Hello.
It would be nice to have a calendar where clients can easily go and book an appointment.
Charge a little bit more than usual and this way many website owners will have an opportunity to establish more workload.
It also saves a lot of money if you really think of it. Reduction of paper. etc etc.

Thank you for your great services at the best cost.

I'm going to add a lot of detail that springs from my own situation and my not-Coffee Cup attempts to solve the problem-opportunity.

I'm creating a huge chaterry for astrologers and people who want to rub text with astrologers. I'm renting sophisticated chat space at the 200 user level from Parachat and in that space I'll have about six "room" options. I want professional level people to be able to reserve these rooms well in advance, so I not only need people to be able to book appointments, but in specific chat rooms with time and date, and hopefully a line of description (with maybe a link to more information)

Now there seems to be a rather wonderful open source solution -- except that you need to be a PhD level technician to install it. This is the mrbs software in all it's current and recent versions. One needs Php, and the grand overview to decide whether or not to use a CGI folder, and how to operate MySql and/or PostGre in glorious detail. And that's just the beginning.

However, it should be possible to make a software that would accomplish the same marvelous tasks which are:
1. Self-scheduling into any of an array of "resources" such as the chatrooms.
2. The production of a calendar that would have dates down the side and "resources" listed across
the top, so users could see at a glance what was happening where, and when.
3. Differential access so that anyone can view the calendar but only authorized folks could schedule themselves. (It's also typical that a single admin user can undo scheduled items, but authorized folks cannot deschedule each other.)
4. (optional but very nice) Email notifications sent (weekly or monthly) to a list of folks who asked to be kept up to date. This list typically would be generated by other (membership) software.

I believe that such software would need to have a self-contained database or interact with MySQL without the owner needing to touch admin my Php ever.

The software would need to reside on the web. It should generate code to insert into an ordinary stupid HTML page. It would surely need it's own folder. My expectation is that for many providers, such a folder would need to be created on the desktop then uploaded by FTP.

IN THE MEANTIME, I'm planning to manually insert details into the existing Coffee Cup web calendar software after my authorized people do some self booking with a utility located in Serif territory. This is no fun at all and will turn into a nasty big job if I don't find a solution before site usage picks up.

Thank you for even reading this.

Jane Axtell
Startiming@aol.com
JanieAxtell@aol.com