Development of hybrid events software.

Our client, meta-fusion GmbH, has supported hybrid meetings and the digital processing of congresses and conferences for 18 years, and built the Digital-Congress-Resources Suit (DCR Suit). It is a hybrid events platform that lets stakeholders (event organizers, participants, sponsors, etc.) work from one place and manage an event across their different areas of responsibility, with a focus on the niche of scientific events and congresses.

unicrew’s team became a backbone in building a sub-project of that main application. Spotlight Manager is used by administrators to create and manage custom submission forms very flexibly.

Content sharing is one of the most critical processes of any event, and more so for scientific and academic ones. The organizers have to collect, process, and distribute tailored information (papers, presentations, reports, etc.) to all participants, given their preferences and involvement. Those contributors are not interchangeable: a participant and a sponsor submit different material, under different rules, to different deadlines.

A general-purpose spreadsheet was almost impossible to customize that far, which is what made this a build rather than a configuration job. unicrew’s development team analyzed the existing business processes and use cases first, and the project’s goal came out of them: automate content collection so it is more manageable, less time-consuming, and structured enough to be handed on.

The delivered solution had two pillars:

• Web-based application: an app for collecting content across multiple event-based projects (summits, conferences, congresses). The hybrid events software has more custom settings than Google Forms that allow having content tracked and structured. Multiple sides can update content in parallel, create templates, and have an advanced filtering overview of the submitted records.

• Cloud migration to AWS: an AWS S3 cloud solution that improved the reliability of the digital assets and made them more manageable.

Multiple sides can update content in parallel, create templates, and use an advanced filtering overview of the submitted records.

Administrators can:

• Create different form templates, configure fields, group them into sections, and add hints for end-users.
• Drag, drop, and clone fields and sections to speed up building new submission forms.
• Set an expiration date with a countdown, so the content provider knows the due date.
• Set many rules and restrictions during template and form creation: file format and weight, image size in pixels, number of characters, and more.
• Run bulk actions, search, apply filters, and export data from the admin dashboard.

Media files submitted through the forms are stored on AWS S3 in a consistent structure rather than as loose uploads, so what comes out of the collection stage is predictable.