Hi,

 

Please forgive an outsider posting. I am not a developer and have only limited knowledge of the art you all practice.

What I do know is how wrong IT projects can go if you do not know the right people.

 

We are looking to project manage the development of a ticketing management database for a client who needs a better and multi-user system of managing their corporate ticket allocation (they get tickets to sporting and music events through sponsorships).

 

Basically they want a multi-user web-accessed database whereby users are allotted an allocation to certain events. The users themselves will need to login to provide correct name and contact information so that said tickets are correctly sent to their invites (customers). With events happening throughout the year there will need to be some kind of reminder system (by email) of closing date for submission, or any tickets outstanding. It would also be good if the database could send out emails to those who attended from that person out of courtesy and to help follow-up business development leads.

 

This is all top-line information but my main question is who should we be looking for in a developer? Are there any off-the-peg solutions that can tailored for such a use? From experience we want to avoid bespoke development. The system should be able to be managed and built on in the future by a developer other than the original author. Ideally any developer or developer company would be located in London.

 

 

Any help, leads or information on this would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks.

D

It sounds very unique, so I cant see any other way other than a bespoke solution. Maybe there are event organisation modules for sugarCRM or something like that but ultimately you'd be hacking something to do a job its not designed for and in my experience these are always a big failure, although your post suggests you had some kind of bad experience with a bespoke solution in the past? or you are just assuming that it will cost more? A bespoke solution doesn't need to be built from the ground up either, a decent developer could create the system as a module/component for an open source CMS system.

 

What you should be looking for in a developer really depends on whether you wanted something bespoke or something 'hacked'. I would decide on what kind of solution you're looking for then write an invitation to tender, post it around to some local developers and see what you get back. There are other sites like rentacoder and elance, but I've not used them personally.

 

I've written a similar system, albeit events booking rather than ticket registration so I'd be interested in doing it myself but I'm about as far away from London as you can get