The litmus test

The litmus test for any scheduling program and any company that purports to market one is the ability to deliver mobile access.  Mobile computing says I get my market and I’m technologically competent enough to deliver it.  In two years your cellphone will be as powerful as any low end desktop.  Think about that.

Free interactive charts for your website

Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.

The easiest solution for creating charts on your website that I have found.  Best of all it supports html tables and CSV files.  Check out the copious demo gallery.  Even better than this it is free for non-commercial use.

Vanilla forums free bulletin board

Vanilla forums is a free solution for those wishing to create a bulletin board for their community.  Vanilla forum has some attractive positives, the first being that because it is a relatively new and small community it is not so much targeted by spammers as say, PHPBB.  It also has a very active community of users who are eager to help with any questions that you might have.  Other features include dead simple embedding that allows you to drop it onto your website with minimal HTML knowledge.  It also has importing tools and mobile and plugins capability.  We use vanilla as a staff bulletin board for our tutoring staff.  This allows communication among staff who may not necessarily interact on a daily basis.

Setting up vanilla is relatively easy but you must first gain access to your website server or have your IT do so.  Set up a MYSQL database, upload vanilla files to your server and follow the install directions.  Again, the vanilla community is very helpful and the developers are very open to feature requests.

Alternate online scheduling vendor

Timetrade has a solution that could replace Tutortrac and Accutrack; however, they don’t seem scaled to support small operations as their main bailiwick.  Plus they are comparatively expensive.  Found the sales staff experience to be a bit reminiscent of purchasing a car also kept insinuating that they did not need your business and are actually doing you a favor.  WCONLINE seems to be the newest contender.  One complaint is that they have multiple versions of the application in the wild so make sure when you are discussing features that you are aware of version under discussion.  Smartphone integration though, interesting.  Starfish, claims to provide comprehensive retention and early alert services as well as tutor tracking.  Website is very professional in appearance, doesn’t appear to be designed by a relative who recently took a web design course or an off the rack template.  If you’re purporting to be an online vendor you have to put your best foot forward.  If you don’t care to do so or unaware of its importance, it’s highly likely that you will be lax with regards to your product as well.  That has been my experience.  They do need a SEO specialist though.  They are practically invisible to Google and a a quick review of their website source code reveals no mention of tutoring in their metadata, hmmm.  Update:  after some investigation their scheduler is very good but for what it does but not yet robust enough to replace a dedicated tutor tracker; for instance, no kiosk check in for students.