1. SharePoint Technology Conference
First out is the SharePoint Technology Conference in San Francisco. It is hosted by BZ media but has a long list of sponsors and over 35 know speakers including Mike Fitzmaurice, Bill English, Andrew Connel etc.
Over 80 sessions will be held during February 10-12

http://www.sptechcon.com/
Feb 10-12 San Fransisco

2. SharePoint Evolution Conference
The first European SharePoint Best Practises Conference was held last year and it will be held again in 2010. Once again it is in London and this time it’s called The SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference. It has 5 tracks; IT-Pro, Developers and Designers, Information Worker, Deep Dive (400) levels and community track. 

http://www.sharepointevolutionconference.com
April 19-21,  London

3. The Experts Conference
The Experts Conference is a conference held by Quest and has three main tracks were one of them is SharePoint. Joel Oleson is leading speaker here and has promised to skip the Quest sales talk. Joel has gather a long list of MVPs like Michael Noel, Rich Taylor and Dan Holme etc. The three days will probably be a very intense and interesting I’m sure. It’s held in Los Angeles but you can also find on their website that they will have a European version as well. The date for that is not set but you can sign up for newsletter to get an alert as soon as it’s decided.

http://www.theexpertsconference.com
April 25-28, Los Angeles

4. New Zealand SharePoint Conference
Last year I mentioned this as well, I have not attended it personally (maybe you have and can tell us about it) but I’m trying to have a global view here and it looks promising. Debbie Ireland, Mark Orange and Chandima Kulathilake are MVPs and is the organizers of the conference that will have both national and international speakers.

 http://www.sharepointconference.co.nz/
June 9-10 Wellington New Zealand

5. Techdays Sweden
I know that since most of the sessions will be in Sweden narrows the possible audience but there are a couple of international speakers like John Craddock, Vittorio Bertocci and Christian Weyer and of course you can’t miss the SharePoint and PowerShell – in real life session held by myself together with my Colleague.

http://www.techdays.se/
March 23-24, Örebro Sweden

Finally I also want to mention the SharePoint Saturdays that are hosted around the world and often through live meeting to make it possible for everyone to attend. The best way to find out when they are is to look at: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/default.aspx

Below you find a list of other SharePoint conferences that was not announced or I did not know of myself when I originally wrote the post. Thanks for all the tips!

MicrosoftSharePoint Connections 2010
http://www.devconnections.com/SPEurope/
January 18-19, Amsterdam

TechDays Belgium
http://www.microsoft.com/belux/techdays/2010/
March 30 to April 1, Antwerp

SharePoint Summit 2010
http://www.sharepointsummit2010.com
April 12-14, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

The New Zealand SharePoint Conference
http://projects.envisionit.co.nz/CONF2010/default.aspx
June 9-10, Wellington

The Australia SharePoint Conference
http://www.sharepointconference.com.au/
June 16-17, Sydney

