mdrabble Posted March 23, 2018 Posted March 23, 2018 We currently use Moodle for room bookings (that is all we seem to use it for after a recent staff survey) and rather than trying to keep this running I would like to switch to something that is a little easier to manage and use. I have been told that from September, we will be moving to a 2 week timetable. So on this news I thought I would looking at room booking systems that will do the following: Authenticate using Active Directory Import TimeTables from SIMS.net Support 2 week timetables Preferably free or a cheap as possible! SSO would be nice but not essential Prefer on premise but can be hosted Anyone have any recommendations etc. Cheers
nwkeene Posted March 23, 2018 Posted March 23, 2018 Hi mdrabble, we use MRBS... https://mrbs.sourceforge.io/ of the things you list: Authenticate using Active Directory - Yes, but we use the windows session credentials. Import TimeTables from SIMS.net - don't know... We use Bromcom and a export to csv for the rooms, mangle it in Excel to a form the MRBS understands. We use the bulkyearmake.php file i found on Edugeek to import the mangled rom data. Support 2 week timetables - yes, we run 2 week timetables. importing the data is fun though, the half term breaks the 2 week cycle as you have to 'bump' the week. the xmas and easter breaks are fine as they're 2 weeks (ish) Preferably free or a cheap as possible! - free SSO would be nice but not essential - don't know... we dont use that but are starting RM Unify soon... Prefer on premise but can be hosted - hosted on one of our HyperV farms... hope that helps... 1
IrritableTech Posted March 23, 2018 Posted March 23, 2018 My lead tech set this up here... https://www.bookedscheduler.com It does everything you want except the import timetables from sims, but the new import from csv is possibly help here with a bit of scripting. We use it for booking It rooms, resources, conference facilities and our mini buses. 1
computer_expert Posted March 23, 2018 Posted March 23, 2018 HAP can do most of the above (if not all!). I think it has an option to import from sims too. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/home-access-plus/191918-hap-v10-6-release.html
Mako Posted March 23, 2018 Posted March 23, 2018 We use Room Booking System. It's a web-hosted service. Does everything you ask. 1
mdrabble Posted March 23, 2018 Author Posted March 23, 2018 Thanks for the replies everyone - interestly Moodle is running MRBS! I didn't realise they had a standalone version. I'll download and install MRBS and have a play :-)
KevinB Posted March 23, 2018 Posted March 23, 2018 +1 for roombookingsystem.co.uk Very good system indeed.
mdrabble Posted March 27, 2018 Author Posted March 27, 2018 My lead tech set this up here... https://www.bookedscheduler.com It does everything you want except the import timetables from sims, but the new import from csv is possibly help here with a bit of scripting. We use it for booking It rooms, resources, conference facilities and our mini buses. The new import from CSV routine - is that available on the current version?
nwkeene Posted March 27, 2018 Posted March 27, 2018 The new import from CSV routine - is that available on the current version? There isn't a direct import from csv as such... I found a php file on edugeek called 'bulkyearmake.php' and that does take a csv file and adds bookings en masse to the system. We take a csv export from bromcom, run it through a spreadsheet with 15 or so macros to mangle the data into a form that the bulkyearmake.php can handle. the bulkyearmake.php thread is here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/scripts/40387-sims-mrbs-script-available-4.html#post868310 happy to share the mangling spreadsheet to show what we did... We have to tweak it each time we do an import as Bromcom changes its csv export fields and we have to amend the column names etc. kind regards Nick
leegcvcc Posted March 27, 2018 Posted March 27, 2018 +100 for roombookingsystem.co.uk with SIMS as we have a 2 week timetable Moved to it from MRBS and Moodle and don't even think about room bookings now... ever! Love it and their support is great when required
mdrabble Posted March 28, 2018 Author Posted March 28, 2018 Have managed to get MRBS installed and running with AD Authentication and also found how to change the times to periods - so far so good! Need to look at changing the view from showing the description to the Description and person who booked the room. Also..... on the moodle version, the bookable rooms have a + sign on them - so would be nice to have that back on it.
robjduk Posted March 28, 2018 Posted March 28, 2018 Another +1 for room booking system. Its epic and ticks all your boxes.
