Conflict Solver Icon Conflict Solver 

Open Source Resource Scheduling Software
for small companies and institutions

About the Software

Conflict Solver is Open Source resource scheduling software targeted at supporting "room reservations" for small organisations (particularly those renting out rooms and needing to avoid booking conflicts).  It is a single-user application which allows you to book resources (rooms, audiovisual equipment, and potentially staff) for users you define within the system, see what resources are in conflict, and maintain contact information for each user.

The software is designed to support small-scale implementations of up to a few hundred resources with as many as a few hundred events/day.  It is written to be cross-platform, using Python 2.2, wxPython 2.3.3 and ZODB 4, but is not currently tested on platforms other than Windows 2000 and Windows 98.

Currently in late alpha release for the 1.0 version, the product is currently being tested for day-to-day use, but isn't ready for non-evaluation purposes.  It does contain most of the code intended to be included in the 1.0 final release.  Development can be tracked through the project page.

Features

Conflict Solver is not as full-featured as commercial resource scheduling software, but it provides a basic solution with following features:

  • TimeLine view with graphical display of the entire database of events as a continuously scrolling infinite graph with events colour-coded according to colours you assign to your users with optional events and username text labels
  • TimeLine view displays conflicted resources as a split-bars with all involved resources displayed
  • Event editing controls that show you what resources are available/not available and let you drag-and-drop to and from the event's assigned resources
  • Consistent object and collection-editing interface (provided by the wxPython Properties Distribution)
  • Object Database (ZODB 4) with strong emphasis on recoverability and robustness
  • Built-in Python 2.2 Shell for scripts and batch-processing tasks (PyCrust)

Notable missing features:

  • No repeating events
  • No libraries of "standard" events (particularly civic/religious holidays)
  • No support for non-Gregorian calendars
  • No support for events with no resources (such as holidays).  These events can now be seen in the event-management window, but they do not show up in the timeline.
  • No resource-requirement negotiation (currently resources are assigned directly by the administrator, rather than being automatically assigned according to resource requirement specifications).  This will require a constraint-solver library.
  • No integration with external sources for user contact information (such as vCard collections).  This will likely require the creation of a standard Python module for vCard and iCalendar reading/writing, as well as a full modelling of contact-information data, which promises to be an involved project.

    • Users wishing to request features should add feature requests on the project page.  Both users and developers are encouraged to join the mailing list to discuss new ideas/features/approaches/changes.

    Why Open Source Matters to You

    Conflict Solver's Open Source license (BSD License) provides you with a number of benefits:

    • Free licensing
    • No chance of vendor lock-in holding your data hostage, you have access to the source code of the application, and can always migrate away from the product if it no longer suits your needs
    • You can modify the product to suit your changing needs (or have someone else modify it for you)
    • You can, if you're so inclined, resell the product providing you abide by the minimal requirements of the license.

    Documentation

    There's not much documentation currently, what there is on this page, which includes a screen shot of the application with a testing database loaded.

    A SourceForge Open-Source Project:
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