Software Shopping

In the heady ’90s, when tech jobs were juicy plums for the picking, companies sprang up offering meetings management software, and new features arrived almost daily. When the bubble burst, experts predicted a mass consolidation of meetings technology solutions. They were wrong. While some mergers did take place, hundreds of choices for managing meetings, members and attendees now exist. Determining which program is right for you can be harrowing.
    Below is a sampling of 10 comprehensive packages, available either as stand-alone applications or online through an application service provider (ASP) model. These products offer a little bit of everything: event and attendee management, reporting, online registration and more.

Amlink Technologies
www.amlinkevents.com; (800) 869-7166

This Australian company’s main product is Events Pro, but it recently merged with Peopleware Pro, a longtime favorite of many U.S.-based planners, making Peopleware a subsidiary of Amlink. While the latter will continue to support Peopleware’s current version for two years and the new version 2.8 (due in the fall) indefinitely, the company’s focus is on Events Pro.
    Features: Planners choose from 13 modules to turn Events Pro into the program they need. The elements are demographics, notes, marketing, registration, functions, housing, travel, CRS interface, speakers, exhibition, financial, project management and report writing. The accompanying Events Interactive program adds online registration; it handles both attendee registrations and abstract submissions.
    Pricing: Call for details.

Certain Software
www.certain.com; (888) 237-8246

Popular as soon as it was released, Certain’s Event Planner Plus was software for a one-person shop. Then came Meeting Planner Plus for multiple users. Now Certain’s main product is Register123, which marries a robust online registration package with the meetings management features that made Meeting Planner Plus a favorite.
    “Our product is for large events, 500 people or more,” says David Ujita, the San Francisco-based company’s director of marketing. “We feel Register123 offers the most ability to create a custom look and feel [for online pages], through a Microsoft HTML tool.”
    Upcoming innovations will include the ability to integrate travel management data with Register123, and a more comprehensive budgeting tool. The system is being expanded to cross-compile budgeting data with several customer relationship management systems.
    Features: Register123 offers customizable templates and wizards for creating meeting websites offering online registration, housing and real-time payment processing. Other elements are the room block management and roommate matching tools, marketing and e-mail tools, and customizable reports.
    Pricing: The program is sold in an online ASP version or as a dedicated portal, which Certain hosts for $2 to $2.50 per registration. Clients also can buy Register123 as an enterprisewide solution for $15,000 to $50,000, based on the anticipated number of registrants processed each year.

eMeetingExperts
www.emeetingexperts.com; (866) 688-4290

This Denver-based company produces the web-based ePlanner, which was designed by a meeting planner. “Our programmers go on site and live the world of meeting hell,” says Joan M. Buck, CMP, president of eMeetingExperts.“They know everything the program is supposed to do.”
    The software is recognized by Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft as a Microsoft Office Solutions Provider. “Our research showed 70 to 80 percent of planners still use Access or other Office products rather than a specific planner software,” says Buck, “so we decided to build from there.”
    Features: Among ePlanner’s offerings are task, budget and property management tools; the ability to print badge-sized personal agendas; a robust report generator; the ability to build a site library for venues planners might use again; room block management, and automated travel manifests, along with a roommate assignment tool. All modules come with the program. The next version, due in late 2006, will feature post-event evaluations.
    Pricing: Cost is determined per meeting, per year. One meeting costs $250; three meetings a year, $500 ($167 per meeting); up to five meetings per year, $750; up to 10 meetings per year, $1,350; up to 25 meetings per year, $2,500. For unlimited meetings, call for pricing.

eMeetingsOnline
www.emeetingsonline.com; (954) 764-7222

The idea behind this Denver-based company was to provide planners with a web-based system where all data exists in one program; there’s never a need to switch to other software to review or manipulate the data.
    EMeetingsOnline’s best feature might be its GDS capability. When attendees book a room, they receive a registration confirmation and hotel-issued confirmation number. When setting up the parameters of the registration site, planners have the option of allowing only hotels in the block to pop up, or they can allow other hotels in the vicinity to be listed. Since attendees are booking hotel rooms through eMeetingsOnline, the planner learns instantly if attendees have booked outside the block.
    Features: EMeetingsOnline offers all the usuals: budgeting, reporting, abstract submission, vendor management and more. New is a group management element, allowing planners to set up subgroups of attendees or ancillary events such as teams for golf tournaments.
    Pricing: Costs for eMeetingsOnline are figured per registration or per abstract submitted, or a combination of the two, generally $2 to $7 per registration/abstract.

Ephibian
www.ephibian.com; (520) 917-4747

Tucson, Ariz.-based Ephibian’s product is called TreeFrog, which has been designed for the independent meeting planner, DMC and corporate planner handling a smaller number of events. It can be licensed as a web-only ASP or purchased as a stand-alone product.
    “It has a lot of features for handling conferences with multiple tracks and sessions,” says Leslie Craw, regional business director for Ephibian. The company created TreeFrog from tools it had developed for the National Speakers Association’s website. Like eMeetingsOnline, TreeFrog offers foursome, booth and table sales through a feature called Groupings. “Our clients say TreeFrog is very easy to use and very intuitive,”says Craw. “A lot of meeting planners aren’t technical people, and they shouldn’t have to be.”
    TreeFrog users can visit Canopy, an online community for reporting bugs, hearing how others use the product and keeping up with changes. “If you report a bug, everybody sees it, and we’ll come back with a response within 24 hours,” says Craw. “Canopy holds us responsible.”
    Features: TreeFrog offers a very visual daily planner, allowing users to book rooms for sessions and preventing double booking. A wizard lets planners create the event quickly; an online registration site can go live at almost any time. An updated report generator is scheduled to be released this month.
    Pricing: Cost is figured per registration ($2 to $3; discounts are available for educational institutions and nonprofit organizations), with a $295 setup charge and a $49.95 per month maintenance fee for unlimited meetings.

