Spreading the SharePoint Love Throughout Southeast Asia in 2013

Happy Holidays! While we wind down 2012, 2013 is already shaping up to be another busy year on the conference circuit. Certainly a new SharePoint version stimulates a new round of learning for us, and the buzz around all the changes (some exciting, some controversial) will no doubt drive attendance. My first event of 2013 will be the third annual Southeast Asia SharePoint Conference that will be held yet again in Singapore on Jan 16-17. The organizers are doing things a little different this year, and I’m very excited about the half-day, executive-centric (C-level) sessions on the first half of day one. In my advisory role at AvePoint, I work a lot with executives on deriving greater business value from SharePoint, and while so many in the community expound on the importance of placing business before technology, most deployments are still done without aligning SharePoint to the business. In other words, it’s still “lets deploy SharePoint and just see how it works in our company.” More times than not, this becomes a bad science experiment. I’m optimistic this half day will help guide and direct CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, and other SharePoint stakeholders to be more productive, and subsequently ensure the necessary business goals and needs come first. Looking to the whole event, there are four tracks covering all SharePoint roles. Whether you’re an IT pro, developer, executive, or interested user, you’ll find something for you. The event organizers are bringing some of the top speakers back to the event, plus mixing in a few new faces. For me, I have two sessions at the event. The first that I’ll be co-presenting with my friend and SharePoint MVP Steve Sofian is a talk on the new application model in SharePoint 2013. Whether you’re doing development today in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or SharePoint 2010, you’ll want to see what is changing as it will definitely impact your future. If you’re considering using SharePoint as a development platform, you’ll find out how to approach your solution architecture to be sure you can get the best long-term value out of your design. Plus, you’ll see lots of fun demos on the latest edition of Visual Studio and how these get deployed as well as debugged on both on-premise and Office 365-hosted environments. My second session is on integrating SharePoint and Exchange – while a popular speaking topic for me, it is entirely revamped from my earlier presentations. To give a bit of historical context, this session originally evolved from a book chapter I wrote on the very subject (see Chapter 9). For my Singapore talk, we’ll start off gently by looking at Office, SharePoint, and Exchange integration points, but then dive deeper into achieving unified task consolidation. We’ll also touch a bit on integrating Exchange with search as well as how new eDiscovery capabilities work in SharePoint 2013. So, let me formally welcome you to Southeast Asia’s 3rd annual SharePoint Conference. The Singapore event will be held on January 16 and 17 at the Singapore Expo. For more information or to register for the Singapore event, please visit http://www.sharethepoint.com/engage/SEA2013. Also going on the same week, back due to popular demand, we will hold a one-day event in Hong Kong for the second consecutive year on January 14. Hot topics include what’s new in SharePoint 2013, social and enterprise impacts, mobility, and devices. In total, we’ll have 14 sessions across two tracks that are sure to leave you with valuable information necessary to take full advantage of SharePoint’s latest platform release. To learn more about this event, please visit http://www.sharethepoint.com/engage/HK2013. I look forward to meeting many of you there. Enjoy the rest of your holiday season and let’s get ready for a rocking 2013!