[consulting] requirement -> new module development?

[Greg Knaddison]

Howdy Consulting List,

I just listened to the call from yesterday and wanted to post a
requirement that I'm trying to figure with to ask for advice and see
if anyone else has a similar need.

I have a customer who needs an appointment management system.  They
are currently using a custom ASP product from a vendor who specializes
in their field.  I'm pitching them on a Drupal site to do a variety of
things including newsletter, "ask an expert", and allowing them to
edit pages.

The piece of functionality that I'm not sure how to implement is an
appointment system.  Here are the basic requirements for this system:

1. Unregistered customers can submit a request for an appointment
where they select the start time and enter some information including
email, phone, and details about their appointment.  In this case it is
an automotive shop, but the details of the form should be flexible.

2. The shop is presented with a view that shows current appointments
and requested appointments.

3. At any time the shop or the customer can either cancel or
reschedule the appointment.

4. The customer should be emailed about any change to the appointment
and should also be able to track the appointment status online.

5. The shop should have the option of being emailed every time there
is a change or just viewing queues of appointments within the site.

I got pretty far implementing this in 4.7 with the event module and
flexinode.  The pieces of functionality I didn't get quite right were
the parts about emailing and the part where event requires you to
enter the start /and/ end time, but in this case the end time is
predetermined by the start time - all appointments take a half hour.

There are other features that could be useful, like
-only showing the customer times that don't conflict with other appointments
-use a "threshhold" to determine if a time is available (for something
like a spa where they can take 3 massage reservations at a given time)
-requiring at least X number of hours advanced notice (e.g. users
can't schedule an appointment for 5 minutes from the current time)

Is anyone aware of a way this can be implemented with current Drupal
modules?  If not, is anyone interested in working on this together?

Regards,
greggles