How do the changes announced at SharePoint Conference affect you and me? SharePoint 2013 and Yammer will affect some more than others. The new products will affect some sooner than later. Attendees learned a lot and are using their new knowledge to figure out a strategy for change. You can too.

Resources For You

My co-worker Jennifer Mason gave her perspective earlier on the keynote. Her big takeaways? Microsoft wants you to consider SharePoint in the cloud and Microsoft is putting the user of SharePoint first in their product design. I also noticed a new message about Yammer. Yammer’s Silicon Valley startup influence is expected to effect change of product development practices at Microsoft. See for yourself. The keynote is available on YouTube in HD (click the image to watch).

Yammer, the cloud and the new App Model for SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 were the focus of all of the breakout sessions I attended.

The App Model

The App Model is a huge shift that will open opportunities for many developers who may have never considered SharePoint Development before. In the past, SharePoint Development was done on a SharePoint Server only and in .Net only. The App Model removes both those requirements. SharePoint Development can be done in Visual Studio on the desktop and SharePoint resources can be used by code run on servers that don’t even run Windows!

Microsoft has released a ton of new information for you to learn more about the Yammer changes and the App Model this week to compliment conference announcements. Here are a few examples:

• Office Web Apps Server overview, Microsoft TechNet, Updated November 13^th
• Announcing the Latest Release of Office Developer Tools, Apps for Office and SharePoint Blog, November 12^th
• Yammer SKU plan and pricing: details direct from SharePoint Conference, Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog, November 12^th

Rackspace also released a bunch of content for you this week to help with the changes including:

• A free 45-day trial of SharePoint 2013 for you to learn on
• Five blog posts from four Rackspace SharePoint expert conference attendees
• Rackspace Delivers End-to-End Services for SharePoint, announcing our new SharePoint 2013 offerings

Tom’s Conference Photo Album

Part of the excitement of the conference is the community of attendees. Now that I’ve shared some technical details, I want to share a little bit of that community in photos I took or was in.

I wish I had pictures of all the great things my co-workers were doing at the conference, but I don’t. In lieu of that, I’ll share some highlights of the conference events and attendees I encountered.

Above is a picture of me in the middle of five other Microsoft Certified Masters in SharePoint. Overall, around 60 of the about 120 MCMs were at the conference, highlighting the importance of the conference in the minds of some technical leaders.

I participated in a book signing with four of my Microsoft Press co-authors Wednesday. Most of the SharePoint book authors were present at the conference and many were signing books.

Seeing as Rackspace is headquartered in Texas, this picture of my friend Eric Shupps is appropriate. Eric, who goes by the SharePoint Cowboy, encouraged attendees with good humor in an excellent technical presentation I attended.

Throughout the week, the Rackspace booth employed an artist making a picture inspired by our MVPs and one MCM. I’m the one with the eight-bit glasses.

Watch for more informational posts following up the conference on the blog feed of our experts at http://sharepoint911.com.

As a web developer, have you ever wanted a server for development, but couldn’t or didn’t want to deal with getting one? When my desktop operating system or hardware wasn’t fitting the need over the last 17 years, I’ve often used servers for testing and often for development. As virtualization got better, I used that a lot so I could separate my development environment from my productivity environment. However, I often ran into resource problems, like lack of RAM. But lately, the maturation of virtualization and the cloud has made on-demand servers a reality.

Rackspace is sponsoring a series of three webinars in which I’ll discuss and demonstrate setting up the perfect development environment in the cloud. I’m always amazed when I hit that button, “Create Server” and less than 15 minutes later, I can Remote Desktop into a fresh Windows Server 2008 R2 server image from anywhere.

Figure 1: Another new server spinning up.

The first session is next Wednesday, July 18^. In it I’ll cover the first steps of setting up a SharePoint development environment on the Rackspace cloud. I plan to take advantage of my new teammate Shane Young’s work and follow closely to Chapter 1 of “Real World SharePoint 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 22 MVPs,” which is titled “Building a Perfect Test Environment for SharePoint Server 2010.” If you’d like to prepare, you can read the whole chapter in the Kindle sample download on your PC or tablet.

By the end of this webinar series, you’ll have seen the entire process of creating a SharePoint Development Environment from sign on and boot up to hello world solution package deployment.

Register now!