App or website to keep track of which machines are in use in a machine room

[dwilbank]

Hi.
My company has a central machine room with several dozen video tape decks in it.
I'm looking for either a website (or an app) that updates its info instantly anytime someone makes a change.
Then anyone in the company can check this site (or app) from their own desktop computer.

Imagine a spreadsheet, with cells representing all the machines in the ingest room

imagine a pulldown menu next to each machine, listing who is using the machine, and another pulldown machine telling when they will be finished using it
and another cell for people to put the machine on reserve... or to notify others that the machine is broken

in excel this would be rather clumsy - involving saving the file every time someone made a change...

Any existing technology that will do this? Or is this much more complicated than I think. Involving HTML 5 or something like that...?

Thanks

[dwilbank]

Well, third voice used to make something where you could overlay sticky notes on any website.
If you created a website of nothing but a chart of your machine room, users could stick their names on any machines that were in use.

But they went out of business.

stickis promised the same functionality, but I think they are also gone...

so what about devote an otherwise idle computer to this use?
make the desktop wallpaper be a chart of the machine room, and just have users drag around icons with their names on them. They place the icons on the machines they're using and everyone can just use vnc to keep tabs on that computer when they want to make a change or check it out!

[dwilbank]

Thx. I'll try that last one.
I'm wondering how many people can log in at one time using VNC though.
Is there something else better that can have 20 users at once?

Still hoping to get this functionality on a web page...

[nudone]

google documents has spreadsheets that can be shared - perhaps several users can edit/update a single shared spreadsheet being accessed by diffferent machines?

perhaps that would be too good a feature for google to provide?

[dwilbank]

They actually do allow multi-user real-time editing now!

But I can't find how to lock certain cells, and no one else can figure out how to get dropdown menus to work...

[nudone]

oh right. interesting. do their spreadsheets actually support dropdown menus and menu locking?

if you are sure they are there then i (or someone else on the forum) might be able to figure them out.

[dwilbank]

everyone on the forums says menu dropdowns are not implemented yet...

as far as locking cells in place, I don't know enough about excel to even know where to look...

I thought maybe just loading a jpg as a background in the spreadsheet would work. So it would LOOK like cells were locked...
But I haven't dug too deeply yet to see if that is possible either...

[nudone]

hmm, well i know google spreadsheets certainly don't have all the options of something like ms excel.

perhaps there's a way of making it do you want need with just the basic functionality. not sure how though.

[nudone]

i've had a quick look around at what is appearing on google's help for their documents - this link might give you something to try until they implement a real cell lock feature:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?tid=3e4e88285a1e1284&hl=en

[nudone]

reading this link also gives the impression that you might be able to set up a form that works the spreadsheet - thereby preventing users from "overtyping" data already entered.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?tid=38f4cd41ed6b5918&hl=en

[dwilbank]

those methods do not look fun - but thanks!