I’ve been to several regional and national SharePoint conferences in the past couple of year at which SharePoint itself was underutilized or not at all used for many of the actions of planning and carrying out the delivery of the conference. Are there any free/shareware or commercial SharePoint apps / extensions / packages available to give conference organizers and attendees the tools they need for a successful conference?
Speaking as an attendee going beyond static speaker/session info to things like:
* personalized sessions schedule
* session reminders and alert notifications of last minute changes or additions
* sessions / speakers / conference feedback and rating
* browser and mobile device support
If there is nothing out there I’m planning to offer to work with my local SharePoint Saturday organizing committee (and the community) to build something like this for event in 2014.
Thanks Mark, this is very helpful, useful to know that there are various mature commercial products. Not sure if their price model fits for a community event with shoestring budget. I’ll ask. If not then I’ll be looking for community / open source options or scratching something together, if my local SPS organizing committee wants to go that route. Cheers
I also guess your requirements are somewhat different for SP Saturdays ? If you just need to show speakers, Agenda, location, sponsors, then standard SP is good to go the whole way! If you want to do some of the other please give me a shout! I am sure both myself and Raphael (Extradium), would be willing to offer up a few licenses depending on what you need.Â
We could even chat about expanding the SP24 platform to help out…Â
Hi John
So far its a mash-up of a few things. We plan to user SharePoint as much as possible, with a few add-ons to help with some other bits and bobs.
So far it’s looking like this :Â
- Live Streaming – Hangouts streamed live to Youtube.
- Session Feedback forms  –DocSurvey
- Quizzes and Competitions –Â DocSurvey
- Distribution and Tracking of important documents / pages –Â DocRead
- Sharing of session / speaker related resources –Â DocRead
- Registration and User Management –Extradium
- Integrates Chat –Â cometchat.
For the rest – it’s standard SharePoint all the way. The whole thing is hosted by Fpweb.net as well.Â
Hi Matthias, thanks for your comments. qnekt.com looks interesting.
For your SPS event how do you cover the cost of their cloud service? In general, do you charge to attend for your SPS event?
Can you put me in touch with the SPSEvents folks so I can find out their plans for the site? I don’t want to re-invent what others are already doing.
Cheers
Hi Mark, thanks for those thoughts. SP24Conf.com looks great. I presume that the software for your conference is proprietary, part of your intellectual property.
I’m hoping to kick-start something that would be open-source for use by the SharePoint Saturday crowd. Not to compete with you, just to make the SPS events actually use SP for their events.
