The MVP Summit, Rudder & "The geekiest named blog"

Yesterday was day two of the MVP summit, and it's been a blast so far. Lots of great people and discussions packed into just a few days. Yesterday morning, Eric Rudder talked about a lot of the accomplishments of the MVPs and Microsoft in the community, and he highlighted the Exchange blog, the Exchange community website, and one of the blogs run by Exchange MVPs as some good examples of things going on in the Exchange community. I knew that was planned for his talk, but I'd figured that someone had just put the slides together for him and he had little to do with it. Well, I stand corrected... I got an email later in the day from him where he mentioned that he really liked what we'd done with the site and he was the one who decided to use us as the sample for his talk (plus he also came up with suggestions for our site). Plus, he called You Had Me At EHLO “The geekiest named blog“, which of course is always nice (thanks again to Exchange MVP Andy David for coming up with the name). I had to wipe a tear out of the corner of my eye; I'm so proud.

I don't know about everywhere else, but I can tell you that in my world, getting a mail from your great-great-great-great-grand-manager complimenting something you were involved in is a good thing.

At lunch, I sat at the Exchange Documentation table... it was unfortunately labeled “Documentation“ due to a mix-up where they didn't put the product name on the labels for each table. But this mixup was fortuitous in many ways, since I ended up mixing with a new crowd - I ate lunch with a couple of Exchange MVPs, some from from visual studio, one from Access and one from MSHelp. By some odd twist of fate, just last week I'd been browsing https://www.mshelpwiki.com/ and told the Help MVP how neat it was, and he was one of the folks who created it. I felt like Scoble - every time he takes a plane somewhere, he ends up sitting next to someone he somehow knows or knows of.

Today we have more sessions focused on Exchange with the MVPs, such as discussing CALLER-ID in more detail, a neat tool we're working on to make troubleshooting problems with Exchange a lot easier (more on this eventually!), and much more.