For those of you headed to Madrid, Spain for TechEd Europe June 24-28, we’ve got you covered. Bookmark this blog as your go-to reference for SharePoint sessions, along with all of the resources and links that you need to become a TechEd pro, even if this is your first conference.

The wait is over! SharePoint Conference is back and bigger than ever. Read on to learn how to sign up, share, get updates, and join discussions.

In March, we outlined our enterprise social roadmap and how the Yammer experience would be integrated into Office 365 and SharePoint. Yesterday, we delivered on the first step of that roadmap. SharePoint admins can now switch to yammer as the default enterprise social experience from the admin center. Christophe Fiessinger, product marketing manager in the Microsoft Office Division, focused on enterprise social across Yammer, Office 365, and SharePoint provides more information in this post on the Office 365 technology blog.

Today, 70% of organizations use SharePoint, but 50% express concern around whether SharePoint can meet key compliance requirements and serve as an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. These numbers come from AIIM International, a non-profit professional organization focused on advocating for and supporting information professionals by providing continuing education, research, and certification programs to help navigate the changing information environment. 

On May 13-14, John Mancini, AIIM's president, and Atle Skjekkeland, AIIM's Chief Operating Officer, visited Microsoft's Redmond campus at the invitation of Tejas Mehta, Senior Product Marketing Manager for SharePoint, and Nishan DeSilva, Senior Director of Information Management and Compliance for Microsoft's Legal and Corporate Affairs organization.  During the course of this 2-day event, the AIIM executives learned about Microsoft's technology goals and discussed the future of cloud, social, and ECM. 

Changing software can be difficult, SharePoint Server 2013 simplifies the process, empowers the user, and improves resiliency and manageability through new features and capabilities designed to balance the needs of users with those of IT.

You have your ticket to TechEd North America, and your bags are packed to be in New Orleans June 3-6^th - what now? The folks on the SharePoint team have you covered. Bookmark this blog, because it's your SharePoint session cheat sheet for TechEd, with all of the resources and links that you need to become a TechEd pro, even if this is your first conference.

We're big believers that enterprise social is the new cornerstone of workplace collaboration. It addresses the changing nature of work, and the changing demographics of the workforce.

We're not alone here. We just published new research detailing global information worker interest in enterprise social tools. We weren't surprised to find that three quarters of workers want social tools to increase productivity and collaboration. We were surprised to learn that nearly a third of respondents would go so far as to bring social tools into their organizations through the back door - aka "bring your own service."

We are pleased to announce that the SkyDrive Pro sync client is now available for Windows. This standalone client allows users of SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online in Office 365 to sync their personal SkyDrive Pro and any SharePoint 2013 or Office 365 team site document libraries to their local machine for access to important content on and offline. The SkyDrive Pro client can be installed standalone and does not require any version of Office to be installed.  It can also be installed side-by-side with previous versions of Office (Office 2010, Office 2007).

Your e-commerce site can increase revenue opportunities, and understanding what user behavior led to a purchase can help retain repeat customers and gain new ones. In this post, we explore how you can connect SharePoint with Hadoop and map-reduce analysis in the background to create a web browsing experience that is personalized to the end user's intent and past behavior, thus increasing the success of a sale on your e-commerce site.

New Jersey-based D&M Group is the parent company of several high-end audio brands such as Denon, Marantz, and Boston Acoustics. With offices in more than 70 countries, D&M Group struggled to manage a geographically dispersed IT environment. To centralize IT management and create a single enterprise platform for all of the D&M Group websites, the company implemented Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. By migrating and redesigning websites using SharePoint Server 2013, D&M Group reports faster go-to-market speed, enhanced mobile publishing capabilities, and simplified product catalog capabilities. By using SharePoint Server 2013 to develop a single global product catalog, the company can now publish and change products with one-person administration.