SORCE, the leading provider of intranet, extranet and business portal solutions, held its 6th and most successful user conference on September 27/28 in Coventry. The two-day conference attracted delegates from SORCE’s customers across a wide range of industry sectors and representatives from strategic technology partners.

Customers had the opportunity to hear how their peers in other organisations make innovative use of SORCE intranet, extranet and business portal solutions. Organisations such as Solent Mortgage Services (Financial Services), DMH Stallard (Legal), Tullow Oil (Oil Exploration), Lockton International (Insurance Services), West London Mental Health (National Health Service), CAMCO (Carbon Management), Lambert Smith Hampton (Commercial Property) and Manchester United (Sports and Entertainment) presented case studies of their use of SORCE for communication, collaboration and business process applications.

Following the presentations, customers had the opportunity to vote in the 2007 SORCE User Awards by scoring each solution presented in the following categories:

• Best Use of SORCE: Winner – West London Mental Health
• Best Branding: Winner – Lambert Smith Hampton
• Greatest Business Impact: Winner – Lockton International

2007 also saw the addition of a new award, the Neatest Innovation. The Neatest Innovation award has been designed for companies that have customised, developed or improved their intranet in such a way that increases the productivity of their organisation.

The 2007 winner was jointly awarded to Tullow Oil and Manchester United

SORCE partners also played an active part in this year’s conference presenting innovative solutions for employee benefits (Perkz) and ways in which companies can drive traffic to their intranet (SilentManager).

John Nicklin, Business Development Director at SORCE highlighted the debate surrounding social software in the enterprise and its increasing role in developing user buy-in for organisations intranets.

The conference once again staged the launch of the next version of the SORCE Intranet product. Customers were presented the extensive new features packed into SORCE V7 including new HR, meeting room and forum functionality.

In addition to presentations by customers and SORCE, the conference hosted a series of workshops for technical and business users highlighting new technologies and functionality in SORCE V7.

According to John Nicklin, “The SORCE User Conference is a great forum for both our client and SORCE. For our clients, it provides an opportunity to see how other companies are using their intranet to improve their businesses efficiency. For us here at SORCE, it gives us another opportunity to gain feedback from our clients, to see how they have adapted our products to their business needs and to understand how we can better serve them in the future.

The focus on our clients extends throughout the event, with over half the program devoted to client presentations showing how they have developed their SORCE Intranet to improve their business efficiency. We never cease to be surprised at how creative our users are in adapting the core product to their specific business needs and how keen they are to share their success with other users.”

Customer Quotes:

“Very interesting to see the wide variety of types of companies who use SORCE, showing the product’s flexibility.”

St Albans School

“I found it whole conference very interesting and it was great to see how other company’s have implemented Source in their business.”

Marlow Foods

“The usual good standard of presentations and conference management.”

Tullow Oil

“A very useful couple of days, very well organised and terrific fun as well. I’m actually looking forward to the next one and there aren’t many product user groups I can say that about!”

West London Mental Health

“It was great to see what people were doing with SORCE, using it as a very powerful business”