Support

December 15, 2015 at 3:54 pm

I have been asked by a consortium of companies to build them an event booking system which each member organization can use through their own website but which acts as a national register for its industry, as it is hoped to establish a new national quality standard.

The purpose is to enable people to book onto pre-arranged training sessions and to pay for the training (PayPal would be suitable for this but each member would need to have their own PayPal account).

Each course would have a specific number of places (set by the member company) and once the course is sold out the page should reflect that. The course material would not be computer-based other than a PowerPoint presentation. Courses provided will differ and may last one day to one week and, once a course is defined the member organization should be able to create a new instance of the course on his web

Following the course, successful participants would be issued with a certificate valid for four years so the back-end system will need to have a renewals module built into it to inform certificate holders that they must renew their certificate through refresher training.

The rights holders to the certification will each receive a fee for each certificate issued – again, I would see this as a back end process probably by way of a monthly invoice to each member organization reflecting the number of certificates issued by that member.

To my mind, it would seem feasible to <iframe> the member-facing parts of the solution from forms built in WordPress (whether or not the end user is using WordPress). Using this method I can issue simple instructions as to what pages need to exist and provide the <iframe> code to paste in.

I haven’t yet worked through all the detail such as how members add new course dates (I might need some support here) but any certificate can include a unique serial number such as YYMMDDMMCC – reverse year, month, day, member number and certificate number (the member number may need three digits).

I’m assuming that all the data collected is stored in a MySQL database and this could happily reside on my own domain, as I will manage the system for the consortium and its members.

In summary, I’m looking for an event management system where the back end handle payments, rights management fees, the issuing of certificates and renewal reminders.

At this stage, I’d appreciate your observations on the following: –

Will your product do the job?
What elements will I require?
What is the cost of the appropriate licence?
Is the licence fee a one off developer licence or a recurring cost?
What additional support costs may be incurred?
Whilst getting up to speed in particular, what support may I rely upon; What is the average support response time and what costs would be involved (if any)?

Thank you in anticipation of your response.

Kind regards,

Martyn