Precision Scheduling

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21st Century Classroom

Precision Scheduling

5/1/2008

By Rama Ramaswami

Double-booking-of space, media, or any other equipment-may soon vanish as new software automates asset management and scheduling.

THANKS TO RHODES COLLEGE'S new automated scheduling system, campus constituents can book multiple locations and A/V equipment for each room, all in one session.

VISIBILITY, SIMPLICITY, EASE OF USE-educators chant these mantras whenever they evaluate any type of software, and classroom scheduling and asset management applications are no exception. Increasingly, vendors are responding to these demands by releasing highly sophisticated tools that manage every aspect of these processes, from automating classroom reservations, to enabling equipment tracking with little or no human intervention.

Integrated Access to Rooms and Services

Meeting Room Manager (MRM), a room scheduling product from NetSimplicity, is in use at more than 250 higher education institutions, but the product's latest version, MRM 7.6 (announced in January), offers an interesting twist: the capability to integrate room scheduling data with the academic course schedules contained in SunGard Banner Student. The new version allows faculty and staff to view a room's availability-via any standard web browser, Microsoft Outlook, or even an LCD panel at the classroom door-and book the same room for another event, confident that the timing doesn't conflict with courses scheduled in Banner.

According to spokespeople for Asure Software, NetSimplicity's parent company, the Banner-MRM integration was one of the most frequently requested features from the company's higher ed customers. Fittingly, the module that makes such integration possible was developed by a university technologist: Richie Trenthem, IT director at Rhodes College (TN), a private institution with about 1,700 students, wrote the software to help utilize the college's facilities more efficiently.

"About a year ago, we began an in-depth program to overhaul event planning and scheduling at Rhodes," Trenthem says. "We were doing things in a fragmented manner and not making the best use of our campus resources." He points out that in higher ed, academic courses and other kinds of campus events frequently compete for space. "We wanted to import each semester's class schedule from Banner into MRM so that end users would always know what rooms were available, and when they could book them. The systems don't offer application programming interfaces," he explains, "but their database architecture is open." Early on, the IT director recognized that MRM's open architecture would allow his team to customize the system to meet their needs.