Meeting News - December 17, 2007 - (Page 58)

Live from the Forum @ MeetingNews.com TOPIC: Determining and drawing floorplans W hen you have to draw your own floorplans of session room setups, what software do you use? Can anyone recommend any free software? I’m considering downloading something like ConceptDraw or SmartDraw. My needs are simple, but I would prefer to use something more appropriate than, say, [Microsoft] Word. Do you have a burning question to ask your peers? Log on to the MeetingNews Forum to get answers fast. meetingnews.com/forum —Isabel Brinck, Events and World Congress Coordinator International Political Science Association, Montreal I have made my own set of custom icons with the easy-to-use OmniGraffle, a Macintosh application, but any drawing program will do the job for you. However, I am shocked that not a single hotel—in five years of asking— has ever once had photos of their trade show setups with booths, where I can count what’s in an aisle, dimensions and openings we can’t block, doorways and outlets, etc., instead of just a printed or digital floorplan showing a plan for booths (they have had events, right?). It is so silly to me that not a single hotel or location has ever been able to tell me, “This room can hold this number of 8 x 8 booths, rod and curtain,” or tell me anything at all close to this. So I do it myself. I start by using the online floorplan and just duplicating my 8 x 8 boxes and seeing how many will fit along each wall. Then I mark out six-foot aisles and see what fits as islands in the center. I know that is my maximum and that I’ll lose some for doorways. This is enough to consider the location or drop it from my list. Deborah Shadovitz, Contributing Editor Mac Life, Los Angeles It has been my experience that most hotels do indeed have maximum floorplan layouts for exhibits. However, many are done for 10 x 10 or 8 x 10 booth layouts with wider aisles than the six-foot [aisles] mentioned. Ask the hotel what exhibit service contract services (with organizations like Freeman, GES, etc.) are in place for the majority of the shows at there. These companies all use AutoCAD to draft their floorplans to scale and should be able to quickly provide an 8 x 8 max layout with your six-foot aisle specifications. For fire marshal approval, they’re going to be looking for a professional to-scale layout that is completed with this technology. Dave Lutz, Managing Director Velvet Chainsaw Consulting, Aurora, OH In general, for simple things in hotels that have the floorplans there, we use MeetingMatrix. [Among MeetingMatrix’s offerings is a 2-D room diagramming solution, as well as space rendering in 3-D]. For anything complicated, we use AutoCAD. The program is expensive, but there are free readers around that can handle AutoCAD files, so the people on the staff who need to see the files can read them, even if they can’t update them or create new diagrams. We then ship it out in whatever format the facility can handle. Generally, the larger decorators often can handle AutoCAD, and often have the plans for convention centers as a set of AutoCAD files already, so you can just layer your plans onto the building infrastructure. Hotels generally can’t handle it, so we export the diagrams as PDFs for the hotels. We do need accurate floorplans, and measuring is always something we need to follow up with, since we never trust plans provided by vendors unless we have good reason to trust them. Depending on the jurisdiction, six-foot [aisles] might not be appropriate/legal. And we rarely use anything that small for anything with more than a few hundred people since it causes traffic tie-ups. Our normal tendency is to assume eight feet, and we use more than that where we expect more traffic. Ben Yalow, Independent Meeting Planner New York City At the site inspection stage of planning, I always ask the hotel for a floorplan showing our estimated group size in a classroom seating with stage, screen, etc. It’s always been my experience that the capacity charts in the sales kit are usually not accurate and give you the maximum capacity of a group squeezed in like a can of sardines. For some conferences, I request floorplans of our tabletop exhibits to ensure that the exhibit ballroom can accommodate our estimated number of tabletop exhibits. I’ve never had a problem getting this. Sometimes you may have to wait a few days, but they always provide it. Karen Close, Conference Manager Packaging Strategies, West Chester, PA When in doubt, check with the local fire department. Most of them have floorplans or at least can tell you the maximum attendance in each room. In Richmond, the aisles at the convention center must be 10 feet wide. In addition, the fire department signs off on large events and makes surprise inspections of the facility. I always remember the poor high school that decorated their convention area with tissue paper—all came down because it was flammable. Be aware that fire codes are local, and never be surprised or annoyed when the fire marshal shows up for a walk-through. The building department has the plans for the facility, and so should the hotel, or at least the chain’s main office. And when making a floorplan for a trade show in a hotel ballroom or conference room, be aware of extra doors—to the kitchen, to the service corridor, etc.—and the wall sconces, which may interfere with exhibit back walls. Julia O’Connor, Speaker, Author, Consultant Trade Show Training Inc., Richmond, VA MEETING NEWS (ISSN 0145-630X, USPS No.356-010, December 17 2007, Vol. 31, No. 18 is published semi-monthly except for January, February, April, June, July, August, which are monthly, by Nielsen Business Media, 770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003-9595, tel. 646-654-5000. Subscriptions are offered free of charge to individuals actively engaged in planning meetings or conventions in the U.S. and Canada. The cost of a subscription to non-qualified subscribers is $79 in the U.S. and $95 in Canada (Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40031729). The cost of a foreign subscription, payable in U.S. dollars, is $195. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. MeetingNews is a trademark owned exclusively by Nielsen Business Media. Copyright © 2007 by Nielsen Business Media Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this magazine, in whole or in part, is prohibited unless authorized by the publisher. For address changes (please include mailing label), single copy sales ($10 per issue including shipping and handling, prepayment required), subscription information, and other customer service inquiries, write to MEETING NEWS, P.O. Box 1189, Skokie, IL 600768189 or call 847-763-9050. Printed in the USA. POSTMASTER: Send changes of address to MEETING NEWS, P.O. Box 1189, Skokie, IL 60076-8189. 58 MeetingNews December 17, 2007 www.meetingnews.com http://MeetingNews.com http://meetingnews.com/forum http://www.meetingnews.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Meeting News - December 17, 2007

Meeting News - December 17, 2007
Contents
What’s Up @ MeetingNews.com
Inside the Meetings Industry
MN Webcast Report
Successful Meetings University
Malibu Hospitality Safe After Third City Fire
Advertisers Index
Live from the Forum

Meeting News - December 17, 2007

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