My New Product Idea

For those of you who don't know, my company's primary product is Oriador Rota, a staff scheduling package. It's what I spend all my time working on, and I think it's really moving in the right direction.

One of the things I especially like about the product is the timeline presentation, the grouped view, and the way you can get a real idea of what's happening from little graphs or colour codings.

A little while ago, I started thinking that it would be cool if I could use the same views to look at time sensitive data from other software. A little more time went by, another idea came along; to have some kind of low cost viewer license to let more people access rota files. Then it hit me, what if as well as reading our rota files, the viewer was able to read some kind of standard XML format. The XML schema could include support for all kinds of customisation and settings, and if I wanted to make any other data compatible with Oriador, all I would have to do is export the data in an appropriate XML file. And, everyone else could use it too, as the schema will be publicly available.

I've put together a basic website to explain the concept (it probably does it better than I have here!):-

http://www.oriador.com/viewer

There's a forum and a mailing list on the site, and I'll be trying to do a better job of explaining the idea on this blog over the coming days and weeks. All feedback would be welcomed, especially if you think you might be interested in using the product, or if you're just confused by the whole thing and think I need to do a much better job of explaining it.