The first-ever SharePoint Saturday: The Conference (SPSTC) is set to begin this Thursday morning in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Annandale, Virginia, and the crème de la crème of SharePoint experts will be descending on the National Capital Region for the historic event. As a locally-based exhibiting sponsor, Bamboo will be making a strong showing at the event, with a rotating cast of staffers in the booth over the three-day event, and a pair of special sessions in the sponsor track:

• Friday, from 11:00-12:15, Tom Polivka will be presenting From Simple Search to Knowledge Management: Getting the Answers You Need from SharePoint; and
• Saturday, from 9:30-10:45 (immediately following the keynote), Rob Manfredi will provide insight into the Trends Driving the Need for Solutions on SharePoint: Frontline Business Automation and How to Best Deliver Those Solutions.

In addition to a series of full-day workshops (requiring advance registration) taking place on Thursday, breakout sessions will run throughout the three-day event. Several of these compete with each other, but some of the sessions I’m looking at with an eye towards attending and blogging include:

• Keynote: Innovation @ Microsoft, Joe Boggio
• Assessing Social Business Evolution, Ray Wang
• The Business Value of SharePoint Community What is the impact of SharePoint community for SharePoint practices, experienced professionals and newcomers to the SharePoint platform? (Baltimore SPUG)
• Keynote: SharePoint and the Cloud
• “What’s in it for me?” User Adoption & Employee Engagement Strategies for Enterprise Social Computing Projects, Jeff Willinger
• SharePoint & jQuery – What I wish I would have known when I started, Mark Rackley
• Invent the Future Reinventing SharePoint…NOW!, Mark Miller
• ECM from a Dev’s Perspective, Paul Swider
• Key “Gotchas” in The Enterprise, Tony Byrne
• Training Users on SharePoint, Janis Hall
• JPoint (jQuery + SharePoint): Hottest Buzz Ever!, Fernando Leitzelar
• Fairy Tales and the Future of SharePoint, Mark Miller
• Pro SharePoint 2010 Search, Josh Noble (Also check out Josh’s guest post for Bamboo Nation on the subject!)
• Stepping into Social Computing with SharePoint, Jay Leask

One session that I won’t be attending, but want to strongly recommend, especially for end users who are relatively new to SharePoint (or SharePoint 2010), is 9 Ways to Become a (SharePoint) Rock Star, presented Geoff Varosky and Christian Buckley. I blogged the world premiere of Geoff and Christian’s presentation a couple months ago at SPTechCon in Boston, and it rocks.

SPSTC fever … catch it!