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Pros
Omnipress is wonderful to work with. Their team is quick to respond and act and my experience has been pleasant all-around.
We have had a great experience with CATALYST and use it for a handful of clients. The staff is knowledgeable and always very helpful - great customer service.
What I like most about this software is that is its ease of use, appearance, and can be customized to fit my organization's needs. I like that its reports and schedule feature.
So far, my experience with Catalyst Abstract Management has been very good. It is nice to have support when needed.
Cons
There are places where it's not obvious how to get from one place to another. So for a beginning user, it could be a little frustrating.
The dashboard format can be confusing to navigate at times.
The way additional speakers are added is very confusing.
Users had a hard time adding co-presenters. Also, the way the information exports it isn’t easy to track the presenter’s company name, address etc.
Showing Most Helpful
Showing 17 of 17 reviews
"New to the World of Abstract Management"
Overall: I am new to the world of conferencing and events, so the system of managing abstracts was foreign to me. CATALYST and Representative has been a tremendous help in learning the system. When I tell you I was new, my entire concept of what I was using the tool for was off. Now, I feel confident and I am looking forward to actually putting our conferencing events and using CATALYST next year, we are even looking into the app designed for interfacing with our event for next year. This will assist us in streamlining that portion of our process and also saving us time in the long run. I really have nothing else to compare CATALYST to as I am completely new to the industry, but I will say, that it’s a great system to have to compare in the future.
Pros: I like the ease of use. It is very intuitive and I am curious to work with the new app.
Cons: Some features that I would like to have were not available. This could be due to the lack of understanding by the person working to create the functionality required for our needs.
Vendor Response
"Great product!"
Overall: My overall experience over the past 4 years has been great! The software accomplishes what we need it to, it allowed the full process to be in one place, and the customer support and timeliness of requests is the best I've experienced from any vendor I've ever worked with. I would highly recommend them to anyone who is looking for an abstract management system.
Pros: For us, the main benefit was how much it cut down on staff time to manually create custom webpages of our own with the necessary information, first for the actual Call for Papers and then separately for the Reviewers. All the way from the Call for Papers to the review process was tedious and took many hours between 2 staff members. This product put everything in one place and offered easy completion for the applicant and easy access for the reviewers and cut staff time to very little.
Cons: There are places where it's not obvious how to get from one place to another. So for a beginning user, it could be a little frustrating. But once you're oriented, it's very easy.
Vendor Response
"Good but confusing to users "
Pros: Overall it is wonderful how some items be customized.
Cons: The way additional speakers are added is very confusing. Users had a hard time adding co-presenters. Also, the way the information exports it isn’t easy to track the presenter’s company name, address etc.
Vendor Response
"Catalyst review"
Overall: Less labor Great support Quick turnarounds Mass emails This software has made the whole collection of abstracts a lot easier for our group. I can't even imagine going back to the way we used to do it.
Pros: We lost an employee due to retirement and then picked up this software, which made it easy to transition from our old manual process to a new, online process - with less labor.
Cons: The fact that you can't have several collections running at the same time. They are all lumped into one collection, even though we are collecting several different types of abstracts at different times.
Vendor Response
"Great Product"
Overall: We have had a great experience with CATALYST and use it for a handful of clients. The staff is knowledgeable and always very helpful - great customer service.
Pros: It is adjustable for each of our clients needs and requirements - and they are varied. The information we collect can be put into journal ready documents that look great.
Cons: The fact that you can't print out just the abstract contents on a page (for reviewers and submitters). The affiliations section isn't very intuitive.
Vendor Response
"Basic Functions for Managing Conference Paper Review Process - More Functions Desired"
Pros: The customer support was very good, with a project manager from Omnipress assigned to us who was very responsive. The submission process was also relatively easy for paper authors and paper reviewers.
