I'm very excited and pleased to get the award again this year! Last year, three months after I received the MVP for "Windows Shell", which is now called Windows Desktop Experience, I was notified that I was nominated for Office Communications Server. Confused, I e-mailed my MVP lead to see if this was even possible.
Three months after that, I was nominated for Forefront Client Security, and I was confused again. A few e-mails between the various MVP leads and my secondary competencies were assigned to OCS and Forefront. I was wondering which of the three would "win" this year on July 1st, or if I would get the nod again at all.
I've always been hard to pigeonhole which has been a benefit and a detriment from time to time. It is a benefit because it means I'm practically 100% billable all the time on the job because I can handle a wide range of technologies, but it is also a detriment because sometimes you have to pick which area you want to focus on. I have a bad habit of trying to master every product, if only for my own personal curiosity.
Instead of getting typecast as "Jack of all trades - master of none", I'd much rather be known as "Jack of all trades - master of everything Microsoft except MIIS/ILM and custom Sharepoint sites".
The way I tend to view things - I work on things that I'd normally be messing around with at home anyway, but I have the added benefit of getting paid to do it. People are no longer surprised to get e-mails from me at 3am because I happened to be up late at night working on a problem someone else was experiencing or trying to figure out a better way to do something.
Work and home life tend to blend together sometimes and it is always a delicate balance. Thankfully, I have a wonderful family that understands my "Mad Scientist" ways when I'm debugging problems or having them try out a new program or operating system on their computer. I wouldn't be a MVP without them.
I'm excited for the upcoming year. I'm seeing more Exchange 2007 and Office Communications Server adoption in Michigan, and nationwide. I've been learning more about Cisco CallManager and CUPS integration with every new OCS project. It is a great cross-brand/cross-practice challenge at times, but the end results are worth it.
Forefront Stirling is progressing well and should be a hit once it reaches RTM. I'm seeing more people interested in Microsoft Deployment and Vista rollouts. I've been brushing up my presentation skills and dipping my feet into public speaking, like last month's West Michigan NT User group meeting.