With great honor and joy I can announce that I have been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for the seventh consecutive year, again in the category Office Apps & Services. Congratulations to other new and re-awarded MVPs as well, and kudos to the MVP program in undertaking the monstrous task of reviewing and evaluating thousands of contributions every award cycle.
With another award cycle also comes the time to have a look at the MVP statistics. Below numbers are taken from the public MVP site. July 3rd is chosen as the first days the site gets updated and new awardees need to turn in their NDA before they show up on the site.
Because people can get awarded each month, the comparison to July 3rd of every year indicates only yearly trend. Therefor we’ll also compare the numbers to those of June to see the impact on long-term MVP population, as awardees from January are only up for consideration in July 2021 for example.
From the numbers, it is clear that this cycle the number of MVPs went a bit down from 2.998 in June 2020 to 2.850 now (-5%), but it is higher than the 2.634 (+8%) of July 2019.
The following table contains the changes per award category from July 2019 and June 2020 to July 2020. I will leave the interpretation up to you.
| Expertise | July 2019 | June 2020 | Change | July 2020 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud and Datacenter Management | 232 | 242 | 4% | 209 | -10% |
| Microsoft Azure | 409 | 455 | 11% | 463 | 13% |
| Office Apps & Services | 491 | 530 | 8% | 512 | 4% |
| Business Applications | 166 | 234 | 41% | 240 | 45% |
| Data Platform | 332 | 375 | 13% | 358 | 8% |
| Developer Technologies | 644 | 742 | 15% | 697 | 8% |
| Enterprise Mobility | 106 | 119 | 12% | 113 | 7% |
| AI | 84 | 109 | 30% | 122 | 45% |
| Office Development | 47 | 60 | 28% | 64 | 36% |
| Windows Development | 119 | 123 | 3% | 110 | -8% |
| Windows and Devices for IT | 57 | 55 | -4% | 43 | -25% |
| Total Awards | 2687 | 3044 | 13% | 2931 | 9% |
| Total MVPs | 2634 | 2998 | 14% | 2849 | 8% |
Note: The total number of MVPs doesn’t equal the total number of awardees, as MVPs can be awarded in more than one category; there are now 82 people awarded in multiple categories’; an increase of 57% compared to June 2019.
When zooming in on the Office Apps & Services category, the awards per country are shown below, including change compared to last year. Be advised that 26 OAS MVPs are anonymous or have profiles without information on residency.
| Country | Number | Country | Number | Country | Number |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | 24 (20%) | India | 13 (0%) | Saudi Arabia | 1 (0%) |
| Austria | 3 (0%) | Ireland | 1 (0%) | Serbia | 1 (0%) |
| Belgium | 5 (-38%) | Israel | 1 (0%) | Singapore | 3 (0%) |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina | 1 (0%) | Italy | 5 (-17%) | Slovakia | 1 (0%) |
| Brazil | 8 (-20%) | Japan | 20 (-10%) | Slovenia | 2 (0%) |
| Bulgaria | 2 (0%) | Korea | 12 (0%) | South Africa | 4 (-20%) |
| Cambodia | 1 (100%) | Luxembourg | 1 (100%) | Spain | 12 (50%) |
| Canada | 33 (6%) | Macedonia, FYRO | 2 (0%) | Sri Lanka | 1 (0%) |
| China | 17 (6%) | Malaysia | 1 (0%) | Sweden | 9 (80%) |
| Colombia | 5 (25%) | Mexico | 5 (0%) | Switzerland | 3 (50%) |
| Croatia | 5 (25%) | Myanmar | 1 (100%) | Taiwan | 4 (0%) |
| Czech Republic | 2 (0%) | Nepal | 1 (0%) | Thailand | 2 (-34%) |
| Denmark | 6 (0%) | New Zealand | 6 (0%) | The Netherlands | 22 (4%) |
| Egypt | 1 (0%) | Nigeria | 2 (100%) | Turkey | 2 (0%) |
| El Salvador | 1 (0%) | Norway | 6 (0%) | Ukraine | 2 (0%) |
| Finland | 4 (33%) | Pakistan | 1 (-50%) | United Arab Emirates | 1 (-50%) |
| France | 18 (-10%) | Poland | 6 (50%) | United Kingdom | 33 (17%) |
| Germany | 24 (-4%) | Portugal | 3 (50%) | United States | 123 (2%) |
| Hungary | 2 (0%) | Russia | 9 (12%) | Uruguay | 1 (0%) |
And last, the number of Office Apps & Services and total number of MVP’s over the last years, before and after the award cycle.
| June 2017 | July 2017 | June 2018 | July 2018 | March 2019 | July 2019 | June 2020 | July 2020 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OSS | 532 | 449 | 490 | 383 | 622 | 491 | 530 | 512 |
| -16% | 9% | -22% | 62% | -21% | 8% | -3% | ||
| Total | 4134 | 3490 | 3815 | 3030 | 3205 | 2634 | 2998 | 2849 |
| -16% | 9% | -21% | 6% | -18% | 14% | -5% |
On a final note, the above data is static; some MVPs have build great dashboards which allow you to work with the data more interactively (if they have updated their data set, that is). Some noteworthy mentions:
- MVP Monitor, by Andrew Koltyakov
- Microsoft MVP Power BI Report, by Reza Rad
If you have questions or comments, please leave them in the comments below.
A quick blog on recently published security updates for Exchange Server 2013 up to Exchange Server 2019. These fixes address the following vulnerabilities:
Updated April 12th: Notice on KB4487563