Conference management project

The Web Team has been asked to select a conference management solution for inclusion in the web tool kit, to be made available to University staff who need to software support run conferences. The process to add this to our service offering will include:

Eliciting the user requirements
Listing and agreeing the selection criteria
Listing and agreeing the solutions to be evaluated
Evaluating the agreed solutions
Obtaining management agreement with our preferred solution
Devising a business model to deploy and support the selected package(s)
Providing this solution to the first client(s), to prove the deployment and training actually works.

The following child pages contain more detailed information:

Expert assistance

The success of implementing software solution is usually more reliant on the deployment and support model than the actual functionality of the software. I believe that this is especially true for powerful, flexible conference management software, as it will be beyond the ability of many staff to use. Staff spoken to have asked about the necessity of access to 'expert advice' to set-up and configure the software, even if they are then able to operate it. One school manager went as far as stating that what the University needs is an event management team, not software, otherwise they will continue to use external companies for this service.

The Web Team are poorly equipped and resourced to offer this level of support, even if it was restricted to use of the software. It will well outside of team purpose and strategic priorities.

However, it could be within the gambit of the proposed web 'super users', the embedded faculty staff with deeper web skills than is currently common with the widely distributed editing model.

Or, if resourcing allowed, such support could be provided by Vic Venues, who have an existing 'facilities management' role for events (up to one day) and conferences (multi-day) that utilise rooms at the University. Jill Purvis of Vic Venues estimates that she supports 35 conferences each year, with an average of 150 attendees. One potential source of funding for this resource could be the 're-targeting' of the per-attendee charge for using the registration system offered by Vic Venues. EventsAir charging has a different model, so a attendee charge could fund a resource to assist with software set-up and support.