News & Updates

NiftySchool: Transition To More Flexible Scheduling

By Paolo Dona — Jun 03, 2011

In the past few weeks we’ve been working hard on a internal infrastructure upgrade. This post explains what we have been doing and why.

NiftySchool it’s always been a schedule-based system, in which you specify the weekly schedule for your classes and enrollments.

When setting up a class, you can tell the system that lessons will be taught for example “every Monday, Tuesday and Friday between 10:00 and 11:30”.

This is good for schools that have fairly regular schedules but it is not working well if you have frequent variations or if you need fine-grained lesson management. In order to create extra lessons, for example, you currently need to create ad-hoc 1-day classes, or write custom information in the class notes.

We appreciate that schools need to be able to quickly add, remove or reschedule individual lessons independently of the standard class schedule, overriding the ‘default’ calendar set for the class. The class schedule should only be a quick way to set up regular lessons but should not be a limit to the flexibility of the class calendar.

We are changing the system to be more ‘lesson-centric’. Class schedules will be treated like ‘recurring events’ in outlook, with each lesson individually customisable (date, time, teacher, room etc).

In order to achieve that, we have refactored the way we store data internally and we updated the application to use the new structure. This is one of the biggest changes we’ve done to the system since we launched.

So what’s the plan?

We will be rolling out the changes in stages:

1) We will upgrade the underlying structure keeping the functionality as it is. You should see no noticeable difference in the platform. Your lesson data will be automatically updated during the migration.

2) There will be a cool-down period of about a week, in which we will monitor the system with the new architecture. This may lead to a few tweaks to improve performance of pages or slightly adjust functionalities.

3) We will start adding new features that take advantage of the new architecture, and you will start enjoying the greater flexibility that the new system provides.

Examples of features we’re going to add are:

• ability to add ‘unscheduled’ lessons
• rescheduling or cancelling individual lessons
• calendar synchronisation with outlook and google calendar

Please note that the system will be constantly available and you can keep using it as usual.

Stage #1 will be rolled out in the next few days, please bear with us during this transitory period. We’re excited as this will allow us to support your requests better going forward and really take NiftySchool to the next level.

Should you have any questions about the upgrade, feel free to contact us at info@niftyschool.com. Thank you for your patience and continued support.