MeetingMakers.com Introduces Event Scheduler System; Online Calendar System Facilitates Private Vendor-Attendee Meetings

             MeetingMakers.com (www.meetingmakers.com), a leading provider of Attendee Relationship Management solutions to the business-to-business marketplace, recently unveiled the addition of a new module to its Enterprise Event Registration SolutionSM suite of Web-enabling products and services.
   The Partnership Sessions Tool is an online calendar system that allows conference and trade-show attendees to schedule private meetings with vendors and other attendees before, during or after an event based on their availability during breakout sessions.
   "For many attendees, the opportunity to meet individually in one location with as many vendors as possible, as opposed to setting up meetings with a dozen vendors at their sites, is as important as the event itself," said MeetingMakers.com president Brendan Cotter. "When they're not attending conference sessions or walking the exhibit halls, trade show attendees typically jam the rest of their days with vendor appointments. The Partnership Sessions Tool is a value-added service that gives conference and show managers a competitive advantage by facilitating their attendees' efforts to schedule vendor meetings in advance of the event."
The Partnership Sessions Tool was created for Ingram Micro, the giant California based provider of technology products and services. The company was shopping for an online registration solution for a series of vendor/reseller events and needed a feature that would enable Ingram's vendor partners and resellers to pre-arrange one-on-one meetings via the Web, according to Lynn Collier, a Corporate Event Planner at Ingram Micro.
             "Our resellers indicated a strong interest in having the ability to use the Internet to schedule meetings with suppliers during the events," said Ms. Collier. "We found a few systems that could do what we wanted but required some type of human intervention to complete the process. MeetingMakers.com was the only company that came up with a complete system that really addressed our specific needs."
             The Partnership Sessions Tool enables vendors to access the online system to specify their available appointment times. Event attendees can then view the vendor list via the event website, check on a selected vendor's open time slots and request a meeting. An email is then automatically generated and sent to the vendor with the request information. The vendor can either accept or decline the request. Another email is automatically sent back to the attendee with the vendor's answer. As their schedules begin filling up, the vendors can utilize an online calendar of their daily schedule to keep tabs on confirmed and proposed meetings, meeting subjects, contacts, and related notes.
                Piers Hughes, MeetingMakers' Chief Technology Officer, said that even though the scheduler was designed initially for Ingram Micro' s specific needs, the MeetingMakers development team recognized the potential broad appeal of an event scheduling tool. "We designed the database structure with a great deal of flexibility," said Mr. Hughes. "It can be customized for a variety of uses, such as attendee-attendee meetings, multiple-attendee ad-hoc sessions, or the designation of administrative control of available meeting times."
             "The Partnership Sessions Tool is an excellent example of MeetingMakers' client-driven, value-added approach to providing customized, enterprise-wide solutions that optimize the use of registration technology throughout the entire organization," said Brendan Cotter.
                For more information about the Partnership Sessions Tool and MeetingMakers' Enterprise Event Registration Solution contact Jesse Leib at 781-994-1216.
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About MeetingMakers.com
MeetingMakers.com's (www.meetingmakers.com) value proposition is an Enterprise Event Registration SolutionSM suite that allows corporate customers to streamline the event planning process in a real-time, on-line environment. MeetingMakers' solution consists of a proprietary web-enabled technology that has been architected to seamlessly interoperate with back-office systems, front-office contact management systems and hand-held devices. Additionally, MeetingMakers' solution allows for information to be accessible by a wide range of individuals within an enterprise on a real-time and interactive basis. The combination of these two capabilities represents a major innovation in meeting planning practices, removing a great deal of manual processing both for the attendees and for the events manager as well as enhancing communication throughout the enterprise. MeetingMakers' Enterprise Event Registration SolutionSM is designed for large-scale events between 50 and 5,000 attendees that require high levels of customization and the ability to outsource event management services. MeetingMakers' event management services include handling all aspects of the event planning process, from site selection, air and lodging reservations to attendee registration, data management and reporting, and end-to-end e-commerce capabilities.