I have become a Sitecore MVP!

I am very happy and proud to announce that I have become a Sitecore MVP! For seven years, I have tried to become a SharePoint Server MVP, but last year I thought: screw you SharePoint, Hello Sitecore! Of course, I am just kidding ;). I have worked for years on very cool SharePoint projects, together with Microsoft, Avanade, a bunch of SharePoint MVP’s and some other very high skilled people. I had the chance to meet great people on SharePoint Saturdays, DIWUG, the SharePoint Conferences, Ignite, I shared a lot of the things we learned at Achmea on SharePoint, Security and WCM and learned a lot from the community.

But things change

Microsoft doesn’t invest much anymore in the Web Content Management capabilities of SharePoint, let alone the digital marketing capabilities. The move towards the App model, all the Office 365 API’s and the recent announcement to get rid of WCM in Office 365 was a direct roadblock for a possible migration of our public facing websites to the cloud in the far, far future.

And then came Sitecore…

Last year, we invested a lot, together with Microsoft, Avanade and Sitecore in this platform and in our Sitecore capabilities. We believe that the Sitecore platform can help us further and help us to reach our commercial goals in the near future. Of course, the Sitecore plaform isn’t perfect (no product is), so from the start, we had a lot of good discussions on infrastructure, platform deployment, product features, technical challenges, building Sitecore capabilities, together with our partners, Microsoft, Sitecore and some community members. As I believe it’s important to invest into the community and the fact that I like to share knowledge, I immediately started to participate in the community; visiting the SUGNL, writing blogs, getting in touch with the members, giving feedback to Sitecore on various (important) Sitecore features.

And now I am a MVP!

I was really honored, flabbergasted, thrilled, proud and excited when I got the message that I have become a Sitecore MVP. I really hope that I can meet all the expectations and that I am a worthy MVP. I’ll continue to share my findings and vision on Sitecore from an enterprise perspective, and I really hope that I can inspire you all to do great, and most important, FUN things as well! See you at SUGNL, SUGCON EU, or even maybe some other conferences J

By the way: this doesn’t mean that I leave the SharePoint community; We’re still doing great things with SharePoint WCM and collaboration, I just have less focus on it. If there some cool things to share, I’ll blog about it.