Letter from the Editor #1

Hello,

This isn’t your typical SharePoint Magazine article. In fact, this is an entirely new section of SharePoint Magazine, and its just one of many new features we’re adding. I’ll get back to these new features in a moment, but first I’d like to mention what’s going on.

You may have noticed that we’ve not been publishing as many articles recently as we used to. The reason for this the print edition of SharePoint Magazine. The print edition takes about one month to produce, so we want to slow down the pace of new articles for a while to allow the print edition articles to catch up. Right now, we have several articles in Karine Bosch’s series on Silverlight in SharePoint in final editing, a new series from BCS mastermind Fabian Williams, as well as several other stand-alone articles that are ready for release.

You will see these on the web edition of the magazine over the coming weeks as we put them into the print edition of the magazine.

Aspiring Authors Competition 2011

I would like to remind you that our Aspiring Authors Competition deadline is approaching rapidly. You need to submit your entry by April 15, which is just a few days away. This could be a great career booster for you and a chance to get your articles published in the leading online and print magazine in the SharePoint community.

However, right now, I’d like to talk a bit about two of the new features we’re launching now.

Blogs

Since SharePoint Magazine relaunched back in December 2010, we’ve received tons of good suggestions, feedback, emails, and comments, and from that, we’ve done some adjustments and made some new features available. What you are reading right now, for example, is the first “Letter from the Editor”, and these letters are part of a new section on the magazine, the Blog section.

SharePoint Magazine has always focused on providing top-quality content from the best authors in the business. However, we realize that the amount of work we put into each article means we can only put out so many articles each month and there is so many interesting things going on in SharePoint these days, we’ve had to come up with a more rapid way of getting that information out to you.

Thus the Blog section was born. The Blog section will contain… Well, blogs. The Letters from the Editor is one of these blogs, but we want to bring in additional authors too. The content in the Blog section won’t necessarily go through the same rigorous editing process as our regular articles, but will be looser in form.

In the Letters from the Editor, I, or whoever is the editor in the future, will update you on what’s going on at the magazine and in the SharePoint world. The print subscribers have already read the first Letter from the Editor in the first issue of SharePoint Magazine print, but web readers will now get their own letter too.

eSubscriptions

One of the biggest changes we’ve done in the history of SharePoint Magazine is to launch the print edition of the magazine. We always intended to include a PDF version of the print edition, but originally we wanted to include this only as part of the regular print subscriptions.

However, we know that many may not have the option of getting print subscriptions and also that shipping to some parts of the world would be prohibitively expensive. These readers would not have any option except for the web site, so we decided to make the PDF edition a separate subscription.

As such, from today, you can now get the electronic subscription from our normal subscription page at http://spm.to/sub. These eSubscriptions cost $77 for a year (12 issues), which is roughly the price of a normal subscription without the print and shipping costs. eSubscriptions are of course available anywhere in the world, so if you live in a country to which we cannot ship print subscriptions, you now have a chance to get the PDF version.

The PDF edition is exactly the same content as we put in the print version, only optimized for web and screen viewing. The PDF issues in the eSubscriptions will be available around the time when print subscribers get their physical copy of the magazine.

We shipped the first issue of SharePoint Magazine print in early April and with an estimated week in transit, the first PDF issue will be available in mid-April. However, we’ve encoutered a few issues with the solution for distributing these editions, so we’re a few days away from making the first issue available still. Subscribers will be notified when they can download the first issue.

What Else?

We’re not stopping here, though, but I’m not ready to reveal all the new things we have planned just yet. However, I want to mention one thing, due for release very shortly.

We’ll be launching an extended exercise feature, based on USPJA’s recently released self-paced course offering (check the News section if you want to know more). You’ll be able to further expand into the topics of selected articles through short courses, including access to a lab environment in which you can practice.

Keep your eyes open for other new features. Of course, if you have further suggestions for us, you should add them to the Suggestions Thread in the forum.

Talk soon!

.b