Spring has come to InvitePeople HQ in Stockholm, and with that lots of energy for a summer full of events. In our experience, the B2B event season has been extended since the pandemic virtual events boom. Events taking place earlier in January and closer to summer vacations. Another rising trend is the Continuous Meeting event concept, allowing events to live longer, sometimes for years! InvitePeople lives for prolonging and digitalizing events and has been since we started in 2008. Many of our latest updates are focused on Continuous Meetings and expect more updates to come around this concept in the future. Longer events put higher demands on event platforms, and we will keep pushing to stay at the top!
During spring we have released lots of smaller improvements making InvitePeople a little bit better, step by step. To mention a few but not all:
Background effects allowing users to blur or choose a virtual background.Disable participant feature allows administrators to temporarily or permanently disable all access for a participant to an event, without removing any data.Customize content for the Order confirmation page so that administrators can customize the last step in the order flow a bit more.Interactivity add-ons have been improved and give administrators more control over the chat.Meetings and Matchmaking functionality are a top priority for us. These updates will come in handy for longer events, virtual global events, and events with speed meetings.
Subscribe to calendar to import their personal InvitePeople calendar into an Outlook, Apple, Google, or other calendar apps. Meeting and session changes in InvitePeople will keep in sync with the calendar app.We recently released our new lead scanning app: InvitePeople Leads. It is available in the Apple App Store for iOS and Google Play for Android. The app allows exhibitors and partners to scan badges and name tags to collect contact information about the people they meet during events.
The app lets company administrators build their lead forms with multiple questions and fields of their preference. The new app works seamlessly with the online lead retrieval function, which has gotten a lift as well with an easier-to-use UI and more customization options.
When using InvitePeople we want you to be in full control of your data and your event participants. We keep adding more features to our exports, imports, and API:s.
Advanced session participant search. This allows administrators to pull lists of participants for a specific group of sessions.Add/remove participants function for sessions has gotten a whole lot better. It is now easy to quickly pre-book groups of participants for sessions, even for very large events.We are only a month into the new year and we have already completed lots of events! Still mostly digital events and of course also some pivots from physical due to Omicron and new restrictions. We carry on, developing InvitePeople with focus on you, our dear customer. Interactivity, emails, support features, imports, and ticket sale VAT configurations have been on the agenda lately. Also, as always we continue pushing our video features. How about a whole new set of technical live stream data, and unlimited file sizes when uploading videos?
InvitePeople has built in support for polls and Q&A but sometimes you need more complex solutions, maybe including quizzes with points and leaderboards or advanced result views for live streams. We want you to be able to use the tools with the best fit in each situation. That’s why we created Interactivity add-ons and the possibility to integrate Vevox, Slido, Mentimeter, Kahoot and more third party tools into InvitePeople chats. Start up your quiz, competition, Q&A session or polling in your favorite tools and create an Interactivity add-on. Read more on how to use this here.
The new email sender types, using either InvitePeople as a sender or your company name have been implemented and serving us well. The number of spam reports are going from low to very low. Another important change to fight the spam folder is our new un-subscription feature. It is quicker and easier to say no to all emails from an InvitePeople event, a necessity when sending out lots of emails. As a bonus we created a new, nicer looking and responsive email template that runs a lot better on mobile devices.
We think that smooth support to participants is crucial for successful events. You and your team of administrators need to be able to act quickly. Thats why we added two new shortcuts when moderating chats and meetings. A new Send private message icon is now available for chats, allowing administrators to start a private message thread with a participant regardless of whether the initial chat message is hidden or not.
For the Ongoing meetings view, where you in realtime can monitor ongoing 1:1 meetings, we added a Join as administrator button to let admins check in on the meeting if there are participants missing or any other trouble. The button appearance and meeting event list is updated in realtime, giving clear feedback to the support team on which admin joined the meeting and when.
Some of you are using external systems for handling participants, speakers and especially company representatives such as exhibitors or partners. If so, the new Company representative import will make your event preparations easier. It will allow you to import multiple Company representatives, connecting an unlimited number of participants to companies with the correct respective role.
We also shaped up the Participants and Sessions import functions. When importing or mass updating participants you may now set the time zone in the import file. When importing or mass updating sessions there are lots of new fields and settings for company name, booking kind, ticket type access, turning checkin on or off and the checkin internal link.
Tax and VAT regulations can be difficult to grasp, especially when selling tickets for digital events to a global audience. Tickets to online events are usually considered digital assets, and are subject to other VAT rules than tickets to physical ones. We now have a wider range of settings to handle this complexity and can offer different kinds of reverse VAT charges for multiple payment methods. Please reach out to us, and we will try to help you set up your events so that you can comply with the regulations that applies to your events.
We are continuously working on our email sender reputation and the quality of the emails sent from InvitePeople.com. All emails sent from us are authenticated and we consistently score high ratings from email providers. The coming month we will release some updates to ensure even better email delivery, more on that later on. Right now you need to know about one of the breaking changes we are planning for the 17th of January. After that all emails sent from InvitePeople.com will get a new default sender, and the Reply-To function will be removed. This is to make sure our emails are not flagged as suspect phishing attacks.
