Team Appointments Planner

[LSM1604]

Hi,

I would like to make a database which holds appointments, vacations, training and more for a team of employees.

The planner needs to be able to have a day view, so that the leaders can see a 30 minute breakdown of employee availability.

A Month view is also required for long term planning.

Does anyone have any experience in making one of these, or something similar?

Any help will be greatly received.

Many Thanks
LSM1604

 

[spikepl]

Any reason why you wish to make one yourself? The web is full of team planners/schedulers at various prices.

 

[LSM1604]

I can't seem to find exactly what we require, and the products available are not customisable enough. We would like to be able to have the appointment planner, and then from there, have it work out the amount of hours of resource available within the team for each day and each work week. I can aim to develop this into the planner once I have the foundations, but I can't think of a way to achieve the planner.

Hope someone can help

Many thanks,
LSM1604

 

[spikepl]

I find it very hard to believe that there is nothing out there that fits, because so far you have not mentioned anything out of the ordinary. But then, I do not know your specific requirements. My main point is not to develop if you can buy something that satisfies 80 % of the requirements. Getting the remaining 20 will cost a bundle.

Regarding "appointments", notice that Ooutlook has quite a number of nice features there, as well as display of availability. For ressource planning, MS Project has some suitable bits.

Reproducing all that stuff in Access can be quite an effort. You may want to consider some type of hybrid solution.

 

[LSM1604]

The reason why I would like to use Access over Outlook is due to the number of people in each team (around 50), therefore Outlook does not provide easy viewing. Additionally, the planner I plan to create will have a number of other features (separate to the planner) built into them, to create a work management package. The other features have already been created.

As for Project, our IT department will not purchase the licensing for it, and will not provide any support if we decide to go our own way.

My idea would be to have a tabular form with a Day view and a Month view, with the hours/days as the columns, and the names of the employees filling the rows.

Note: not all employees are classed as planning resource due to their job role (including apprentices), but remain key to being on the planner as the leaders need to know who is on holiday/training etc.

Essentially, what I would like to be able to create is a form that books "appointments" for a particular employee, saves that information into a table, and then displays it on a calendar.

I am willing to take on a challenge but I really need some guidance to get me started.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Many thanks,
LSM1604

 

[G37Sam]

So, what did you end up doing?

 

[LSM1604]

Hi Sam,

Unfortunately I still haven't been able to create a Team Planner on Microsoft Access. However it is still very much required.

I have started to make a planner in Excel, but it is just too slow due to the amount of information that it holds. The good thing about using excel is that I can use the cells to plot absent days.

The Excel version seems like it will work, but with the excessively slow speed it seems lime it will be impractical, so if anyone could still help me with a way to make an Access version, I would appreciate it greatly.

Many thanks,
LSM1604

 

[G37Sam]

Tell you what, share the Excel sheet and I might come up with something along its lines.

 

[LSM1604]

It is 13mb with a serious amount of code in it - which is all messy as I am a novice programmer. No doubt there are easier ways to achieve my coding.

It will be a challenge to look through.

Cheers,
LSM1604