If you want to learn more about the new version of ConfOrganizer due in October, here is a little bit of history about the software and what I am currently working on.
This is not a secret, ConfOrganizer was created to serve the ECCE6 Conference with more than 3500 registered authors and nearly 1500 submitted abstracts. The software was developed extremely rapidly and then following the requests of the subsequent users, it has grown a little bit organically. The problem now is that also all the features you need are there, the way to access them and the way to use them is not necessarily very intuitive.
This is why, after a good assessment of the situation and the good feedback of our customers (they told me where the software is bad but also the good points to keep), I have decided to rework a big part of the software to create ConfOrganizer 2. Looking at the current speed of development (quite a lot is extracted from the old code) and what I have done up to now, I can announce that the new release will be available in October.
The good things for you as the conference organizer is the availability of more statistics about your authors, a better mailing list system and especially a better review/improvement loop. The new interface is built with the submission/review/extended abstract submission process being considered as a feedback rich improvement loop. A bit of a buzz word to simply say that the authors will be able to easily exchange with the reviewers to improve their submission. That way, you will get better involvement of the authors.
The new part, which has not been coded yet, is the improvement of the tools to promote your conference and to follow who is linking to your conference etc. The idea is to give you tools to easily contact old participants to similar conferences but also keep the current authors active in the promotion of the conference.
Another improved component will be the ability to have suggestion of presentations based on keywords or selection by other users and suggestion of people to meet. Yes, the problem with conferences with 200+ attendees is that it starts to be hard to meet new people. The recommendation engine will optionally allow an attendee to find people with common scientific interest.