New Registration and Housing Software Launched
By Dave Lutz, Executive Vice President

After years of planning, programming and testing, we have rolled out our new proprietary database to service our registration and housing clients. Over the past six months, we have done parallel testing and numerous events from start to finish on CHARISMA (Conferon’s Housing And Registration Information System for Meetings and Assemblies)

We are very excited to have CHARISMA fully operational and are looking forward to the many benefits that this software will deliver for both our ability to better service our clients, as well as increasing efficiencies within our operations. CHARISMA runs on Microsoft Windows NT, utilizes SQL Server to store the data and is very scalable for web deployment. Because we wrote and own all of the source code, it is also a program that will be able to be improved, as our customer needs change. CHARISMA utilizes Crystal Reports and Microsoft Word for all of the reporting, confirmation and badging outputs.

Some enhancements that will be seen externally and internally include:

• Automatic inclusion or exclusion of specific agenda items within a registration category
• Automatic conflict notification for individu-als registered for overlapping events
• Waitlisting for session attendance or guestroom assignment
• Conditional confirmations that allow for greater personalization of communications
• A system that is easier and quicker to learn for temp personnel
• Faster setup of database for repeat customer
• More user friendly import and export capabilities
• Easier to read and more flexible reporting

Additionally, we are in the very final stages of deploying 10 of the most frequently requested reports to the web. These reports will be accessible to all customers via a password-protected website. Customers will be able access critical conference, hotel and financial data 24 hours a day/7days a week. A demo site where you can view report samples and functionality will be available by accessing www.conferon.com before year-end.