1 reply to this topic

[kbarger]

This is not exactly a pre-purchase question since we've already bought Trumba , but it has to do with how Trumba integrates into our operation, so perhaps you'll all indulge me.

Trumba is great at what it does. (People on our campus who have viewed our soon-to-be-rolled-out prototypes have been very impressed.) But it doesn't do everything for us, scheduling wise. We have a further need to do things like

• Book rooms for people--What rooms are available? Which have already been scheduled? Is the room I want big enough for the number of people attending?
  
• keep track of what events require a flip chart, a slide projector, a coffee service, etc. (and notify/remind the appropriate people that it needs to be taken care of)
  
• Generate an invoice if appropriate

Or at least if Trumba does these things I can't immediately see how to implement them. And I don't necessarily expect it to--in looking at a large number of calendaring products, it seems that most of them concentrate on the "back office" booking and event coordination process, or on the public display of information. (In fact, we have an existing product from the first category, which I'd like to replace for various reasons, and we went with Trumba in response to that product's extreme weaknesses in the second category.)

So my question is, what products are other people using to address these functions? Preferably it would be something that would allow an easy exchange of information with Trumba. (Right now we have a Crystal Reports report that queries the existing product for appropriate events, and the results are imported into Trumba. As you can imagine, it works, but it's definitely not as easy as it ought to be and it's certainly not problem-free.)

[Jill]

Hi Kyle,
I can offer some suggestions and links to other forum topics from others who have wanted to do this. Andrea, one of our other active forum members, has done pretty extensive work with event registration and payment.

First, here's a topic that she started about events being full. Maybe there's a way you could use the invitation feature with booking rooms and indicating whether they're available or not. Event item modifications

If you haven't already, you might also want to check this Help topic for relevant info: Event registration in Trumba

Next, we don't have a way to generate an invoice, and as far as I know, that kind of feature isn't in the near future plans. But Andrea figured out how to use PayPal with Trumba. Here's her post on that: Sign up and pay for an event

About the issue of knowing what equipment is needed, could you use custom fields for that? I'm not sure if it could be as simple as having one field titled "Special Equipment" in which you could list whatever is needed. If that's too vague, you could create a separate Yes/No field for each type of equipment that might be needed. That might be somewhat limiting unless you included an "other" type of field for those exceptions.

I hope someone can offer some suggestions about other programs! I'm not familiar with products that would work well with Trumba, besides calendar programs such as iCal, Sunbird, Outlook. I wonder if something fancy could be done with RSS, ATOM, or ICS feeds?

Thanks for posting to the forums, and I hope some of these suggestions help some. I suspect that Trumba will get better with event registration as we go.

Jill / Trumba UA