I was about to put up a guideline for what we are trying to accomplish with plevsy and i stumbled upon a recent DHH posting. He simply advices that we need to make our goals public so that we can start thinking and plotting about getting it done. Considering the fact that plevsy is almost 3 years old without any physical form, i think this might be what’s missing.
plevsy is addressing a lot of problems in the event management business. It is especially for professional conference organisers which have diverse needs ranging from abstract awards to online registration to vouchers. Although plevsy aims for a whole event management suite the current focus is on operations [as PCOs call it] which means actual handling of the event. Some examples of the main needs in this area are:
- reports and statistics about participants like number of arrived participants or attendees of a select meeting who also happen to be from the same institution
- in-house listings of hotels for correlation purposes or number of occupied rooms over the course of the operation for accurate prediction
- transfer logs for select hours and sources/destinations including flight numbers and/or PNR codes
- managing all registration, accommodation and transfer fees as sales of predefined products enabling participant sponsors and sponsor based invoices
Some of the topics do not apply to all operations and they definitely do not cover what may be possible. As far as we know, feature-completeness comes at a cost [no, not that cost]. That much detail does not easily fit on any screen without making it extremely hard to use. That’s where most feature-complete tools fail because frankly, it is not easy to use anything that contains so much detail. plevsy+ops is trying to cover every aspect and on the other hand it keeps things simple by disclosing just enough information. How we simplified things and how you can improve your event operations will be the priority of this blog for some time as plevsy+ops is the main tool to achive that.
As a reminder [to us and everyone around]: plevsy is not and is never going to be a silver bullet for event management or an event organiser itself. Software are there to help people, and the bests are the ones that stays out of the way while doing it. plevsy will be the best helper for event organisers who are willing to get help. That’s our goal, made public.
