren,
In our lab we also employ the google calendar (Gcal) for our two AKTA machines and also for our New Brunswick shaker. We have one Gcal for the two AKTA devices and one for the shaker, in which an administrator (one of the lab's member) grants accessibility to add or delete entries. Users are requested to type in their name, cellphone number (in case they are outside users), column used (or flasks volume and number) and any other bits of into required (temp, for the shaker). We've found out that if there is a need to swap or cancel, it's easier to do from the PC terminal or just pick up the phone and call the person listed - I am not sure a social network will contribute anything to time and device allocation rather than a place to do some gossip (which is done in any case..).
Even so, the down side of using a shared web calendar is the possibility that a user syncing his PC/mobile calendar device can mistakenly remove all entries from the server if the sync is not done properly. To overcome this potential hazard, we routinely backup from time to time the current Gcal of every device.
Hoped I helped!
Chen

>>>Also:
www.prog4biz.com
The application we have developing for managing core facilities, Bookit, has been evolving tremendously in the past 2 years and many modules and features are included now, allowing 3 universities to benefit from its use.

>>I’ve used schedule it software which is available as open source.

hope it’s of use,

best regards,

Paul.

--
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Dr. Darren Hart,
Team Leader
High Throughput Protein Lab
Grenoble Outstation
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)
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