Microsoft Announces Changes to the MVP Program
Microsoft announced several changes to the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award program today. Based on the feedback from the MVPs, these changes to the MVP program have been overwhelmingly welcomed. According to Microsoft “The awards for Developer and IT Pro oriented MVPs are moving from 36 areas of technical expertise to a set of 10, new, broader categories that encompass a combined set of 90 contribution areas—including open source technologies. In addition, all MVPs will now be recognized for their community contributions across multiple technologies.”
Microsoft is also opening the doors to the MVPs with new opportunities, such as speaking at regional events where Microsoft technical evangelists (TEs) will join their community events. In the past, only Microsoft employees were allowed to publish on Microsoft’s Channel 9. Now, for the first time, Microsoft is also allowing MVPs to publish on Channel 9.
Here are the new MVP award categories. Click on the image below to view it full-screen.
My SharePoint award category will fall under the Office Servers and Services. The following award categories will remain unchanged. In other words, they will not be included in the above buckets of categories.
The following table makes it easier to see how the current MVP award categories map with the new categories. This is a downloadable PDF file.
Microsoft may adjust some of the categories so they map better with the award categories. Frankly, it’s not an east task to map these categories. I am sure Microsoft had to do a lot of brain storming to figure this out. One big challenge is the over-lapping of the categories, where they may seem to fit more than one categories. A nice thing about these new categories is that they seem to be more durable. While Microsoft may decide to change the name of a product, e.g. Lync is now Skype for Business, it will still fall under the major category Office Servers and Services. There are thousands of MVPs around the world and there will be some questions about the category names and how and why they were selected. As Microsoft makes some adjustments and we all get used to these categories, I think in the end these changes should work out well for us. Personally, I am satisfied with these changes and look forward to continue sharing my knowledge with the global IT community.
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