As you might have seen, Penton Media announced that registration opened today for IT/Dev Connections 2015 (http://windowsitpro.com/connections/itdev-connections-2015-registration-ope ns). The conference runs from September 14 to 18 at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas and is intended to be the premier independent conference for Microsoft technologies.
IT/Dev Connections is not a competitor to Microsoft Ignite. Apart from offering independent voices a chance to express opinions and idea about the best way to deploy, manage, and extract business value from Microsoft technologies, Connections is four months removed from Ignite - and as we all know, a lot can happen in the world of software in four months. To reflect the changing nature of Microsoft, IT/Dev Connections organizes sessions into a new set of tracks for 2015. This doesn't mean that the old "Exchange Connections" or "SharePoint Connections" are gone. Instead, that content will be provided in sub-tracks, which is essentially how these focused conferences have operated in the past. * Cloud and Data Center o Azure and related services o Data Platform and Business Intelligence o SQL Server, Azure BI * Development Platform and Tools o DevOps, Visual Studio, Open Platform development * Enterprise Collaboration o Office 365 plus the on-premises versions of Exchange, Lync, and Yammer o SharePoint * Enterprise Management and Mobility o On-premises (System Center, Patching, Security) and Cloud (Intune) management Some crossover in the tracks is inevitable. For example, InTune is a pretty big thing within Office 365 right now because new device management tools will be available to Office 365 tenants in early 2015. SQL is important to SharePoint and SharePoint is often regarded as a development platform in its own right. Any slicing and dicing of technologies would result in some debate and disagreement, but I think the 2015 tracks should provide the right level of coverage. Penton will issue a call for sessions closer to the conference (I hear that it might be in February).
