Problems with Indian MVP Community Emails

Problems with Indian MVP Community Website and Email List

For those who are not aware of the Microsoft MVP award, here is a brief introduction:

MVPs are independent experts who are offered a close connection with people at Microsoft. To acknowledge MVPs’ leadership and provide a platform to help support their efforts, Microsoft often gives MVPs early access to Microsoft products, as well as the opportunity to pass on their highly targeted feedback and recommendations about product design, development, and support.

And I am glad to be an MVP, and I feel privilegded to be in the company of such experts, its truly an invaulable experience. Now coming back to the Indian, or rather South-Asian MVP group. This group, just like other regional MVP groups, comprises of industry experts and community leaders with some of them having multiple specializations in different MS product areas. Most of the members have their own "fan" following, hence there is a great deal of "community excitement" involved. But it is indeed sad to see the way the community activity of the group is managed by Microsoft.

I really fail to understand why Microsoft (or rather MS India to be specific as I am not sure how the MVP groups works in other regions) cannot create a simple community website, or atleast buy some decent community software out there in the market to make the MVP interactions much more manageable and interactive. Here are the main issues I see with the way the MVP interactions are carried out by MS:

1. The emailing list: this medieval age concept is a real PITA. You get tons of emails daily, flooding and sometimes choking email bandwidth. Even if you select the less bothering digest settings, it is still an issue going through so many emails out of which only a few may interest you. I specifically cannot go for digest settings because there are some really good emails which I do not want to miss or recieve them late. I cannot subscribe to specific feeds, infact there is no concept of feeds if you use emailing lists. Why cannot MS simply get rid of such distribution lists and create a simple community website with forums or Facebook like notifications for a "smoother" and less-invasive community experience? Truly reminds me of the Dark Ages!

2. Polls and surveys: the MVP community site (atleast the Indian one) is nothing but a pathetic excuse of a community website. It sometimes doesnt run in FF and Chrome, and is badly designed. To make things worse, sometimes we get surveys which are on a compeltely different website (like SurveyMonkey). Why cannot a centralized community website aggregate all this data, including polls and surveys?

3. Events: community events are extremely important considering the huge amount of learning as well as networking opportunities through such events.. but these events managed through multiple websites..for example for the MVP Open Day we sometimes have a brand new website, whereas some other events are managed via the list itself and others through the "ugly" MVP site.

4. No centralized file/document management: there are many invabluable community contributions, guidebooks, and other useful files and data. Usually these are distributed through emails or the badly managed website.

5. Announcements: If a member gets a new job, becomes a parent or leaves/joins the group, we get tons of "congratulation" emails. Email ettiquetes are quickly forgotten, instead of sending such congratulatory emails to the owner, they are sent to all the members in the list. Imagine hundreds of members sending their personalized on liners in the distribution list! Now I almost dread the day when someone announces their marriage or parenthood...! It is extremely irritating to see the barrage of emails that follow such an announcement. And this is not related to announcements only, we as members have no way to subscribe to a specific section related emails: Groove MVPs will continue to get bombarded with core ASP.NET tech emails even when they do not want to recieve any such info!

6. No track/history: What if we want to see the previous announcements or see a history of announcements? Only one way: go through all the emails in your inbox. This is Web 2.0!

7. Many other core community aspects either missing or absent.

I know big companies like MS have a certain degree of bureaucracy inbuilt in their systems, and I can understand sometimes it is unavoidable. But running such core technical lists for years like this is simply not acceptable. I wish I can get some decent answers from someone in the MS MVP management level.