CS Office Assignment System

Interface Summary

This outlines the different views (including editing views) needed for various people.

Room Assignment Editor

Staff responsible for assignment office space need to be able to be able to view entitlements and move people around.

Directory Pages

We need to automatically generate the grad student office listing from the information in the assignment system, probably subject to some filtering for students who are not employed by UW and who have specifically requested to be excluded.

Table Summary

This outlines the data tables required to store the information for the system.

Room

• ID, effective date, number, termination date

Location

• room (ID), position
• positions are typically 1, 2, 3, ... or A, B, C, .... The existence of rooms with letter prefixes makes position numbers look more attractive while rooms without letter prefixes make position letters look more attractive. Still it feels like picking one is tidier.

Entitlement

This table describes the right of a person to office space.

• person (UW userid), effective date, termination date, type
• What about visitors? Do we ever need to assign space to non-UWdir people?
• Types include shared office, private office, etc. For grad students this is shared, almost (?) always. For faculty (not to be included initially) this would be private office.
• Termination date may be NULL to indicate indefinite (until further notice).

Assignment

• person (UW userid), position (room ID + position), effective date, termination date

General Notes

• Should positions have ID numbers? If so, should they be barcoded with the ID numbers, or just with their short position number, or with their room number and position number?
• If a desk is moved to a different room, do we keep its ID? This is not a furniture inventory system.

Outstanding Questions

Anything not covered by the above that may require a design change:

• What about hierarchical assignments? e.g. DC 3456 is assigned indefinitely to the DB group to use for their grad students. This term, Joe Smith is in DC 3456. We don't necessarily need a "full" implementation of this concept, but we do need to be able to record that certain offices belong to certain research groups, and a hierarchical implementation might actually be the simplest way of doing it.

-- IsaacMorland - 07 Dec 2006