Employee Scheduling Calendar Software

Employee scheduling calendar is an instrument that allows employers to administer and regulate activities of their staff members through time planning. It allows driving such a calendar in a computer-based way, so multiple people interacting within the same virtual or physical network can share and update common information to reach high level of awareness and coordination. Such a business calendar may represent:

• Timeframes of different projects and other working activities (their start and finish dates);
• Target and event dates of different kinds (holidays, contract renewal dates, milestones, etc);
• Working agendas of individuals and workgroups;
• Chronologic order of project’s tasks, stages and steps (timelines);
• Set alerting reminders not to miss any of upcoming events;
• Plan recurring tasks to re-occur every period of time;

Therefore, any effective software product of such a type should provide its users with the following capabilities (just some of them with a specific example of software to explain):

• Template – a tunable electronic interface that allows adjusting its time-grid to fit current interests of the viewer, and sharing time-related information in real-time regime with other team members to provide coordinated picture of tasks to everyone in the team. VIP Task Manager is a client-server program that provides its users with Calendar view to plan, review and report their tasks on a customizable time-grid;
• Hours & Minutes – sometimes it is necessary to allocate employees’ working daytime literally down to every minute, as they may have a very intensive schedule of tasks, where every interval of daytime creates certain business value and cannot be wasted purposelessly. Calendar mode in VIP Task Manager provides users with “Day regime” to display tasks on a daily grid including timescale graduated in hours and minutes (down to 5 minutes);
• Months & Years – when we cope with some long-term activities and projects we need to create prospective schedules including some target dates lying ahead. When we speak about yearly schedule we can mention prolonged calendar of employees’ vacations or calendar of contracted obligations to renew or withdraw once finished. Using Calendar mode of VIP Task Manager we can turn its grid to show weekly, monthly and yearly tasks; 

Examples

As an example of freeware we can mention Google calendar. The practice means using free individual Google accounts to access the calendar function and sharing calendared events between different people. Real-time capabilities of Google calendar aren’t developed well yet, as this solution is not a special one, but it is often used by virtual teams of collaborating students and young entrepreneurs who are attracted by freeness & simplicity of the Google calendar solution. However, such a free calendar is not recommended to be used by serious professionals as it is mainly a Web-based tool that critically depends on availability of Internet connection (once it is your free software with all your business information will appear inaccessible).   

VIP Task Manager is a shareware package that doesn’t depend from Internet connection or Web-browser, but it works within your LAN, so users are connected to your shared corporate server where the server component of the program resides. Collaborating people can use their personal client components of software installed at their workstations to access and review the scheduled information from the database. This software is a commercial solution, but it is supported by free capabilities like free trial versions, free tutorials and methodical materials, free support, etc.