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Paul Sutton wrote: > > http://www.prlog.org/10270946-digiqms-wireless-queue-management-system-dubai-uae.html Is that free software? > http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010511.html That is message queuing, a different beast entirely. I failed to find a good answer to Tom's question. Several of the people selling proprietary systems use GPL'ed products to run their websites on. Whilst I think it is relatively easy to write the software, to be useful most of it needs specialist hardware. Probably where free software falls down. I suspect also one of those areas where low tech may be as good or better anyway, depending precisely what they want to achieve. Since one can run a single queue to multiple desks and people can come forward when there is a gap (works fine for M&S, and they have a far bigger financial interest in efficient queuing of their customers). Tesco's use a printed roll of tickets, and an electro-mechanical counting board. The Post Office manage with a complex looking system, but at the end of the day is it mostly directing people to an empty window (needed in big post offices). As it doesn't appear to track queue length information, Tesco on the other hand can easily figure out the abandonment rate from the tickets that are never redeemed. So presumably either the council have a huge number of service personnel, or they want to be taking queue metrics they can't get from just looking at how many things each person working a service desk did in a shift. Or they have some plan for the queuing system? Otherwise it sounds a lot like a "me too" system, where they are sure other people have good reasons for their complex queuing systems but aren't quite sure what it is. Worth asking at least if the money might not be better spent on some comfy chairs for the infirm, and a coffee machine (which might make a profit if the queues are long enough and the price high enough!), or other ways of divesting queuing of it's annoyances. http://mail.davidmaister.com/pdf/PsycholgyofWaitingLines751.pdf -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html