Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is off and away – with the largest crowd in attendance yet, about 14,000. There was a quirky beginning to the event with a Microsoft employee running across the stage singing “O Cloud” to the popular tune “ole” from the FIFA World Cup that ended yesterday with Spain as victor. A few members of the approximately 10,000-fold crowd in attendance at WPC joined in the singing, although it was a bit too early in the a.m. for raucous behavior.

The reference to "cloud" was the ubiquitous topic of the year in our industry – cloud computing – as our bloggers have reported from DIA, FOSE, EMC World and other shows in recent months. Although the concept of cloud computing has been discussed by Microsoft and others for years, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said this morning, “2010 is the year when the opportunity and transition to the cloud is absolutely clear.” (The VAR Guy blog gives a great summary of Ballmer’s keynote address at WPC.)

I spent some time at the show today getting to understand the new Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) and what we at Adlib need to do to maintain gold status on our competencies. The regional support center lounge (shown in the photo above) has been set up to offer on-site support for Microsoft's partners in the transition to the MPN program, with its new rules and requirements.

As at other industry shows, we ran into Nintex who go by the tagline, "Do More with SharePoint." Shown below is Mike Fitzmaurice, Nintex's Vice President of Product Technology, wearing his trademark kilt at the Nintex booth.

We had a lot to talk about, seeing as Nintex is our newest technology partner. This week, Adlib and Nintex launch our tightly integrated solution of using Adlib PDF for SharePoint with Nintex Workflow for the automation of business processes in SharePoint through workflows and the conversion of documents to PDF. (This video gives a demo of the integration.)

Tonight we Adlibbers will be attending Nintex’s launch party for the Nintex Workflow 2010 solution. More updates and insights on the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference to come later this week!

Riley O’Brien Wolff
Microsoft Alliance Manager
Adlib Software