Feature note
Emailing weekly timetables to lecturers
A lecturer should not have to go and look. Once a week, their own week arrives — and since the 2026 release the school writes the letter itself, without writing to us.
One letter per person, not one timetable for everybody
A timetable that is published is not a timetable that has been read.
The reliable way to reach a lecturer is the mailbox they already have open, and the reliable way to be read is for the letter to be about them and nobody else.
So the scheduled mail walks the lecturer list one person at a time. Each letter carries that lecturer's own week as a PDF, rendered at the moment of sending rather than taken from a file somebody exported in September, and a link that opens their timetable on exactly the week the letter is about. A lecturer with nothing scheduled that week is skipped rather than sent an empty page.
Two jobs are available and they are configured separately: next week's timetable, usually sent on a Thursday or Friday afternoon, and this week's timetable, usually sent on a Monday morning. Most institutions run the first only; the second earns its place where the timetable still moves during the week.
The school writes the letter, and changes it without asking anyone
What changed in the 2026 release is who owns the words.
The subject lines, the covering letters, the send day and the send hour used to be configuration on our server, and changing a sentence meant writing to us. They now live in the school's own database and are edited on the school's own timetable site, under Settings ▸ Notifications, by anybody holding configuration-administrator rights.
Per job: whether it sends, which day, which hour, and which week. Per language: a subject, a link template, and the letter itself as HTML. A lecturer is written to in their own language where one has been written, and falls back to the general text where it has not — including a block of its own for lecturers with no language recorded, who are usually the people an institution most wants to address in English.
The letter is composed from placeholders, so one text serves everybody: the lecturer's name and code, the week number, the Monday that week starts on, and the link to their own timetable are each filled in as the letter is built.
- Nothing that is a credential appears on that screen. The mailbox, its password, the mail server and the database connection stay in server configuration, where the person editing a sentence neither needs them nor can reach them.
- “— unchanged —” is not a blank. It is the starting value for a school that has just been switched on, and it means this setting is still answered by the configuration on our server. Until somebody deliberately sets a day and an hour, nothing about the school's mailing has changed at all.
- The jobs are not created on the website. The server's configuration is the only thing that knows a job exists, so the first run after the upgrade writes the row and the screen only ever edits what is already there.
One real test letter, before three hundred people get it
A preview in a browser is not a rehearsal.
Outlook renders HTML with Word's engine and a browser does not, and the two do not agree. So the screen has a field for one address, and the server sends one real letter there on its next pass — a real lecturer, their real timetable, their real PDF, every placeholder expanded exactly as it will be — and then empties the field again. A filled box means pending; an empty box means nothing waiting; clearing the box cancels a test that has not gone yet.
And after every real run a short summary goes to a nominated address: how many lecturers were checked, how many letters went out, and — the part worth reading — whether the mail server refused any of them. A refused letter is almost always one bad address in the lecturer list, which is how a typing mistake gets noticed in week one rather than in week eleven.
- A test never interrupts a real run. Asked for during the job's own sending hour, it waits for the next pass rather than narrowing the real run to one letter.
- No run summary is sent for a test. “We checked 700 lecturers” after one letter is a sentence a person would file and nobody would believe.
- It takes up to an hour. The job is an hourly pass, not a button.
Why a job set for 14:00 may go out at 14:20, and why that is correct
The background job wakes once an hour, counted from whenever the server was last started rather than from the top of the clock. On each wake it re-reads its configuration — so a change saved on the website is picked up on the next pass, with nothing to restart — and then asks one question: is this the configured day and the configured hour? If it is, it reloads the timetable from the database and sends.
Two consequences follow, and both have caused a puzzled mail at some point. A job configured for 14:00 goes out within its hour, not at the start of it. And a change saved five minutes before the sending hour is in that run — there is no separate reload, and there is no way to recall a letter that has already gone.
From a weekly letter to a calendar that is never stale
A letter is a photograph. It is right when it is sent and it stays exactly as right afterwards, which is the one thing a timetable cannot promise.
So the letter can carry a subscription address for that individual lecturer — one placeholder, one sentence under the button — which Outlook, Google Calendar and Apple Calendar recognise as something to subscribe to rather than to download.
The weekly letter still arrives; the calendar behind it stops being a photograph and starts following the timetable on its own. How calendar subscriptions work covers the other half, and online meeting links explains how a join address reaches the letter and the calendar entry in the first place.
The manuals
Every field on the screen, the full placeholder list, what the run summary tells you, and a table of what to check when something looks wrong. Free and ungated, like every other document on this site.
- Scheduled timetable mail (PDF, 9 pages)The complete guide to the Notifications screen: the two jobs, the letter per language, placeholders, the test letter, the run summary, and what each thing that can look wrong actually means.
- Calendar subscriptions (PDF, 7 pages)The other half of the story: what a lecturer or a room gets from a subscription address, how the two forms differ, and how often a calendar application actually re-reads one.
Want to see this working?
Book a 45-minute online presentation and we will walk through it against your institution's own scheduling problem.