Linked accounts and shared resources

Linked accounts connect several distinct Omniscol accounts — hence several schools — that share, in real life, teachers and classrooms. The link makes the occupancy of these shared resources visible from one account to the other: when you view or build a timetable, Omniscol surfaces the lessons from linked accounts that involve a teacher or a classroom you share, and flags them as already busy. You thus avoid booking the same person or the same room twice, without having to call the other school. It is an option enabled on request by the Omniscol team.

Each account remains fully autonomous: it keeps its users, its settings, its school years and its administrative scope.

What the link shares

• Shared: the occupancy of the teachers and classrooms present in both accounts. It is what feeds the occupancy views and cross-account conflict detection.
• Not shared: the users, students, classes, settings and administrative data specific to each account. Seeing a busy time slot does not open access to the other account's details.

Matching is automatic: Omniscol recognizes the same teacher by name (the date of birth settles homonyms) and the same classroom by its site name and room name. For it to work, these teachers and classrooms must therefore carry the same names in each account.

Use cases

All involve several distinct schools, each with its own Omniscol account:

• A group of schools that pool teachers or classrooms — for example a network of schools in the same city.
• Legally separate institutions located in the same building, and therefore sharing the rooms.
• A campus where several entities (engineering school, business school…), managed on distinct accounts, use the same lecture halls and the same instructors.

Activation

Linked accounts are scoped with the Omniscol team, because you need to decide together:

• which accounts are linked;
• which common resources — teachers, classrooms — are shared;
• the harmonization of the names of the shared teachers and classrooms, on which automatic matching relies;
• which account remains responsible for each piece of data;
• how to handle the conflicts detected across scopes.

Once the option is active, shared occupancy appears in the occupancy views and feeds cross-account conflict detection, with no further action on your part.

Enabling or disabling a synchronization

When a timetable is synchronized with other active timetables — from the same account or from linked accounts — a Synchronization button appears: in a timetable's reorganization mode, as well as when editing a calendar timetable, on the shared dates. It opens the list of these synchronizations: each other active timetable of the account and each linked account that shares teachers or classrooms.

All are enabled by default. Untick one to stop taking into account the occupancy of that timetable or that account in the current view, then tick it again to re-enable it. The button only appears when there is at least one synchronization to manage.

Related case: several active timetables in a single account

Linked accounts coordinate distinct schools; the same need also arises within a single account, when a school runs several active timetables in parallel. The same shared-occupancy principle then prevents a classroom, a teacher or a class from being booked twice by two simultaneous timetables.

This is typically the case for a multi-program organization with different rhythms — an 18-month EMBA, a Grande École running calendar semesters, a preparatory class on a weekly timetable — that shares rooms and instructors across its programs; or for a class straddling two calendars, with a recurring organization in the morning and a one-off organization in the afternoon.

This coordination is included with Premium and can, exceptionally, be enabled on a Standard account after scoping with Omniscol. See Multiple active timetables in parallel.