events.geant.org is the main system used by GÉANT to manage it's events and to advertise and log events within our community.  Below are some FAQs and tips and tricks to help you get the best of the system.

Support questions, feature requests and access permission requests for events should be sent to help@geant.org and will be picked up by the most appropriate person.

Event Types

When creating an event, there are three options to choose from:

  • Event Listing. These are for external events that we want to log and be aware of - it's very useful to include external events so we avoid clashes...and to help advertise things for our community.  You should always fill in the external event url for these event types.
  • Meeting. This should be used for the majority of the events we run, virtual, hybrid or face to face.  Allows you to create registration forms, manage participants, send out reminders and create a timetable. 
  • Conference.  This also allows you to create a call for proposals process and has a few more features in terms of complexity of registration.  Please ONLY use this if you need the call for papers feature as it creates compatibility issues with the CRM due to the different structure of these events. 

If you frequently run the same type of event, the clone feature is useful.  This can be accessed by visiting the event page for the event you want to clone and clicking on the pencil icon.  It will give you the opportunity to clone once or clone a whole series at set times.  When cloning, think carefully about what you want to copy across - for example you probably do not want the materials from previous meetings.

Event Overview

Events can be created using the bar on the righthand side of the screen.  This also gives you various options to view and search for events.  The calendar view of upcoming events is useful if you are planning how to fit your event in with the overall schedule of events in the community.  The search bar is great if you are looking for events that have happened in the past to clone or review.

Link with CRM

Events are linked with the CRM so we can pull basic information out of the system and use it to support information overview - for example tracking who attends events and attendance from specific NRENs.  When setting up a new meeting, please toggle the "share with CRM button" on if this is a GÉANT event.  Those with CRM accounts can then import this information within Creatio. 

Event Administration

The ability to create events is given to two separate groups - community members and GÉANT staff.  If someone would like to have access they should send a request to help@geant.org. 

When you create an event, by default only you will be able to administrate it (apart from the system super users).  We strongly recommend adding at least one other person as an administrator in case of sickness, holidays etc. This can be done by clicking on the Protection tab on the lefthand navigation bar.

It's important to remember that the system contains a lot of personal data so please be sensible with access rights. 

Hybrid Events

At the moment, event managers use various different approaches to manage information about whether a person will attend face-to-face or online.  This makes it very difficult for us to track the different ways people are attending.  We recommend that you create TWO SEPARATE REGISTRATION FORMS for online participation vs in person particpation.  There are many benefits to this - you can ask different registration questions (we don't need dietary requirements for online participants) and you can put different caps on the number of attendees. 

In order to do this, first select "participants" from the left-hand menu.  This will tell you that no registration form has been created and give you an opportunity to start one.  This will then automatically add a new "Registration" option further down the left-hand menu.  Before configuring anything, move to this option. You will see a basic registration form has been set up. This can be configured and renamed "in-person participation" and a second form for "online participation" can be adding using the create form button.

Don't forget to open both registration forms (see section below).  This will then give the attendees two options to choose from when registering:

Registration Forms

Once you have created your registration form(s).  There are two main sections to complete:

  • General settings, where you configure the admin options for the event.
  • Registration form, where you configure the fields for the form.

Under general settings you have a range of options including moderation (so you can approve each attendee before they sign-up), require users to be logged in, set a limit to the number of participants and decide whether you want to publish participant names and number of particpants.  You can also set the email that all reminders come from and add an icalendar file to the registration...don't forget to scroll right down for that. You can also ask to be notified about any registration / changes but this can get quite noisy!

The registration form is self explanatory - you can use the pre-configured settings or add / change your own fields. 

Each registration form you create needs to be actively opened before registration will begin.

Calendar Invites

Getting a calendar invite to your attendees can be done in three different ways. 

Firstly, when you set up your registration form "attach icalendar file" can be selected under notification for registrants. This also gives you the ability to configure a range of different notifications for your attendees:

Secondly it can be added to reminder notifications sent out under the "reminders" section:

Thirdly, participants can download calendar files themselves by visiting the display view of an event and clicking on the calendar icon at the top.  This is particularly useful if you have filled in the timetable as participants can download a detailed timetable displaying all the sessions:

Timetable

Timetables can be set up for any event, although the process is slightly different between conferences and meetings.  Again, we recommend only using the type Meeting unless you need a call for proposals. The timetable allows you to add a new contribution (single session), session block (to which you can add multiple contributions) and breaks.  Indico does have an API that allows you to export the data from this timetable directly into a webpage.  We currently only have this feature supported for TNC but we are looking at how to easily use this for other events to cut down on multiple copies of the same information.

Reminders

The reminders tab on the lefthand side lets you send out reminders to all or some of the event participants.  You can send reminders immediately or schedule them - for example to go out just before the event is about to happen:



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