[thelist] Online Schedule of Appointments?

[aardvark]

> From: "Gina K. Anderson" <gina at sitediva.com>
[...]
> Say there's a carpet cleaning business, with four locations spread out
> over the city. They want their employees to be able to log in from a
> laptop or from home and see the times and specifics of that day's (or
> any other day's) appointments, not all the employee's appointments,
> just the person logging in can see their own appointments. They also
> want to allow appointments to be made online by homeowners,
> business-owners, etc, for their services. They also take appointments
> by phone at all four locations.

any number of online calendar tools... keep in mind that 
appointment scheduling is a common business problem and there 
are lots of tools out there to handle it...

or you can build a truly simple tool that allows one administrator to 
go in and enter appointments on certain dates, and then the info is 
displayed via a calendar view that defaults to the current date...

if it's simple enough, staff with PDAs (or other wireless devices) 
can view it easily...

and you can add complexity to allow the person viewing it to enter 
a comment afterward -- like the time spent, or any comments, or 
just that it's been completed...

once you want to lock out certain people (only allow people to see 
their appointments) you have to start managing users in the 
application, which adds a lot of complexity...

and if you truly want to allow customers to schedule appointments, 
you may have to change the way the carpet ... um... cleaners do 
business... it would need to go through some approval process so 
you don't get teenagers or clueless people scheduling them, or 
conflicting appointments across town, etc... so either a person or 
code has to manage that process... i'd suggest you stay out of that 
part since it can affect them beyond just the cost for the 
technology and its implementation...

or you can just treat an online appointment as a request, and 
handle it with the phone reps...

and then there's hosting, and control, and lots of other stuff...

the calendar part is pretty easy, even if you have to have someone 
who enters the time since it can be the only repository for all 
locations and is easy enough to shoehorn in to replace their 
current process... the rest is a bit much without knowing a hella lot 
more...