Electronic Bulletin Board Publishes Schedules in Real Time

Real Time Schedule Publisher (RTSP) is a computer program that generates a report of the current schedules of as many as about 25 users within an organization. The report is refreshed every 5 minutes and displayed in a common area on a flat-panel computer monitor that serves as an "in/out" bulletin board. The report is displayed in a five-column tabular format and includes color-coded legends that describe the status (with respect to availability) of each user. Each row of the table reflects a single event for a single user; the five columns represent, respectively, the name of the user, the event start time, the event end time, the location, and the subject. The display also includes the current date, day of the week, and time. In addition to the common display, an interactive view of the scheduling information is available, through a standard web browser, on any desktop computer connected to the organization's computer network. The interactive view provides an interface for administering users' accounts. RTSP is based on the active-server architecture of the Windows NT Server operating system and is integrable with similarly based commercial-off-the-shelf scheduling programs.