Chris Miller
The biggest issue that came up in some places (outside of the busy servers and signals) is that the pages they had locally were cached, and they couldn't see that registration for the hotels and Lotusphere had opened. It kept looking like the site had not been updated.

Luckily, I had all the staff in early, and we hit the phones and Web site and got the staff registered via the phone and two customers via the Web since we got in on both sides.

Dan's response
Before I read Chris' email, I hadn't really thought of working in teams to register. I wish I had that kind of help. Of course, I did have to get up at 5:30 in the morning since I live on the West Coast, and I don't really want my co-workers to come over to my house and see me in my underwear. That's just wrong in so many ways.

Chris Stoner
I'm not going to Lotusphere 2001. -I think I'll wait until 2002 to go again. I went this past January and was bored....

Regardless, I think Lotus should offer a limited number of registration seats to Business Partners before releasing the registration to the general public. That really wouldn't limit their number of seats to the convention, rather it would allow Business Partners the chance to register without having to fight with the hordes to get in. We should get something for being Business Partners, right?

Other than that, it will always be a spectacle. That's why the Technical Events (like DevCon) are more fun. Less hype means less people!

Dan's response
Chris does bring up a good point about not forgetting about other conferences that are out there, like Lotus DevCon in June and Advisor DevCon, which happens twice a year, including this October (see http://www.advisor.com/cld0010p.nsf).

Conclusion
That ends the DominoPower author chorus for today. Maybe we can gather some of them back together for an encore after Lotusphere 2001 takes place. Stay tuned for some useful links and the exciting conclusion.

The moral of this article is probably that most of the people that I know of who desperately wanted to register for Lotusphere were able to register. They were willing to go through a little bit of aggravation in order to enjoy a lot of fun at the event. You definitely have to be determined to attend Lotusphere and willing to do what it takes to get there, so if you're not going this year but would like to go next year, I suggest you start nurturing that desire now.

Lotusphere is special because of and in spite of all of the difficulties involved in registering, which once again have decreased significantly in the past few years, in my opinion. All of the trouble mainly boils down to the fact that Notes and Domino have become increasingly successful and popular over the past few years and that the number of people who can attend Lotusphere has stayed pretty much the same. Yes, we could have Lotusphere in Las Vegas or some other larger venue, but it wouldn't be the same event. Besides, I saw the movie Leaving Las Vegas, and it just depressed me.