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.
Have to agree! I am also organizing SharePoint Saturday Stockholm (apart from the SP24 conference together with Mark) and was forced to move from the SPSEvents site to a WordPress site which allowed me to do even the simple things like managing speakers, sessions, sponsors, raffle prices etc.
For the personal schedule, mobile access and also for push communication to the attendees we will use qnekt.com who hopefully also have the Window Phone version available by the time our SPS happens.
Anyhow, I believe that having a standard conference web template for SharePoint would not be something too hard to create 🙂 The SPSEvents team is working on the next version of their site, so let’s hope that they will address the basic needs with it.
Hi John
Totally agree! As part of a community initiative here we have putting together a massive 24-hour, online SharePoint Conference, called SP24. We are building the entire conference on SharePoint Foundation 2013 (hosted at Fpweb.net). So far we have phase 1 live, but we are also very busy working on getting Registrations live. Following that we are going to release the Virtual Session Rooms!
There’s also a chance we are going to be at Stockholm to live stream one of the tracks there straight onto our platform.
Stefan Bauer (part of the SP24 Team) has also been doing a great job making the design responsive so it works well on mobile, although I do believe a “custom app” would rock. As you can imagine, time and money are our biggest enemy, so we can only attack essentials.
Take a look at SP24Conf.com and let us know what you think.
