Project Thor Part 1: The Problem
As I announced yesterday, the November meeting of the Twin Cities Cloud Computing User Group will serve as the kickoff meeting for a community based project designed to give people experience developing a meaningful cloud based application. My goal in the days leading up to the meeting is to provide a background on the project, so, when the meeting rolls around, everyone will be on the same page with what we're trying to accomplish and how we're going to get there.
The first installment in this series is a quick description of the problem we're trying to solve. After all, we might have some great technology at our disposal, but without a problem to apply it to it doesn't do us much good. With that said, here's the problem as currently envisioned:
Most large companies have a significant number of conference rooms in their facilities. Often the schedules for conference rooms is managed as resources in Microsoft Exchange Server. But frequently, people have need to host an impromptu meetings. In many of these cases, people don’t either have their PC’s with them or the time to access Exchange to determine if a conference room is free (Or even if they could access Exchange find the correct resource). In these cases, the users tend to make a quick pass of physical facilities to see if any rooms are available. If the room is empty, its assumed its free. This can of course be a bad assumption.
Project Thor is an attempt to make the schedule discovery for a conference room or even resource quick and easy by allowing users to create two dimensional bar codes via Microsoft Tag for each conference room in a given Exchange server. These glyps will be resolved via the Microsoft Tag Applet to a given resource's calendar which will be rendered to the mobile device via an AJAX web page. If availability exists, the user will then be able to book the resource.
I want to keep these posts short and sweet, so I'm going to end this one here. In the next post I'll lay out our assumptions and business requirements.
Stay tuned....
The first installment in this series is a quick description of the problem we're trying to solve. After all, we might have some great technology at our disposal, but without a problem to apply it to it doesn't do us much good. With that said, here's the problem as currently envisioned:
Most large companies have a significant number of conference rooms in their facilities. Often the schedules for conference rooms is managed as resources in Microsoft Exchange Server. But frequently, people have need to host an impromptu meetings. In many of these cases, people don’t either have their PC’s with them or the time to access Exchange to determine if a conference room is free (Or even if they could access Exchange find the correct resource). In these cases, the users tend to make a quick pass of physical facilities to see if any rooms are available. If the room is empty, its assumed its free. This can of course be a bad assumption.
Project Thor is an attempt to make the schedule discovery for a conference room or even resource quick and easy by allowing users to create two dimensional bar codes via Microsoft Tag for each conference room in a given Exchange server. These glyps will be resolved via the Microsoft Tag Applet to a given resource's calendar which will be rendered to the mobile device via an AJAX web page. If availability exists, the user will then be able to book the resource.
I want to keep these posts short and sweet, so I'm going to end this one here. In the next post I'll lay out our assumptions and business requirements.
Stay tuned....
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