Decision/Business Case
42 km is quite long and for me it’s a milestone to achieve the NY Marathon. When you start consider to implement SharePoint within your company or organization you should ask yourself why. I know a million reasons were SharePoint can increase productivity and where SharePoint will do good for the Information Workers, but the question is do you. What do you want to achive and I’m not saying this in a negative tone. Start with one thing where you want to use SharePoint and go from there. My goal is not winning the Marathon, your goal should not be using all of the SharePoint functionalities from day one and it simply doesn’t work.
Equipment/Team
At least in Sweden running has become very popular during the last couple of years, this have made the sport more of a equipment sport with lightweight shoes, Gore-tex jackets and GPS watches. Well a GPS-watch will probably not do the implement of SharePoint for you but you certainly need a good team and hardware to do the job. Make sure you have a mixture of people with different knowledge. You will not only have SharePoint knowledge, invite someone from the SQL group, the AD and exchange guys and not to forget, people from the business, someone that knows what the business need.
Exercise/Testing
Running a marathon will not be like running to a meeting. I will probably need to do a +1000 km within the next year to be able to finish within a reasonable time. When you set up a SharePoint environment you will need to do a lot of testing, in most of the cases the setup includes some custom web part or workflow. Test again and again. If you plan for using it on many sites, test on many sites. The result will look the same if you use it on 1000 sites as it does on your small test site. If you have a lot of users you will need to do a lot of performance tests. They say that you never get a second change to make a first impression, well, if you launch day makes the server crash or act slow your installation will be synonym with bad things for a long time.
Preparations/Training
When the marathon (May 30, 2010) is around the corner I will need to plan my weeks, not only with the exercise but with food and sleep. In the same way you need to prepare your end users with training. I have a separate Fivelist regarding end user training. Make sure they know how to use the system, do you have different end user groups like editors and site collection owners make sure they know their responsibility.
Run/Implement
One of the most common mistake people do when running is to start too fast. Plan your run, calculate what time you are aiming for and keep track of you progress through the kilometres. Like the Decision/business case don’t go forward too fast. It takes time to incorporate SharePoint within business and to replace tools earlier used in day-to-day activities, so plan your implementation, talk to the business during the journey and don’t push it to fast, that could cause you to not finish the lap at all.

Best Practices Conference
In August (24-26) the fourth Best Practices Conference will be held in Washington, D.C. As in the earlier conferences I expect a long list of MVP’s sharing their knowledge in a broad selection of topics. New for this year is that they have combined it with the SQL Best Practices which makes this even more interesting.

http://www.bestpracticesconference.com/

SharePoint Connections
The SharePoint Connections will this year be co-locating with a number of other Connections conferences. Much focus will be on development but there will also be a SharePoint Administration track. A number of known speakers will be there including Thomas Rizzo as key note. The conference will be held at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas between 9-12 of November

http://www.devconnections.com/shows/FALL2009SP/default.asp?s=138

MS SharePoint Conference
This will probably be the biggest SharePoint event of the year and if you are interested in the coming version, SharePoint 2010, this is the event to attend. It will be held at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas between 19-22 of October. I will not miss this event and I promise to write more about it.

http://www.mssharepointconference.com/

New Zealand Community SharePoint Conference
If you are located in the Asia-Pacific region then you should definitely consider attending the New Zealand SharePoint Conference. It is a two day long conference in Wellington, but even if it’s only two days long there is a long list of speakers including Joel Olsen.

http://www.regonline.com/builder/site/default.aspx?EventID=714444

Tech Ed Europe
This might not be a SharePoint Conference per se but I’m quite sure that you will find a lot of interesting SharePoint stuff including information about SharePoint 2010 since this will be held after the MS SharePoint Conference in October. The dates are 9-13 of November and will be located in Berlin easily accessible from whole of Europe if you are located here.

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/

Find the right level
To find the right level and to meet the expectations, talk to some of the participants a couple of weeks before the education and ask about their expectations. Do a couple of small interviews and when you have them face-to-face or by phone you get a feeling of how much knowledge they already have about SharePoint and their technically skills in general.

Learn their environment
Get a good understanding of how they are using SharePoint. Do they have a intranet or are they only using the document management parts? Are they using Publishing sites or Team Sites? Maybe a combination and in that case you need to show how to access different settings in two ways. Do they have any customizations and other lock-downs of the system?

Learn their terminology
Do they have a name for their intranet, what are they calling their business units. This is very good to know so that you can referee to “real life” examples and so that they feel like you know a bit about them. Maybe they have other names then the SharePoint names for Sites and document lists. By using their names you will avoid confusions.

Plan content and time
Time is a luxury most people don’t have but if you rush through the education nothing will be remembered and the time spent useless. Plan the amount of time, think about what is actually important for them and don’t be afraid of divide the education into two different sessions if you have two groups with different knowledge or interests in SharePoint. Don’t teach Site collection administration tasks for end users or “simple” editors of news items.

