MeetingHand Abstract Management vs Microsoft CMT

MeetingHand Abstract Management helps academic event organizers collect, review, schedule and publish submissions. Organizers can configure submission forms with topics, presentation types, rules, deadlines and author fields, and accept text, file or multimedia uploads. Review features include assigning reviewers, recording scores and comments, tracking progress on dashboards and conducting blind peer review. Authors can edit abstracts until the deadline if the organizer enables that permission. Accepted submissions can be scheduled into a multi-track agenda and exported as a book of abstracts. Abstract submission can connect with conference registration through single sign-on, with an option to require payment for submissions. MeetingHand says the system is designed for events with hundreds or thousands of submissions. Pricing depends on registrations or abstracts collected: Free covers up to 25, Pay as you go costs $4.90 a month and is charged according to collected registrations and abstracts, and Small is a prepaid plan at $990 a month for 250. The Medium plan covers 1,000, but no price is listed. The software is web-based. MeetingHand offers human support and a knowledge center; it also notes that its site is not tailored to regulations such as HIPAA or FISMA.

Microsoft CMT is a free web-based conference management system for academic and scientific peer review. It supports roles for chairs, senior meta-reviewers, meta-reviewers, reviewers, authors, and proceedings editors. Organizers can create any number of independently configured tracks and customize forms with separate question visibility. The workflow covers abstracts, full papers, supplementary material, revisions, camera-ready files, and presentations. Reviewer assignment can be manual or automatic, with Toronto Paper Matching System integration. Review collaboration includes bidding, reviewer suggestions, threaded discussion, virtual program committee meetings, and author rebuttals. Uploads are unlimited, with a 100 MB maximum per file, and supported types include PDF, DOCX, audio, video, and others. Conference data exports to Excel, XML, or CSV. CMT runs on Microsoft Azure with geo-replicated data, logs submission and file activity, and offers a schedule builder and IEEE eCopyright workflow. After a conference ends, CMT removes its data. The Free plan costs nothing.