Project Homepage - www.antinoos.gr/en/orologio.htm
Project Screenshots - www.antinoos.gr/orologioen/OroTour.html

Orologio Class Timetabling System is a commercial product maintained by Antinoos a company based in Greece. The software is used by multiple levels of education from elementary school to the university level. The software has had many revisions, so it is very stable and is well suited to be a model for scheduling software, but like all software there are good, bad, and missing features.

Good Features

• provides automated teacher-course-classroom scheduling
• provides the ability to keep the teacher, course, and classroom in a database
• provides simple interfaces to add courses and teachers
• provides teacher preferences in terms of what they want to teach, where they want to teach, when they want to teach, and how much they can teach
• provides interfaces to edit teachers, courses, and classrooms
• provides interfaces to edit already created schedules, which when being edited show what can and cannot be done based on teacher preferences, classrooms available, and time frame
• provides administrative ability to place courses before automated scheduling takes place
• provides previews of individual timetables per teacher-course-classroom
• creates a weekly grid of the resulting schedule
• provides the ability to lock and unlock a timeframe for a class or teacher after the initial schedule is created for in a situation where a complete rescheduling is needed
• provides automatic creation of school exam scheduling so that there isn't a room conflict during finals week
• provides the ability to copy-paste of data and timetables into Word, Excel, or text files
• provides configurable printouts of individual timetables (teacher, course, or classroom) or of master timetable (teacher, course, and classroom)

Bad Features

• the ability to use pre-existing templates, but it involves opening an old one and then saving it as a new name so that it does not accidentally overwrite the pre-existing template
• proprietary database structure that does not adhere to our system specification (permanent course/instructor/room/preference database with per quarter copies of each)
• only two scheduling views available: daily and weekly
• only available for windows
• created in Greece so vocabulary and support will be limited
• confusing user interface
• database is in a format made for the program

Missing Features

• no separation between admin(scheduler) and end user(teacher)
• no source code

Overall, the Orologio Class Timetabling System seems like good on paper, however, when attempting to use their trial version the UI was very simplistic and didn't provide any guidance to creating a schedule. It has all the features we are looking for, but because the program is a commercial product, there is no way to import or export the databases, or editing it to work exactly the way we want. We would be limited to the way Antinoos has created the piece of software and the way they want it to be used.