Tag: Opinion

It’s January, which means we’re coming to the end of another contribution year for those of us Microsoft MVPs that are up for renewal on July 1st. By the end of March, we need to have submitted our contributions, and new this year, answered the four magic questions on the MVP site.

This post was somewhat hard to write, to find the right tone, to express my feelings succinctly enough without seeming ungrateful for what I’ve just been awarded.

Yesterday, I received the official news from Microsoft that I had been awarded with an MVP Award for the 2018/2019 period, my first “renewal”. Leading up to yesterday, there were a tremendous amount of messages, emails and social media threads among the various channels that MVPs communicate in (some official, some not) where people were announcing they weren’t getting renewed. Included in this were several within my own award category, Business Solutions, within my own peer group of those focusing on Dynamics GP.

Continue reading “And then there were 10…”

At the end of April, I thought I would do an experiment. I kept track of nearly every email that I received as a part of the MVP program for the entire month of May. I deleted nothing. However, some emails such as calendar invites are auto-deleted in Outlook once you accept or decline the invitation, so I may be missing a few. (I know you can change that behaviour in Outlook but I didn’t want to change my normal settings for the sake of an experiment!)

As a Microsoft MVP, depending on how many Distribution Lists (DLs) you subscribe you, you may get a LOT of emails. I was curious to keep track of exactly how many on a random month. May was that month!

There is no “one” reference point since every MVP will customize what DLs they subscribe to, if any, and what other forms of communications their product group prefers to use. For this post, my reference point, I subscribe to 2 DL’s in Business Solutions, which for the sake of NDA I will call “the primary one” we are all told we should follow and one for my own product group, Dynamics GP. Those in Business Solutions will know what I mean.

There are 7 different DLs in Business Solutions, not including ones marked as “Retired”. I also subscribe to 1 Data Platform DL, out of 16 in that award category. There is absolutely no way to effectively keep up with the information if I chose to subscribe to more, let alone what I already subscribe to, so, I must limit myself to a handful of DLs to keep sane!

Continue reading “MVP emails gone mad!”

When we receive the Microsoft MVP Award, the first thing after “accepting” the award officially is signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Each time our award is renewed, we must acknowledge, accept and sign it again.

That NDA is an individual agreement between Microsoft and ourselves as an individual, not our company or employer, not our family, but us, individually. Additionally, even though all MVPs have signed the NDA agreement, we are not to share NDA information with other MVPs without pre-approval or through authorized NDA channels. I’m getting this part verbatim from the MVP site, by the way, to avoid mistakenly describing something in my own words that aren’t precisely true.

Continue reading “What the MVP NDA means to me”