Forum OpenACS Q&A: Utility Reservation System

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1: Utility Reservation System
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 09/20/03 04:09 PM
OpenACS is missing a utility reservation system, similar to the ACS Problem Set 2. The utility reservation system will allow the user to make reservations for certain utilities for a dedicated amount of time.

Admin package

The admin packages allows the admin to define types of utilities. This could be rooms, beamer or ships, whatever you like. Each type of utilty has certain properties. E.g. a ship has the number of cabins and the lenght, whereas the room most likely has a capacity and further equipement. Both the types of utilities as well as their respective properties are freely definable by the package administrator.

In addition to define types, an admin can define instances of the types (the actual room, the actual ship). These have all the properties defined by the type. Furthermore a certain set of standard attributes are thinkable.

  • Maximum time for rent: Maximum time a user is permitted to rent the utility per instance
  • Max. instances: Maximum number of instances a user is permitted to rent a utility.
  • Permissions: Who is allowed to make reservations for this utility. Who is able to administer access to this utility (meaning add/edit and delete reservations).
  • Default location: Place where the utility usually can be found

User pages

  • The user can browse through the utility types and search for a certain utility this way.
  • Additionally a user could search for each utility type by certain properties and a time. This will result in a list of all utilities that match his demand. If no utilities are found for time constraint reasons, offer different times. If no utilities are found due to property constraints, offer the rooms with the closest match of properties.
  • In Either case, the user will be guided to a calendar view of the utility where he can make the reservation just like adding an event into the calendar module.

Future outlook

  • A future version of the system should definitly provide an interface to the e-commerce system to allow the payment of utilities. Imagineable are also different payment methods for each utility.
  • Additionally some usage statistics would be advisable combined with a Quality Assurance (how much did people like the utility they rented). And don't forget the possibility to take a utility out of order (temporarily or for good).

Additional information (aka discussions in the forums):
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=62086 https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=33870

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2: Re: Utility Reservation System: Use cases (response to 1)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 09/20/03 04:20 PM
Completly to mention some use cases:

University

A university can make use of this in multiple ways, here are some selling arguments:

  • Room Reservation. Should be obvious ;). Additionally it would allow each institute to make reservations for their own rooms (so not to start university wide, but take a grassroot approach, e.g. with the media lab room belonging to the department of arts).
  • Hardware: Who has the beamer at the moment for the next presentation. What about the wireless card the department bought recently.
  • Books: In a fairly simple manner departments would be able to keep track of their own books.

Company

Same as university. In addition you could imagine the usage of the car pool.

Sailing Club

The sailing club could keep track of it's sailing vessels, damage that has happened to each of the boats during a rent, location where the boat is sitting around at a particular time.

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3: Re: Utility Reservation System: Use cases (response to 2)
Posted by Bruno Mattarollo on 09/20/03 04:28 PM

Would be great to link this to an iCalendar so that you could susbcribe to the "calendar for meeting rooms" and see a "free-busy" overview of those ones (for example)! from applications like iCal (Mac), Mozilla Calendar or Outlook.

This has a lot of potential! 😊

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4: Re: Utility Reservation System - Appointments too? (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on 09/21/03 12:13 AM
Should this package support this use case?

A professor has office hours from 3 to 5 pm on MWF.  Students in his classes can use dotLRN to reserve 30 minute slots during his designated office hours.

Appointments made on-line appear on both the professors and the student's calendars.

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5: Re: Utility Reservation System - Appointments too? (response to 4)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 09/21/03 12:51 AM
Well, I certainly didn't see the professor as a utility, but yes, with regards to the package it does not make any difference. Just wonder what kind of properties we'd assign to him ;). Which brings in a different thing for the package: Linking of existing objects to utilities.

Wasn't there talk about a general scheduling package for Objects? If this is the case, we could split the reservations from the utilities and have a utilities package, that keeps track of the utilities and their properties, and a scheduling package, that allows reservations for any object within OpenACS.

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6: Re: Utility Reservation System (response to 1)
Posted by Jade Rubick on 09/22/03 07:22 PM
I agree that we need a general scheduling utility. Caroline called it acs-scheduling, I believe. That's a good name.

I'm going to be needing something like this in a couple of months for project-manager.

The needs I'll have are as follows:

- a Tcl based API for querying the availability of resources. I'd like to be able to use acs-scheduling to answer questions like:

how many hours/days is Person A available between Date X and Y?

how many hours/days is Person B scheduled on Date Z?

- I'd like to use acs-scheduling to keep track of people's schedules, so they can record when they are going on vacation, and have project-manager  keep track of how that affects the schedules on projects. If you schedule a vacation for next week, any project you're on should reflect the fact that you're not going to be available for 8 hours that day.

- It would be nice to show availability of resources on a chart of resource vs time.

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7: Re: Utility Reservation System (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on 10/30/03 11:59 PM
Here is a propreitary product with a nice demo in this space.

http://www.mhsoftware.com