In various meetings industry settings, planners and suppliers alike have said they want to be using APEX's effective, time-saving reports immediately after they were approved by the Convention Industry Council (CIC) Board. Although the four accepted practices - industry glossary, post-event report, event specifications guide, and housing and registration - are available for free download from the CIC Web site (www.conventionindustry.org), meeting professionals did not want to wait until APEX Technology Advisory Council (TAC) completed the data specifications that will make all accepted practices automated. The CIC listened and responded.

Released in July 2005, OfficeReady is a user-friendly toolset designed to interface with Microsoft Office, specifically Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It provides a neatly packaged set of ready-made tools for meeting professionals that can be customized for individual events.

These include:

• The APEX Industry Glossary with more than 3,900 industry-approved terms, acronyms, and abbreviations, and their respective definitions.
• The APEX Event Specifications Guide (ESG), which is driven by the wizard technology contained in MS Office. Using this tool will help meeting professionals prepare detailed instructions for events more quickly and efficiently.
• The Housing and Registration accepted practices, including event registration, housing, and rooming list forms and templates.
• Completed samples of all hard-copy APEX templates that have been adopted as accepted practices, so that planners can use them for reference.
• All checklists from The Convention Industry Council Manual, 7th Edition.

In addition, APEX OfficeReady has the built-in ability to create an Adobe-compatible PDF file, so that users can distribute secure files via e-mail, or post them to a Web site. It also has an automatic profile feature that inserts the user's name, address, and event-related information into new documents automatically. According to Juli Finnell Jones, vice president of the CIC, "The final automation of the APEX products will take time to develop, since it is a function of the business cycle of corporations within our industry.

Therefore, we wanted to move forward and provide a product that could be used now. OfficeReady was developed for three important reasons: to help event organizers implement accepted practices as they are developed by the APEX initiative; to provide vital revenue for APEX to move forward; and to give meeting professionals an incredibly functional product that is also a great value!"

OfficeReady costs $99.95. "We have sold hundreds of copies to individuals," Jones said. She noted that Hyatt Hotels has purchased 4,000 copies to give to customers. "A number of other industry corporations are interested in doing something similar," Jones said.

OfficeReady will be updated regularly. Users who register their copy when first purchased will automatically receive updates with new APEX tools and templates as they are available. OfficeReady can be purchased online at http://www.conventionindustry.org/shop/cic_%20pub_%20and_comm.htm.

The Accepted Practices initiative (APEX) is streamlining many of the business practices on which many professionals in the industry spend an inordinate amount of time. OfficeReady is a tool that will further automate accepted practices.

Types of Standards Being Developed

APEX is developing two key types of accepted practices (also known as voluntary standards):

• "Action," or process, accepted practices that address the "how" we do business & exchange information. From the APEX Post-Event Report, or PER, an example of an Action-Accepted Practices is: "The most recent PER for an event should accompany any request for proposals (RFP) sent to solicit proposals for future occurrences of that event."
• "Information" accepted practices which outline the specific information we expect to be shared, transmitted, or stored about events. Again, from the APEX PER, Information-Accepted Practices include: Published Event Start Date, Published Event End Date, Event Type, Event Frequency, Original Expected Attendance, Total Pre-Registered Attendance, Total On-Site Registrations, No-Shows, Number of Exhibitors Attending, Actual Attendance.

Status of Each of The Seven Industry Panel Reports

• Terminology - complete and approved by the CIC Board in November 2003
• History/Post Event Reports - complete and approved by the CIC Board in November 2003
• Resumes & Work Orders - complete and approved by the CIC Board in September 2004
• Housing and Registration -? complete and approved by the CIC Board in August 2005
• Request for Proposals (RFPs) - this panel is reviewing the public comments on its preliminary recommendations and will complete its work by the end of 2005
• Meetings and Site Profiles - this area is on the same track with RFPs. The panel is reviewing the public comments on its preliminary recommendations and will complete its work by the end of 2005
• Contracts - the panel's discussion document was mounted on the CIC Web site in mid-November for industry comment. The CIC Web site also has a brief survey meeting professionals can fill out in order to help the panel in its work. The final report by the Contracts Panel is scheduled for the first quarter of 2006.

Contributing Editor Sara Torrence, CMP, is the president of Sara Torrence & Associates, a meeting and events planning consulting firm in Gaithersburg, Md. She is the author of How to Run Scientific and Technical Meetings.