Inside the first two parts of this series we explored what MVPs do, how they may be picked, and how this fantastic crew of PowerPoint MVPs can help you along with your PowerPoint situations. we’ll look with the yearly summit conference where MVPs throughout the entire world collect around the Microsoft Redmond Campus. Up to the Summit! many Microsoft MVPs travel from across the globe to gather in Seattle Washington for the annual MVP Summit. Microsoft hosts the summit as an opportunity to provide information on current and future activities, product releases, and MVP coordinating information. In excess of the last few years the amount of time the MVPs spend with their product groups has grown from a single question-and-answer style meeting, to deep dives with the teams lasting a couple of days. Presentations begin preparation months in advance,
Windows 7 Ultimate Serial, special guests from related teams or technology representatives are tasked to present. The team contact has become a rigorously scheduled two full days of presentations, feedback sessions, demos and social gatherings. PowerPoint MVPs, about half were able to come this year. For some the state of the entire world economy made attendance a hardship. However, we still had representatives from as far away as Germany, Korea, Great Britain, India, and of course the Americas. We do have a regular monthly phone call in which all are invited to attend and discuss the state of the application, but it's always great to have face-to-face contact. MVPs start arriving on Sunday, as things get going early on Monday and they need the extra time to get registered, badged, and settle in. A Meet and Greet reception is held for all the teams in the Washington State Convention & Trade Center. It’s a huge crowd. They do get to sit in on a few presentations, just to warm up, during the main hall. Microsoft execs talking about the MVP program,
Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2007 Serial, what’s ahead for your rest of the conference, and other orientation stuff. Then it’s off to a huge hall exactly where a huge number of MVPs gather to drink, dine, and catch up with old friends. Members of the Microsoft MVP coordination group get the product-specific MVPs gathered in signed areas, and a few of the product crew make it in to catch up as well. a quick look on the gathering, with some close-ups of the PowerPoint folks at the end: Breakouts focus on the PowerPoint MVPs activities here, it’s worth noting that their contact was not exclusively with the PowerPoint development team. As mentioned above, our crew has a lot of regular contact with the MVPs, from a regular world-wide phone conference to e-mails and individual phone calls about issues that spring up around the MVPs radar (see MVPs and Escalation from the earlier post in this series.) preparation for the summit,
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, we poll the MVPs to determine what they want to see while in the staff sessions. High on those lists are face-to-face sessions with the teams that add to PowerPoint’s function through Office shared code. The Excel team, who provides Charting function, sat down to discuss difficulties and requests. A programmability session was the focus for MVPs who spend time creating add-ins and tools for other PowerPoint users. The Office Graphics team provided insights into work that was going into the Office SP2 release, as well as the upcoming
Office 2010 product. And we had a couple of surprises, new groups whose names would give away a little too much about yet-unreleased Office plans. sessions on Monday and Tuesday highlighted work being done for PowerPoint in
Office 2010. It would be great to be able to tell you all about those sessions,
Windows 7 Ultimate Activation, and we dearly want to! However, they’re still not public and so we’ll have to leave you with the news that the MVPs were ecstatic about the work we’re currently doing and can’t wait to get their hands on it. we’re not totally teasing here, we promise that once we can start talking about the next PowerPoint release, the whole team will be writing about their features, right here from the PowerPoint Crew Blog. The PowerPoint MVPs get to see behind the scenes at the Microsoft MVP Summit. Fun and Relaxation all of the Office MVPs joined with the product teams for a dinner catered in our Redmond campus office cafeteria. You’ll recall that most of the PowerPoint team is located in Mountain View California, on the Silicon Valley Campus. However, many were able to attend the Redmond dinner, and were joined by our close peers during the Office Graphics team and others. night was the big event, as the whole of the MVP program bussed across the bridge into the shadow of the Space Needle to attend an event at the EMP: Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum. This is the perfect place for technology focused professionals to let their hair down and do live Karaoke or browse the history of popular music or the wonderful visions of the future. and Softies Gather for a group photo in the 2009 MVP Conference Out the Week finds the MVPs back in large sessions with the Microsoft executives, giving more organizational insights and collecting feedback from the MVPs. There were no official product group activities on Wednesday, but the PowerPoint MVPs are notorious self-starters and have for your last few years organized their own farewell dinner gathering. It’s one last time to chat,
Microsoft Office 2007 Serial, praise, and promise the best is yet to come. you PowerPoint MPVs! Bretschneider May 4th, 2009