Choosing
The web administration and the desktop planner
Two ways to build the same timetable, over one database. Most institutions now need only the first — and if your IT policy forbids installing anything, that is the whole answer.
The short answer
You do not need the desktop program.
The web administration covers the whole working cycle: reading and building the week, placing lessons and being told what is in the way, moving and swapping, availability blocks, bookings and their approval, courses and their plans, programmes, groups, lecturers, rooms and students, the hour ladder, the academic year, reports, the generator, and the bulk operations that change many lessons at once. It runs in a browser and needs nothing installed on anybody's machine.
We say this plainly because for a growing number of our customers it is a procurement requirement rather than a preference. An institution whose IT department will not approve desktop software, or whose tender specifies a browser-based system, can run Wise Timetable in full.
So why is there a desktop program at all?
Because it came first, and because the planners who have used it for years are fast in it. A timetabling officer who knows the keyboard in that application is often quicker there than anywhere else, and we are not in the business of taking a working tool away from somebody who is good with it.
It is also where two generator settings live that are deliberately per-workstation and are never published — the anchor-relations rule and the group and lecturer warning thresholds. They belong to one person's copy, not to the institution, which is exactly why they are not on a shared screen.
What it is not, any more, is the only place anything can be done.
One timetable, one owner
This is the setting that matters, and there are only two values.
Each school is set to be administered either from the web or from the desktop. Where the desktop owns it, the web screens read the timetable and refuse to change it, and they say so in those words rather than failing quietly. Where the web owns it, what you save is saved.
The reason is not caution for its own sake. Publishing from a planner's document is a whole-timetable write: the school's tables are written again out of that document, and anything typed elsewhere that the document does not know about is written over. A system that let both sides write freely would lose somebody's afternoon on a schedule nobody could predict.
Moving a school from one to the other is something we do for you, once, and it is not difficult. Most new institutions start on the web and never have the question.
If both are in use, four things to know
Your colleague sees your work within seconds
A lesson placed, moved or swapped in the browser reaches an open planner's document in about ten seconds, and arrives as an ordinary colleague's change. It is not a batch, and there is nothing to press.
A publish rewrites, and it wins
When somebody publishes out of a planner's document, the timetable is written again from that document. This is the one operation that can undo work done elsewhere, and it is worth knowing who in your office can trigger it.
Five things survive a publish rather than being lost
A lecturer's password, the language they chose for themselves, their administrator status, the students saved from the web, and every room booking. These are carried across deliberately, because each of them is something a person set for themselves and would have no way of knowing had been undone.
A few operations reach an open document later
Adjusting turn periods to schedules, putting course schedules into equal time, and an online meeting link placed on a single lesson are in the timetable at once, but a planner who already has the project open sees them when they next open it.
How to choose
- A new institution, or one replacing another system. Start on the web. There is no reason to install anything, and nothing you will miss.
- An existing customer with a planner who prefers the desktop. Keep both. Set the school's owner to whichever side does the bulk of the building, and tell the office which one it is.
- An IT policy or tender that forbids installed software. The web administration is a complete answer, and we will say so in writing during procurement.
- A faculty where several people build the timetable at once. The web, on its own, is the simpler arrangement — there is no document to open, no lock to wait for and nothing to publish.
What the web administration still does not do
Two things, and neither of them is a reason to install anything.
A single lesson cannot be deleted on its own. Teaching is removed either across a week range, with a tool that counts what it is about to change and asks first, or by changing the plan line the lesson comes from — which is usually what was meant anyway.
A small number of very old plan lines — 283 out of eighty-five thousand across every institution we run — are written in a form the web screen does not compose. They are shown exactly as they stand and are left alone by a save. Every one of them was written years ago in the desktop program; a school that has never used it cannot produce another.
We would rather list those two here than let you find them yourself in week three.
Want to see this working?
Book a 45-minute online presentation and we will walk through it against your institution's own scheduling problem.