Bryan has been making videos about his project, just to document things. Small push to change eXpo payment type to Herbo payment type. Lots of talk about layers on time and availability. Bryan got deeper into reviewing the horizontal time view page for Beaver. We also talked about time buttons (this will be a sub of my cart favorite buttons but to help book and sell time - with an additional calendar tie-in as well as shopping cart functionality). See elements of time #'s 6967, 8004, and 9633 for other ideas on time buttons.

We were playing inside of Microsoft Excel with scenarios and options for web availability and layering.

Work session with Bryan going over projects. We talked about date-picker stuff and then moved onto scheduling. I was pitching a small proposal to add in a temp roster for the horizontal time view. This would be a JSON formatted setting that would allow you to pre-load in certain people to your horizontal time view. It's not real availability, but it was a step in the right direction. I did a bunch of drawing and brainstorming with Byran. Most of it was on the fly. He recorded a few notes.

We then switched and got into deeper availability and the layered calendar options that we are planning on building. This flow would allow us to prep or overlay a schedule or virtual availability schedule over the main calendar (elements of time). We went over ideas for flow, logic, and what it might look like. We determined that there were 3 main steps. For a single assignment, we would need who it was that was being assigned? The who could also be the what. For example: are we setting the availability for a person, place, or thing? That's step one. Step two would deal with a date or a date/time range. These first two steps would always be required. The third step would ask if we need to reoccur or duplicate those new availability settings. We would need to select that option, only if needed. If used, we would copy or duplicate the existing settings in bulk.

We got into tons of details and ideas. Lots of drawing and brainstorming. Bryan and I were even playing in Microsoft Excel and doing some fake table layout and data input stuff for the new layer tables. We would like to think of the new overlay functionality for the calendar as layers or availability layers. This will end up being part of our "any" scheduler. Behind the scenes, we will have the real elements of time (that already exists). The front or overlay layers will be for things like employee scheduling, non availability, holidays, web availability (options for online booking), etc. Fun stuff.

Planning with Bryan. The topic of the day was brainstorming on the "any" scheduler or any scheduling stuff. We talked about a number of different steps and what we could save and where.

1. We will use JSON page level settings for simple and advanced (shifts) rostering. Thinking about a number of different tabs going across the page for the new settings. Tab 1 would be simple full day rostering, tab 2 would be advanced shift level rostering, tab 3 would be shift settings, and tab 4 would be the web availability stuff listed below (in number 2).
2. The more advanced stuff will be saved in the layers or availability layers. We have already come up with 3 sub steps of that process. Click here for more info about the web availability layers. As a note, the web availability layers would be saved in a database as individual records vs JSON object storage. It will help us look things up and map usage/availability levels better.
3. We will offer a number of different, user defined, saved favorites. These are custom reports with saved search criteria. Some of these may be calendar views, horizontal time views, vertical time views, and other custom reports. Here are a few links with some ideas. See element of time #'s 8004 and 6967 in the shop.

Good brainstorming session and going over ideas. We got pretty technical and did a lot of drawings. It's fun to see how things progress and the progression of things.

Meeting with Bryan and going over some quick fixes that we had to do this morning on some date/time formatting. Small review. Next, he had done some clean-up on the employee and employer withholding settings for payroll that were launched a few days ago. We pushed up the new code and Bryan ran some update scripts to update the new settings for all corporations.

While Bryan was running the update scripts, I was doing some emails. We then pushed up some new code for Bryan's project management stuff. This is a small custom page that he runs all of his stuff (projects) on.

We spent the last hour looking at time, scheduling, and web availability settings. We did some light review and planned another meeting for tomorrow. Planning the next steps to help with scheduling, rentals, and making internal and online reservations.

Working with Bryan on planning for scheduling stuff. I showed him a small pitch on what I showed the guys earlier in our sales meeting. We then flipped over and did a good session on the time settings and scheduling stuff. We were looking at reservations and what else we have already built. So far, we have a fully functional one-to-many assignments that can be attached to reoccurring events (similar to the bike shuttle company). We can do a one-to-many assignment for unique events (similar to what we built out for ski area and their special events). The next major round will be dealing with single events and flow.

We talked a lot about settings, and even reverse settings (what don't you want to schedule may be less than what you want to schedule). We were talking about booking nights, booking days, timeslots, and individual appointments. We got into talks and discussions about showing calendars with availability, restrictions, and taken dates and time. We talked about web availability layers and other calendar layers and ideas.

Bryan is going to build out a small scratch file using the existing date-picker and see if we could use that widget to show availability without having to build the whole thing on our own. We will feed it (the date-picker calendar) with real data, but if it can help us show available and unavailable dates, that would be huge. We will build out a quick scratch file to test things out with hardcoded data and dates before we fully build it into the ecommerce page flow.

One of the last topics was talking about getting data both in and out of the database. This is where the forethought and layering of the calendar comes in. Thinking in database language, what would the SQL (queries) look like to figure out what is taken vs what is available vs what is potentially available (maybe in flux or being modified)? Being able to go backwards and forwards from a known date range or timeslot and figure things out. Maybe even on a multiple or over multiple layers, locations, persons, places, or things. It could get a little interesting.

Meeting with Bryan. We were working on some planning for the next level of online scheduling. We went over a few things that we are learning on rentals. Sean is onsite this week in Texas with a trailer rental store. We had to figure out some things with saving credit cards per person, incase other payments were needed the card was no longer present. We also had some funky special credit card fees that the client wanted to pass on to their customer. We then had to tweak that special fee to make it show up at the very bottom of the invoice line items, even if it was added in between other line items. Anyways, small review of what we are learning.

Bryan and I then shifted gears and went into our own prep stuff for online scheduling of appointments. We went over some of our ideas for the web availability and calendar layers that we had talked about previously. We did a bunch of drawing and planning for the next phase. Bryan asked me to record a small video. We used a different tool and we only got my side of the audio. That's my bad. Anyways, we did a quick 16 minute clip.

After that, we spent a little bit of time time talking about Bryan project management and timeclock tools. He is looking at ways of recording sub times in one corp and being able to auto add those same timeclock records to other corporations (where permissions were assigned). We talked about some time id matching and storing those cross-corp mappings. Light back and forth. Good meeting.

Meeting with Bryan to look at a query. Light research and refinements. Ended up being the main po/invoice line status. The query was including removed or inactive line items. We only wanted the active line items. We also had to add in a web availability filter that we missed.