Institute seeks booking software (participant management)

As an institute for continuing education and adult education, we are looking for booking software (participant management). Together with another client from the education sector, we organize around 100 conferences, courses, and excursions each year on current topics in construction, planning, and related legal fields. Our events are attended by approximately 3,000 participants from all over Germany each year; and around 250 speakers are involved in our events each year.

The two institutes are planning to procure new booking software to make booking processes and participant management more effective. Both institutes access the same participant and speaker database and want to continue using the same software.

There is currently a website (TYPO3) where the courses are presented in the institute's own corporate design with their own course characteristics. Bookings are made via the website, but registrations are processed separately in another system. As this involves additional work, the data should be entered into the system at the time of course registration.

The current course presentation on the existing website via TYPO3 should remain unchanged; only the registration process (including accounting) should be automated. The focus is therefore on participant management (including accounting), not on the presentation of courses on the website.

This is a preliminary search query. A formal public tender will be issued next year.

The solution should meet the following requirements:

• Use by two clients with different contact/account data and invoice numbers
• Independent access to a shared database for both clients
• Option to add additional users (independently)
• Registration data must be entered directly into the system during the course booking process (interface to the website) – no separate entry required, as is currently the case
• Link to the account (financial accounting)
• Link to MS Outlook
• Creation of courses or training programs
• Participant management, including links to their companies or institutions
• Technical requirements
• Web-based
• Tech stack should be open source if possible
• SQL database, MySQL/MariaDB if possible
• (REST) API
• Option to share views with other employees (permalinks)
• Full-text search with results sorted by relevance
• “Fuzzy search” (with support for German language specifics: i.e., ß = ss, ä = ae, etc.)
• Viewable change history of data by user accounts

Ten to 15 software workstations are planned.