The delegate-facing side of Rostrum. It is a mobile web app, not something delegates download from an app store — you give them a web address or a QR code and they are in.
There is no native iOS or Android application to submit to the stores, and no install for delegates to fail at. The Attendee App is a mobile web app that behaves like an installed one: a delegate can add it to their home screen, it works from a phone browser, and it keeps working through the venue's usual wifi problems by caching what it has already loaded.
Setting it up
Enable the product, then set the event's web address — a short slug that gives your event its own URL. The Attendee App tab shows the finished address and a QR code to put on badges, signage and the program book.
Public — anyone with the link can browse the agenda. Sign-in required — a delegate must verify an email address first. Public is right for open conferences; sign-in required is right where the program is members-only.
Optionally, only email addresses you have uploaded may sign in. Upload the delegate list on this tab.
Whether delegates may bookmark sessions into their own schedule.
Three settings: no files at all, handouts only, or everything speakers uploaded. Think carefully here — "everything" includes slide decks some speakers may not expect to be distributed.
Whether the faculty directory — speakers plus abstract, poster and paper authors — is browsable.
Individual show/hide switches for the abstracts, poster and papers sections, so a section can be kept out of the app even while its modules stay on for the web.
A primary and accent color so the app carries your event's branding.
What a delegate can do
- Browse the agenda by day, and open any session or presentation.
- Search across the program — sessions, faculty, abstracts and papers.
- Browse the faculty and their profiles, each listing what that person is presenting.
- Bookmark sessions and abstracts into a personal schedule.
- Browse the poster gallery and ask authors questions.
- Read the accepted abstracts, and follow one through to its session, poster or on-demand paper.
- Watch the on-demand papers, streamed inline with scrubbing.
- Leave session feedback.
- If they are also presenting, see their own presentations and posters.
The poster section requires the Posters product; the abstracts section requires Call for Abstracts plus a live Abstract Viewer; the papers section requires Papers on Demand plus a live Paper Viewer; the session feedback option requires the Session Feedback product. Each also has its own show/hide switch in the app settings, locked with an explanation while its modules are off. No error anywhere — an unavailable section simply is not there.
One more publication rule, easy to miss: a presentation only appears in the app — on the agenda, in the faculty directory, anywhere — once its session is published: visible, and out of draft. Unscheduled talks and draft sessions stay backstage. The same holds one level up: the app answers at its link only once the event itself is published, so nothing is on show while you are still building it.
Why it works when the venue wifi does not
The app remembers what it has already loaded, so a delegate who opened the agenda in the lobby can still read it in a basement session room. An offline indicator tells them when they are looking at cached content.