Impact Solutions
www.impactsolutions.com; (800) 858-8330

Hefty is a good word to describe MemberMax, the meetings product from Impact Solutions. “Our service is more for large-scale meetings, with lots of sessions with dinners, golf outings and trade shows,” says John Keelin, president of the Pittsburgh-based company. “It tends to be expensive for people who are running simple meetings.”
    Totally web-enabled, MemberMax allows meeting planners to publish conference pages on the Internet quickly. Most clients install the program on their own systems, although Impact Solutions will host it for a fee. Since this is such a robust system, users need to be computer-savvy.
    Features: MemberMax has everything. A short list includes room block, exhibitor and speaker management; tracking of purchase orders and continuing education credits; and online registration. Planners can create many different passes for a convention, such as show-only tickets and day passes, with specific perks attached to each one.
    Unlike most other programs that organizations host themselves, MemberMax supports Apple users. “We offer a native Macintosh system,” says Keelin. “We have customers who run Macintosh OSX servers with Windows clients.”
    Pricing: Starting at the five-user minimum and unlimited meetings, MemberMax costs $12,500 for the initial license; after that, companies pay an annual maintenance fee of 18 percent of the license ($2,250 a year for the five-user model). Impact Solutions will host the software starting at $500 per month.

ISIS Corp.
www.goldreg.com; (201) 337-8115

The Gold System from ISIS drops data from one section to all the other places it needs to show up. For example, “while you’re building an event, you’re inviting 100 people to a $32-per-person breakfast; that cost automatically drops into your budget,” says Charles Lohr, director of marketing for the Oakland, N.J.-based company. “Once your meeting is completed, you can do your financial reconciliation; there’s a cascading of costs so you can compare what was charged vs. what was budgeted.”
    Version 4.1 was released this year with better calendar functions and improvements to the CRS capabilities (it connects with Amadeus, Apollo and Sabre).
    Features: Gold offers functions under eight headings: meetings, events, registration, people, resources, company, budgeting and invoices. The program comes with more than 125 standard reports; additional customized reports can be purchased.
    Pricing: A 10-seat license to install the Gold System on site is $18,000, followed by an annual maintenance fee of 15 percent, or $2,700. If ISIS hosts the program, a three-seat license is $1,000 per user plus $100 per month per user.

MRA Services
www.mra-services.com; (425) 636-1640

Grown from a tool created for Woodinville, Wash.-based MRA’s clients, seven-year-old iPlan now is being offered to the meeting world at large. The product is web-based, allowing planners to make quick, real-time changes to the registration site. 
    “The real value of iPlan comes with events that repeat,” says John Moss, president of MRA Services. “You can build up a history of an event as sparse as the date and time to as rich as the template for the entire event. With meeting rooms, you can put in the venue’s inventory with capacities and room types, and you can create a chart to look at your history of room use. It does not resolve conflicts, but points them out and allows you to adjust as you schedule.”
    Features: In addition to the usual set of event management functions, iPlan offers custom web surveys, custom reports and a task scheduler for staff.
    Pricing: An annual subscription to use iPlan is $10,800 for six future events; the cost per event drops incrementally for a greater number of meetings.

The Planstone Group
www.planion.com; (630) 598-1430

Flexible is the word company president Dan Soukup uses most often to describe his firm’s meetings management tool, Planion. “For example,” he says, “if you are planning for a medical group and need specialized equipment, you can create a ‘medical equipment’ category with a pick-list of those items. When assigning sessions to rooms, people will see that tab [along with the standard A/V, F&B and furniture tabs] and be able to assign equipment. You can attach costs to the items, so you can see how much the sessions will cost.”
    Soukup says the product is best for meetings with a large education element (e.g., the American Library Association uses Planion to schedule about 2,600 sessions a year).
    Features: Planion comes with several core modules facilities, budgeting, scheduling, reports, change tracking, speaker database, session and facilities repository, abstracts, and signs. Five other modules, such as the curriculum manager, are available to increase the product’s functionality.
    Pricing: Call for details. Costs are based on the modules and the number of sessions planned per year.

Ungerboeck Systems International
www.ungerboeck.com; (800) 400-4052

Another robust system, Ungerboeck’s Event Business Management Software (EBMS) offers 25 modules, with data integrated throughout. It includes a customer relationship manager, planning functionality, budgeting and more. The program can be hosted by Ungerboeck or run on a client’s own equipment.
    A bonus: Some 500 venues around the world including the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center and Chicago’s McCormick Place also use EBMS, allowing planners to exchange information easily with these far-flung facilities.
    “We have two data centers that we back up from one to the other approximately every two hours,” says Dieter Ungerboeck, president of the St. Louis-based company. “If one goes down, within about four hours the other can be up and running.”
    Features: It’s all here attendee marketing, speaker management, budgeting, registration and housing, receivables, payables, a general ledger, financial analysis, exhibit sales and, for designing show floors, a CAD program.
    Pricing: The cost is determined by the number of  users and the number of modules needed. Combining the license fee, maintenance costs and training, the program starts at $7,500 but can reach as high as $1 million.