The new default sender will be InvitePeople <events@invitepeople.com> and the option to select a sender name per event will be removed. We will offer all our yearly subscription customers to create their own sender name for all of their events, eg. The Company via InvitePeople <thecompany@invitepeople.com>. Please get in touch, and we will help you select an appropriate sender name!
We think that creating beautiful events should be simple, and keep developing our rich text editor and design options. Build stunning Netflix-style landing pages by combining the new background image and Card functions.
Regardless if you are hosting events with a handful or thousands of meetings, managing and scheduling them should be straight forward.
We never rest when it comes to improving our video features.
We always strive to make our interface easier to use for you. Still we don’t want to make too many big changes at a time, allowing you and all the other InvitePeople users to adapt gradually. Some of the more prominent improvements can be found in the HTML and CSS editors, in the meetings and calendar handling functions and in video management.
The HTML and CSS editors now allow you to drag-n-drop files straight into the editor. The file will upload to our servers and an URL to the file will be inserted at the cursor in the editor.
Handling participants calendars is easier than ever. You can now for example remove booked sessions and unmark participants as busy from the administrator interface. Managing and rescheduling large meetings with many participants is now straight forward.
For you who upload a lot of videos or use parallel live streams we added a description field to every video. That way you can keep track of which video or live stream is which. When trimming live stream recordings you can assign the new trimmed video directly to a session or add a description to it.
We love digital meetings, but are also super thrilled that in-person events are on the rise again! The InvitePeople Entrance app will allow you to scan InvitePeople tickets from your own iOS devices. Just download the app, sign in as an administrator and start scanning. The ticket QR codes can be distributed via text messages and email, or just accessed by the participants by logging in to InvitePeople. The app can be used for entrance ticket validation and statistics, session scanning to ensure pre booked participants their seats and coupon scanning.
Many events have different groups and types of participants, and sometimes they should be able to access different information and different sessions. You can now granularly control the participants access to a page or session. Pages can be set to be publicly accessible on the internet for anyone with the link, accessible by logged in participants only, or by participants with a specific ticket.
If you run workshops or webinars and want to share documents or files with the participants this one is for you! You can now, as an administrator or chat moderator, upload files and documents and publish them to all participants in any chat. If you need to collect files from the participants there is a new poll type: File upload. This will allow participants to upload and submit files back to the chat moderator.
We are constantly working on making InvitePeople easier to understand both for administrators and participants. Most often we try to make small and gradual changes to the administrator UI, but this summer we renamed one of the most important InvitePeople modules. Seminars are now called sessions to provide a more general and easier to understandable name. You will find the sessions and all the features around them in the same place, but the headline is different.
We have made video meeting workshops and breakouts easier to manage for administrators and moderators. A simple, but easy-to-use raise hand function will allow any participant in a workshop to turn on their camera or microphone until there are twelve active speakers. After that, any person who wants to join the discussion will have to raise their hand and be approved by a meeting moderator. This will allow hosting a larger workshop in a safe way.
When sending participants into breakout rooms, random or pre-booked, most often there are some no-shows and some rooms might end up with too few people in them. We added the ability to manually move single participants into other rooms so that no one will be alone.
A picture is worth a thousand words. That’s why we added image uploads to our chats. It’s up to you to enable this function for participants, but administrators will always be able to upload and publish images in chats. Be it announcements, advertisements, QR-codes leading to external quizzes or apps, or just mood-boosting pictures.
InvitePeople have always put our recording and video-on-demand features as a high priority. Participants should be able to access recordings quickly if they miss out on any part of a live stream. It is crucial to give access to video-on-demand content while the event has the participant’s attention. Our new live stream recordings will be available to watch almost instantly when a live stream starts. It usually lags around a minute behind the live stream. Administrators could publish the whole recording in one chunk or use our trimming feature. For a longer live stream, every finished session can be trimmed out of the recording and published fast, sometimes within minutes.
We added a shortcode for publishing your sponsor, partner, or exhibitor logotypes in a rotating carousel. With this, administrators can add more logotypes using less space on a page. The sponsor carousel will make an event page a bit more vibrant and exhibit your sponsors in a tasteful way.
Every year the mobile usage of InvitePeople increases and this shouldn’t affect your revenue. We updated our credit card payment solution to create a better, more user-friendly, and responsive experience for participants.
Actors in the public sector are required by law to use e-invoicing. With our invoicing feature administrators are now able to export invoices to PEPPOL BIS format, a widely used standard for e-invoicing.
We have released new features for chats, allowing participants to like messages and administrators and moderators can view of a toplist of the most liked messages. There are two new import types for: seminar participants and breakout participants. This will give administrators full control over who joins which seminar or breakout session. We also updated our email reporting with open, delivery and bounce statuses for each individual email.
This week we are releasing the first version of our new streaming service. It uses the same back end as Twitch and lets us deliver full HD live streams with very low latency. The standard latency is 10 seconds, much lower than what for instance Vimeo is able to deliver. Switching to low latency mode will let you push the latency below 2 seconds if the stream is correctly configured from the studio.
