OCS is designed to be a multiple conference management system, and the Site Administrator is responsible for configuring site-level settings and creating new conferences to be hosted within a single site. Hosted conferences are entirely independent, with the exception of user accounts; while a user may participate in any combination of roles in any number of hosted conferences, the same email address and username will refer to the same user regardless of conference.

Basic information is entered by the Site Administrator that is applicable to all conferences hosted by the site, including a site title text/image; site style sheet; an introductory statement and a description of the site; name and email of principal contact; a minimum password length for registered users; and indexing registration.

Conference Redirect. Once a hosted conference is set up, it will appear in the dropdown menu to be selected for the Conference Redirect field. This will ensure that requests to the main site are redirected to a particular conference web site, useful for when a site is hosting a single conference.

OCS allows any number of individual and distinct conference web sites to be generated, so conferences occurring once or more can be easily established and managed. A new conference can be created by entering information about conference title and description, and a path name to indicate the conference unique URL for accessing. Be sure to check "Enable" to make this conference appear publicly on the site, otherwise there will be no links to the new hosted conference from the main site page (although it will still be accessible to Site Admins and others who know the URL).

Data can also be imported from OCS 1 to OCS 2 by selecting "Import from OCS 1", filling out conference path, OCS 1 path, and selecting importing options, though only certain items can be imported.

OCS is designed to be a multilingual system, supporting a wide variety of languages for the site and its hosted conferences. From the Languages page The Site Administrator can specify the site-wide primary locale and install additional locales as they become available. For locales to be available to hosted conferences, the Site Administrator must install them, and check off that they are supported locales under Language Settings.

English, the primary locale, comes as the default language for both the site and the hosted conferences. Additional locales can be found on the OCS languages page. Detailed information on installing new language packs and even writing new translations of your own are available in Translating OJS and OCS from the PKP website.

By default, OCS authenticates users against its internal database. It is possible, however, to use other methods of authentication, such as LDAP. Additional authentication sources are implemented as OCS plugins; refer to the documentation shipped with each plugin for details.