Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award

Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award Update - Oct 2015

A lot has changed since Microsoft first recognized 34 exceptional community leaders with the MVP Award in 1993. When they came to meet with the product teams a year or so later, they all fit in a boat—with Bill Gates.

Today there are more than 4,000 MVPs globally, and many of them now design, build and innovate across multiple platforms, devices and technologies, creating holistic solutions and helping others do the same. With this increased agility and openness in mind, we have evolved the MVP program to better align it to today’s cloud-first, mobile-first world.

As part of this evolution, we are shifting much of the traditional MVP Award structure—which recognizes MVPs by technical expertise—to encompass the broad array of community contributions many MVPs make across technologies. The awards for Developer and IT Pro oriented MVPs are moving from 36 areas of technical expertise to a set of 10, new, broader categories that encompass a combined set of 90 contribution areas—including open source technologies. In addition, all MVPs will now be recognized for their community contributions across multiple technologies.

MVPs consistently tell us that one of the things they value most about receiving the award is the connections they make with Microsoft product teams. With these changes to the award, we’ll be gaining greater insight into how and where MVPs contribute to the community and the host of technologies they work with, which will enable much richer conversations and deeper engagements with our product teams.

These changes also will provide local Microsoft teams with increased insight into MVPs’ interests and abilities, opening the door to expanded opportunities for MVPs such as speaking at regional events and having Microsoft evangelists join their MVP-created community events. In addition, all MVPs are now invited to publish, for the first time, on Microsoft’s online community, Channel 9.
New Award Categories

The details of the new Award Categories and Contribution Areas, focused on Developer and IT Pro products and services, that were announced in October 2015 are as follows:
MVP Award Categories list 1 MVP Award Categories list 2
Unchanged Award Categories

In addition to the above, the following Award Categories are carried forward from the previous award structure:
Unchanged Award Categories

With these enhancements to the MVP Award, MVPs and Microsoft are in an even better position to help people and companies around the world make the most of their technologies. If you know an awesome community leader (maybe it’s you?), please nominate them to become an MVP!