Arrived at the IET on the evening of Wednesday with my team this week and immediately got the benefit of the IET's professional staff. Within 1 hour I had the server running a custom software package crafted specifically for DATE to manage the submissions.
Imagine trying to manage 900 submissions on paper + email? Impossible.
In the initial hour I also deployed 4 wifi routers, all linksys WRT54GL's to manage the 190 members who review the papers in groups organised by topics.
On Thursday under peak load the WRT54GL's were handling 43 WPA encrypted connections simultaneously (note that the SPI was disabled and also note a CPU monitor would be very helpful to gauge the CPU load).
They worked all day with only 5 laptops unable to connect, and considering the fact that wifi with encryption isn't a very well adhered to standard (lots of bugs) that is just noise. Even that was resolved with a driver update to a 2200BG card from Intel.
It all had to work, and it all came together.