November 2007
Wembley Stadium was the venue for the biggest IBM Collaboration partner event of the year; Portal Partnership’s Collaboration Summit on 6th November 2007.  The Royal Suite (behind the Royal Box) was packed with PP and IBM customers as we introduced the Domino 8 family, and showed that Web 2.0 was so much more than a passing fad.

Wembley can be a difficult journey on a cold November morning, but those guests who made it early were able to work off the effects of the welcome coffee and Danish, with some surprisingly physical activity on the Nintendo Wiis arrayed across the back of the suite.  The opportunity of beating up a salesperson at virtual boxing was just too tempting for some customers.

And so, to business.  Portal Partnership CEO, Shamus Kelly introduced PP, highlighting the breadth and depth of our offerings, before handing over to Darren Adams of IBM.

Darren introduced the Domino 8 family (Notes, Domino, Quickr, Sametime, and Connections).  It was interesting to see how many organisations in the audience had either already upgraded, or were planning to upgrade to Notes/Domino 8 in the near future.  This was due in no small part to the ease of upgrading that IBM enables, and was shown in sharp relief by the numbers of users of other messaging systems who are running two or three versions behind.

The power and versatility of Quickr (and its predecessor Quickplace) was highlighted by D.I. Tony Moore of the Metropolitan Police.  D.I. Moore talked about how Quickplace had been used to co-ordinate the diverse support and information needs of victims, relatives, and the media immediately following the 7/7 bombings in London.

Customers were able to get a flavour of the new Wembley Stadium at lunchtime, many taking the opportunity to take their lunch in the Royal Box.  After lunch, customers were able to take a stroll through our “Solutions Bazaar”, to discover how PP’s solution practises underpin and enable the extended empowerment and collaboration offered by Lotus software.

Consultants from our Services & Support, Empowering People, Leveraging Information, and Governance, Risk & Compliance practises vied for the attention of the customers with demonstrations and presentations.  Bite-size presentations on Omnifind, Content Manager, Commonstore, Records Manager, Quickr, Connections, and Information Server were available, along with Support, Upgrade Planning, and Storage Management.

The afternoon session was dominated by Brendan Tutt of IBM.  Brendan has been evangelizing Web 2.0 of late, showing how organisations can harness the new collaboration.  Brendan talked about how many organisations were faced with graduate recruits who were surprised that no social networking facilities existed and were pressing for them to be made available.  Lotus Connections met this demand by providing business-focused social networking.  Brendan’s session was very well received and clearly gave a lot of customers pause for thought.

No day at Wembley would be complete without a stadium tour, and most of our customers availed themselves of the opportunity; the changing rooms, press room, and other facilities were all visited.  Thank you to all concerned for resisting the urge to kiss the hallowed turf…