Richard Echeandia
So...I clicked into the registration form and after a three-minute wait, it finally displayed. I keyed in the information as fast as I could, and hit Submit. The page failed, so I clicked back and tried to submit it again. On or around the twenty-fifth time, it finally went through. I thought to myself, "What the hell... this card has a high enough limit...."

Within about two hours, I got an email back from Lotus letting me know that the registration (only one of them by the way) had been processed. Sweet.

I got the hotel booked online too.

In years past, I've heard more than a few horror stories from people that registered online and then came to find out that the registration was no good. For now, I'm happy, and I think it worked--albeit with quite a few glitches. I'll have a better level of comfort, though, when I call Lotus in two weeks and check on the registration in person.

Dan's response
I agree with Richard on the last part, it's always nice to hear confirmation from another human that you're going, no matter how much paper confirmation you receive. I don't view this as a mistrust of Lotus but more as a minor case of Lotusphere-induced Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It's the same reason that I sometimes go back to my car and check to see if I set the parking brake properly and that all of the doors are locked and the lights are off. Oh God, I think I need some professional help….

One thing I think is easy to overlook when we get involved in the registration process is how much it's improved in the last few years. Being able to get confirmation so quickly and efficiently this year has been killer. I've already received my official confirmation for the event and have actually begun to relax and accept the fact that I actually get to go.

Tom Lowery
I'm not going this year, but two people from my department are. Neither of them was even able to get to the online registration form. They were able to get through eventually over the phone and did get registered.

Dan's response
I heard about a couple of people having good luck with the phone once they got through. I actually registered by phone last year, and it worked pretty well.

Jim Cimino
Well, it was a slaughter. What really bothers me about the entire process (or lack thereof), is the fact that Lotus (an IBM company), has been touting all these years how well there software scales, clusters, etc., and their own Web site crashes from the overload of users trying to register for this conference. Now, it's not like they didn't know that so many people were going to try and register. They should have learned that lesson from Lotusphere 2000, and they had a year to prepare. They also don't have a leg to stand on regarding server hardware and horsepower. For crying out loud, get an AS/400 cluster from Big Blue already.

Dan's response
I think that Jim voices what we all thought at first, that this doesn't look good for the scalability of Lotus products. It was probably an incredible hit for their servers to take, but they had to know it was coming. To be fair, though, many people probably did what I did and had multiple browsers open trying to load a page to register, which probably aggravated what was already a difficult situation. I'm going to give Lotus a little slack on this one since I enjoyed watching the Olympics, and they did a lot of work on that. Next year, though, maybe they could take some of those killer Olympic servers and use them for the Lotusphere 2002 registration site.