What to do about bad broadcast e-mail addresses

We have had to turn our attention to a new unanticipated problem. What to do about bad schedule broadcast e-mail addresses?

It ends up that most of our users that broadcast schedules have bad employee e-mail addresses entered. This causes a number of problems: we have failed mail messages filling our mail boxes; since we are sending the message, we get the notification the broadcast failed to reach a given employee instead of the manager; and when we send lots of bad e-mail, it can cause our our server to appear as a spammer fishing for valid addresses.

To solve this problem, we are adding the ability to flag bad employee e-mail addresses. Once an e-mail address has been flagged, it will no longer be included in broadcast recipient lists and warnings will be displayed to notify the manage of the bad address. We are still left with a some decisions to make regarding schedule broadcasting: what to do once an address has been flagged, and if long term we should consider moving schedule broadcasting to a premium version of the employee scheduler. Another idea is to charge a one time fee of around $10 to clear an account of flagged addresses. If you have an opinion about this subject, please leave them in the comments.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

New Server On-line

More behind the scenes work going on lately. We are now up and running on a fresh Dual Xeon 5130 (Dual Core, 2.00Ghz), 4GB RAM, 15K RPM SA-SCSI server. Looks like most or all of the kinks have been worked out. The site was snappy, but now it feels even quicker.

With this wrapped up we can get back to work on the site. We are hard at work building an 'Account Properties' page where all the settings that cut across our various services (schedule-my-employees.com, 5minutesite.com, online-marketing-manager.com) can be managed from a central location.

Employee Coverage Display Updates

Most of our energy has been going towards our new marketing manager tool, but we have not stopped working on the employee scheduler. In the latest update we have further refined the Employee Coverage Displays and put them through another round of testing. Aimed mostly at schedules with more than 10 employees, the coverage graphs allow you to see the number of employees scheduled over the course of the day. Coverage graphs can be viewed by clicking the `Employee Coverage Graphs` link as seen below:

Below is an example of the graphs drawn, one for each day of the week. The number of employees scheduled are on the left axis and the time of day is on the bottom axis. We recommend taking a quick look at your coverage graphs once you are finishing up with your schedule and are getting ready to send it out or save it.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

Recent Changes

A quick update on recent changes.

- Each account on schedule-my-employees.com now allows up to 8 schedules. Some users requested this so they could plan their schedules 2 months in advance.

- If the previous segment starts before the previous starts, an error is displayed and the update to the schedule is blocked. This is a first step in validating the start time and duration of the schedule data as it is entered to insure the quality of the schedule.

- A warning is now displayed when a segment with no duration is entered. Segments with no duration do not contribute to the hour and cost totals leading to a misleading manager view.

Another project undertaken in the last month was an automated off site nightly backup. This is a first step in building a fully redundant second site disaster recovery system.

Most of our programming resources as of late have been going into the building of a new small business tool - online-marketing-manager.com. Once we have online-marketing-manager.com to the point where our consulting clients can begin use of the tool, we plan on splitting our time on schedule-my-employees.com and online-marketing-manager.com so they can both move forward and complement each other.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

Problems with Google Docs

After finishing up some work on the Easy Export feature in schedule-my-employees.com, I did some more testing, sending schedules to Google Docs and ran into a couple problems.

First off, every schedule sent never showed up in Google Docs. After poking around for a few minutes, I discovered that Google had changed my assigned import e-mail address with no warning or notification of any kind. No too user friendly. So after updating to the new address assigned to my Google Docs account, small schedules (2 employees) started showing up.

Now for what appears to be an even bigger problem with Google Docs. No matter what I do, bigger schedules (26 employees) never show up in Google Docs. I know schedule-my-employees.com is working because I send a copy to a Yahoo e-mail account and that works every time.

So, while Google Docs looks like a great small business tool, it would seem it suffers from some serious issues. Not sure if Google is blocking the bigger schedules and changing import addresses by design, oversight or some kind of bug, but it leaves me hesitant to recommend Google Docs to my users. When users run into problems, I would have assume they would lay blame on schedule-my-employees.com rather then the much better known Google.com.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

How to add schedules to your web site

I received some great questions this week regarding schedule-my-employees.com and I thought many other people might have the same questions so I will post them here:

The broadcast feature is cool, but I wonder - is there a way to have employees go to my own website, and then click a link "view current schedule" and have it link to an online view of the schedule? Is the email broadcast the ONLY way to disseminate the schedule?
To add a link to your web site, go to a schedule and scroll down and look in the 'Access and Organization' section for 'Group web link for this schedule'. You can add this URL to your web site. It has two nice features: You can go to any schedule and use the 'Publish Schedule' button to control what schedules employees see when they click the link, also you can go the Schedule Manager Home page and fill in a View Code if you want to limit who can see the schedules.

The schedules have a week like Monday through Sunday... and that's cool for a schedule that doesn't change... but what about a restaurant, where the schedule is different from week to week... there is no where that brands a Monday as Monday March 10 for example... is there a reason you have left dates out? I do my schedule a month ahead, and would love to be able to plug in at least a couple weeks at a time, but then I would need to have dates associated with days.
The way users currently put a time frame on a schedule is to go to the schedule and scroll down to the 'Header' section. Users will enter there the range of dates the schedule is for. Example: TASTE CAFE SCHEDULE - July 9nd to July 15th. I am looking at a more formal assignment of data ranges to schedules, but while I am working through the technical and business considerations of this, putting the data range in the header seems to be working well. To handle making schedules a month in advanced, once you have the current week's schedule entered, go back to the Schedule Manager Home page and click the 'Copy' link for the current schedule. This will make a copy of it. You can then click on the copy's Edit link and update the header with its date range and make any needed changes to the schedule. You can continue to make up to a months future schedules this way. Once a schedule is no longer needed because its date range
has passed, you can delete it to free up space for future schedules. If you want to archive a schedule before you delete it, you can save it to your computer with the 'Printer/Spreadsheet Friendly Schedule (Manager View)' link on the schedule, or use the 'Easy Export' feature near the bottom of the Schedule Manager Home page to save it to an on-line office suite like Google Docs.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

schedule-my-employees.com on-line

After many hours of programming and working with a launch client with about 30 employees, I have gone live with schedule-my-employees.com. Already a few other companies have found it and put it to use.

It is at a stage where it is very useful for a small business to add their employee's schedules to their web site. It places the schedules behind a view code so only current employees can see them and makes it very easy to control which schedules are currently displayed. Two things that are not so easy to do if you are using an Excel spreadsheet to make your schedules. One other nice feature is the broadcast function. It will sent a copy of the schedule to every employee that has an e-mail address on file with a push of a button.

There still many features to add, training and demo screen casts to make and polishing to do. But my new web app seems to be off to a good start.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com