Why Community Rocks

Treat people the way you would like them to treat you. That’s my sentence, how I wish to interact with others – and of course everyone wants to be treated in a nice way. I also heard several times the following sentences in the Microsoft community:

• “In a world, where you can be anything, be kind.”
• “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice”

These words describe exactly the characteristics of the Microsoft community. Being awarded as an MVP in this community makes me even more proud and I feel honored every day, when seeing the MVP trophy on my desk, just next to photos from my family. I’ll come to this later, why this fact is important.

Microsoft was always a big player and a very well-known company. You can imagine, how excited I was, when starting my professional career as a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft in Munich. When looking back into that time, based on my own experiences the MVP community was characterized by technical experts with a crazy deep knowledge in their specific fields. At the same time, Microsoft had a hard time with its reputation as a big player, sometimes even called monopolist. It was not always easy to talk about the great Microsoft vision and convince family, friends and others from products like Outlook.com, Bing or Windows Phone, in which I believed in. I’d even say, also MVP community was a bit silent and folks were not that motivated to spread the word for Microsoft publicly.

However, since Satya took over the lead, a fundamental change to the internal and also external culture started. Amazing community leaders from Microsoft, like?Dona Sarkar,?Anna Chu?and?Laurie Pottmeyer?started a big change. MVP’s were not just only silent and deep technical blog writers anymore. With a rising demand for agile and flexible solutions for more and more complex problems, the Microsoft community leaders understood, the world needs a more divers and comprehensive approach.

Inspire

Amazing speakers like?Dux Raymond Sy?or?Tracy Van der Schyff?created a big attention to the Microsoft community and made clear, IT is not just boring coding to solve technical problems. No, it’s entertaining and inspiring. I also started to understand, Microsoft’s reputation is changing, supported by a new and inspiring culture. Microsoft was not the bad boy anymore and more and more folks started to join and contribute to this community. Inspired by great speakers and community leaders, they started to dare sharing their own content. The fear decreased, that their content could be maybe too less technical and therefore not appreciated by existing MVP’s and community members. And those "new" people shared fantastic new perspectives, ideas and approaches for a way bigger community audience. The community saw the positive impact of this diversity, too, and they well appreciated new content and new direction of the wider Microsoft network.

Appreciate

Now we had momentum! More and more people understood the power of diversity and not only solving specific single technical problems. A wave of #SharingIsCaring started along with a lot of appreciations for shared and inspiring content.

Also Microsoft started to listen not even closer to its customer’s user voices, but also to its MVP’s. The entire program was renewed with regular feedback calls, events and even swags with give-aways to appreciate, what MVP’s are doing for Microsoft, the community and entire society.

You know, not only MVP’s like to be appreciated. Today it’s one of the most important demands from employees to their managers being happy and satisfied with their jobs. The appreciation among community members - independently if you are a “Microsofty”, an MVP or in another role - is simply outstanding and a great role model for the global society.

Support

This leads me to my last main characteristic for the Microsoft community. Sometimes I’m a little bit sad to remember a few hard times 10 years ago. “Sorry Rob, if you don’t have a case number, where I can book my time, I cannot help you.” While I totally understand the reasons behind, nevertheless, it’s hard in a young career to grow in such an environment.

You may guess, what I'm going to write now. Yes, of course this environment changed entirely. Based on my experiences, not only other community members, but also Microsoft product leaders like?Mark Kashman,?Dan Holme?or?Chris McNulty?always find time to support, when questions are open.

Additionally, the support within the community is tremendous. In forums like?Microsoft Tech Community?not only community rockstars like?Chris Webb,?Chris Hoard?or?Adam Deltinger?are answering on almost every question, but also other members contribute with great ideas and new approaches solving problems asked for.

Furthermore, great blogs from?Vesa Nopanen?or?Oliver Pinkoss?or the Office 365 Distillery from?Marijn Somers?keep us up to date with frequent changes, best practices and recommendations. A great support we can all rely on, when needed.

In this context we also cannot thank enough the conference organizers for their tireless effort of bringing knowledge exchange, fun and diversity to the people. The many amazing online conferences, like?Teams Nation,?365 Saturday Warsaw or the?MWCP helped us not only to extend our skills and knowledge. They also helped feeling inclusive and not alone in difficult COVID times.

This brings me to my closing point and to my family pictures mentioned in the beginning. Under incredibly hard pressure of regulations and new developing virus versions,?Adis Jugo,?Spencer Harbar,?Mike Fitzmaurice?and their Team worked even harder to realize an in-person event, the?European Collaboration Summit. I still believe, they went through this stress and pain only for us – for our community, because #CommunityRocks.

It’s incredibly hard to describe my overwhelming feelings, seeing well-known faces in real again – even when half was mostly covered by a mask. It was a feeling of coming home, absolute inclusivity without any condition, just all together as one community for a common goal, as one family. I enjoyed the entire conference with a smile on my face.

With that said, it was amazing for me to also?support?the community with my session and talks, I’m still super thankful for the?appreciation?before, during and after this time. And in the end, it was THIS conference, which?inspired?me to share my emotions with everyone about this amazing family in Tech and to explain,?Why Community Rocks…