The browser requirements for RotaDoc administration are more restrictive than those for rota viewing. We will endeavour to make rota viewing work with most browsers. Please let us know if you find any that don't work.
For rota administration we have tested RotaDoc on Internet Explorer 5 and 6, Mozilla (0.98) and Netscape 6. We have also done some limited testing on Netscape 4. We would expect it to work on Internet Explorer 4 and 5.5, but we have not tested these yet. We have reports of successful use using Internet Explorer 5 on the Apple Macintosh.
We have not been able to make rota administration work in Opera due to its poor JavaScript support (we understand this may well be remedied in the Opera 7 release). We have not yet tested on web browsers running under Apple Macintosh, Unix, Linux or other operating systems. If you have tried RotaDoc on these operating systems or on other browsers, please contact us to let us know of success or any problems.
RotaDoc needs to remember your log-on details as you move from page to page. It will do this using a cookie if your browser accepts them. The cookie does not persist on your machine, but is deleted when you close your browser.
If your browser is set to reject cookies RotaDoc will still work, but you will see a suffix on each URL in your browser. This suffix is of the form: "jsessionid=xxx...". Adding these suffixes costs a little in performance and makes bookmarking pages (or adding to favourite pages) more inconvenient. For this reason we recommend that you enable cookies. On IE6 and Mozilla/Netscape 6 you can do this on a site by site basis.
The RotaDoc database is backup once per day to a separate physical site from the RotaDoc server. We maintain these backups of the whole site for service continuity. However because RotaDoc is a free service, we can't guarantee these backups.
RotaDoc provides an XML backup facility, so that organisation administrators can make their own backups. The ultimate responsibility for safeguarding data resides with the organisation administrator.
RotaDoc runs on a Linux system which has carefully controlled access. It is only accessed for system administration using secure encrypted connections.
All access to rota data is protected by passwords set by the organisation administrator. Those passwords are stored in secure hash format, so it is impossible to retrieve the passwords again once they have been entered.
We use other good security practices:
RotaDoc is currently only accessible via a standard unencrypted HTTP protocol. We are considering providing an enhanced service that would enable access via a secure encrypted HTTPS protocol. Please let us know if you would be interested in such a service.
RotaDoc is currently privately funded. Costs of running the service are low discounting time taken to write the software.
We are investigating sponsorship and advertising on the web site. We welcome approaches from would be sponsors and advertisers. Please use our feedback form to make initial approach, or see our contact details.
The following list indicates features that are currently being developed. The order in the list reflects current priority:
If you disagree with the priority of these features, or would like to see other features, please let us know.
We are considering making the RotaDoc software available as a package for those who wish to run it on their intranet. If you are interested in this, please approach us.
We are considering making the RotaDoc available with service level guarantees in exchange for an annual fee. The service might include features like encrypted connections and guaranteed automated backups. If you are interested in such a service, please approach us.
RotaDoc is written in Java using the Java 2 Enterprise Edition technologies (J2EE). It uses JDBC, JavaMail, JSP, Servlets and Struts. It also uses SQL to access the data which is stored in a MySQL database. It uses HTML for presentation combined with a smattering of Cascading Style Sheets. JavaScript (ECMAScript) client side scripting is used extensively in the administration pages to aid performance and provide editor functions.
RotaDoc runs on Linux (RedHat at present). However it is possible to run it on other operating systems which support Java and MySQL. This includes various versions of UNIX and Windows. RotaDoc is currently developed on Windows 2000 and XP.
On a Windows PC you can insert a non-breaking space by holding down the Alt key and typing 0160 on the numeric keypad. A space will appear. When the name is seen in the rota view, there should not be a line break at that space.