Because of this we have decided to focus on tools that are designed to serve the specific needs of meeting planners. These are still primarily “cloud” based tools, but they need to be able to just work, and provide value without a huge learning curve.

We are excited about this new direction. Now we can focus on providing specific, targeted applications that solve specific problems for meeting organizers. If you would like a sneak peek at what we are up to, check out our new site at: http://trimeet.com. While this project is still in its early stages, we are excited about where we are going. And we welcome your feedback.

As we have discussed in previous posts, adding a new spreadsheet to the Event Communications Center is a 2-step process.

1. Create the room block pick-up report as a Google Docs spreadsheet
2. Embed the spreadsheet into a page in the Event Communications Center site.

The spreadsheet consists of 2 worksheets. The first, shown below is used to track the room block forecast prior to the event. In some contracts there will be predefined dates when the room block can be adjusted. The fields in this worksheet include the forecast milestone, the forecast date, the adjustment that would ideally be made, the contractual maximum adjustment, the actual rooms that will be adjusted, and the net commitment as of this date.

The second worksheet shows the actual room pickup once reservations are open. This can often be provided by the event hotel as a weekly report. By adding the actual numbers to this worksheet the planner can track the pickup week by week before the event. In additional to alerting the planner to any critical issues with the room block for this event, the provides a way to compare pickup for future events which can provide the event planner better intelligence for managing the room block.

If you look at the top of the page, you will see it says: “Private to only me”. In order for this spreadsheet to be viewable on the demo event site, we will need to change that to “Public on the web” by clicking on the “Share” button on the upper right side of the page.

Now that the spreadsheet is in place, it is a simple matter to create a new page in the ECC where we embed the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet itself can be modified to better conform to the requirements of your particular event.

For more information on how you can set up an Event Communications Center for your event, go to: http://www.meetingplannertoolkit.com/google-apps-for-events/. Or join the conversation with us directly on Facebook at Meeting Planner Toolkit.

Now that we have a site with some content we can look at ways that we can modify the design to be more appealing. The first thing we will do is to change the theme to one that is more compatible with the changes that we want to make. Our original default theme was the iceberg theme.

In this step we change the theme to Blank Slate. We have also set the page width to 960px, and changed the height of the header to 290px to make room for a photograph we will insert later.

From here we apply our color scheme to the page background, the content area, and the sidebar navigation. Notice that the site title is still visible in this theme.

As a final step we disable display of the site title, and upload our header picture to the site. There are 2 places that a header image can be inserted. In this case we inserted it as the site header background image. It is also possible up upload a logo to the header, but it has padding around it and won’t fill the header space cleanly. The header logo is meant to be placed on top of the background image, if there is one.

That’s it! We have completely changed the look and feel of the site using a few simple configuration steps. Admittedly the flexibility in this approach may not be enough for some public facing promotional sites, but it is certainly sufficient for a project site like the Event Communications Center.

Do you have any comments on this post? Feel free to give us your feedback at the new Meeting Planner Toolkit Facebook Page.

First we create a Google Docs spreadsheet to hold the conference schedule. In this spreadsheet we track the date, the start and end time for the individual meeting, the contact name for the meeting, meeting name and description, the room where the meeting will be held, along with the floor and a brief code or description for the room setup.

Following the creation of this spreadsheet we then create a page in the Event Communications Center site. Because this picture was taken when I was logged into the system, the Google Sites edit buttons are visible at the top of the page, and there is a link under the Conference Schedule Spreadsheet that will take me directly to the spreadsheet.

From this spreadsheet we can actually generate a mobile version of this schedule for use by attendees at the conference. I will discuss how we do this in a later post.

Now our demo event site is starting to take shape. Over the next few days we will add a few more spreadsheets from our initial document suite and show how to update the design of the site.

Do you have any comments on the Conference Schedule? Feel free to give us your feedback at the new Meeting Planner Toolkit Facebook Page.

The first step is to create a VIP Room List spreadsheet. This version of the VIP Room List spreadsheet has 2 worksheets, one for the VIP List and a second for the VIP Room Block. The VIP list consists of normal contact information for the VIP, as well as a reservation code. In some situations it may be desirable to actually track the VIP arrival and departure dates in this list. However these days many people coordinate their own travel plans, so rather than attempting to track the dates here, we have a reservation field. Based on this the hotel can lookup a reservation record and find out the actual arrival and departure dates for the VIP.

The second worksheet tracks the VIP room block. The category field indicates the specific room type (eg. Suite, Penthouse etc.). The Assigned To field indicates the VIP that the room is assigned to. And the reservation code once again can be used to determine arrival and departure dates. Using this sheet a planner can determine at a glance which rooms are occupied, and which are still available.

The final step is to add the VIP Room Lists spreadsheet into the Event Communications Center where it can be published to the rest of the event team and the hotel if desired. From here staff is only one click away from being able to edit and update the VIP List, without having to search for the spreadsheet in the Google Docs file system.

As demonstrated, adding capabilities to the Event Communications Center is as easy as creating a new document, and then creating a page in the Event Communications Center to display that document.

Do you have any comments on the VIP Room List? Feel free to give us your feedback at the new Meeting Planner Toolkit Facebook Page.

So the first document we decided to implement on the ECC is the Contract Summary. Google Sites allows you to store both scanned images of the original documents (see “Attachments” at the bottom of the page) as well as a spreadsheet that captures the information that is essential for your event.

