As 2020 draws to close, I thought I’d take a quick opportunity to highlight what I have been up to this year!
For many of us, its been a year of CHANGE and largely due to COVID-19 with the way we live and work. One thing is for sure that working from home and seeing more people outdoors doing exercise rounds has given a sense of community and belonging. The benefits of virtually no travel, more quality time with family and great technologies for online meetings has been great for us, but also at times the pain and frustrations have been there too!

As most of you may know, I enjoy speaking and sharing all things Microsoft 365 related topics but a lot of these experiences happened online amongst various communities around the world.
By far the most this year I delivered over 20 sessions and volunteering at few events with moderating over 20 sessions – this was very rewarding to stay and feel connected with the community. You can check out all the sessions that I presented with the slides and recordings where organisers made available.

To further contribute and hopefully bringing community together in some form of constant and never ending learning, I set up a new user group, Microsoft 365 UK (M365UK), in June, whereby every month on Wednesdays the event is running for 2 hours with two guest speakers covering variety of topics on Microsoft 365 and related technologies. I am grateful and also thankful for all the M365UK speakers who gave up their time to be with us presenting and sharing their experiences. You can find the slides and recordings here.

With on an off work throughout the year, I managed to schedule my learning and passed exams to transition from my MCSE Productivity certification to Microsoft 365 Enterprise Administrator Expert certification. The MCSE: Productivity Solutions Expert certification will be retired on January 31, 2021. It will continue to qualify as a prerequisite option for this certification until January 31, 2022!

It was also a privilege to be recognised by Microsoft of my contributions to various technical communities with the receipt of Microsoft MVP award (Office and App Services) and is been a great experience so far to be part of the MVP family! There are far too many people to thank here for everyone who I have come in contact with organisers, speakers, attendees and friendly interactions on social media!

Looking head into next year, it sure will be a challenging year for many of us, but I hope to continue through speaking, sharing and stay connected with the community as this is the spirit that keeps me going and hopefully we will all be able to meet soon. Happy New Year!

Published by Chirag Patel @techChirag

Chirag is an independent Microsoft 365 consultant at Patel Consulting, and Microsoft MVP (Office & Apps Services), based in UK with more than 20 years of industry experience. He is also a BCS (British Computer Society) Member & Chartered IT Professional, Microsoft 365 Certified Enterprise Administrator Expert, MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) and TOGAF9 Certified Architect. He works with a wide variety of clients in many sectors, designing and implementing business collaboration, data and information management solutions and services based on Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365 technologies, Power Platform to create business value for both themselves and their customers, including UK Microsoft Gold Partners with deployment, upgrade and migration services delivery. Chirag is an active Microsoft 365 community participant, frequent speaker at local and international events including Microsoft 365 Saturdays, Power Saturdays, SharePoint Saturdays, Collab365, TeamsFest, Modern Workplace Summit and Scottish Summit. You can follow Chirag on twitter at @techChirag. View all posts by Chirag Patel @techChirag