5 Years of Blogging!

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The TechNet UK Blog is 5 years old today and boy it's been a good 5 years getting to know you all. In this post we want to share with you some of your favourite blog posts and also let you know what our 6 TechNet Editors are up to now. 

From the very first post the editors have had a great time working with our writers to come up with new and interesting articles and competitions. Here are just a few of our highlights: 

The Fun Articles 

Celebrating our SysAdmins

On the last Friday of July every year we like to celebrate and show our appreciation for the great work our SysAdmins do for us here at Microsoft and in every company. We sure do love our gifs (and cake): 

Competitions

We have had some fantastic competitions over the years, here are two of the highlights:

Popular Blog Posts

Over the years we have published a vast array of articles and it's hard to single out just a few but here are the articles that you guys seemed to love the most: 

“Don’t focus on having a great blog. Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.” (Brian Clark, 2012) - this quote really encompasses how we've aspired to create a blog that you can go to and find useful content to help you be successful in your jobs. However, we know we're not perfect and are always looking to improve. With this in mind as a birthday present to us we would love to hear about what we have done well and most importantly where we can improve so the next 5 years sees you continue to receive content that you really want to read! Let us know your thoughts in the comments section and we will get our editors to work. 

Editors of the Past and Present

Over the past 5 years we have had 6 TechNet Editors who have done a fantastic job with the TechNet UK Blog in their own special way. Here's what they're up to now:

Rachel Collier

Editor from launch until September 2011

In my last post I said that I was leaving my role 'to deploy and manage a baby', the project has been running for four years and now has a little brother. These days I answer to them. I've had more reasonable managers! My favourite thing about being editor was definitely getting the blog started in the first place. There was often news we wanted to share between editions of the TechNet newsletter or stuff for which we needed more space - competitions, interviews, events, etc. I loved the competitions we ran. It's fair to say the prizes varied; from a Windows phone to a TechNet mug, but the responses we had always got us giggling (though they were occasionally unprintable). As an editor it's great to hear back from the folks you write for.

Sarah Lamb

Editor from November 2011 - June 2013

After working at Microsoft, I went self-employed and started my own Social Media and Comms Consultancy. I still love social media and comms and learnt a lot when I was at Microsoft which I now use to benefit startups like digi.me. There's many highlights and it's really hard to choose just one! Giving the winner of the 12 Days of Geekmas their Micro Server in person at their office was definitely a highlight as well as working with the team with TechDays Online. My favourite articles were the interviews with various people including Jason Zander and Stephen Rose and the guest articles we had from the MVP's, they were always fascinating and had plenty of technical depth to them.

 

Alexander Guy

Interim Editor from September 2011 – November 2011

After a great couple of months standing in as TechNet Editor, I completed my internship with the TechNet Team and returned to University to finish my degree. I am now back in the team, managing our Social Media communities and campaigns. I really enjoyed how as Editor of the blog, you can immediately see the fruits of your labour. Having worked with a contributor or composed a blog yourself, from the minute you hit ‘publish’ you can watch the view count climb and start to gauge how interested IT Pros are in what you’re saying. Be it positive or not so, the feedback was always very enlightening! My favourite article was the first piece that I researched and wrote myself from scratch to mark the 900-day milestone in the run-up to Windows XP End of Support. Using cold hard evidence to articulate to our readers why they should look to upgrade their venerable friend, as well as some interesting comparisons to technologies which had come and gone since XP’s launch, was particularly fun to write. Furthermore, it helped me to understand what End of Support means from an IT Pro’s perspective, really getting a feel for why some folks were so reluctant to move.

Steven Mullaghan  

Editor from July 2013 to July 2014

Seems like only yesterday, I was keeper of content across the blog and newsletter channels. I have now recently graduated Newcastle Business School with a First Class BA (Hons) in Marketing Management and delighted to be joining Microsoft again as a Graduate in September working as a Partner Sales Executive within SMS&P in Reading. Needless to say I'll always have a soft spot for the TechNet team - no doubt finding a way to pop by when I can. My favourite thing about being editor was curating the content that mattered to our technical audience. Not to be cliche, but what I enjoyed the most was being out and about, on the road at events and gaining insights from you on what's best to publish. Then working with our awesome team of content creators to make that happen. My favourite article was the TechDays 2013 wrap up, mostly because the memories that I associate along with it. The hard work, the team collaboration, the Steve B interview, Countdown conundrum and... my xbox onesie cameo. Top event all round and well summed up through this article (I'm getting all nostalgic). It's been great to grace the blog pages once more, hopefully I may bump into a few familiar faces when I'm back.

Charlotte Utting

Editor from July 2014 to July 2015

Being TechNet Editor for the past year has been a fantastic experience and I have many highlights. Firstly, I must say it has been great getting to know you all and building up a network of great writers who have written lots of fab articles for the TechNet UK Blog over the years and we really can't thank you enough for those! One of my highlights was definitely leading the Learning at Work Week campaign back in May, championed by the Campaign for Learning organisation, which aims to put the spotlight on the importance and benefits of learning and development within the workplace. We saw this as fantastic initiative to encourage our IT Pros and Developers to use this week as an opportunity to develop their learning which is important in order to stay up-to-date with the ever evolving technological landscape - it was a lot of fun sourcing and writing the blog posts highlighting the campaign as well as lots of the great online learning resources for our readers to ingest. Another highlight was getting the chance to be involved with the two TechDays Online events and getting to work amongst the production team throughout those events, we had a lot of fun producing the events and we hope you enjoyed them too. Life after being the TechNet Editor sees me heading back to Nottingham Trent University shortly to finish my Information Systems degree. Hopefully this is not a goodbye but more of a see you later. 

Harry Eagles

Editor from July 2015 to Present 

I may only have been editor for a month but I can already tell that it is the people who make the blog what it is. Over the next year I hope to meet as many of you as possible. I want to get to know the writers, they are experts in their field and I intend to learn as much from them as I can. I also wish to meet as many readers as possible, I have already met a few of you at events and really enjoyed speaking to you. SysAdmin Day has been by far and away the highlight of my work for the blog thus far. We got to commission a cake, present it to our SysAdmins (which made them happy) and then - most importantly - we got to eat the cake! Easily the best day yet! I loved writing the article that we published on the blog for the day - it was a bit of fun and different to anything else I have written thus far! I used my previous experience as a SysAdmin and some funny GiFs to create an article that I hoped would make people laugh – thankfully no one has told me it is rubbish so I take it to be a success!

Thank you for everything so far and bring on the next 5 years! #HappyBlogging