I speak at a fair number of conferences each year. My wife might tell you that I speak at too many conferences. I enjoy every experience. Each speaking experience is different — but there’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. It’s a topic that many conferences shy away from. The topic is Governance. I enjoy the topic because it’s a way to make things a lot better with a relatively small amount of work. However, it’s not a topic that most conferences spend much time on.

I’ve given talks at various conferences but the organizers realize that governance can be a real snoozer if not done correctly so it generally gets an odd time right between the pasta lunch and the end of the conference. I’m happy to say that governance is something that the SharePoint Best Practices Conference will be spending a lot of time on — I’ve got three sessions including governance and some other best practices and I’m joined by tons of the best speakers in the SharePoint space.

My first session, Selling Governance in Your Organization, is a must see if you’re struggling to help your organization put some governance together. (By the way, here’s a sneak peek — think of governance as risk management, and a governance plan as insurance. Everyone buys some form of insurance.)

The second session is Governing Development in SharePoint. You’ve probably seen the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group’s SharePoint Guidance. In this session I’ll walk you through some of the conversations that they had internally and with the advisory team to talk about what went behind the best practices that they published.

Finally, I get to talk about How to Upgrade Your Applications in SharePoint. This is fun because there’s a ton of information out on how to get started with SharePoint but there are also some real rough spots you hit when you try to upgrade.

Certainly there are many conferences to consider attending, but this conference is the only one where the focus will be on getting you a well rounded set of best practices which you can use to improve the engagement with your users, deliver rock solid infrastructure, and facilitate developer productivity. If you’re a team leader, architect, or manager, there isn’t a better conference publicized today that you can go to this year.

[Oh yea, I’ve also got a major product announcement I’m going to be making at the conference.]