MRBS and Facility CMIS

[NotSoFast]

Hi everyone. I've got loads of help over the last few months reading through the forums, especially with regard to room booking systems. I've done a lot of work getting MRBS set up and working, and now just need to solve a couple more problems before we adopt it as our school system.

 

a) It would be great to be reassured that lots of schools are using this as a "robust" solution for room booking. We plan to use it for all our bookings: ICT rooms, study spaces, room changes, lettings etc etc, so it has to be solid. If you're using it in that sort of capacity I'd love to know how reliable you've found it and any issues that you've picked up.

 

b) We use Serco's Facility CMIS MIS. I've developed a process using Access to take a CSV of the timetable from CMIS and output a text file for MRBS. This works, but it's clunky. Has anyone found a better way? Would anyone like to have a look at what I've done so you can use it/improve it?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Simon.

[ricki]

MRBS is quite reliable. I have been using it for a bit now and the only problem I have is people booking rooms and then not using them. The main room booking for the school when setting up the timetable is done on sims and I have not found a way to transfer the data from one to the other as smoothly as you have so congratulations on that.

 

If anyone does know a way to transfer room booking from sims thats on the admin network to mrbs could you let me know at the moment we enter them by hand every half term.

 

Thanks for all your help.

 

Richard

[budgester]

b) We use Serco's Facility CMIS MIS. I've developed a process using Access to take a CSV of the timetable from CMIS and output a text file for MRBS. This works, but it's clunky. Has anyone found a better way? Would anyone like to have a look at what I've done so you can use it/improve it?

 

Hi,

 

This sounds interesting, I am connecting to CMIS using php and odbc and would like to have a look at your solution.

 

Regards

 

Budgester

[Sirbendy]

We use MRBS as well for ICT suite bookings and resource booking. Standalone though.

 

Rock solid to date..minor bug in the last version, but the programmer is very helpful.

[NotSoFast]

@ Budgester: I'll look at posting what I have when I get back to work next week. I have a Word file of "instructions" I wrote to help me remember what I did, plus the Access database itself. It's quite a large file though so I'm not sure if I'll be able to post it here. I suppose I'd better change names etc as well.

 

Thank you to everyone else for your responses.

[NotSoFast]

OK, attached you should find a zip file with my Access file and a Word file I wrote (to myself!) as I went along. I know it's not amazingly clear, but I haven't had time to update it for general consumption. I've removed a lot of the records from the "ready for import" table as there were over 60,000 and that made the file too big to upload here.

 

The main things I learned from my research were:

• An MRBS_entry record uses the UNIX timestamp (ie. no of seconds since 1/1/1970) to store times.
  
• If you are using the periods feature of MRBS, times are stored as 12:00, 12:01, 12:02 etc for that date.
  
• You have to allow for BST/GMT
  

 

So my database creates a unique record for each instance of a lesson (not just the lesson slot itself), adds the extra fields required by MRBS, matches the CMIS room to the MRBS room ID and converts the date and time fields exported by CMIS into a UNIX timestamp value.

 

Anyone is welcome to use/adapt this for their own ends, but please do share any improvements you make.

 

Thanks,

 

Simon

Process for putting timetable into MRBS.zip

[gazboy7]

Hi,

 

I have just started working for a Comprehensive School in East London as a VLE administrator and I need to find out what CMIS stands for, as we are currently using this system or any good links to further explain?

 

Also, is anyone any good at using Microsoft Sharepoint, as this is the VLE I will be using.

 

Thanks,

Gary.