… I can’t share any of the content from the Microsoft MVP Summit 😉
We’ve been encouraged to let people know about the experience but all content, be it technical, strategy, marketing, jokes, etc are all under our MVP Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA) and MS went to great lengths yesterday to reinforce that.
Yesterday was a sort of introductory day to get the ball rolling. We had some generic sessions and some keynotes. I attended one session where senior managers from a division worked as a panel and MVP’s brought their own questions/feedback, and those from their employers, customers and colleagues. I think it was educational for both sides of the conversation. And as expected, MVP’s don’t have questions - they have comments with question marks on the end.
At the end of the day there was a reception. I was selected to be one of the MVP’s to video record a question for an executive keynote on Friday. I cannot share anything about it, other than it’s a question I think everyone would have on their top 5 list. It’ll be cool if it gets played and answered.
We might now be able to tell people now about what we learn (not even our employers) but we will be able to work better (without telling you why) and be in a better position to share information when MS releases us on those specifics. We’re also bringing feedback that we have gathered, hopefully helping MS to give their customers a product that you want.
Another part of the summit is networking. It was nice to meet some of my American fellow virtualisation MVP’s for the first time. I also got to meet Mike Sterling, one of the guys behind Hyper-V, that you may know through blogging and Twitter. He’s a cool guy and really got me excited about these next 2 days, giving us a hint of the hard work they’ve been doing to prepare. I also got to meet up again with fellow STEP & TechEd Springboard booth staff members Justin Rodino and Miklos Cari. There were lots of the familiar UK/Ireland MVP’s. At least 5 of the Irish MVP’s are here in town covering virtualisation, unified communications, XNA and SQL. And of course, there’s a good representation from the Minasi forum which has a unusually high number of MVP’s in the ranks. We hung out at the reception last night and chatted about things from writing, books, the upcoming Minasi conference, and what we’ve been up to since we last met.
Later this morning we head out to the Redmond Campus and split up to meet the product teams in person. These will be the deep-dive, uber-secret technical sessions that everyone wants to know about :) I’m quite excited about these two days, because these two days of the year are the biggest of the benefits we get as MVP’s. Not even our fellow MVP’s who couldn’t make it here this week get access to this information. It’s an amazing privilege and one we have to take very seriously.
Starting from 7am, 1,400 MVP’s will be leaving 4 hotels and getting on the Microsoft shuttles to head out to a number of buildings in Redmond. There we take on our role of playing secret agents once again, keeping secrets and hopefully representing you … but also hopefully having a lot of fun in the process.