...does shift management

[oblivion]

I may be pushing my luck a bit.

My wife has just inherited the job of doing the staff rostering for her workplace.

It's not complicated, particularly: 100 hours a week to fill from a small number of staff; I have a picture in my head of a sort of spreadsheet with staff down the side and the working hours of the day along the top, with the ability to drag bars left-and-right to represent the chunk of the day someone's scheduled to work.

I've trawled around the net and found various complicated things, mostly designed for much bigger and more complex organisations and for vast sums of money, and a single exception of something intended for schools timetabling (Mimosa) which apparently can be adapted for other uses but again, it's far too clever and complicated and I can't work out how to adapt it anyway.

I suspect I'm going to have to do something with a spreadsheet and do without the visual aspects I, er, visualise. But, just in case I'm missing something, I thought I might ask the nice people here if they had any suggestions!

[George]

Hi oblivion,

there is a free online application called TeamCal Pro that might fit your needs. It is a day-based team calender targeted on absence management. But it can be - and I know it is - used for shift management as well if a team member can only have one shift per day.

You can define your own absence types (in your case it would be shift types) and then assign them to the team members.

TeamCal Pro's GUI is as simple as attractive. It comes with a user management so team members can log in and maintain (or only view) their calendars.

You need a web server with PHP and MySQL to run it.

I am not sure if this helps you but I thought I mention it.

You can find it here:
www.lewe.com

You can play with the demo here:
www.lewe.com/tcpro