Handouts
One of the most frequent sentence in emails today is “Consider the environmental effect do you really need to print this email?” and yes I have it in my signature as well. But some people really like to have something in their hands, and in most of the cases it’s also good to give them some reminders they can use when they get back to their office and try to remember what you just told them. My suggestion is to bring it in a digital format and for those that really need to have it in front of them can print it, and the others can use the digital version. There are thick books written about SharePoint so just put the absolute most important in there and make sure that all screenshots are made from their environment or at least looks like it.

If anyone by any change is in the neighbourhood of Kuopio Finland the coming two days, just send me a message and it would be nice to take a glass or two and talk SharePoint!

Search in WSS
I’m not sure that the standard search in WSS is actually allowed to be called search… It’s not very customizable but the good thing here is that Microsoft gives you the Search Server Express for free. This at least gives you quite a lot of extra things to do. For instance Federated search, iFilters, index file shares etc.

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/default.aspx

MOSS Search
For those of you that installed Moss in its first version know that since the Infrastructure update released almost a year ago it has taken a few steps forward when it know contain all the functionality that is included in Microsoft Search Server. There is however a huge disadvantage (as in the WSS with or without Search Server Express), there is no wild card search. Something that everyone needs to be able to find, well, anything…
But on the other hand, if you can solve that (as I will talk about below) you have quite a lot of options to tweak the search and since the SharePoint Search Results pages are built on publishing sites you have a lot of options to give the users a good search experience.

If your organization use My Sites then you have huge amount of advantages in sharing knowledge finding internal resources etc.

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/moss/default.aspx

Dot net mafia wild card search
The Dot net mafia wild card search is a Codeplex project that has been around for a while and now starts to be quite competitive, especially if you have the luck of internal development resources. What this wild card search does is that it actually replaces the standard (well you have to do it yourself) results web part and then displays a wild card search results. It works both for document’s items and for people search.

http://www.codeplex.com/WildcardSearch

Ontolica
Ontolica has a couple of different solutions for SharePoint and they come with different licenses. The basic search they offer is a wild card search that allows you to use “*” in any search webpart you have, it works very well but it’s probably their Ontolica Saerch solution for Moss that is most impressive. This offers a whole new search site template and includes Metadata search, Drill down results and images search. Just such a small thing as to search for people by letters makes it so much easier to work in Moss. (And no, I did not get anything for this…)

http://www.ontolica.com/

Fast
No one has probably missed that Microsoft know owns the Norwegian company Fast that delivers cutting edge search platforms and has been since quite a while be innovators within the field. Already today there are integration possibilities between Moss and Fast and this combination is one discussion for itself. I have not worked with this integration myself, just seen it so if anyone of you has and want to share your knowledge I will be more than happy to listen.
Moving forward with “Office 14″ we will see not one but a couple of steps forward for SharePoint and Search.

http://www.fast.no

Looking forward and looking at the more complex search engines that are still very expensive and mostly targeted for enterprise usage we have only seen the top of the iceberg. After having seen a couple of the cutting edge platforms in action I can’t stop thinking of Metadata and how much we actually will need it. We don’t need metadata? You will say I’m crazy, but the new search engines are so cleaver in indexing the content of the actual files that it will not surprise me if the huge focus on tagging everything with metadata values might decrease. I mean, think about it.
If you have a document with security classification “Internal” attached to it with a Site Column, and then in the actual file it says Security Classification “Secret”, what is most likely the accurate classification? And since the larger Search Engines or platforms can handle this, with language support and then sort it or classify it, don’t you agree just slightly with me?
I however still think that Site Columns and categorization in for instance SharePoint will remain a very important cornerstone of document management. But the usage will probably be more focused on sorting and grouping your documents or list items to present the data in different ways. Not as much as support for the search engine.

Microsoft has a Enterprise Search site where you can compare their own solutions and find more information: http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/default.aspx