Mimosa Scheduling Software

Mimosa is a Finnish scheduling and course planning software for use in any kind of school and university of varying type and size. Besides academic timetabling, Mimosa suits perfectly to schedule conferences and in business and organisations. The application is fast and slim, versatile, user-friendly with a large capacity. Mimosa has a very rich set of efficient optimisation tools and interactive timetabling selections even for the most demanding scheduling challenges.

Mimosa is not only an efficient timetabling machine. No way! It lets the user control the scheduling process in various ways and always provides the most relevant information where it is currently needed. All steps in timetabling are easy to undo and redo, and it is a snap to go to back to any previous or bookmarked step. Forgetting all unnecessary details and multidimensional thinking does not only make timetabling an enjoyable process, but also enables viewing completely new opportunities to solve the puzzle and make others happy too!

"It's such a relief finding your software - like a sort of "At last someone has done this intelligently" - In the last few weeks I have evaluated probably 15 or 20 pieces of software, and none of the others come close to your solution - typically as luck would have it, yours was one of the last I tried!!" --- D.L.P., Plymouth, United Kingdom

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Once you have started to input your data in Mimosa, you will soon forget how complicated a task you are actually working with. You do not necessarily need any pencil or paper while you work, since all data is now at your fingertips, and you can forget all those pitfalls and conflicts you previously faced. You can easily jump from one view to another, see your data from any angle, find, sort, browse and schedule first, then add any of the missing resources. You can print your reports on printer or publish them as web pages, or select one of the numerous ways to transfer your data in and out via Clipboard, using your spreadsheet application as your companion.

"I love this program! It makes a dreadful chore almost fun - like a puzzle, but a workable one! We will buy the full version as soon as our school gets a bit larger, but we are grateful for the use of the free version in the meantime - thanks!"
--- T.C., U.S.A.

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More about Mimosa

• Mimosa is user-friendly. It prevents you from making common mistakes; instead you receive useful hints, answers to what-if questions and you have the context-sensitive help or access the tutorial on our webpage. You can create all or some of the timetables either automatically, or interactively and in any order. Mimosa permits flexible working flow by allowing you to change any part of data or constraints even after scheduling of timetables, while still preventing you of making any errors. The revolutionary 1000 step Undo and Redo tools makes the manual timetable scheduling a simple and enjoyable process.
  
  
• We provide you free lifetime upgrades and support. Purchasing the Mimosa license entitles users to upgrade Mimosa to its latest version, free of charge. Free email and phone support is also provided and users can join our discussion forums when they want to be in touch with other users.
  
  
• We are approachable. You can contact us anytime and ask for new features and extensions to existing features. We try our best to promptly fulfil your requirements, if they are technically possible and in the scope of Mimosa.
  
  
• Openness of Mimosa allows you to move data easily to and from other applications via numerous Clipboard selections and the text file conversion tools. Use your spreadsheet software to input data and create own reports and layouts from Mimosa data, if the numerous options of reports do not suit all your purposes. It is easy to add your own notes and data for administrative needs and also hide them from published reports.
  
  
• Scalable capacity of Mimosa allows you to manage up to 300,000 timetables, 30 slots in a day of a 7-day week and 255 terms and over 8000 entries in a single small file. No third-party databases or additional software is used with Mimosa in order to guarantee maximum performance, reliability and easy maintenance, combined with low one-time price.
  
  
• Mimosa is slim and fast. It uses only a couple of megabytes of the computer memory and disk capacity. All actions are instantaneous even when using a large data set. Instead of using external databases, Mimosa utilises its own efficient integer arithmetic based and fully optimised engine to perform demanding scheduling tasks fast and reliable.
  
  
• Mimosa is portable. The same version of Mimosa runs on all versions from Windows 98 to Windows 7, and it is also currently used by our clients on Mac OS and Linux, by using suitable emulators.
  
  
• Flexible architecture enables Mimosa to fit for all types of users, very easily. It supports all school and university or other academic institutions, organisations and companies, since you can easily configure the application for your special scheduling needs or apply the included templates and sample files. You can define the needed resource types and calendar schema according to the special requirements. You can also set bookings to slots and terms, lock selected courses and, block terms to prevent unwanted assignments.
  
  
• Professional approach will ensure that you can always find the right means for every task among its 600 menu selections, including also the efficient timetable optimisation tools, which enable you to create a good initial solution, minimise the gaps in an existing solution or optimise students' course selections, just to name few. Mimosa has been used to schedule timetables by thousands of institutions over several years, and the intense co-operation with of our clients has enabled us to create an extreme rich and robust toolbox for the most demanding scheduling environments.
  
  
• Several departments can use Mimosa simultaneously and automatically merge their files over a network, expanding its capacity even larger. The network extension is not based on any specific network architectures, and it takes into account the dynamic nature of Mimosa data files and does not block the files while others are working.
  
  

"We are looking at several other scheduling packages but I personally like the user interface of your product."
--- B.B., Ontario, Canada

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Examples of cases where Mimosa is in use

• Class-Teacher Timetabling: This problem is normally associated with secondary or primary schools where the students are scheduled as a “class”. All students in the same class take exactly the same set of courses. Typically, teachers and classes are busy most of the day, and the problem is to find times when each teacher can meet with his/her required classes with no conflicts.
  
