On Friday April 1th I got one of the best e-mails in my professional IT career so far, Awarded MVP for Enterprise Mobility for 2016!

This is my first MVP Award, and I’m incredibly proud and honored to be part of such as amazing community and network of professionals.

I thought this was a good opportunity to introduce myself to the community, so in this blog post I will write a little more about myself and what I do.

Some personal info

I’m from Norway, a town called Sarpsborg some 100 kilometers south of Oslo. I work as a Architect for Cloud and Datacenter solutions at Skill AS, a Microsoft Partner with offices in both Oslo and Sarpsborg. My company has received numerous partner prizes and finalist awards over the last years, embracing the Cloud and Microsoft especially.

I’m born in 1971, at an age where I’m old enough to know how and when to use my experience when I need to, and young enough to eagerly learn new stuff and use technology to solve challenges and use solutions creatively. When I’m not working I spend time with my family, I’m married and have two boys at the age of 10 and 12. Its all about football (soccer) in the spare time, and at least 3 of us are huge Arsenal fans. You can guess who 😉 We also spend a lot of time in our cabin in the mountains, where we ski (cross country) a lot. This is where we recharge our batteries, a very needed window of family quality time in a mostly hectic work and activity filled weeks.

Work and career

I’ve been in the IT industry for over 20 years now. When I started I did IT support on IBM OS/2 machines, my first internet e-mail experience was using 3270 terminals and if I remember correctly something called Office Vision. I wrote documents using Lotus Ami Pro, Later I achieved my first Microsoft MCP certifications on Windows 95 and Word 6.0. From there on it has been mainly Microsoft products and solutions for me!

A large part of my first career I spent at a private educational institution, and was an instructor for Microsoft Official Curriculum courses. I kept my Microsoft Certified Trainer certification from 1997-2012. I have spent thousands of hours teaching students and business IT pros on MCSE certifications for NT 4.0, Windows 2000, 2003 and beyond. For a few years I was even a Citrix Certified Instructor. While working as an instructor I started to get more in to consulting as well, working at customer sites and presenting company seminars.

I remember that I could hold the BackOffice 4.5 CD folder in my hand, and say that I had knowledge of all Microsoft management, productivity and server solutions! Try to say that today 😉 The first “System Center” product I worked on was SMS 2.0, later I started working with Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM) from 2000 and up, I have been working with e-mail and productivity from Microsoft Mail via Exchange 5.0 to todays Exchange Online and Office 365, identity solutions from “User Manager of Domains” to Azure Active Directory. It has really been a great journey, but nothing compares to how rapid Microsoft and Cloud solutions evolve these days,

After leaving the educational institution, I worked for a few years as a consultant and freelance training, before I worked some years at an Application Service Provider. I was working with the Datacenter and Infrastructure, moving into virtualization slowly by using Virtual Server 2005! Exchange 2007 was my first meeting with PowerShell, love at first sight, and offered Hosted Exchange as a Service. If only we had something called Office 365 and Azure Stack etc.. 😉

In 2010 and till today I have been with my current employer, Skill. In these years I have been working more and more with Azure, Office 365, Enterprise Mobility Suite and System Center, while at the same time been working closely with Microsoft, being a P-TSP for Cloud OS and Datacenter management.

Community

Over the last years I have been more and more engaged in the community of IT-professionals, visiting conferences, using social media, blogging and networking with other MVP’s and other community influencers. I have also been a speaker at local events and at conferences like Experts Live, Nordic Infrastructure Conference and will also be speaker at this years System Center Universe in Berlin, August.

It is with huge pride my contributions has led me to receiving the MVP award, and I can only look forward to contributing more in the years to come. While Enterprise Mobility and especially Azure AD is an area I focus greatly on, I will also continue to contribute in areas related to Azure, Cloud and Datacenter Management (CDM) with OMS, Service Manager, Operations Manager and more as these are solutions I work a lot with in my daily work as well. I will especially look for contributions where EMS, CDM and Azure can work together and play to each others strengths 🙂

Thanks for reading, looking forward to engage with you all. In addition to this blog, you can follow me at social media using:

Twitter: @skillriver

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jvelven