Checkin

By Matthew McNaney

Our Financial Aid office sees a lot of students. So many students arrive with so many different concerns requiring various lengths that Financial Aid implemented walk-in service. Scheduling just wouldn't work.

I originally wrote this for 0.10.x. For 1.x, I figured I might as well generalize it and offer it to other people.

Basically, you add users to the system. Each user can be labeled as "staff." Meanwhile, the front office allows students to enter their first and last name and their reason for being there - the reasons are created administratively. Depending on their reason for being there or their last name, they will be assigned to a staff member.

Staff members have three statuses - available, not available, and meeting with visitor. Their status prevents or allows visitors to be assigned to them. A green "available" status means the front desk should send back the visitor. When the visitor arrives, the staff go into the meeting status.

Checkin records when the visitor arrived and for how long they met with the staff. This allows reports showing total time visitors waited to be seen and how long their visit with the staff lasted.

It should be obvious that this was designed for Intranet purposes. Visitors signing up from anywhere on the Internet would cause problems.