Microsoft + Joomla! at J and Beyond 2011

It is not that often that we have the chance to visit a medieval abbey in Europe…but that is exactly what we are doing this May: we are sponsoring and attending J and Beyond, a major Joomla! event that will take place on the Rolduc Abbey in the Netherlands on May 6-8 2011.  Besides being thrilled about the event venue we are also excited and looking forward to the opportunity to interact, engage and listen to the Joomla! community. At Microsoft we’ve put a lot of effort in making Joomla! work really well on our platform and created an integrated development and deployment experience through WebMatrix to make it even simpler for developers. 

We’ve got a couple of fun sessions planned and we’re looking forward to continuing the conversation and engagements with the Joomla! community at our booth as well:

• “IE6 RIP - send flowers” with Jas Sandhu (@jassand). Join us in moving users to a modern browser and be free of Internet Explorer 6! Jas will talk about what to look for in a web browser today. The features and standards that are presently available and updates that are close in HTML5. We’ll be covering the work we are doing with Internet Explorer moving forward including a discussion of what is here today with IE9 and our IE10 Platform Previews and what will be coming in our HTML5 labs to help create a better and more interoperable web.
• “Microsoft and the Joomla! Community” with Grace Francisco (@gracefr, the liason for the Joomla community within Microsoft). Grace will talk about your role working with open source communities and some of the activities Microsoft is involved in to make the Joomla experience great on our platform.

We want to give a shout out to our friend Sudhi Seschala from Hooduku who is delivering a session on “Joomla 1.6 support multiple databases” covering the work he’s been doing to give the Joomla community more db options including the integration work that he’s been doing for Joomla 1.6 and SQL server and with Joomla 1.6 and SQL Azure.

Looking forward to being at J and Beyond soon. Hope to see you there,

Jas Sandhu, Technical Evangelist, @jassand

Grace Francisco, Sr. Program Manager, @gracefr