Frequently asked questions

Four distinct things, and keeping them apart is what makes everything else work. The person is John Smith. The office is “director” or “minister”. The institution is the university, the bank, the ministry. The appointment combines office and institution, with a start date and, where it applies, an end date.

No. Each person can hold several appointments at once, which is what lets you invite them to different ceremonies. When invitations are produced, the most senior appointment is used.

You close the existing appointment with an end date and open a new one. The person’s record stays as it is, and whoever held that office at last year’s ceremony stays on the record: history is not rewritten.

Yes, and you do not do it yourself. During onboarding we take the data you use today, in a spreadsheet, in an old database or in a hand-maintained list, and load it into CerimoniereWeb. Almost every client has started this way: nobody retypes fifteen years of archive.

Yes. Import and export use a shared format, so different offices running CerimoniereWeb can pass people, offices and appointments between them without re-entering anything.

It depends on the role. Secretariat manages offices, the registry, protocols, ceremonies and invitations. Secretariat (read only) sees everything without being able to change it. The base registry, meaning people, institutions, offices and appointments, is also in the Administrator’s hands.

They see what they need, with the safeguards confidentiality requires. At the door somebody has to recognise a guest quickly, work out whether the person presenting themselves is a representative, and notice anyone who should not be there: the records carry name, photograph, office and, where it applies, the name of the person being represented.

Yes, and they appear in the printed lists carried by the reception team. It is the detail that avoids the scene of somebody being stopped at the door because nobody recognised them.

For the most part, yes. The Registry menu holds every table linked to people and offices, from contact details to contact types, and you adapt them to the way your office works.

Yes. The history of past ceremonies stays available, with the guests and the offices they held at the time. It is useful in a practical sense too: to prepare a new event you can clone a past one and update only what has changed.

Yes. The Administrator has snapshots, which are pictures of the data on a given date, complete database dumps, and restore, which recovers in a few clicks with the backup history always available.

No. If you have several sites, each works independently: people, appointments, ceremonies and protocols stay isolated per site, and each user sees only their own data. The Administrator is the only one who sees everything. A new site does inherit the Administrator’s registry, so it starts with something in hand.

Two, built on the Italian D.P.C.M. of 14 April 2006 as amended in 2008: the national protocol, from the President of the Republic to brigadier generals, and the territorial protocol, from regional presidents to colonels.

No. The engine orders by category, subcategory, office, appointment, rank and seniority, and those are the criteria any order of precedence is written with. A diplomatic list ranked by class and date of credentials, a civic order, a federal and state ordering: each is modelled as a protocol. The Italian ones ship built because that is where twenty years of use are, and they are the proof that the engine goes as deep as a statute requires.

We do, during onboarding, working from the legal text and from how your office actually applies it. It is part of the same work as importing your archive and drawing the plan of your hall.

You define them in a custom protocol. Academic bodies, internal appointments and honorary offices are the usual cases: no statute governs them, so whoever hosts the ceremony writes the rule.

As many as you need, with no limit. The quickest way to build a new one is to copy an existing protocol and edit the copy.

In steps. Category first, then subcategory, then office or appointment. Civilian dignitaries are ranked by institutional office, military ones by appointment, rank and length of service. If they are still level, the base criteria take over: age, and last of all alphabetical order. No seat is left undecided.

Yes, and that is why the protocol is kept separate from the registry. When you create a ceremony you choose which one to apply: the same registry serves the opening of the academic year and a graduation, with different orderings.

From the invitations screen, which also shows accompanying guests and any representative.

Yes, and the follow-up is handled from there: the guest who cannot attend and sends a proxy in their place, and the people arriving alongside them.

Each guest can bring one or more. From guest management you can set “seated beside”, which forces the software to place the accompanying guest next to them.

Yes. The representative is recorded on the invitations screen and takes the seat carrying the office of the person represented: the seat belongs to the office, not the individual.

No. In some cases you have to post to the address of the office rather than the personal one, as with a head of state. You decide that on the invitations screen when the envelopes are printed.

Invitations are built on a Microsoft Word template, so they are fully customisable. There is a system of substitution codes for pulling data from the software into the text.

Yes. The Recall role follows the state of each invitation through the calls: confirmed, declined, awaiting reply.

Yes, through the invitation portal. Each guest receives a personal link by email and from there accepts or declines, names accompanying guests and appoints a representative, if the ceremony allows one. The reply appears in CerimoniereWeb immediately, and the secretariat stops chasing confirmations by phone.

No, deliberately. The invitation portal asks for no username and no password: the link carries a unique code valid only for that invitation, so the guest clicks and replies. Asking an ambassador or a vice-chancellor to create an account is the surest way to get no reply at all.

Yes, the invitation portal handles a reply deadline, after which the guest can no longer change their answer themselves.

Seat 1 is assigned first, the place of honour. The most important seat beside it is to its right: with three seats, the place of honour is at the centre, the second to the right of the person seated and the third to their left, and so on. If the seats are even in number or of equal weight, a double centre is created, a kind of joint presidency: the first seat goes centre-right and the rest follow, left then right.

Yes. What changes is the plan, not the rule. Sectors, tiers, stands and numbered rows are drawn once, seats are numbered from the place of honour outwards, and the ordering follows. CerimoniereWeb does not do banqueting or table layouts: it seats people in halls, stands, stages and conference rooms.

Yes. Any guest can be moved, or swapped with another, to any seat in the hall. The automatic calculation is a starting point, not a cage.

You open a seat and drop the new guest into it with one click. Anyone who must not move gets pinned: when the arrangement recalculates, the pinned guests stay where they are.

Yes. Once seat A1 is fixed, CerimoniereWeb assigns all the odd numbers to the right (A3, A5, up to F7) and all the even numbers to the left (A2, A4, up to F8).

The whole hall as a spreadsheet identical to the screen, the seating list ordered by seat or alphabetically with what the ushers need, place cards in several formats, and folded name cards.

No. CerimoniereWeb runs in the browser: Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari, at 1280 × 720 or better.

No, and for many of our clients this was the deciding question. There are three options: cloud hosted by us on a dedicated subdomain, on-premise on your own servers inside your own network, and standalone for offline work on a single computer. If your policies require that data never leaves your infrastructure, on-premise answers exactly that.

Yes, with the standalone version: you generate it from the administrator area, it runs locally on the computer, and at the end of the work it realigns to the central system with backup and restore. It matters when a ceremony is prepared at a site with no network, or when the hall is somewhere the connection does not reach.

Yes, as an optional module. It adds a six-digit temporary code to sign-in following the TOTP standard, generated on the user’s own device. It works with Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator and any compliant app. No external service and no SMS: it uses the users and roles already configured.

With the Check-in module you register arrivals from the web app, for instance on a laptop at the door, and a dashboard shows who is present, who is missing and how the hall is filling in real time. With the Check-in app, which has its own licences, the same reaches the phone of whoever is on the door, including guest search by QR code.

Protocols, the registry and the invitation templates are configured in whatever language your office works in, because that content is yours. For the interface and the documentation, ask us: tell us which language your office needs and we will tell you plainly what is available today and what would have to be produced.

It depends on how much data you have and what state it is in. A typical onboarding is: we import your archives, we configure the plan of your hall and your protocols, and we build the customisations you need. The system is already populated when you first log in.

Several at the same time, each with its own guests drawn from the registry.