Cons: I have used other conference paper submission and review software tools and found them to be much easier to use - from an administrative side. For example, the process of adding reviewers to the system, assigning reviews, and viewing results is a very manual process. Significant automation of these tasks is needed, along with improved visualization of the reviewer scores for each paper. I provided Omnipress with a long list of recommended improvements many of which I believe they are working on.
Vendor Response
"Great proposal management system "
Pros: I appreciate the support we get from our contact at Omnipress, the ease of use, the flexibility in getting things set up, and that it has all the functionalities needed for a smooth call for proposals process.
Cons: There are always reporting functionalities that would make things easier! We make it work (and our Omnipress contacts help quite a bit) but if it were possible to merge reviews in with each proposal in a report, it'd be great.
Vendor Response
"Good system depending on your reporting needs"
Pros: It was easy to use as an administrator and visually looked good for reviewers and submitters.
Cons: Abstract reviewers could not print their assigned abstracts with corresponding graphics in line with the text. As an administrator I could not get a report in Word format of all the accepted abstracts for our print publication.
Vendor Response
"Simple and Effective"
Overall: I have been working with Catalyst for over three years and I love I don't have to worry about the functionality and customer service. There's a lot to learn but it's so simple and user friendly, it's quick.
Pros: -Usability including training for evaluation and application function especially with the ongoing changes of volunteers who evaluate programs
Cons: Pulling reports! I wish there was a clearer way to do this as it doesn't seem as simplistic as it could be.
Vendor Response
"Poster/Scientific Session Abstract Mgmt"
Overall: The overall experience has been great. Our poster presenters and session chairs love it. The customer support we receive from OmniPress is also wonderful.
Pros: I like the ease of use. I use it but so do the Chairs of my sessions. Once we started using Catalyst, we no longer received calls/emails from users needing help.
Cons: At times, the system is slow w/saving info and/or updating info. We've been told that is due to the number of companies that we have in the "Institution" pull-down screen.
Vendor Response
"Highly recommend Omnipress and the Catalyst Product"
Overall: Omnipress is wonderful to work with! Their team is quick to respond and act and my experience has been pleasant all-around.
Pros: This is a very robust program but it's pretty simple to navigate and deploy.
Cons: The display application is slow to load but I know Omnipress is currently developing solutions to improve the load experience.
"Catalyst - Great Abstract System"
Pros: Very user friendly. Great search engine.
Cons: Little complicated for issuance of reports
Vendor Response
"CATALYST review"
Overall: My point person at Omnipress is SO helpful.
Pros: It easily collects a lot of information and is understood by people who do not necessarily communicate with English as their first language.
Cons: The dashboard format can be confusing to navigate at times.
Vendor Response
"Omnipress CATALYST Review"
Pros: It provided us the information we needed -- but difficult to extract that information.
Cons: I found it clunky and difficult to navigate. Not user-friendly.
Vendor Response
"Review of CATALYST Abstract Management Software"
Overall: So far, my experience with Catalyst Abstract Management has been very good. It is nice to have support when needed. The hands on/hands off approach with our contact at Omnipress works well.
Pros: What I like most about this software is that is its ease of use, appearance, and can be customized to fit my organization's needs. I like that its reports and schedule feature.
Cons: TBD as I have yet to really experience the software as an user. As software administrator, the thing I like least about the software is that we are unable to customize the letter templates more (i.e. include images like our logo).
Vendor Response
"Helped make this course a success!"
Pros: The ability to hand off the work we used to do pre-course and trust it was all taken care of. They created the site to mirror our company and had constant communication and follow-up to our requests and changes.
Cons: I had no issues with it and was so pleased to have a tool to collect our abstracts/presentation materials for the faculty.
Vendor Response
"Excellent Product, Great Value "
Pros: The software was easy to use and navigate. The process was very simplistic for our team and users. The vast array of customizable reports was a life saver. The customer service was awesome. Our rep was very responsive and helpful through the entire process. They were able to make changes very quickly.
Cons: We didn’t find any issues while using the software.
Vendor Response