I’ve posted before about how fantastic the Microsoft Project & SharePoint Conferences are, well a couple of months ago Microsoft announced that they were merging those two conferences along with Exchange, Lync, Office 365 and pretty much everything in between into a new conference called Microsoft Ignite. The Microsoft Ignite team have been hard at it planning what the event will be and it looks to be a cracker, but in a break from usual conferences, the team at Ignite want to hear from the community at large as to what content they want to see in the conference and have put up a survey at http://ignite2015.

With the introduction of Office 2013 and the arrival of Project Online in Office 365 I thought it would be a good time to try and bring some members of the Project and SharePoint community together to launch a new community site. So it is my great pleasure to introduce the365project.net. What is the365project.net? Well it’s a new tips and tricks site for the Project, Project Server and SharePoint, covering the existing versions and the new 2013 wave of products.

First let me get this off my chest. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Ok, now to continue. Over the past couple of days I have been exploring the new capabilities of Project Online, specifically I have been looking into the experience for new users to the service, things like how quickly they can provision the service and then start to use it in anger. One of the things I was drawn to was the ability for new users to download the relevant client software from the cloud to their local PC.

With all the excitement of the Office 2013 announcement this week, its hard to think how it can be topped, well it can. Saturday 4th August, just two weeks away is SharePoint Saturday Melbourne, the first Australian SharePoint Saturday since the Office 2013 preview was announced and therefore the first to include SharePoint 2013 content. This year in a departure from the norm, I will be taking part in the keynote giving an insight into some of the killer new features and capabilities of the platform.

With the release of Project 2013, Microsoft have made a number of enhancements and improvements to our favourite project scheduling software. The first thing you will notice are the changes to the look and feel, not as radical as the introduction of the ribbon, but a gentle evolution to provide a flatter, minimalistic look and feel that is common across the rest of the Office 2013 platform. Project 2013 also allows users to sign in, ensuring their preferences and cloud based services such as SkyDrive, Office 365, SharePoint are configured and roam between applications.

This morning, Microsoft announced the availability of the first public preview of Office 2013 which you can download from office.com/preview. Office 2013 is a massive release, encompassing nearly every product in the Office suite, including my favourites, Project, Project server and of course SharePoint. Over the next few weeks I will drill into each of the products and highlight some of the new capabilities, changes and favourite features. The Microsoft team have released an absolute stack of content today to compliment and support the release, including: