How to Add a Mobile App to Your ConfTool Conference

ConfTool handles submissions, reviewing, registration and the programme, and publishes that programme as public web pages. This guide covers how to build the attendee app from those pages — link first, the export as the fallback — and what to require from the mobile layer, without touching your ConfTool workflow.

Preview my programme — free
Book a 20-minute call

ConfTool is the submission and programme management system of choice for thousands of European academic conferences — in communication studies, sociology, linguistics, education research, public health, and interdisciplinary humanities. It handles the complexity of multi-track peer review, registration and programme scheduling exceptionally well. What it doesn't handle is the on-site attendee experience.

What ConfTool does publish is the programme itself: the "Browse sessions" pages that anyone can open, one per day, with every session, paper, author and abstract. Those pages are enough to build the attendee app from. No export is needed unless your programme is not public — and this guide covers both paths.

This guide is for ConfTool organisers who want to give their attendees offline access, fast navigation, personal schedules, and real-time updates on mobile — without rebuilding the programme elsewhere or adding maintenance work for their team.

Already decided? See how HEPCon reads a ConfTool programme: ConfTool Conference App solution.

What ConfTool Does — and Where Attendees Are Left Behind

ConfTool Pro covers the full organiser workflow: abstract submission, peer review coordination, author notifications, registration, payment, and programme scheduling. Its programme management module lets you build multi-track schedules with session convenors, paper assignments, and room allocations, and publishes the result as a public programme on the web.

The gap is the output. ConfTool's programme view is designed for desktop browsers and programme committees. An attendee trying to navigate a dense three-day conference from their phone during a coffee break is not the use case ConfTool was built for. Common on-site failures:

  • No offline access: ConfTool requires connectivity to browse the schedule. Venue Wi-Fi fails at exactly the moments people need it most.
  • No personal schedule: attendees can't bookmark sessions or build a personal track.
  • No push notifications: a moved session or an announcement reaches attendees only by email — often too late.
  • Desktop-first layout: the programme grid that works on a 1400px screen doesn't work on a 390px phone.
  • No full-text search: finding a specific paper among 400 presentations means scrolling, not searching.

How to Connect Your ConfTool Programme

There are two paths. The first is a link and takes about 30 seconds. The second is the older export procedure, and it is still the right one when your programme is behind a login — or when rooms matter.

Path A — the public programme link (recommended)

Once your programme is published, ConfTool serves it at an address of the form https://www.conftool.pro/<your-conference>/index.php?page=browseSessions. Any page of your conference will do; HEPCon derives the programme from it and reads two kinds of page:

  • The overview, for the list of programme days
  • One list-view page per day: every session with its time span, title and session code, and its convenor line; inside each session every paper with its title, authors — the presenting author marked — their affiliations, and the full abstract; break rows such as registration and coffee

Because affiliations and abstracts are printed inline on the day page, there are no per-person or per-paper fetches: a five-day conference is about six requests, made one at a time with a pause between them. Paste the address on the try-free page with your email, click the confirmation link we send, and a private preview of your conference is built in about 30 seconds — real sessions, real papers, real abstracts — with a join code you can hand to the programme committee. HEPCon keeps every session and paper under its ConfTool id and re-reads the same link whenever the programme changes.

Check two things before pasting: that the programme is public — opening the address in a private browser window shows it — and that the public list view shows the presentations, not only the session titles. If ConfTool hides the papers from the public view, there is nothing on the page to read.

Path B — the export (when the programme is not public, or rooms matter)

Some conferences keep ConfTool behind a login until registration closes, or never publish the programme. Then the original path still works. ConfTool's most complete export is the XML programme export, from the admin panel under Programme > Programme and Scheduling > Export Programme Data; it carries sessions with room assignments, start and end times and convenors, every accepted paper with its authors, track and abstract, and the track definitions. The CSV and Excel outputs from the paper list and scheduling views work too for straightforward programmes.

Send the file with the event basics (dates, venue, time zone, logo, colour) and the preview is built within 48 hours. Because the export carries room and track columns and the public pages do not, this is also the right path when rooms matter at your venue. Everything after that — re-sync on a new export, materials, push notifications — is the same as on the link path.

What the Public Pages Do Not Carry

The link path is honest about its limits, and each one has a plain answer.

  • Rooms and tracks. The public day view prints neither, so a preview built from the link has no rooms. The export carries both; choose Path B if they matter.
  • A start time per paper. The day view prints the session's time span, not a time per paper, so each paper carries its session's slot in the app.
  • Author identities. ConfTool prints names, not ids. One person is created per distinct name, so an author with three papers is one person with three contributions — and two different people with an identical name are treated as one.
  • The venue's time zone. Times are printed as venue wall-clock with no zone. A preview is built in Central European time; if your venue is elsewhere, tell us the zone once and every session is stored as the exact instant it represents, daylight saving included.
  • Email addresses. Not published, so nothing that depends on an email match happens automatically: a convenor is not granted moderator rights in the app just because ConfTool lists them. That is a deliberate step in the organiser dashboard.

What to Require From a Mobile App for ConfTool

Reads the public programme directly

The mobile layer should take your programme link and build from it — not ask you to export XML and send it after every change. If the vendor's answer to "ConfTool" is "send us the export", you are doing their integration work for them, and you will do it again every time a session moves.

Keeps ConfTool's identities across updates

Every session and paper in ConfTool has a stable id, visible in the page itself. The app should keep it, so that a re-import after a schedule change updates records in place and an attendee's bookmarks and reminders survive. An app that rebuilds from scratch on every update loses exactly the state your attendees care about.

Shows convenors as convenors

In social science and humanities conferences, the convenor and discussant roles are significant. The app should display convenors clearly on the session — not merge them with the presenter list or omit them — and mark the presenting author of each paper as the speaker.

Handles poster blocks and multilingual abstracts

ConfTool conferences often combine oral sessions with poster blocks of dozens or hundreds of posters, and submissions in French, German, Italian or Spanish next to English. Require search that reaches the abstract text across a whole poster block, and names, titles and abstracts whose diacritics survive the trip from ConfTool to the phone.

Real offline access

The app should cache the full programme — all sessions, papers and abstracts — on the attendee's device at first launch. Offline means no "loading" spinner in the conference centre basement.

Re-sync from the same link, with push for changes

When the programme changes in ConfTool, the public pages change with it. Require that the app re-reads the same link and applies only the difference, and that a moved session or a cancellation can reach installed phones as a push notification — the one thing a web page cannot do.

Preparing Your ConfTool Programme for the Link

The quality of the app follows the quality of the pages it reads. These checks take minutes and prevent the common surprises:

Publish the programme, with presentations shown

The "Browse sessions" pages must be public, and the public list view must show the papers, not only the session titles. Open the address in a private browser window: if you see sessions with their papers and abstracts, the app will too.

Confirm every accepted paper has a session

The day pages list sessions and the papers inside them. A paper that is accepted but not yet scheduled is on no day page, so it cannot be read; run ConfTool's scheduling report before you share the link.

Write author names consistently

Authors are matched by name across papers. "J. Smith" on one paper and "Jane Smith" on another become two people; the same spelling on both becomes one person with two contributions.

Tell us the venue's time zone

ConfTool prints wall-clock times with no zone. Unless your venue is in Central European time, send the zone with your preview request — one line — and the whole programme is stored correctly for the actual dates.

Decide whether rooms matter

If attendees need room names in the app — a multi-building venue, a campus — take Path B: the XML export carries room assignments, and it is built for you within 48 hours.

The Setup Process for ConfTool Events

  1. Publish the programme in ConfTool so the "Browse sessions" pages are public, with presentations shown.
  2. Paste the programme link on the try-free page and click the confirmation link we send. The preview is ready in about 30 seconds; if your venue is outside Central European time, tell us the zone once.
  3. Share the join code with the programme committee so they can open the preview on their own phones and check sessions, papers, abstracts and author lists across every parallel session.
  4. Evaluate for as long as you need. The go-live decision is due one week before the conference; until then the preview follows the public programme as it changes.
  5. Go live, and keep editing in ConfTool. The preview becomes the event; re-sync carries every later change, and materials such as papers and slides can be attached to their talks.

Programme not public, or rooms required? Path B above: the XML export, and a live preview within 48 hours. See: How to get started.

Why This Matters at ConfTool Conferences

ConfTool's home ground is the association annual meeting: a society's members who come every year, a local organising committee that changes with every host city, a programme that runs in several languages across parallel panels, roundtables and poster blocks. The programme committee's work is rigorous. The delivery layer on site is usually a PDF and a website.

An app that reads the public programme changes what the organising committee has to do: nothing beyond keeping ConfTool current. The members get the programme offline, search that reaches every abstract, a personal schedule that flags parallel-session clashes, and a push notification when a session moves — and the next host committee inherits a setup that takes a link, not a project.

This isn't about impressing people. It's about not creating unnecessary friction at an event your programme committee worked hard to build.

Related reading

Ready to give your ConfTool programme the attendee experience it deserves?

Paste your public programme link and browse your own conference in about 30 seconds — every session, every abstract, personal schedules included. Programme not public? Send the export.

Paste My ConfTool Programme Link See ConfTool Integration Details