Portugal became the first country to make the Euro 2012 finals last night at the expense of Czech Republic. They have a good pedigree in this tournament, as they have made the semi-finals on 3 previous occasions (1984, 2000 and 2004), winning one of these to make the final in 2004.
In 2004, they were hosts, but they were upset by Greece (losing 1-0). Greece’s triumph was unexpected considering that they had only qualified for two other major tournaments, Euro 1980 and the 1994 FIFA World Cup, and their victory in the opening match was their first in a major tournament.
As it’s the weekend, here’s a poser for all those people who like football trivia. Something happened for the first time in a major football tournament when Greece and Portugal met in the final. What was it?
Watching last night’s game has certainly put me in the mood for Sunday’s big clash with Italy. This youtube video I came across last night on Twitter is a brilliant summary of England’s group stage journey.
Twitter made the news itself yesterday when the social media web site was offline for a couple of hours. The report on the BBC web site gave very little away, but I would hate to be the IT Manager (or Director) trying to explain themselves today!
With a nice link in to service, it’s certainly been a successful few weeks at work with some very successful product launches. I thought it an appropiate time to provide an update.
If you recall from my previous blogs, we launched Good for the Enterprise several months ago. For those not familiar, this is Blackberry email, calendar, contacts and browser on any consumerisation device except a Blackberry!
The initial launch was a huge success and within weeks we had over 800 users. I’m pleased to say that today we nearly have a 1000 users registered and the service is still proving as popular. With the proliferation of smart phones in the consumer world and the development of new features for the IOS, Android and Windows mobile devices, we can only expect this to increase over the coming months.
Another product we finally launched after a long delay was Symantec Enterprise Vault. This went live last Monday and, as of today, we have archived 3.5 million email and 116gb of associated storage! Although this may seem minimal at this stage for a business that is email heavy, this is an amazing statistic after only 5 days of conservative archive settings. Certainly all of our users appear to be enjoying their new found freedom of no space limitations on their mailboxes.
The best part about both of the services we have delivered is that they are fully automated and completely self service, which is our aim for all new services we launch over the coming months.
So the weekend is here and a busy one ahead with our annual family and friends baseball event scheduled for Sunday and the big game in the evening.
Good luck to all those teams still involved, but especially special luck to England. Have a good one.
