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Last week Martina and I have been speaking at Unity Connect in Haarlem in the Netherlands. Unity Connect is an IT conference about Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Skype, Yammer, and Azure and took place from 16th to 18th November 2016 in the beautiful city of Haarlem. We arrived on Tuesday evening and entered the stunning inner city of Haarlem with so many cool restaurants and bars. The banner picture of Unity Connect just gives a brief impression of the beautiful buildings in that small town. The conference location was in Philharmonie Haarlem which is actually a concert hall but a very cool event location. With the inner city and the hotels around the corner, this event is - besides the conference offerings - one of my absolute favorite places to go in this region. ...

The European SharePoint Conference took place in Vienna from 14th to 18th November 2016. We took this occasion to meet our friends from the Office 365 community in our home town Vienna for an informal come together aka #SharePintVienna. Right after the MVP Summit week in Redmond, we invited about 60 persons and more than 40 came to our come together at “TheRoom” near the city center for some drinks and dinner on the 14th November. See some snapshots of the evening in this Sway. ...

Each year, Microsoft invites members of the MVP program and the RD program to their headquarter in Redmond, Washington state. This year, the MVP Summit took place from 7th to 10th of November. As in the previous years, for Martina and me this event was a great occasion to come to Seattle area, to connect with other MVPs and Microsoft product managers and to provide feedback on Microsoft technologies. We met friends and colleagues from all over the world. ...

Today, one day after the US presidential elections, there’s an interesting read about coming together in IT industry in blogs.microsoft.com by Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer at Microsoft. Moving forward together: Our thoughts on the US election (My) very short extract: “…And like so many Americans, regardless of who we supported through our vote, we strongly share the view that this is a time for the nation to come together…” ...

Recently, Microsoft launched the Microsoft Regional Directors website at rd.microsoft.com. Finally! Our CEO, Martina Grom, was awarded as Regional Director in 2015, see here. So we are more than happy that there’s now a place where Microsoft informs officially about the Regional Director program. Check it out at rd.microsoft.com. Since it’s not well known, what the Regional Director award is about, there’s a FAQ list at rd.microsoft.com/FAQ. The most frequently asked questions are, if Regional Directors (RD’s) are employed by Microsoft, how they are selected or if they are also MVP. The FAQ’s answer these questions clearly, see the statements summarized here: ...

Project managers and IT personnel, pls. see this animated GIF about “How long it takes to complete a task”. Source: https://www.robbomb.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tasks.gif Thx, @adisjugo for that post! Awesome!

Last week, our third IT/DevConnections conference took place in Las Vegas. We had the pleasure to have several sessions there. The IT/DevConnections conference took place from 10th to 13th of October in the luxurious Aria resort that is located right in the middle of the famous Las Vegas strip. That’s a very cool location for obtaining KnowHow transfer during the day and enjoying the nightlife of Vegas. Besides the networking at the conference, there were social events and parties. ...

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” George S. Patton (1885-1945) …found on Martin’s frig.

It has been a busy week when we’ve been at Microsoft Ignite conference 2016 which took place in Atlanta from 26th to 30th September. This was Microsoft’s second Ignite conference (the first one happened in Chicago in May 2015, see here) with more than 20.000 people attending and more than 1.000 sessions. For us, it was our first time in the US South (in Georgia) and we enjoyed it very much. ...

This week Martina and I have been part of the aOS community event in Aix-en-Provence in South France. See our session presentation and some snapshots of the event here. The aOS Community organizes and supports all types of events promoting the sharing and exchange of Microsoft technologies in various communities in public meetings, conferences and online meetings targeting primarily French speaking countries. The event took place in Aix-en-Provence on 6th September at the campus of YNOV, a school building with perfect infrastructure for such an event (rooms, space, seats, projector, aircondition and fast WiFi). The event web page is Journée aOS Aix en Provence. ...