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2007 Global MVP Summit

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Starting this Wednesday and Thursday we will have our Global MVP Summit! What is this you ask? Glad you did. Let me tell you about it.

First the acronym: MVP stands for Most Valuable Professional. Our MacBU MVPs are a small group of people that both represent our customers and champion our products. They help us in lots of ways. The full details about the Microsoft MVP award can be found here.

For MacBU our MVPs help us to moderate our feedback forums, answer questions, work the booth at MacWorld, give us valuable feedback and of course they get to be part of our super secret betas. ;-) To become a MVP for MacBU you "are nominated by your peers, Microsoft employees, and other MVPs" Basically, you just have to kick butt in knowing how to use the product and helping folks out. We’ll see it, others will see it and you will be asked you if you want to help out as an official MVP.

The Newsgroups

You didn't know we had newsgroups? We do and it's where we get lots of feedback and answer tons of questions. Since our MVPs are superb, they answer almost all the questions single handedly. Most of the MacBU team lurks there too and you'll often see MacBU team members respond to questions directly. Seriously, if you have questions you should check them out:

https://www.microsoft.com/mac/community/community.aspx?pid=newsgroups

Additionally some of our MVPs actually have resource sites of their own with information about using our products. The Entourage and Word sites are particularly active. Here are some of them:

MVP Resource Sites

In addition to helping out the community of Mac users, we bring the MVPs to Redmond this year to play a double elimination tennis tournament on our newly acquired MacBU Wii. Uh, what I mean is, they are coming so we can talk about how things are going and what we can do better. :-) So what are these MVPs going to be doing for 2 days? Here's some of the stuff on the list:

  • We'll discuss the core features of the upcoming version of Office for Mac.
  • Talk about major features and theory behind the actual implementation of those features for Word, PowerPoint, Entourage, and Excel.
  • The MVPs will present the Top 5 Office issues they've seen in the community and we'll discuss what we can do about them.
  • We'll discuss future versions of Messenger for Mac and Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac.
  • We'll talk about geeky stuff like our programmability story for Office.
  • Marketing will chat about the new Office 2008 branding, packaging and overall launch plans.
  • We'll give an update on the Office 2008 Beta.
  • The Mactopia Site Manager will chat about plans for a redesign of the product website.
  • We'll discuss the planning approach for the next version of Mac Office after Office 2008.

I'm sure you get the idea. What's really cool, especially for the folks in Redmond like me, is that when these MVPs get to come they are literally just down the hall in a big conference room. We can just walk down and chat with them. It’s also nice because since these folks are obviously under a NDA, we can chat with them frankly and get great feedback as well as explain things in greater detail than what we could do or say chatting on the MacWorld floor. :-)

All in all, it's going to be a great time and just one of those things that will help make Office 2008 insanely great!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2007
    Will you guys be talking about finally making Entourage as good as Outlook for Windows is? The differences between Entourage and Outlook is just astounding -- Outlook is amazing, and Entourage is mediocre.

  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2007
    Hello. I'd like to help out things. I'm not quite sure how to become an MVP so maybe someone can point me in the right direction... Adam jackson -Adam@dailytechtalk.com

  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2007
    Remote Desktop Connection — I was thinking of filing a missing persons report for the development team for this application :)

  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2007
    Adam, Check out the MVP FAQ linked to at the beginning of the blog post. Start monitoring the newsgroups and trying to help folks out, that's what you can do to begin with. David Weiss

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2007
    Sigh;-) Sorry I can't be there with you this year guys - it looks like a good programme you have lined up. I look forward to catching up on the news later. Have fun with Office 2008! -- BarryW PS: The link to Paul Berkowitz' blog page is broken...

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2007
    A request that I have is to make the MSN Messenger app update along with the rest of the office suite. It makes no sense for it to be a separate and "non user-friendly" update. For the time being, the current Microsoft Messenger update process really provide better instructions. As a tech savvy individual, I figured out that I have to drop the updated app into the Microsoft Office 2004 folder in my Applications folder. However, everyone else in my company thought that all they had to do was double-click and run the app from the disk image. There should be a basic background image in the disk image that simply states that the app needs to be moved in the Microsoft Office 2004 folder in the Applications folder. Entourage works really great for my company. However, one feature that I see in Outlook that would be really beneficial is the ability to see overlapping calenders. If it could emulate the way iCal does it, that would be excellent!

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2007
    Thank you David.

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2007
    Fixed the Link to Paul's scripts. Sorry about that and thanks for the heads up Barry! David Weiss

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2007
    Just a word to the wise. If you participate in the user newsgroups, your email will be posted forever on Google. Think automated spam-email-harvesting-robots when you decide what email address you choose to register with.

  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2007
    The comment has been removed