I am not really into awards and titles, since they are rarely more than an indication of what a person does. There is one exception, though: being a Microsoft MVP does fill me with pride, since I see it as a recognition for what I do in the community, with that (mostly) great technology stack. It is always one of the dearest presents for the new year, to get an email from Microsoft which starts with:
Dear Adis Jugo, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2016 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Office Development and Office Servers and Services technical communities during the past year.
As our industry was changing, the Microsoft MVP award was changing as well. I was first awarded Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server. In September 2015, that title was changed from “SharePoint” to “Microsoft MVP for Office Servers and Services”. That includes Microsoft Office 365 (a service), but also Office Servers (like SharePoint, Exchange, Skype 4 Business, Project Server etc.).
We, “SharePoint people”, have used to have internal division on developers (which were using SharePoint as a development platform), IT Pros (those guys who were keeping your SharePoint up and running), and business (people who took care that SharePoint is understood, adopted and used properly). Even if my work was inevitably in all three fields, my focus was always on creating and delivering software solutions, which were related, or even dependent, on SharePoint in one or another way. In the past five years, this has slowly shifted towards Office 365 stack. Office 365 went public on June 28th 2011, and I had a privilege and honor to demo development options three months earlier, on April 4th 2011 at Micrsosoft’s WinDays conference, in Rovinj/Croatia. I have just looked at the slide deck and the code samples I was presenting back then: even if it was only less than 5 years ago, it seems like ages. It was all about sandbox, CSOM, and yes – integration with Azure! Still no mention of Azure AD, though. And I had that “Microsoft Code” image on my last slide 🙂 Slide deck (in Bosnian) and demo code from that session can still be found on my “Speaking” page.
Since then, as the technology was evolving, my “let’s start with Office 365 development” session has been changing pretty much radically. I spent the good part of the last year speaking about Azure AD, AAD Applications and how they differ from SharePoint Apps/AddIns, and artist formerly known as “Unified API” (now known as Microsoft Graph). I had a privilege to “present” the Microsoft Graph the very same day it went public, on November 18th at Slovenian SharePoint Days conference. Altogether, I was speaking about this topic 14 times in the past 12 months, in 8 different European countries. It was a good ride, this 2015 year.
This is the reason that I am extremely honored, and humbled, to be awarded by Microsoft, another MVP category: “Microsoft MVP for Office Development”. I am, at this moment, one of the first two people to be awarded in two Office award categories (“Office Servers and Services” and “Office Development”), together with the developer legend Scot Hillier. And, one of the first 11 Microsoft MVPs for Office Development world-wide.
I can only thank Microsoft for recognizing those efforts, and promise to invest more time into blogging about this great technology, what somehow stayed aside in the past two years, mainly due to the numerous speaking engagements, which included almost all major SharePoint/Office conferences in Europe.
It is a good ride, it is a job which I love, it is a technology which I love (mostly, actually almost always when I don’t profoundly hate it). And if fits with the upcoming changes in my life, which I will be posting about soon. Thanks everyone for sharing this ride with me. I have the most profound respect and admiration to the people I am meeting along this way.
