My name is Michel de Rooij, and I’m an Office Apps & Services MVP from The Netherlands. I help organizations in their cloud journey, where my focus lies on Identity and Messaging. To be more exact in the Microsoft domain, which translates to Microsoft Exchange, (Azure) Active Directory and Teams. I am a big fan of automation, so automating tasks or create supporting project or administrative tools using PowerShell is also what I love doing.

Background
After my bachelor study Computer Science, I started my professional career as a 3/4GL developer. Back in those days, this meant for me coding in DB3/4, Clipper, some C++ and in the end PowerBuilder. I worked on several applications for data processing, but over time became more interested in working with infrastructure technology. At some point, I got the opportunity to work on an customer infrastructure project, and made the switch professionally at that point.

Since then, I have worked on many projects, ranging from client migrations to designing infrastructure architecture. Since 2004, my work experience has been mainly related to Exchange and related products and technologies, and over time related workloads of Office 365 were mastered as well.

Having a developer background is a big asset as modern infrastructure related projects, as they not only assume scripting (PowerShell) knowledge, but a certain way of breaking down work and integrating solutions as well.

EighTwOne
What’s with this name, EighTwOne? Well, I had to make up a name as all the name variations on mail, exchange and ehlo were already taken. So, used the original RFC number for SMTP, which was RFC 821, and wrote that down: eight two one. Then I noticed overlapping letters between the words, so I left them out, keeping only 1 letter and put that one in uppercase for readability.

So, in short:
RFC 821 => eight two one => EightTwoOne => EighTwOne

Mystery solved 😀

Logo
Recently I changed to site logo from the cheesy ‘cloud’ logo many other sites are using in some shape or form, and replaced it with initials from Exchange, Outlook/Office 365 and Teams icons. I added PowerShell as well because of the code snippets and scripts you can find here.

So, as a mnemonic:

• E is for Exchange is for Eight
• T is for Teams is for Two
• O is for Outlook or Office 365 is for One

Finally
On another note: In case you are wondering where names such as Philip Mortimer, Francis Blake or Olrik, that make an appearance in many examples, come from: I took them from the comics series Blake and Mortimer, created by the late Edgar P. Jacobs.