Overview

Introducing Mimosa

Mimosa is an integrated timetabling and teaching planning software. It is designed to be as flexible and versatile as possible and to aid in all kinds of teaching planning problems in schools, independent of their type and size. In fact, the user may construct a school type that does not yet even exist - by defining a suitable set of component types. The user may change and save all names of weeks and days, time-periods, categories, report titles and other printed words in any existing or non-existent language. The technical side of Mimosa has been kept as simple and self-contained as possible, despite the scheduling difficulties that schools often face when they create their timetables.

A school timetable is a table for coordinating these four elements:

School timetables usually cycle every week or every fortnight. The phrase "School timetables" largely refers to high schools, because primary schools typically have trivially simple structures. Note that Mimosa has been successfully used in variety of environments outside educational institutions, including also conferences, organisations, businesses, TV stations and departments of corrections.

Scheduling is not easy

Contrary to booking systems, scheduling is in most cases much more complicated. Each event (or course as they are called in Mimosa) contains a variable amount of resources (or components), that should be kept linked together in timetables. When hundreds or thousands of events and resources are linked together, the resulting system becomes easy dynamic and multidimensional. Humans cannot easily manage and memorise the contents of several matrices and their dependencies and the complexity of creating timetables for a very small school may easily increase.

Often the primary goal is to create a feasible solution, which does not have any overlaps of resources, that is, the same person or room should not be occupied by two or more events at the same time. A secondary goal is to make schedules that are meaningful, often preventing from scattering events randomly across timetables, grouping some events and taking care that some resources are not assigned to slots where they are not available. User should have the possibility to view the data from different angles and make decisions that lead to better solutions, but do not cause any errors.

Mimosa enables to create timetables manually or automatically, and in any combination of these both approaches. Creating timetables manually often requires similar talents as solving some of the tasks below. But whether you use the manual or automatic approach, Mimosa does not allow you to make any mistakes and enables to undo, redo the actions, and store the results on disk and so on.

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 tracked. You can easily jump from one window to another, view the data from any angle, find, sort, browse and schedule first, then add any of the missing resources. You can print your reports on any printer or as web pages, or select one of the numerous Clipboard formats, and use the spreadsheet software as your companion.

Installing of Mimosa

When installing the application from CD-ROM, the installation process should start automatically when the installation disk is inserted to the drive. If it does not happen, browse the disk and select setup.exe or from the Windows menu, click  Start|Run... and click Browse or typed:setup.exe, where d is the drive letter of the CD-ROM drive. Go through the installation wizard by clicking the Install, Next and Finish buttons.

You can uninstall Mimosa with the Uninstall command created during the installation process.

Mimosa features

Examples of educational environments where Mimosa is used

Connections to other applications

Mimosa provides several ways for integration to other applications. For such a purpose you can use for input and output either the text file conversion selections or pass the information from or to other Windows applications with the help of several available Clipboard formats.

You can use your spreadsheet application to input your data, analyse results, print reports and insert in your documents.

Mimosa also provides an open data format for other administration software packages.

Several (up to 255) users can combine their Mimosa files and process them simultaneously; all networks support this feature. Mimosa merges and synchronizes all files automatically, lists possible conflicts and removes them from the combined file.

You can print all reports or publish them as webpages.

Capacity of Mimosa

Mimosa is suitable for

Data transfer options

General features

Optimisation tools

Reports

Timetabling

Other tools

Compatibility

Go to Basic steps