No, we haven’t gone silent, but we’ve had some plans rearranged. Now we’re back, though, and as you probably know by now, we have some news of the interesting type for you.

SharePoint Magazine Issue 3 Cut-Off Date

First of all, because this is of some urgency, the cut-off date for getting issue 3 of SharePoint Magazine print is on Wednesday, July 20. That means that if you want to get print issue 3 as part of your subscription, you need to sign up before then.

Sign up here: http://spm.to/sub.

Of course, even if you miss that date (or you read this after the cut-off date has passed), you can get single issues shipped now. You can see all of our purchase option on our new Purchase page.

Oh, and that means that just after July 20, we’ll start shipping issue 3. I know, I know, it’s been two months since the previous issue, but it was always the plan to have a one-month break during the summer. We had planned to have that in July, but as mentioned, some last-minute change of plans made June that break-month.

Aspiring Authors Competition Results

In May this year, we ran a competition called Aspiring Authors Competition, in which we invited some very skilled authors to submit their articles for evaluation and judgment by the SharePoint community. And you did, so I’m happy now to present the results of the competition.

The finalists all get both publishing contracts with SharePoint Magazine as well as a scholarship at USPJ Academy. The winner gets a longer contract and scholarship and in addition inclusion in an upcoming author mentoring program that USPJA Publishing will run.

Well, I’m guessing it’s time to announce the results.

In order, from least to most votes, they are as follows:

• Josh McCarty’s “Best Practices for SharePoint Groups” (third place, 51 votes)
• Mikael Svenson’s “Three Main Reasons Why You Should Upgrade to FAST for SharePoint” (runner-up, 112 votes)
• Andrew Vevers’ “A Guide to Leaving Lotus Notes and Moving to Microsoft SharePoint” (winner, 125 votes)

Congratulations to Andrew Vevers as our Aspiring Author Competition winner for 2011 and thanks to you, the community, for helping us decide the winner.

New Column: Leading Change with Kerri Abraham

We’re also proud to announce that we have a new resident author on the team. User adoption expert Kerri Abraham joins us to write in a new column called Leading Change, where she discusses the strategies, tools, and methods she has used to create her amazing results in user adoption.

Kerri will be adding additional posts in her column on a regular basis, starting with her already published article that also gives name to the column, namely, Leading Change.

However, I know Kerri to be a person of strong convictions, so I’m sure that she’ll contribute far more than just her tasked user adoption content, and I’m sure she appreciates topic suggestions in the comments too.

Check out Leading Change with Kerri Abraham.

New Commenting System

Speaking of comments, you may notice that we’ve moved away from the forum-based commenting system to Facebook comments. Frankly, the forum commenting system didn’t work as we had hoped. Now, commenting is much quicker, and you have an easy option to post the comment to your Facebook wall too, to drive even more comments and keep the conversations going. If you’re not on Facebook, you can sign in using Hotmail, AOL, or Yahoo too.

I happen to know that Kerri is particularly fond of the new commenting system, and I’ll take her silence as agreement.

That’s actually it for this update. I hope you won’t let the new commenting system sit there all by itself but instead comment and let us know your thoughts.

And by all means, keep watching this space for more updates now that summer is if not over then at least well underway.

.b