Editor's Note: All SharePoint eyes on #SPC12 plus RTM bits

It’s a great week for SharePoint. Thousands of SharePoint experts and enthusiasts alike are congregating in Las Vegas Nov. 12-15 for SharePoint Conference 2012. Also available now is the trial download for SharePoint Server 2013, plus many updated technical resources.

By Nina Ruchirat

If you work with SharePoint and you were undecided about going to SharePoint Conference 2012, consider a last-minute registration and getting yourself to Las Vegas, stat! This is the largest SharePoint-focused community event featuring the highest concentration of SharePoint experts, including product team members, MVPs, MCMs, partners, and others who will not only be delivering sessions, but will be available to network with you, answer your questions, and collect feedback on SharePoint.

Here are some numbers to give you an idea of the scale of this event:

  • More than 9,500 attendees registered so far – IT pros, developers, business decision makers
  • Keynotes by Microsoft SharePoint leaders Jared Spataro, Jeff Teper, Scott Guthrie, David Sacks
  • 270 breakout sessions
  • More than 300 speakers
  • 45 hands-on labs
  • More than 200 exhibitors
  • Microsoft Product Pavilion featuring multiple booths and SharePoint Express sessions
  • Pre- and post-conference sessions

Attendees can also make the most of the event with a new MySPC 2012 mobile app.

If you absolutely can’t make it to the conference in Las Vegas, social media will likely be buzzing on a high frequency this week about SharePoint and SPC. On Twitter, follow the profile @SPConf as well as the hashtag #SPC12 for real-time updates and announcements. The SPC page on Facebook will also be active.

Microsoft blogs related to SharePoint include:

And you can always ask questions at any time in the SharePoint forums on TechNet. Many of the same forums plus additional developer-related forums are also available in the SharePoint forums on MSDN.

If you would rather just get your hands on the RTM version of SharePoint to check out the improvements that have been made in scale, security, and flexibility, the SharePoint Server 2013 evaluation trial bits are now available for download.

Many new and updated resources are available for the new SharePoint. You’ll find pointers to most of the significant resources on the SharePoint 2013 for IT pros TechCenter and the SharePoint Developer Center on MSDN. For apps and the new cloud app model, use the Build apps for Office and SharePoint Dev Center on MSDN.

Here are some IT Pro highlights:

Thanks for reading,

Nina

Nina Ruchirat

Nina Ruchirat*, Senior Content Project Manager, sits in the Office Content Publishing group and is a liaison for the technical communities of Office, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, Project, and their related products and technologies. She has worked on various technical and non-technical content projects at Microsoft since 2000. Before that, she was a daily metro newspaper journalist at the* Seattle Post-Intelligencer*. Follow Nina on Twitter at @MSNinaR.*