First of all, I’d like to start off by thanking YOU, my readers and followers. I hope you’ve had a wonderful 2012 and I wish you the very best for 2013. I sincerely hope that 2013 not only will be an enjoyable year, but foremost one that’s loaded with purpose and meaningfulness.

Following the example of fellow UC Architect Michel de Rooij and co-blogger (also an Exchange MVP) Andy Grogan and probably many, many more; here’s my view back on 2012 and some early thoughts on 2013…

Make sure you take a look at their ponderings too. Fun facts, light reading > ideal for a new years eve! Winking smile

Looking back on 2012

For me, 2012 has been an exiting year in which I’ve been able to do lots of things. I’ve attend my share of seminars, met tons of great people and had the opportunity to speak a various events. But above all, I’ve had loads of fun! 

Amongst the highlights of 2012, the following events definitely earn their place:

  • the revival of my “personal” blog on michaelvh.wordpress.com next to www.pro-exchange.be (Belgian UC Community)
  • joining “The UC Architects”
  • Attending the also-revived Microsoft Exchange Conference, TEC Europe (Barcelona), MCT Summit in Poland…
  • The release of the entire Wave-15 product-range (Exchange 2013, Office 2013, Lync 2013, …)

image When looking back at the site stats, I’m actually amazed to see that
– since July – I’ve been able to attract a little over 40.000 views! Not
bad of a first half-year!

I honestly didn’t believe I had posted this much articles over the past few months…God bless my wife for letting me spent that much time on this! 🙂

Unsurprisingly, amongst the top posts were the ones about Exchange 2013 like:

Looking forward to 2013

Although 2012 has been a very interesting and rewarding year, 2013 seems to be taking off even better.

So far, I’m confirmed to be speaking at the Belgian TechDays and I’ve got a few TechNet webcasts coming up in January. Next to that, my employer agreed to send me to the MC(S)M training, which – if all goes well – I hope to attend in May/June of 2013! (How cool is that?!)

There’s one more thing that I wanted to announce, but due to some (minor) setbacks, I’ll have to wait a few more days before making it public. Either way, I hope it’ll be worth waiting because it’s something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while now. But more on that later…

Next to all of this, I look forward to continue working with my fellow UC Architects on our awesome podcast. No, for once I’m not going to be modest about it: It’s really awesome! 🙂

So far we’ve recorded about 14 episodes. If you haven’t had the time to listen to one of them: NOW is a perfect time to do so. We’ve had the opportunity to have some very interesting guest speakers in some of our episodes and each episode is always stuffed with great news, views and insights from leading experts in the industry.

We’ll also be working hard in 2013 to maintain this level of quality, but with the lineup of “special guests” we have in mind, that won’t be much of a problem.

There’s nothing much left for me to do in 2012 except to thank YOU once more for visiting my blog and keeping the Exchange community alive! See you in 2013!

Michael