From everyone at Oxford Abstracts, we’d like to wish you a Happy Christmas and to thank you for your continued custom and support.
It has been a challenging year, to say the least, but sometimes challenges bring out the best in us and are often catalysts for change. This time last year, none of us could have imagined that for most of 2020, we would all be living in the midst of a pandemic and coping with the necessary restrictions and associated challenges, both personally and professionally. We have all had to learn how to adapt.
We at Oxford Abstracts are no exception and have used most of this year to develop our products to support business continuity and the conference industry’s changing requirements, the key response being the unprecedented and wholesale shift to virtual conferences.
After talking to our clients who, some at very short notice, had to transition to hosting their conferences 100% online, we developed and introduced some powerful new features to ensure our conference program tool, already fully integrated with the abstract management process, is now optimised for virtual conferences.
We have created a simple, user-friendly interface, where you can create unlimited parallel sessions and embed content e.g. links to live and pre-recorded sessions. We introduced flexible time zone controls, so users can view a program in their own time zone and, for asynchronous events, can be switched off. Profile pictures of authors and presenters can now be added to engage presenters and delegates and enhance user experience. We’ve also created a facility for users to comment on sessions, for increased interactivity and engagement. Users can also download sessions to their calendars, for increased attendance.
We continue to talk to clients about what they are looking for when sourcing virtual conference software, so will be introducing more powerful tools early in the new year to help you create an outstanding user experience.
2020 was also the year we decided to expand our free package. We know and appreciate the financial constraints that many face when running an academic conference, especially this year. Previously limited to 25 abstracts, our free version now offers unlimited submissions so everyone can benefit from our exceptional conference management software, even those with absolutely zero budget.
Finally, over the last 12 months, we have been delighted to watch our client satisfaction ratings continue to soar, and can proudly boast that our Capterra review rating is at 4.8, Trustpilot 4.6 and Google reviews, a whopping 5! We are immensely proud of this as we are a small team who are all committed to personal and professional customer support.
We’ve no doubt that 2021 will bring its own challenges, but we will continue to develop the Oxford Abstracts suite of products, and be on hand to help you with every aspect of your event, from start to finish.
We hope you have a well-deserved rest over the festive period and look forward to working with you next year.