2011, What a wonderful year
Last year was a truly amazing year for me.
Although there was no Tech·Ed Europe event this year, and I didn’t attend Microsofts Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) of any of The Expert Conferences (TECs), I did find a couple of other parties to crash. I still fondly remember the dinner with Marcus, Marien and Jeremy (and his wife) after TechDays Netherlands.
Also, the MVP Summit (as usual) was one great party, especially the night at Safeco Field.
2011, for my family, also was a year of vacations. Vacations ranging from forest bungalow parks to Southern France mobile homes, from chalets to all-inclusive Caribbean resorts. Returning home wasn’t always as pleasant. One time we returned to find a temperature difference of 20 degrees (centigrade), another time we found a window smashed. The vacations themselves, though, were brilliant and really charged our batteries.
As a speaker I was invited to speak at the Dutch GeekNight. Marien and I had a blast live migrating hyper-V virtual machines with Kinect that night… Achievement Unlocked! Other sessions I presented were more basic, like the session at Grip op IT, the session at the Carrièredagen, the NGN Windows Server Afternoon and the NGN iPad Day.
Businesswise, I was involved in a couple of career tracks. I invested a lot of time in GeekSchool, a talent track for high potentials including certifying them as MCITP|EAs. One of my wildest ideas also came to life in the form of a Microsoft Licensing Workshop and proved to be pretty popular among my colleagues. To actually make money for the company I was involved with a couple of big Office365 prospects and architected 2 big (and one little)Windows 7 deployments. (13k seats in total)
Also, as of April 2011, I’ve started working for Microsoft as an IT Pro Evangelist. I didn’t actually need to join the company, since Microsoft Netherlands has special arrangements for MVPs. I’m now part of the same team as Tony and Daniel and helping them out with some stuff, like the Dutch TechNet newsletter. Great Fun!
As 2011 comes to an end, I want to wish all my family, friends, colleagues, MVPs and customers a very Happy New Year.
Thank you.