Hello, I'm Konstantinos Papadimitriou, I'm the web developer and analyst from GeForce
Open Technologies Alliance.
I will show you how we combine easy appointments with GC for online appointment management.
In Covid, a lot of private and public services switched to online appointments, most of them used closed source or services for the online part.
At GeForce, we adapted the easy appointments, which is an online software platform for appointment management and CC, an online open source meeting with audio and video,
and combined them into a seamless integration for booking an appointment that will take place online rather than physically.
About our organization, we established in 2008, we are a non-profit organization and also we have
officers, holders, universities, research centers and public beneficial organizations.
Our objectives are development and promotion of open standards, open software, open content, open data, open government, open educational resources,
active common license of open material and design technologies, and also open hardware and design.
We contribute to openness in education, in public sector and also in private sector.
And we have thematic working groups on open software and open standards, open technologies and education, open governance and open data,
open design, open hardware, wireless networks, information, system security and personal data protection, and also innovation and entrepreneurship.
Well, the easy appointments part, it's a web application for appointment management.
It has a very easy installation on a web server and also configuration is simple.
Users can use it directly without having to install any applications.
The operation is using a web browser and it works on a computer, on tablet or mobile phones since the design is responsive.
It's a really simple and fast operation, optimized without unnecessary options.
Also, easy to use environment for managing the appointments from the service side.
It supports over 25 languages and also since it's open source anyone can contribute more languages.
It's written by Greek developer Alex Cellegidis, which actively continues the development.
It's open software, open source, and also it has already hundreds of installations around the world.
It's written in PHP, it requires PHP 7.4 or above.
It uses MySQL or MariaDB for the database part, runs on NZINX or Apache web server
and uses PDO extensions for JSON, MbString, OpenSSL and PDO.
It's a developer friendly with clean source code.
And now the JITZY part. JITZY is a set of open source projects that allow easy teleconferencing.
It's written in Java and JavaScript. It's compatible with web by RTC.
JITZY video bridge transmits video and audio to all participants separately rather than combining them first.
And of course it's open software.
The platform now, on the first page, if the text seems Greek to you, actually it is Greek.
In the first menu, the user can select the service he wants.
After that, he selects a specific agent or any available from the service.
And finally, some information appears about the selected service, the duration of the appointment.
On the bottom, you can select also the interface language.
We added the part that you can also arrange an online appointment.
That's why maybe it's the same service, but rather than physically, you want to do it online.
On the second step, you choose the available dates and times of the service you choose.
Or if you select a specific agent, you see his availability or any other agent available.
You will see the calendar here.
In the third step, the user inserts its information, first name, last name and email.
Which in this email, he will receive the details of the appointment.
And also the option to change or to cancel the appointment.
The fourth step, you view the user views all the details gathered for the appointment.
And finally, when he submits the appointment, two emails are, he sees confirmation messages on the browser.
Also, the system generates two emails, one for the user with details and also from the selected agent to the selected service.
The email he receives, again, the confirmation, the details and also in case it's an online appointment,
the location on the location field, it will appear the unique video link to the GC service.
Also, the user will receive an as an attachment and an ICS file, which he can import it to the calendar.
From the administration side, the agent sees all his meetings with information in an easy management environment.
Also, you have roles in the system, so you can have directors of the service, which they will see all the appointments.
Some technical details about our prototype.
We did minimal changes to the appointments source code, so it will be also easy to use it.
If the administrator doesn't set a physical location of a service because it's a service,
so you say the appointment is on this address or this building, this office, if this is empty,
then the changes we did, they generate a unique GC link using the appointments house.
Each appointment has a unique house in the database, so we use this also as a link for the conference.
We used the native location field to store the GC link.
We added the location field in the email the user receives.
And administrators on settings.
We also wanted to show some text with information on the home page, which wasn't an option in easy appointments,
so we also added this, and we wanted to change also the appearance.
So we inserted a CSS file, which from there you can change colors and some design of the pages.
The source code is available on the GitHub you see here.
And that was our project. Thank you for coming.
Does anyone have any questions?
Once further information?
Yes.
I understand that this is a fork from the official easy appointment. Yes.
So how do you manage with the new versions? Do you provide something like an automatic combination to add some touches to the main project?
This is a prototype. We spoke with a developer of easy appointments. He has a system for plugins,
so it could be written as a plugin to easy appointments.
At the moment, no, you change the actual code. That's why also we wanted to make minimal changes.
Thank you, Konstantinos. That was fantastic.
Thank you.