Welcome to another letter from the editor, this time brought to you in the midst of celebrating USPJ Academy’s first birthday.

As you may have heard, we’re celebrating by giving away gifts and great offers throughout the organization, and SharePoint Magazine is giving out over $8,000.00 worth of prizes this week. I’m sure you’ll want to check out the Egg Hunt competition if you want a piece of that action.

If you’re looking for more extensive training, you may want to check out the anniversary offer from USPJ Academy too, where you can study for two months for just $297, a discount of more than 70% off the regular tuition.

However, we have other cool news too.

SharePoint Magazine Print Issue #2

First of all, to answer a number of impatient readers, we are now in the process of shipping the second SharePoint Magazine issue. It seems that these things always take longer than we anticipate, so please excuse the delay we’ve had. You should have your copy in the mail within a few days.

That also means we’ll be putting out the second PDF issue shortly, and I have some great news related to that. Many readers have contacted us to ask for previews of the PDF and print issues  before buying a regular subscription.

Of course we want to address those questions, so I am happy to announce that the full PDF issue #2 will be available free from this site as soon as it is ready for distribution. Watch the premium section of the site (or subscribe to our newsletter, follow the RSS feed, or follow us on Twitter) to learn when that issue is available.

Single Print Issues

We also want to provide an alternative for those who want to see a print issue before subscribing. We’re faced with a bit of a challenge here. If you know one thing about us, it is that we never compromise the quality of our products, whether that is the content or, in this case, the quality of the print issues. We want the issues to look stunning and also be durable, which means that we need to use heavy paper, leading to a higher shipping cost.

Already, the first Phoenix issue has become a collector’s item, and we’ve had readers calling almost with tears in their eyes because their Phoenix issues have been damaged, asking for a replacement copy. As far as we can, we try to accommodate those requests, but we only have a few reserve copies ourselves. But, I digress.

What I wanted to say was that both the shipping and the price we pay for printing these issues make it impossible for us to simply give away sample print issues. However, we will now launch the option of purchasing single copies and have those shipped to both US and international destinations. The shipping will be somewhat costly, but I can assure you it’s exactly the same as we pay.

Single issues will be available for purchase starting from issue #2, so sorry, no Phoenix issues available for single purchase. You will find the link to buy single issues when we set up the issue page in a day or two. Again, keep your eyes open and follow along for the announcements.

But this isn’t the only piece of news we have.

Quick Courses

Being part of a learning organization has its benefits, among which is access to learning resources and technology that SharePoint Magazine can utilize.

We’re happy to announce what we call Quick Courses, which are learning content that aims to expand on articles and series in SharePoint Magazine and give you extended and hands-on training on the topics covered. These quick courses are meant to be a few hours long, and some of the will include lab time where you can practice what you learn in a safe environment without having to set up local installations. These courses will help you get started with the technologies or provide you with additional material without asking you to commit to a long training program. Think of them as, well, quick courses.

The first two quick courses are a Silverlight course, authored by Karine Bosch, and a SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow course, authored by myself. More courses are planned, and we want to invite our authors to add such courses as part of their work for us.

We will also invite external partners to showcase their products and solutions. This will allow you to learn about and evaluate products, set up in an environment by the people who know how.

The first Quick Courses will be available in a couple of weeks, and, well, you know what to do if you want to know when that happens, right?

And one more thing.

Today’s egg hunt code (May 19, 2011) is 1456AF31FF

You may also want to follow us on twitter, especially tomorrow.

Talk soon!

.b