That Time of Year Again

I got the dreaded email this week.  Contained in it was the attachment.  Every potential MVP or MVP up for annual renewal in the UK/Ireland is sent a spreadsheet that asks for your last year of activity.  My renewal (or not) is July so the review process for me started this week.  The spreadsheet can take a couple of hours to complete if you have done a good bit of work.  Luckily I keep records of the activity so it’s just a matter of copy/pasting.  After this it is wait until July 1st and then refresh the MVP profile site to see if my name is still up there.  A mail is sent later that day either congratulating you or expressing the bad news.

I heard this week that we got 3 new MVP’s in Ireland this month, one in OpsMgr, one in UC and one in CRM … there’s a lot of privacy stuff wrapped up in it so we think those were the specialties.  Well done folks!  We did lose one MVP late last year … but only because he became a MS employee.  We think our numbers here are around 13-14, still quite a rare species, and still only half of what it should be.

Discussions were held this week to also re-launch the Windows user group.  Attendances were dropping off.  We think it’s because asking people to come to a venue every month on a Friday morning was tough – people are losing jobs all over the place and there are exactly zero legitimate IT pro job openings (I hear there are plenty of fake ads for CV/resume harvesting).  We also know that evening events and very-early morning events are non-starters.

Another MVP, John McCabe (Unified Communications) has expressed interest in helping out which is more than welcome.  We’re looking now at doing bigger, multi-track, day long events about 3 times a year, with a keynote speaker, maybe from Redmond (any Redmond folks fancy a trip to Dublin?  If so, I’ll put you in contact with the right person in the Irish sub).  Most of the product expert speakers will be from the community, mainly from Ireland but some invitees from abroad.  The provisional date for the first one is in September.  I think it could be a pretty fantastic event with a nice mix of content covering different aspects of the business that IT Pro’s in Ireland work with and care about.  More details on that later.  Oh you can safely bet I’ll be talking about something in the virtualization world.