Abstract

As an important component of Concordia INdexing and DIscovering system (CINDI), Conference System (ConfSys) aims to provide useful functionalities and services to help both organizers and participants of any roles in an academic conference and eJouranl. All processes of auction, debate, decision, final version upload and so on associated with such events and issues are supported and facilitated by ConfSys.
After more than ten years development and improvement upon practical academic conference management experience, the second generation of ConfSys (ConfSys2) not only possesses a lot of strong and applied features such as user-group management, privilege system, context sensitive help system and smart daemon and database maintenance mechanism, but also be able to support multi-series academic conference.
The experience with ConfSys2 pointed to some of its shortcoming which in turn pointed to the need for additional features that were needed in conference management and to incorporate the management of eJournal. This has resulted in the third generation of ConfSys – ConfSys3. In this version, we have focused on the flexibility, extensibility and customization. ConfSys3 is based on the same platform as its previous version -- Tomcat, java/jsp and MySQL. In addition to the interface improvement and many new useful features such as automatic email management, automated verification of uploaded files, incorporation of special features needed for eJournal management, introduction of concurrent track feature and associate editor, and a major upgrade to make it possible for organizers to customize their conferences. Hence, ConfSys3 is extending the advantages of ConfSys for better configuration to address specific requirements fo supporting peer review based academic events in various domains.