mdrabble Posted March 28, 2018 Author Posted March 28, 2018 Having spent the last couple of day working on MRBS - I'm happy with how I have managed to customise it - just looking at the import routine so fingers crossed!
mdrabble Posted April 4, 2018 Author Posted April 4, 2018 @nwkeene I don't suppose you would mind sharing the csv format you import to MRBS - i'm struggling a little and no idea why
nwkeene Posted April 4, 2018 Posted April 4, 2018 of course... The bulkyearmake.php file needs the csv to have 7 columns in this order: Room ID, Day, Period, Class, Teacher Code, Subject Code & Number of Students. Room ID should be the MRBS 'room' number - see browser address bar when room is open, Period should be defined as 'Mon:7' or 'Mon:07'. The bulkyearmake.php file does have some help comments buried within the file. the first 2 lines of my csv file is: Room ID,Day,Period,Class,Teacher Code,Subject Code,Number of Students 7,Wed,Wed:6,111/Fn1,Mrs A Baker - Food and Nutrition,A, Obviously the 2nd line mentioned is just how we display rooms / teacher names / subjects etc.... I didn't use the number of students column and it didn't fall over on import. hope that helps.. PM me for more info or if you want a copy of the mangling spreadsheet, but its all very basic macros for deleting empty columns, removing columns we don't need, formatting cells to be correct, adding columns together to generate teacher plus subject and doing lookups to convert room names into the Room ID numbers etc. Nick My excel spreadsheet 'mangles' the Bromcom export csv into the above MRBS csv layout 1
mdrabble Posted April 4, 2018 Author Posted April 4, 2018 Just looking through the PHP file and I've just seen some lines I need to change
mjk Posted April 4, 2018 Posted April 4, 2018 We used to use MRBS and changed to Google Calendars because it has a 'resource' booking system and is easier to use. It is also integrated with all our other systems and staff are well trained in using google calendars.
mdrabble Posted April 4, 2018 Author Posted April 4, 2018 (edited) Hmm...... still having issues when I try and import - says my session has expired? I'm using using version 1.4 of the script - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/scripts/40387-sims-mrbs-script-available-8.html#post1522565 I've changed the period details and room ids to match my settings - think I may leave this until next week and let my brain have a rest! Edited April 4, 2018 by mdrabble
DSapseid Posted April 4, 2018 Posted April 4, 2018 i use https://www.schoolbooking.com/index used them for years and its great. It has all the things you listed plus you can it drags the cover out of SIMS and marks the room changes on there.
nwkeene Posted April 5, 2018 Posted April 5, 2018 Hmm...... still having issues when I try and import - says my session has expired? looks like the browser / server has 'lost' something on the MRBS side...! Haven't come across that particular error myself. I'd try the usual things.. log out of MRBS, close the browser, re open broswer, login fresh etc. Have you set up admin users in the config.php file? I know you're using AD to authenticate though so that 'should' work... We never got AD authentication working smoothly and used session authentication in the end... it was enough to stop the teachers messing things up..
Tech1 Posted April 5, 2018 Posted April 5, 2018 i use https://www.schoolbooking.com/index used them for years and its great. It has all the things you listed plus you can it drags the cover out of SIMS and marks the room changes on there. +1 for School Booking as well. Used them for many years now. Excellent support and relatively cheap, even with the SIMS module added on as well.
mdrabble Posted April 5, 2018 Author Posted April 5, 2018 I’ll have a try as the actual admin user when I am back at work on Monday. I’ll also try with Chrome and IE11 as I was using Edge when I tried the import.
nwkeene Posted April 5, 2018 Posted April 5, 2018 I’ll also try with Chrome and IE11 as I was using Edge when I tried the import. Edge can be very flaky in certain things... I think I did the last import using IE11... possibly Firefox... they're the browsers I use most... enjoy the time off...
mdrabble Posted April 9, 2018 Author Posted April 9, 2018 Right back after a busy couple of days off and I'm still getting the same error message. I've disable LDAP and just using the admin user - to rule out any admin type issue. I'm tried Chrome, Edge, IE11, Firefox - still getting session expired. May need to switch from version 1.4 of the import routine to an earlier version and possible switch on verbose logging if I can find how to do it.
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