The new type of live stream also has higher security, let you view recordings before the live stream has ended, provides global RTMP ingestion and allows the studio to send live subtitles. We also updated our video player to increase the probability of auto-playing without muting.
Please contact us if you are interested in trying out the new low latency streams!
We have updated the user interface for all video meetings in InvitePeople, including 1:1 meetings, workshops and broadcasts. Not only does it look better and is a lot easier to use, it handles more participants with cameras on better and has a pre call interface that let participants change their camera and microphone settings before joining 1:1 meetings.
The InvitePeople team have been using the new user interface for our internal meeting rooms for some time, and it will soon be replacing the old meeting rooms for all events. Please contact us, if you’d like to test or use the new interface for an event before it becomes generally available.
We are currently translating InvitePeople into German and Norwegian. The participant views are 99% translated and we would love it if you wanted to run an event with any of these languages. Contact us if you want access to German or Norwegian for your event.
We created a Microsofts Teams Bot, that can automatically join the 1:1 meetings booked in InvitePeople. The bot will feedback information on who joins the meetings and when, so that administrators can monitor meetings and get statistics on the actual length and participants of the meetings.
If you are using, or want to use our Microsoft Teams integration, please contact us for more information on the monitoring bot.
We have worked hard with accessibility, foremost improving keyboard navigation compatibility. We updated our REST API with 6 new endpoints and lots of new participant data. Also, it is now possible to fully manage subtitles for videos uploaded in InvitePeople and we added pre recorded live functionality to our Vimeo integration.
Simple, yet great function to visualize how much time it is left until your event starts. Use the code /*COUNTDOWN*/ in the text editor to include the countdown timer anywhere you like.
There is a new settings at Settings → Customize appearance → Branding. Choose between two different themes for your event: light, or dark. The dark theme is alot easier on the eye, and makes the live stream appear more prominent during webinars. And maybe it fits your brand better?
It is now possible to create profiles for the company products at Settings → Profiles → Product profiles. Let your exhibitors tag their product pages to make them searchable in the product list. The product list, displaying product pages from all companies, can be added to the menu at Settings → Event pages → New sub page.
To bring exhibitors, partners and sponsors forward into the spotlight we added the Related products feature to seminars. Go to Administer → Seminars → The seminar of choice → Products and connect any company product pages to the seminar. These product pages will work like ads and be exposed to participants viewing the seminar both on public pages and in the logged in views.
We added more control of security and login settings for you at Settings → Event settings → Visibility & security. Choose the login method that best fit your needs in terms of accessibility and security or limit the number of devices a participants can be logged in from simultaneously to prevent sharing of accounts.
We have improved the experience for mobile users, when watching video and using the chat. The video meeting rooms are now loading alot faster. There is more granualar access control for seminars, and administrator can choose exactly who to give access to a certain seminar.
As you might have noticed, the admin user interface has changed alot in terms of colors and styling. We hope you like it, and that it is a little bit clearer and nicer to the eye. Everything should be found in the same place, just looking a bit different.
We have updated our text editor with alot of new functionality. The editor will now preview the content with your event specific branding and styling applied. It is possible to style inserted links into buttons of different colors. You will also be able to insert and manage basic column designs.
We want to make it easier for you to brand and style your events, without HTML or CSS knowledge. Under Settings → Customize appearance → Branding there are some new settings for just that.
Choose a primary branding color for your event that will apply to buttons, links and more. Paste a web font from for example Google Fonts. Select the navbar style that you like and match your own brand.
Please note, that if you already have custom styling for your event, these settings might conflict with the current styling. Please contact us and we will help you!
It is now possible to pull data on online participants for any time frame and page. Go to Administer → Statistics → Activity to see who is online now, or was in the past.
Click on Show filters and select the time frame you want to get data on. You will see the total number of uniqe participants, aggregated statistics per page and also a list with every participant online during the selected time frame. Scroll to the very bottom of the page to download the list as XLSX or CSV.
Internal linking of the seminar checkin button makes it easier to set up, for example, a live streamed track with multiple seminars. Create an Event page with the Page type: Embedded video and paste the embed code of the live stream. Then set the Content for checked in participants of all the seminars in the track to Internal link and choose the event page you created.
Participants will checkin to the seminar as usual, but end up on the same live stream page. When recordings are published for the seminar this won’t affect viewers who keep watching the live stream.
We know that you want to fit a lot of content into your events, and that the size of the navbar is limited. Thats why we introduced drop down menus, making it possible to merge multiple links and pages into one.
Go to Settings → Event pages and click on New sub page (the Event pages menu option has moved outside of Event settings for quicker access). Chose the Page type: Menu. You can then edit any other page and move it from the navbar into your new menu, using the Visibility settings.
Combine the calm of mind of using pre recorded video with a live experience for the participants. You can now upload videos to seminars and set them up as pre recorded live sessions. During the the seminar all participants will be watching live, with no access to seeking in the video. Directly after it finishes the whole video will be available on demand
This feature is still in beta. Please contact us if you are interested and we will look at how to best use it for your event!