As a manager, creating schedules, ensuring your employees see them, and making changes on the fly when someone calls in or does not show can be a headache. Weather your managing a local restaurant or a larger company, the same problems persist, albeit on different scales. Most recently an application has come to our attention that seems to put ease in the idea of scheduling, sharing schedules, and and so much more. ShifPlanning.com has come to the rescue by not only offering a web interface, but creating a mobile interface to keep your schedule with you at all times on the iPhone.
ShiftPlanning.com is a unique tool that offers the following scheduling possibilities:
- create multiple schedules
- drag/drop interfaces
- calendar sync (Google, iCal, Outlook)
- vacations systems
- shift trading
- notifications and alarms
- shift confirmations
The last one is pretty important. Why? Now you can share the schedule with people online and have them check off, verifying they’ve seen it. No more “losing your schedule” or “forgetting what time you were supposed to come in.” At the end of the day once you’ve created schedules, you get custom detailed reports that will show you expenditures, hours allotted, employee hours and more.
The web and mobile app has really gone above and beyond what I think a manager might think of. Personally I wish something like this would have been used when I was working hourly at a few local joints. If you’re managing your schedules and shifts and can’t seem to find your stride, give this app a look and let us know what you think.
Social networking is turning into a bit of a bramble patch. Whilst making loads of new contacts and keeping in touch with old ones, we’ve somehow lost the part of the networking that is the social – the sharing of information. Be it photos, music or words of wisdom, it’s not quite as easy to let those who’d like to, know.
A solution, however, is afoot. Zentact, brought to us by among others, Eric Marcoullier of MyBlogLog fame, aims to collate your contacts into one place and allow you to share bits and pieces as you browse.
After signing up and adding in a few personal details, you can simply import your contacts from Hotmail, LinkedIn, Gmail and Outlook via a CSV address book and after a few seconds, they are on your system.
Next, and I highly recommend this, download the Firefox extension, all will be revealed shortly.
Now, the genius part. Each contact is taggable with their likes and dislikes and when a web page which has tags that match your contacts, if you installed the extension, a smart little box will flash up in the top right hand corner of your screen with the list of contacts who’s interests are relevant to the site. You can then send them a link and be merrily on your way. Remember, social.
Now the one down side to this is that if you have hundreds of contacts, it takes ages to go through them all tagging away. I’d recommend doing it bit by bit, adding tags as you go – this will take longer but does two things:
It lets you see who you will really be sharing with – there’s no point in having 300 contacts if you only ever talk to six of them regularly anyway, which means you can quickly identify those defunct e-mail addresses you’ve not used in years or people who don’t share common interests.
Secondly, it makes the whole process a lot smoother – you may like a tag binge, but frankly I’d rather be spending my time actually looking at what I came to see rather than typing in long lists of keywords, especially ones that are tricky to spell.
Now, it will take a while for you and Zentact to get to know each other, but the more contacts you tag and the more sites sites you send, the better Zentact becomes at recommending what is suitable for whom. This is a great service and especially suitable for anyone who is on a lot of social networks but can’t quite keep up with what is going on with who. Now you can build your relationships easily and stay in touch better.
We are lucky enough to have a handful of guest invites so you can try the private beta version of this site and tell all your friends about, which you can get by clicking here. Incidentally, you can tell your friends about it via Zentact and you can then invite them to join in this most social of networks.
