Managing staff schedules, calendars and tasks is complicated and time-consuming. Actually, it is almost impossible to manage personnel without using scheduling freeware or shareware. If you want to manage your employees and their tasks and schedules efficiently, you need to know how to choose scheduler software and what capabilities should be considered while deciding on one or another solution for employee management. This article guides you through three key features of staff scheduler software . It is a solution for planning and managing working time of team members by using schedules and calendars.

The best scheduling programs are often available as shareware that allows you to evaluate a r free trial copy prior to purchasing; however, you can also find freeware examples that have "so-so" functionality for scheduling employee tasks.

Let’s see which capabilities make either open source scheduler or shareware solution more powerful and sufficient.

• Full-featured capability: users can design task lists and place them on a calendar. Tasks may have due dates and be prioritized and sorted by assigned users. Such a capability also allows creating printable todo lists and calendars.
• Multi-user capability: two or more employees can enter one and the same database and collaboratively work on shared tasks, schedules and projects. If you want your employees to collaborate and access shared information, you should consider multi-user capability of staff scheduler .
• Data export-import capability: users can export their calendars and to-do lists from software to some external application (for example to HTML editor), or vice versa. Such a capability may be required for you if you need for example to import your contacts and journals from MS Outlook to your task list in staff scheduler software .

Taking into consideration these three capabilities, you can start looking for a desktop or online solution. By the way, your choice between web-based scheduling software and similar desktop-based solution will most likely depend on your requirements, such as software performance, security, usability and accessibility. If to be brief, in most cases desktop-based software for employee scheduling often wins easily, while online free software is at a disadvantage.

VIP Task Manager is a desktop-based shareware solution that combines all the listed and other capabilities that help you achieve better staff scheduling and task management. You can download a 30-day free trial copy of VIP Task Manager from this website.

VIP Team ToDo List is another shareware solution that is best for managing tasks and todo lists of staff members. The shareware allows exporting todo lists to Excel spreadsheets.