The European Association of Urology (EAU) organizes around 25 meetings a year; the largest is the Annual EAU Congress with 10,000 delegates which was held in Milan, Italy.

Trentt the IT supplier of the EAU and a business partner of ExchangeIt says: "To speed up the registration process for EAU congresses we have switched from a ‘per event' paper badge to a MIFARE® ID card showing a photo of the delegate. This ID card will be used for all future congresses. The photos are taken onsite after which the delegates can collect their personalized ID card directly from our printing station. We already obtained some experience with the production of ID cards when we introduced it to a small group of delegates during the EAU's previous Annual Congress. The printing of the ID card was then outsourced to another company."

In 2008 the EAU and Trentt decided to go full scale, an innovative and challenging step for a congress this size since it meant that all 10,000 delegates of this Annual EAU Congress would receive an ID card. The experience obtained in the year before gave Trentt sufficient confidence to manage the production process themselves.

"Thus we were looking for fast, professional and reliable card production software with completely separate designing and printing facilities. It should be possible to integrate the software into our in-house developed registration software. We looked at all the other possibilities; however, CardExchange was the only software that could meet all our demands. Apart from the software the liability, quality of the print and the speed of the card production of the ID card printers, were also very important requirements", says Pim Pronk of Trentt.

In addition Pronk said: "You can imagine that having so many people in front of the desk, waiting for an ID card to enter the congress, puts a lot of pressure on the hardware and software liability."

Pronk also says: "Soon after the first meeting with ExchangeIt and OmniCard, the Dutch distributor of NiSCA printers in the Netherlands, it became clear that the CardExchange® software from ExchangeIt and the NiSCA printers from OmniCard where capable of meeting the challenge."

"Thanks to the native database support, CardExchange® connects directly to our MySQL based registration software without any problems. However, the real benefit of CardExchange® was the introduction of the CardExchange® Dispatcher and CardExchange® Print server software. Thanks to the Print server, we could manage 6 NiSCA PR5350 printers from 1 CardExchange® instance", says Pronk. "We used the CardExchange® Dispatcher to create 2 printer groups, 1 for member cards and 1 for non-member cards. Because of this setup, the 10,000 cards we needed to print during the 4 days of our congress were automatically balanced between the printers, which considerably reduced the waiting time for our delegates".

Pronk says that in addition to the supplied support ", ExchangeIt managed to build a fully functioning test environment at the Trentt office before the congress started. "Therefore we were able to fully test the integration of CardExchange® into our registration process, which contributed to a smooth registration process for our delegates."

Pronk concludes: "The first time we did the card production was a great success. We are very happy with the level of service provided by ExchangeIt and OmniCard, the liability of the NiSCA printers, and look forward to working with them in the future!"

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