Derek Gallo

The Lehman Associates have released a study on the use and satisfaction of AMS systems among large associations in North America. iMis ranked at the top among the available solutions out there. iMis holds a 37 percent market share and ranked at the top in implementation experience and product satisfaction. The study was done using national and international associations in North America with budgets greater than $2 million. iMis rated higher than others in stability/reliability, cost and ease of implementation, time, upgrade path options and performance.

Personally, from a developer’s point of view, I think iMis has plenty of room for improvement but I am probably inserting opinions based on areas I view as more important being a developer (like structure, simplicity, etc.) and not on how it is actually used by an association. All in all, it actually provides a pretty strong back-end to a CMS for an association’s website. Since it contains all the data for an association’s events, members, products and finances, and it provides a decent COM API into that data we can setup websites to be administered directly from iMis for the most part. We are actually in the process of integrating the ACTE Website directly into their iMis system. Integrated features include, membership management and registrations as well as registration for events and conferences. Check out more that NFi can do with iMIS

We have returned from the ACTE conference in Miami. Overall the conference was a success, both for ACTE and for NFi Studios. ACTE reached every goal they aimed for despite a few setbacks due to inclement weather. The nQuest Event Browser supported decent usage and great feedback from attendees, particularly on the newly released features.

The Green Movement is catching wind among many associations and events. Due to this they are not releasing conference collateral or presentations via printed hard copies any more. nQuest was equipped with a new Paperless Portal allowing attendees to insert their USB flash drive to easily select and download some or all of the conference presentations. The process is almost completely automated. Overall we received tremendous feedback from users on how quick and simple the process was to grab the presentations.

Usage of the Event Browser was consistent with previous events although usage of the Messaging component was down. This was most likely due to the conference location being in the United States with a large amount of U.S. attendees that all had working mobile email devices. We tend to see higher messaging usage at overseas conferences that still have a large U.S. attendee base. Usage of the new Paperless Portal was very good despite attendees gaining knowledge of it not until later in the conference. We now look forward to future events in Singapore, Munich and Washington D.C.

Tomorrow Tom, Sterling and I head down to The Doral in Miami for another ACTE Educational Conference. Chris will be meeting us down there on Sunday. We will be heading down there to help support website updates and technology during the conference. We will also be providing our Meetings Connect solution including the nQuest Browser.

This conference will have the largest attendee count in ACTE’s history. We will be hosting 10 kiosks. It should be good times as usual at the events. We will be launching a couple new features and the skin for this conference is by far my favorite so far. I can’t wait to get some feedback on the new look.