COTS Workshop Registration System

Question

Does anyone have any experience with any COTS systems for managing workshops and the associated registrations, courses, communications, etc.?

We have a home-built Perl system that is about 8 years old and is currently embedded as an iframe in a SharePoint portal site (externally facing). Needless to say, it isn't integrated into our site well, looks like crap, needs an overhaul, lacks features, etc. It would be nice to find either a product we can install or a service that provides those features.

Thanks!

Answer 1

@Greg - A couple things:

• Sure, technically 90% of all applications are just lists and edit screens so why isn't everything done in SharePoint or DabbleDB or some other similar app? One reason is because while there may be 80% that is common and simple, the other 20% is custom and more complex that what simpler tools can provide.
• While we do have SharePoint exposed as our external portal/site, it is SP2003. I imagine that MOSS2007 is much better but a lot of the functionality in SP2003 is sorely lacking.

@All - To provide a little more info, we have the following:

A workshop instance is actually all of the following combined:

• Specific workshop (topic)
• City
• Site (Hotel)
• Room
• Provider rep
• Attendees
• Evals, etc.

After a little Googling, I think that specific market niche is referred to as 'event managment' so that is helping a little more. Now it would be a matter of finding a solution/service that supports our requirements as closely as possible (lots of one-time event management options).

Thanks!

Answer 2

You might also look into Moodle - it's a platform developed to supplement classroom teaching (or implement online learning courses) but should have all the major features you listed, and would support your needs reasonably well, as well as enhancing your event with an online component such as slide/presentation distribution only to registered users or users that took a particular class, etc)