Microsoft's WinHEC conference, first held in the early 1990s and last held in 2008, is returning in 2015.
WinHEC was an engineering conference held every year by Microsoft's partners in hardware, which aimed to assist the companies in integrating Windows and other Microsoft software into their devices.
However, upon the return of WinHEC, the conference will no longer be an annual event. Instead, WinHEC will be a series of small conferences and workshops that will be organized more frequently. The WinHEC conferences will be held according to the needs of the different countries where they will be staged.
The change in WinHEC's purpose is reflected by the change in name. While WinHEC previously stood for Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, the new WinHEC will now stand for Windows Hardware Engineering Community.
The announcement was made on the official Windows blog by Microsoft official Matt Perry.
"WinHEC will bring the hardware engineering community together in one place, providing a unique opportunity to interact with technical and business experts from Microsoft, other partners, and customers, facilitating exchange of ideas, best practices, and opportunities," wrote Perry.
According to Perry, the conferences will include executive keynotes, highly technical training classes, hands-on demonstrations and Q&A sessions, all of which will be focused on implementing Windows in hardware.
The new WinHEC conference will be targeting the executives of the hardware partner companies as attendees, along with engineering and technical product representatives that are looking to do more with the technologies presented by Windows.
The first of the new WinHEC conferences will be in Shenzhen, China, on March 18-19. The conferences that will be staged there will cater to the needs of the various electrical design, system integration, software engineering and hardware manufacturing companies located in the country.
Microsoft's move of resurrecting the WinHEC conferences, albeit in a different form, goes against the move earlier announced by the company that it will be combining several conferences. The umbrella conference would include TechEd, Management Summit, and events that are held for SharePoint, Exchange, Project and Lync.
The announcement of the new WinHEC conferences comes just before a planned press conference by Microsoft, where Windows 9 is expected to be unveiled.
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