hey, I work for a non-profit autism charity which provides respite (a weekend normally) and short brakes for parents (~4 hours) and I've recently noticed the chaos they go through to make our rota's (and all hell brakes lose when someone calls in ill). Here's the basic idea of what it needs be able to cope with! There are a large number of service users and staff members Some staff members cannot work with specific services users (due to lack of experience/training, bad relationship etc). Some services users MUST have multiple staff members (2 to 1 or even 3 to 1 care) to be able to cope with staff on holiday and calling in ill, suggesting alternative carer and child shifts (but also considering that certain service users shifts CANNOT be cancelled) They most likely would buy a commercial package if i informed them of one (i don't know of any though...) but i'm trying to shift all the office computers to Kubuntu (so i really don't really want any windows only software!).
I've seen quite a few LAMP-based solutions, both commercial and open-source. The beauty of a web-based solution is that it's truly cross-platform. You might try the usual sources for the OSS, like SourceForge, etc. For the commercial, I'll keep my eyes peeled.
