Folks, I'm part of a team of advisors at a school. Students go to a central office to physically sign up to see us. The office is far from most of us, so we all need to make a once-daily trip over there to learn who's coming and when. The system is inconvenient for the students, too.
I have access to (but tiny experience with) Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 Express, and some programming in C. We have an IIS server. In my reading so far on Visual Studio, it looks as if (but of course I don't know for sure, is why I'm asking) it would be doable to build an online signup form that:
- Displays open time slots to the student in a date/time grid
- Enables advisor to "block out" times when unavailable
- Requires student to sign in to make or change appointment (LDAP authentication would be ideal but I suppose too complex for a quick-&-dirty solution)
- Instantly (via DB connection) blocks out time on the interface when an appointment is made, but does not show student who made the appointment (unless s/he did).
- Does show the advisor, and the advisor only, the names attached to the appointments
I understand it could even be possible to tie an advisor's signup page to his/her Outlook calendar--but again, I don't have an experienced sense of how complex the various pieces mentioned would be to implement.
Can anyone give me an idea of the scale of a project like this? If there are pitfalls I need to watch out for? Tricks/shortcuts you learned while implementing something similar?
Thanks very much
