Organising a large-ish conference

What tools?

[Casethejoint]

Hey -- What tools do you use to track conference delegates (let's say around 400 from about 25 countries) from the moment you send an invite to when you've finally got shot of them?

I see a lot of commercial online "solutions", but what homegrown stuff has helped you? Are we all just using Excel/Simple Access to do this?

[Casethejoint]

Good to see you're all thinking about this question :p

[limbo]

Hi - I used to organise small conferences a few years ago - had one excel spreadsheet with every attendee listed.

used auto filter to sort against column headers like: paid, cancelled, attending, booked etc.

So it made it easy to filter out those who wanted to come who hadn't paid - or those who needed accommodation.

Used another worksheet with contact details and linked them.

I called it 'the oracle' - was quick and dirty - but really easy to update and everything was in the same place - of course I kept a copy online (protected) so I could access it from anywhere ;)

Don't know if that helps.

[Casethejoint]

Yeah, that's how we're doing it now, but we're going to have some major version control and tasking issues which a web-app could probably solve. Just wondering if anyone knew of one so we don't have to hack together our own?