WingateWeb

Turning Event Mangement from Hours to Minutes

Salt Lake City, UT- April 4, 2002 – WingateWeb provided its Event Technology System, Conference 3.0, for Novell® BrainShare® 2002, held March 17-22. This is the fourth year in a row that Novell has entrusted WingateWeb’s event technology to provide the solution to BrainShare's content management.

Among the more impressive systems was WingateWeb’s Conference 3.0 Self Check-in System. Event Check-in, a process that had previously taken several hours to complete, was reduced to a matter of minutes. For the BrainShare conference staff and the 6,000+ attendees, the Conference 3.0 Self Check-in System was a raging success!

“WingateWeb's Self Check-in System greatly increased the efficiencies of our on-site registration process,” commented Mike Morgan, BrainShare Manager Novell, Inc. “What used to take hours, now takes minutes thanks to the system created by Wingate. A smooth, quick check-in process is critical to start a conference on the right tone. Attendees are happy that they can spend time doing other things, instead of waiting in line.”

In the past, BrainShare check-in was a manual process in which attendees would be shuffled through a series of stations. At each station, a staff member would confirm the attendee's registration and give them their badge, bag, or binder. This process was a extremely slow and took several hours to complete, required significant staffing resources, included long lines, and gave attendees a painful experience right from the start.

WingateWeb’s Conference 3.0 Self Check-in System hit at the heart of the BrainShare Check-in problem. Instead of waiting in line for hours to have a staff member look up attendees' names and issue badges, attendees immediately entered the registration hall to find 50 self-serve registration kiosks. Through a simple process of identifying themselves in the registration database, attendees could print their own conference badge and conference schedule. With badge and schedule in hand, attendees could then redeem their conference bag and materials by simply scanning their badge in a card reader. Scanning the badges also kept an inventory of conference bags and tracked who had collected their materials.

For the attendee, the entire check-in process took less then 5 minutes. “The BrainShare check-in was extremely fast. Absolutely no wait time”, said attendee Jason Simoneaud, Service Manager for Entre Computer Center. Marcus Blough, a Network Administrator for the University of Michigan said, “BrainShare check-in was quick and very simple. After answering a couple of questions on the computer, my badge was ready by the time I walked up to the pick-up counter.”

WingateWeb has been offering successful and innovative event solutions including the Conference 3.0 Self Check-in System, to technical event managers for over 4 years. WingateWeb’s Conference 3.0 System is on the cutting edge and is used by several fortune 1000 corporations.