In the first stage, the work focused on identifying the main needs that the online congress platform had to address. Three priority areas emerged: first, fulfilling commercial commitments already made with sponsoring companies by ensuring visibility and interaction opportunities with participants; second, organizing conference coordination, including multiple simultaneous rooms, schedules, access, and participation of speakers from different locations; and third, managing the administrative aspects of the event, such as registrations, ticket sales, conference access control, and coordination of live streaming.

With the priority needs clearly defined, we began evaluating possible solutions with the development team, keeping in mind that we had very little time: the pandemic began in March and the congress was scheduled for August, so building a fully custom platform from scratch was not feasible. We analyzed available providers and technological alternatives and ultimately opted for a hybrid solution: we used an existing tool to manage the conference rooms and developed the commercial areas and general welcome section in-house. This approach allowed us to efficiently manage administrative and commercial aspects while ensuring the technical stability of the streaming and simultaneous conferences.