Every year, Microsoft hosts an MVP Summit event at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. MVPs pay their own airfare to get to the event, but once you’re there, Microsoft picks up the tab for food & hotels. MVPs have to share a room, and I think that’s fine because it emphasizes the community portion of the event. By the time you’re an MVP, you should know at least one person well enough to share a hotel room with ’em.

Last week, I attended my first MVP Summit and loved it. You know those people in your office who always know about the coolest web sites, phone apps, and software programs before everybody else? The ones who know a million shortcut ways to do things faster and easier? Over a thousand of those people were in Redmond last week, walking around from one meeting room to another, sharing their knowledge and excitement.

And you know those people who have the highest standards for software and infrastructure? The ones who always seem to say, “That’s not good enough – go back and build it again, but this time here’s how to do it better.” Those people were in Redmond too, and perhaps not surprisingly, they gave Microsoft a lot of that kind of feedback. “Product X isn’t good enough,” they’d say, “and you need to build it again, only this time add more cowbell.” If you were going to send community representatives to Microsoft to speak on your behalf, MVPs are a great group of people to send.

And you know those people who have really strong opinions about technology?  They were hanging out in Redmond hallways having wild discussions, challenging each other in new ways.  Sean McCown and I had a loud, passionate debate about database mirroring, log shipping, and replication.  Think about that for a second – when was the last time you had a passionate debate about high availability?  And no, arguing about whether or not Access is highly available does not count.

What Happens at the MVP Summit

The MVP Summit puts MVPs in touch with the product groups.  We get to ask questions about upcoming technology, and Microsoft gets to ask us if they’re doing it right.  It’s really good for relationship-building on both sides.  In some sessions, the development groups asked – and took – a lot of feedback about how specific features could work better.  I had to pinch myself and say, “Am I really getting a voice in what’s coming in SQL Server?  Am I really going to see the product change in the next release?”  Sure, there’s Microsoft Connect, but I never really felt like Connect requests got taken seriously.  And heck, for all I know, the feedback in these sessions may not be taken seriously either.

Attendees got a lot of future-direction information that helps them focus on where their career should go next.  After a couple of sessions, I found myself saying, “Knowing ____, now I won’t invest any of my time learning ____, and I’ll focus on learning ____ instead.”  Now I understand how people can bring out books and training so fast.  It’s not enough to play with the CTP releases the day they come out – you need even more heads-up advance warning than that to produce quality content, and the MVP Summit can provide that.

The most useful thing about the Summit for me wasn’t the sessions, though.  My favorite moments were talking with Buck Woody in the hallway, having breakfast with my MVP lead Ryan Bolz, and getting face-to-face time with my SQL peeps that I don’t get to see often enough.  Next year, I’ll do two things different; I’ll attend more non-SQL sessions like SharePoint and Visual Studio, and I’ll create my own side sessions before and after the MVP events.  I’m thinking about organizing a SQL breakfast on the first morning because so many East Coast folks were sitting around bored at 6am.

It wasn’t all unicorns and candy, though.

The M Doesn’t Stand for Mature

Before I was an MVP, I got so pissed off about MVPs who would tweet things like, “I’m seeing cool stuff, but I can’t tell you because it’s NDA.” Now that I’m on the other side, I have even less tolerance for that. Sure, MVPs see cool things, but they’re not going to be in production for months or even years, so why breed resentment with the public?  Stunningly, some absolute boneheads go so far as to violate their NDA by tweeting the confidential news:

It gets even worse.  We had at least one incident where an MVP (not a SQL Server one, either) got carried away at a party and screwed around with someone else’s Twitter account.  Stunts like this hurt everyone’s reputation.  You might think that MVPs are the cream of the professional crop, and that these kinds of things wouldn’t happen in such a group of consummate professionals.  You’d be wrong.

If you want to get the MVP award, you don’t need maturity and good interpersonal skills.  But if you want to stay one….