News from TechEd: New MVP Logo!

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This morning Steve Ballmer gave his keynote address to 11,000 TechEd attendees (which you'll be able to watch here shortly).  We saw lots of great things:

  • "Direct Mobile Messaging" - also known by its more catchy name of "Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 and Messaging and Security Feature Pack for Windows Mobile 5.0" or ES2K3SP2+MSFPWM5 for short
  • Microsoft Update
  • A Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet PC
  • Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (why are these product names so long?), now with built-in support for developing managed code add-ins for Outlook!
  • MSN Virtual Earth
  • A great demo with Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005
  • and more!

I was pleasantly surprised to see Samantha Bee from The Daily Show add a bit of humor to the event.  (She'll be back tomorrow, too, for Paul Flessner's keynote.)

But for some, perhaps the biggest news was that yesterday at the Peabody Hotel, the new Microsoft MVP logo was unveiled to several MVPs (and Microsoft employees)!  The rest of the world should start seeing the logo on June 14th unless it leaks out earlier.  Some people were taking pictures with their camera phones, but I haven't seen any appear online yet… :)  Apparently there were many heated debates and hated prototypes, but I think the final logo does a nice job of staying faithful to the original logo while giving it a modern look.

But in all seriousness, it was a great event, and I really enjoyed meeting MVPs (such as Mario Cardinal) and learning more about the program.  Did you know that there's an online directory of MVPs here?  Sean O'Driscoll, the senior global director of the MVP program, gave a great talk about community.  And in the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy, he presented a funny "You Might be an MVP if…" list.  It applied to pretty much all of us geeks, though.  The one that resonated the most with me: "Your spouse gets jealous of your laptop."