It's an honor to be able to say that I'm officially a Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint and I’m the Go-Kart Master of SPR3.
I can remember myself laughing while reading the announcement of the MCM for SharePoint. My first thoughts were, out of my league, not enough budget. But one of our guys was so excited about this certification that he came up with the plan to use our bonus (it still hurts) as fund for the certification. So we decided to go for it and apply for the Master program.
Our first milestone was the moment we got accepted for the training. After being accepted we got the pre-reading list (which is a long list) and so we started studying right away. During this time the first blog posts started to surface on the internet telling us how hard this training is and what a great experience it is. This made me think that I would never pass on the first try. On May 31st the adventure began, together with my colleague Marcel van der Lem, two other Dutch guys (Johan Kroese and Donald Hessing) we flew to Seattle for the moment of truth. Arriving on Saturday we had two days to get used to the time difference, do some shopping and relax a little. Apparently we were lucky because the weather in Seattle was terrific (they told me it usually rains in Seattle). This lasted until Monday the 1st of June because from that moment on we were pretty much locked up in a classroom with 16 of the worlds best SharePoint people and one of the worlds best SharePoint ladies. Our days were long and nights were short. All we did was listen, learn and practice hands on labs. No time for work, mail or sightseeing. We literally saw every aspect of SharePoint and each attendee was provided with its own blade server for the labs. The general comment on the blades was “I’ve got to get me one of these”. During these three weeks we had some of the worlds best teachers for such a small group. All sessions were very interactive and that resulted in a lot of interesting discussions. Trust me when I say that going to all the top SharePoint conferences in a year doesn’t come close to this experience. I ate Chinese food for almost three weeks and I managed to finish two 1,2 KG bags of M&M’s. You can image that I was more than happy knowing we would fly home the day after the QualLab.
Cheers,
Robert Jaakke
