A2Z Events is an enterprise-level event management solution with a full suite of tools required to manage and market expositions and conferences, including built-in integration with in-house accounting, AMS, CRM and CAD systems. According to the vendor, their clients realize improved productivity in back office processes and increased connectivity with membership, CRM and financial databases. Features include online floor plans, event websites, speaker management, matchmaking tools, and…
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Dryfta
Score 3.0 out of 10
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Dryfta is and event
platform that is comprised of a free suite of applications that are designed to
collect event data and measure event ROI, sell tickets, build event websites,
launch mobile apps, engage and network attendees, retrieve and manage leads for
exhibitors with a unified CRM, segment attendees and create email campaigns,
create shareable real-time custom reports and more.
Well suited for sessions and events information with the exception of large white space areas when viewed. Depending on how your organization is set up the only "less appropriate" area for us would be the actual accounting side, but that is because our accounting department prefers to maintain invoices, etc out of their own system. However, the invoices provided by A2Z does aid them when the are reconciling to their own system
I can't provide a scenario where Dryfta could be well suited. I guess it's a matter of delivering what has been promised on time, and without having to invest thousands of hours in extra work, as it was in our case. If it worked properly it could be a good tool for any conference.
It has a lot of functionalities (website and administration) all included in the same platform. If it worked properly, it allows you to organise a conference paper-free.
Coming from software where I had a huge amount of access to the "backend", it would be nice to be able to manipulate areas of the Exhibit Floorplan a little easier with regard to items like tables, chairs, stages, etc. Maybe add some icons that could be pasted into the floorplan for faster success?
The agenda within A2Z does not give you the ability to host on your own conference site.
The agenda view is sometimes perceived as being too long, there's a lot of extra "white space".
Multilingual issues. Although it is advertised as multilingual, it didn’t really work as such. The many issues that popped up throughout the conference preparation were fixed little by little at a cost in time, from help desk emails and to struggles with the unfriendly UX.
Admin pages reloaded every time you clicked on a button (their developers seem to ignore Ajax technologies). It was time-consuming and required constant page searches.
Inflexibility in many of the supposed functionalities it offers.
Certificates were not modifiable nor custom when we had to send them (it was solved months after the conference finished when we were surprisingly contacted by the help desk).
Problems with the size of images to be displayed on the site, very small fonts and limited options to display content. We had to hire a professional developer in order to get a graphically consistent and presentable website.
Very poor mobile version. Too big margins, unreadable text, endless text blocks and lists, distorted pictures, etc.
Issues with the ordering of the authors’ names for different proposals (authorship being so important in research).
Fixed, inflexible fields in the contact sheets, speakers info, and so on.
Special character issues (due to Latin characters and other types used in linguistic research).
Not being able to include links in the HTML editor due to Dryfta's inadvertent decisions to block them.
Only one Superadmin user allowed to access the full functionalities of the platform, so we had to share it (consequently not knowing who did each action).
Problems with the generation of reports and the high complexity of their interface.
Some issues on the mandatory anonymity. The double-blind review process not fully respected due to unclear user info and options, with other issues coming up on the go such as unwanted info in automated notifications and messages in the Welcome dashboard.
Not being able to use the other payment methods on the platform because they were incompatible with the conference country.
Missing information and time wasted when creating events for sessions with info that already existed in the server that randomly failed to be selected. These issues were reported even with video proofs (help desk didn’t believe us), and were never solved. We had to repeat the same processes again and again, never knowing what was going on
It was quick, that's all we can say. Quite a few times they sorted out the problems and issues. But, sadly, sometimes their answers were useless and irritating (not addressing the problem or simply ignoring it, "passing the buck"). In some cases, they pretended the problem didn't exist and we had to send them videos as proof. No response to that.
A2Z is so much better than ExpoCad. It is easy for the exhibit sales team to use and it is easy for the attendees and vendors to use. Pulling the program book is a cinch now. I don't understand how people still use ExpoCad?!
Positive - it provides one place from which primary players in the conference could pull information. A2Z maintains consistency and lowers the discrepancy issue when everyone tries to keep their own little database.
The overall performance was okay in the end, but it was due to our team's commitment and effort. Without that extra work, the results would have been awful.