At the bottom of the contract summary spreadsheet you can see that there are several tabs. These are the same tabs that are in the original spreadsheet, and by clicking on them you can see the information from the other pages.

Changes to the spreadsheet are made by editing the original spreadsheet document in Google Docs. People that have permission to edit this document will see a link just under the spreadsheet that takes them directly to that document for editing.

See how easy it is to share information with the ECC! And with Page Level Permissions only the people you want can have access to that information.

Until now we have discussed the concept of an ECC in terms of sharing information between event planners and 3rd party organizations such as venues, hotels, vendors, sponsors etc. We haven’t discussed how an ECC can drive information to other sites for the conference or event. There are 2 main systems to consider: the Event Portal and the Attendee Portal.

An Event Portal is the oldest and most familiar website for both planners and attendees. Its purpose is to provide potential event attendees with information prior to the event, and link them to event registration, hotel reservations, and other pre-event services such as printing visa letters.

More recently, as mobile devices have gained acceptance the Attendee Portal has become increasingly important. Its main purpose is providing the attendee with information and services to make the most of their participation in the event. This includes conference schedule and updates, local information, access to event presentations and documents, safety and security information, as well as a host of social networking capabilities.

While the Attendee Portal should support both traditional web browser access as well as mobile device access, the area of most concern today is support for mobile devices. There are 2 different approaches for Attendee Portal support in mobile devices.

1. Native mobile application designed to run on specific types of mobile devices, such as iPhone and Android.
2. Mobile browser-based applications designed to run across mobile devices.

While native applications are generally viewed as having a better user experience in the devices for which they are designed, they are often more expensive and don’t work on all mobile devices. With the introduction of HTML5 mobile browser technology is improving rapidly and the differences between browser based systems are becoming less and less.

In the subsequent posts in this series we will demonstrate how to build a browser-based mobile Attendee Portal, and how to use documents stored in the Event Communications Center to automatically push information out to the Attendee Portal. Stay tuned!

Conferences and events are complex undertakings. One of the biggest issues is that they involve coordinating the efforts of a number of 3rd party hotels, venues, vendors, sponsors, exhibitors and partners. While the event planner may need to communicate with these different organizations, it is often also true that these organizations should not be able to view the communications from other organizations. Imagine for example that the planner needs to coordinate a social with a restaurant outside of the event venue. There is no reason that the event venue should see the communications between the event planner and the restaurant. In fact, there may be serious confidentiality issues if those communications are shared with the venue.

So what happens if the planner wants to use an Event Communications Center (ECC) to be the focal point for their event? Unless the technology can support the need for information privacy, its not an acceptable solution.

When we started the ECC project, Google Sites only supported site level permissions. If a person was assigned the ability to view or edit the site, then they could view or edit all of the pages on the site. In order to protect the privacy of information between 3rd parties, we looked at combining the site level permissions with document level permissions to solve this problem. What that meant is that we could create separate documents for each 3rd party, and embed those documents on pages in the site. Then, when the 3rd party contact accessed that page, they could see the page, but if they didn’t have permission to access the document, they would see an empty page.

This was a workable solution, but its not ideal. The better solution is that 3rd party contacts should only see pages that they are entitled to see in the first place. The recent announcement for Google makes this possible. I am looking forward to using this powerful new capability to add features to the ECC project in the coming weeks.

As with any community driven effort, the initial implementation of the ECC is pretty limited. Our plan is to add features and capabilities that demonstrate the power of the technology, and provide event planners with a useful set of tools to use with their own meetings and events. Your feedback will be critical to this project.

The initial version of the ECC is based off of a basic Google Site, using a standard default template. Google Sites allows a great deal of flexibility over the look and feel of the site, which we will be exploring in more detail in the future.

We changed the default “Home” page of the site to use the “Announcement” page type, and renamed it “Announcements”. This allows all event related announcements to the team to be posted on this page where they can be easily seen, and referenced in the future. There is also a “Subscribe to posts” option that allows other sites to publish the new posts as they occur.

In this case the security of the event site is set for public viewing. In normal circumstances, the ECC would be a private site, accessible to members of the core event team, and select 3rd party vendors and partners. The core team would typically have the ability to view and edit the content on all of the pages, while the extended team would only have selective viewing and editing capabilities. We will discuss how this is done more in future posts as well.

Feel free to tell us what you would like to see as we develop the ECC, and check back often as we plan to provide frequent updates to this system.

The idea behind the Event Communications Center (ECC) is a single place to store, share and collaborate on the event. It is a place where the core team can access the bulk of the event information, but also share it with third party vendors, hotels and venues as appropriate. It is also a place where individual software applications can be used to automate aspects of the event processes.

We decided that the best way to explain what we mean is to create a demonstration ECC so you, the professional event planner can see how it will can all fit together. The platform we will be using for the ECC is Google Apps, where a Google Site provides the structure for the Event, and Google Docs provide the various information resources. Initially the ECC will be fairly simple. Our hope is that over time we can get feedback from Event Planners such as yourself, and can add to the ECC information and tools that will help you be more productive, and your event be more successful.

Stay tuned for the actual launch of the ECC demonstration site. This is a community driven project, and we look forward to your ideas, suggestions and feedback. If you want to use this as a template for your own project, feel free to do so. If you would like more information, or help setting up ECC for your events, feel free to contact us for a free consultation.