Future Decoded – MVPBuzz – My first conference experiences as a Microsoft MVP

Many years, I’ve been going to Microsoft conferences, first the Evolution conferences in London and then for the last 4 years the Future Decoded. For the last 2 days I’ve enjoyed many sessions.

From the presentation by Julia White…

The Presentation about accessibility by where Haiyan Zhang shows us 3 situations where people with disabilities are helped by technology and are able to do a job like you and I.

Sessions about migration to the cloud with Azure…

Sessions about GDPR and Compliance Manager

Quantum Computing… I now actually understand how complicated this is. Leo Kouwenhoven did a great job explaining the basics.

Meeting football star Gary Neville, talking about character in young people.

But also meeting up with former colleagues like MVP Wes Hacket.

And this gets me to my point of this post. I recently earned my MVP jacket as Microsoft has recognized my work that I have done within the SharePoint community. Being recognizable as an MVP at a conference seems to make a difference.

I had a few people recognizing me from my blog posts. A number of people contacted me through the Futere Decoded App as they saw business opportunities.

But I have noticed that a lot of people look at the MVP badge and don’t dare to open a conversation or ask a question.

I’ve seen this for a few years, but never experienced in directly myself before. The nice thing is that once you start a conversation people love to talk to you.

I’ve always contacted people directly. It seems to be the Dutchman in me! But for some reason though people seem to be scared off by MVPs a bit. Then I started to think about why did we get our MVP? As mentioned above “Work in the Microsoft community”. We all love presenting, talking about technology and above all helping people.