Mimosa Scheduling Software Free Edition

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on January 24, 2011

Mimosa is well known in the education community as a versatile scheduling and course-planning application that's used in schools and universities around the world, but it's also suitable for business, industry, nonprofits, and any place that can benefit from better scheduling and planning. Though the full package is a substantial purchase, Mimosa Small School Edition is freeware. It's fully functional but has some limitations, such as saving only 100 "codes" compared with the full package's 8,000 plus. However, that's more than enough to help smaller schools and institutions improve their scheduling and planning.

Mimosa allocates resources and avoids scheduling conflicts automatically by using unique Codes to identify combinations of Components, which are all the available resources of the school or institution, for example, classes, teachers, and rooms. Collections are sets of Components defined by requirements, and Courses are sets of Collections defining all teaching requirements. There's also the Timetables function, which creates matrix views composed of the previously mentioned building blocks plus Bookings, which prevents scheduling conflicts and unintentional assignments. Then there's user-definable Categories, such as Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced; and Block scheduling, Intake scheduling, Cycling timetables, and numerous other functions are designed to make it easy to create, schedule, book, and recycle lesson plans, course schedules, timetables, lectures, and reports. This sounds like a lot, but Mimosa's "field-tested" interface, intuitive functionality and layout, helpful wizards, and high degree of interoperability between its various features and tools make it surprisingly easy to use. We recommend spending some time with Mimosa's comprehensive Help file, but we were surprised by how easy it was just to start right up with the default settings (in our language of choice) thanks to frequent pop-up explanations that help new users over each bump. The Help file and Web site each offer tutorials as well as access to the large Mimosa community.

Despite Mimosa's unique concepts and structure, it ably fulfills its objective of making the everyday job of teaching much, much easier, as educators and institutions in more than 68 countries have already learned. For small schools with limited budgets, Mimosa's freeware version is an easy A.

Publisher's Description

From Mimosa Software:

Mimosa is a universal scheduling and course planning software for use in any kind of school and university of varying type and size. It is also used to schedule conferences and work-shifts in business and industry. The application is fast, user-friendly and has an extremely large capacity. It has a rich set of efficient optimization tools and interactive timetabling selections. Mimosa has spread fast through the Internet to several schools and businesses in 64 countries and on all continents. All Mimosa users are also entitled to free and life-long software updates. User-friendliness prevents from making common mistakes; instead users receive useful hints, answers to what-if questions and you also 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.

Openness of the software allows you to move data easily to and from other applications via numerous Clipboard selections and the text file conversion tools. Flexible architecture enables Mimosa to fit for all types of users. It supports all school and university forms organizations and companies, since you can easily configure the application for your special scheduling needs or apply the included templates and sample files. Enormous 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 codes in a single small file. No third-party databases or additional software is used with Mimosa in order to guarantee maximum performance, reliability and maintenance, combined with low end-user price. 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 require any licensees.

What's new in this version: Version 5.9.2 adds four layout selections to copy course timetables to the Clipboard.