Michigan State University is a public research institution founded in 1855. The goal of its Information Technology Services unit is to deliver and maintain effective technology resources for students, faculty and staff.

All students frequently take part in group projects. This is frustrating because finding the best way to communicate, setting up meeting times, and managing resources used for the project is very difficult.

Our Group Project Organization and Scheduling app reduces the stress of these tasks in a quick and simple way: by allowing a user to create a group, easily add members, and connect with any services they find useful for their project.

The user simply clicks to create the group, invitations are sent out, and the tools selected are automatically configured. A team portal is revealed, displaying scheduled meetings, linked tools, and suggested tools the group may find useful.

The main feature of our app is the ability to schedule meetings based on the users’ linked calendars, whether that is Google Calendar and/or Outlook Calendar.

The scheduling algorithm finds available times from the individual calendars and proposes times which work for all or most members. After approval by a group member, the new meeting time is added to a list of scheduled meetings.

Our web app is built with the Serverless Framework and calls to Amazon API Gateway endpoints to invoke AWS Lambda functions written in Python. Our user interface is constructed with Vue.js and Bootstrap, served from a public Amazon S3 Bucket.