Cvent Event Diagramming (Social Tables) is a software application that allows event planners and properties to work together online. Cvent's cloud-based hospitality software positions event properties to increase sales and work more collaboratively and efficiently with their event, and meeting customers. The vendor boasts over 175,000 unique users who rely on Social Tables and state that over 4 million events have been planned within the platform.
It's the best software I've used. It allowed me to collaborate on a huge event with multiple stakeholders to ensure the main planner understood the venue and capacity issues. It's also allowed me to realize the scope of venue needs and abilities. Very helpful in visualizing a space
Omnigraffle is great for documentation, mapping, flowcharting, and other technical diagramming scenarios. It's simple enough to bang out a quick illustration and powerful enough to build complex blueprints for complicated technical systems. If you need cross-platform compatibility, though, you're probably better off looking elsewhere. If you want complex integration with data sources (ala Visio's SQL Server integration for shape metadata), OmniGraffle also falls short — but those scenarios are few and far between in my experience.
OmniGraffle is fairly simple to use, but the one thing I think it does best is working with curved lines, particularly if you are using some of the available arc templates. Drop an arc onto your page, then tell it the dimensions it needs to be, and viola! Done. Manipulating the arcs is as simple as clicking and dragging offset points.
OmniGraffle has also done an excellent job in stirring up the creative minds of many people who create templates and tools to work with OmniGraffle (not that Microsoft hasn't done so either), and managed to get the bulk of those into well organized repositories.
What it all boils down to for me is: it just works. One doesn't need to have a computer science degree to work with it either. It is as simple or complex as you want it to be.
A development that would be useful would be the ability to reorder the diagrams to a custom order in one event so that when exported as one document, they are in an order that can be customized to flow well for the meeting planner.
There could be more scaffolding to support new users in getting to know how to best use all of the many features and tools it provides.
There could be more support for printing. Many of our process flows extend beyond just one page, and OmniGraffle is rather finicky about printing multipage documents.
We could use this tool more effectively if there was the ability to have real-time team collaboration. Document handoffs can be a point of missed communication, so it’d be great if we could ever have the option of working together in the same place at the same time.
The support was exceptional, and they remained an arm's reach away for when we ran into any questions after we began using the tool. Overall, we experienced phenomenal customer service. We also had more than one web-based call where their team would walk us through examples and answer any questions we had.
It has similar tools that MeetingMatrix has, but the Collaboration, or allowing vendors access is the feature that I appreciate the most that Cvent Event Diagraming offers that MeetingMatrix did not have. It is also easier to save as a PDF to print and email a version to vendors as well
use Omnigraffle for diagraming or for quick wireframe drafting
use Sketch for more in-depth wireframing that you can then flesh out into a high fidelity mock-up, export assets for production, and integrate with prototyping tools like Proto.io and UXPin.
This program allows us to be nimble in our communication with our vendors and clients.
This program has empowered my new staff members to solve problems discreetly and on their own, prior to bringing them to my attention. It is a key tool to our success.
