Today we can find a large number of methods to collect the required information from participants.
Good ones and others...
Of course, there is more than one single best solution.
However, we still frequently see many opportunities for improvements.

There exist many ideas what an online registration can be. Some solutions are based on the sending of an e-mail. Other solutions provide a downloadable form, which you have to print out and fax back. In our understanding, such solutions are using parts of the available technologies but all of them have a break in the media and the delivery of the data. The collected data have to be processed manually or by other, unrelated systems.
When we talk about an online registration system, we think that it is very important to close the chain from the collection of the data to the storage and processing.
A real online registration system must be based on an underlying database. All media changes or interrupts in the chain can lead to errors. The needed interfaces to transform the information from one system to another to makes further processing also more expensive.
If you use a database driven system you have all data only once in your system. It is possible to validate the received data and to give sensible feedback to the user. If there are follow-up registrations, you can pre-populate the registration forms with already existing data. If you give the participants a personal account, they can see previously stored information. If you allow them to edit some of the fields, they might do the address changes themselves. As an organizer, your data will be more current. Moreover and much more important, you can save time and money with the data administration.
In many cases, lists and reports are used for the further processing. Common export formats as CSV (Excel) allow a simple and fast transfer of the information to local used office systems.
Eveni provides for example such an interface to the described Spotme device above.
As conclusion, we think that it is time to leave paper forms and fax registrations.
The future will be online registration systems without interrupts in the chain. There will come up standards form with much more intelligent web forms by using new xml-based form definitions (XFORMS).
Therefore, we are sure that we are just at the start of an interesting development for online registration systems.
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