SharePoint Server MVP Again for 2012
On January 1, promptly at 13:00 EST (that’s 1pm to us Yanks), I got the email from Microsoft informing me that I had received the MVP Award for SharePoint Server again for 2012.
As in 2011, I feel tremendously honored and humbled to receive the MVP. I view it as a statement by my peers that what I do in the community has value, even if that isn’t the real reason I received it.
Yes, there’s some controversy around the MVP award. I’ve seen the good (many of these), the bad, and the ugly in posts about it over the last week or so. I can understand and echo some of the bad and the ugly, frankly. If there’s a point to the whole MVP program, I’m not sure what it is, either. No client of mine really cares about it if they know what it even is, other than to give me a gibe or two about it from time to time. Microsoft really doesn’t choose to share much with me that I can’t learn by following links on Twitter. The group of us who are MVPs represent vastly different skills sets, attitudes, and – dare I say it – aptitudes – me included, of course.
What the MVP *has* meant for me over the last year, though, is that I’ve gotten to interact with that incredibly interesting, diverse, and talented bunch of my fellow MVPs. We don’t all see eye to eye all the time, but that’s part of the fun of it. We have interesting conversations and debates about how SharePoint works, how we can best solve problems with it, and where we hope it goes as a technology. At the MVP Summit in Redmond last year – and I look forward to it again in February – I was surrounded with the best and the brightest in the SharePoint world. That interaction alone is worth being proud of the award. Whether or not Microsoft cares about us or wants our input is certainly moot, but I’ve written that part off by now.
So, thank you Microsoft for seeing something in me that deserved the MVP award, and I look forward to more and more opportunities to learn from my fellow MVPs and the rest of the SharePoint community in 2012. I’m having a ball.
Not being at risk for being given one, I can’t even offer a sour grapes perspective. But it seems like you wring a lot of value from inter-MVP interactions, as you said. Regardless, congratulations!
Way to go Marc. I just know by working with you in the past that you knowledge and contribution went a long way with fostering my skills with SharePoint.