Over the years I've met or heard of edu IT staff who have written some software and started up in business selling it. Sounds easy. I've decided to give it a try, and (possibly by way of free advertising) keep a journal of what happens.

Me: about 10 years ago I did an OU degree in software development, then landed another network manager job, and my new found skills were left on the shelf. However, over the years I've noticed a gap in the market - electronic student timetables. Wouldn't it be nice if they could be injected into Google/Exchange/o365/WHY?

So I set to work just last summer, and last september all students in the school had their calendars in Google....

...nobody really noticed. Maybe I should have advertised it more. So I thought - this needs to work for staff too, and they need to be able to communicate through it. The problem was, what I had written was a proof of concept, but not really configurable, so I went back to the drawing board armed with bunch of chunks of Google code and a knowledge of what was and was not possible with Google APIs.

I finally got a working piece of software about a month ago. I emailed all the local network managers and got an underwhelming response. This is going to be the story of what happens next.

See the details of the software at public_web

Jim Potter