  
• Course Timetabling: In course timetabling, the system is used to help the user determine the day and time to offer each section of each course. The objective is normally to find a course timetable that minimises the number of (potential) student conflicts while respecting teacher, room and equipment restrictions. Unlike the “Class-Teacher” setting, students typically have more flexibility in selecting courses, which adds to the complexity of the problem.
  
  
• Student Scheduling (Student sectioning): Student scheduling normally occurs after the timetable has been determined. In some schools, courses can be offered in more than one section (i.e., different instructors may offer the same course at different times) and a student scheduling package helps the user decide which students should be allocated to each section to minimise student conflicts and balance section sizes.
  
  
• Teacher Assignment: Normally, each teacher in a school will have a number of different possible courses that he/she could teach. The teacher assignment problem helps the user to assign teachers to courses to maximise teacher satisfaction, cover all of the required courses and avoid conflicts.
  
  
• Classroom Assignment: Classroom assignment normally takes place after the timetable has been fixed. Each course section must be assigned to a specific classroom to meet capacity, location, preference and special equipment restrictions.
  
  
• All these cases can be solved within the same file with a user-defined calendar and/or terms selection. Other supported special cases are Personalised timetables, Block scheduling, Intake scheduling and Cycling timetables, just to name few.

"By far, Mimosa is superior to any scheduling product I have researched and believe me, I have researched many."
--- M. W., Washington, U.S.A.

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Free downloads and free support

With Mimosa you are never alone; if you do not find the solution to your problems in our documentary, you can be in contact with us anytime. We are used to serve our customers promptly and professionally worldwide. If you encounter new features you would like to add to Mimosa, we will do our best to include them in the future versions.

Purchasing Mimosa entitles you to all these free and unlimited services:

• Download anytime the latest version of Mimosa -
• Email or call us in case of any questions
• Get informed of latest updates and tips how to increase your productivity
• Join our discussion groups

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How On Earth Did We Live Before Scheduling Tech? - An article by Isabella Woods

It’s difficult now to think back to the days before teachers used dedicated software to organize scheduling and timetables. What is still a task of great proportion must have been even harder for those that taught before computers were widely available. Even when Windows 3.1 finally heralded the promise of the future, software to sort out tough scheduling tasks was nowhere in sight. So how did we manage?

Frankly, it was a bit of a nightmare with a lot of time wasted for individual teachers and, in larger schools, the administration office. It was particularly difficult where the class times for different grades differed substantially. This meant allocating teachers for different time periods and hoping that they turned up at the right location and at the right time. If you managed to get a timetable done without having students or teachers in two places at the same time, there was a rousing cheer.

Part time teachers caused big problems because it was difficult to balance needs as well as those of the students. Some had full days off while others worked half days most days of the week. Timetabling was easier if you could match them up and pretend that each pair was a full time teacher, but this often didn’t work out.

Split Campus Locations?

Campus travel caused even more headaches. Often you needed to keep students in one part of the campus when you really wanted to have them cross town in seconds to be available for the next class.

Sports venues caused problems too. Sharing with other schools meant not just managing your own scheduling and timetables, but organizing that to fit in with another school that needed the playing fields at the same time as you.

And then there was the issue of allocating teachers for a period of time, but changing to another subject for the next semester. Swapping art one semester for sports activities the next mixed up classrooms, students and teachers.

Move the Teacher or the Students?

Back before the software arrived it was easier to keep a teacher in one room and move the students around, multiplying the chaos by thirty. Some schools used the opposite planning method, where the students stayed in one room and the teachers moved around. Of course, this only worked in elementary schools and was useless when the students chose different subjects to study in high school.

Another major problem was incorporating the ways that students could attend rooms for out of hours learning, for example lunch time sessions. It's no wonder there were so many stressed out teachers and administrators and this probably didn't help schools' public liability insurance premiums.

The Age of Software Scheduling

At least when Outlook, Exchange and other software arrived you felt as though you could manage time a little easier, even if that meant personal time and not school time. You could easily transfer all the scheduling and timetable information into the software.

This gave teachers a level of freedom in managing spare time; it showed when you could mark papers and when you needed to prepare new lesson plans. However, it didn't help with timetabling and scheduling on a larger scale.

Help From Within

Fortunately, academics were quick to learn how to use and manage computer programs and it wasn’t long before some initial software packages arrived. Usually they were written to work in just one school or college, but eventually one programmer would help a friend in another school and pass on their program which could be badgered and beaten into submission until it adopted the new school’s curriculum.

These options still weren't perfect, so many teachers were thankful when a new program took the task of keeping schedules up to date out of their hands. Mimosa Software stopped stressed out teachers from running a mile in the opposite direction whenever the topic of timetabling was raised. Flexible enough to take a room off the system and provide instant updates to teachers and students, it's the software no-one could have imagined in a time before task scheduling. Now, no-one needs to miss a session, and no-one needs to tear their hair out.

- Isabella Woods