MVP Award Technology Structure

For over 20 years, the Microsoft MVPs have played a vital role in the support, advancement and adoption of our technologies. Today there are more than 4,000 MVPs globally, and many of them now design, build and innovate across multiple platforms, devices and technologies-including open source, creating holistic solutions and helping others to do the same.

In this mobile-first, cloud-first world, the ability to recognize the broad array of community contributions MVPs make across cutting edge technologies and constant innovation is essential. The MVP Award structure is designed to align with Microsoft's top priorities, while at the same time, allowing us to be agile with the pace of innovation, changes in the market and wide range of contributions you make in the communities today.

We award MVPs in Award Categories which encompass a great number of Developer and IT Pro focused technology areas-including open source. Our Award Categories are specifically designed at a high level for durability and enablement of broad contribution recognition of MVPs in these technology areas. They are also directly aligned to Contribution Areas, an array of related technologies under each Award Category. The Contribution Areas are designed to be dynamic and may change as industry, products and services evolve. They also provide greater insight toward MVP contributions, enabling rich conversations and deeper engagements with our product teams.

A key element of the MVP Award structure is recognition. If you contribute to areas that span multiple technologies, you have the opportunity to potentially be recognized in multiple MVP Award Categories. We are very excited about this for our community!

MVP Award Categories

The details of the new Award Categories and Contribution Areas, focused on Developer and IT Pro products and services, are as follows:

Award Category	Microsoft Azure	Windows Development	Office Development	Developer Technologies	Data Platform	AI
Contribution Areas	Azure App Service Azure IoT Azure Service Fabric Enterprise Integration Azure Compute (VM, VMSS, HPC/Batch, Cloud Services) Azure Storage Azure Networking Azure Backup & Recovery Azure Security and Compliance Azure Container Services (Docker, Windows Server) ARM & DevOps on Azure (Chef, Puppet, Salt, Ansible, Dev/Test Lab) SDK support on Azure (.NET, Node.js, Java, PHP, Python, GO, Ruby) Azure Stack Azure Blockchain	Windows App Development Windows Mixed Reality Windows Hardware Engineering (IoT, Mobile, and Desktop) Windows Design	W/X/P Development Microsoft Graph SharePoint Development Microsoft Teams Development Outlook Development	ASP.NET/IIS .NET C++ ALM Developer Security Visual Studio Extensibility Front End Web Dev Node.js PHP Python Java Unity Xamarin JavaScript/Typescript Accessibility	Azure Data Lake Azure Cosmos DB Azure HDInsight and Hadoop & Spark on Azure Azure Search Data Warehousing (Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Fast Track & APS) Azure Stream Analytics Cortana Intelligence Suite Information Management (ADF, SSIS, &Data Sync) Power BI SQL Server, Azure SQL Database & SQL Server on Linux SQL Server Reporting Services & Analysis Services SQL Server R Services & Microsoft R Server Azure Database for MySQL Azure Database for PostgreSQL	Cognitive Services Azure Bot Service Cognitive Toolkit Azure Machine Learning

Award Category	Cloud & Datacenter Management	Enterprise Mobility	Windows & Devices for IT	Office Apps & Services	Business Applications
Contribution Areas	Datacenter Management PowerShell Hyper-V Storage Networking High Availability Enterprise Security Group Policy Windows Server for Small & Medium Business Linux on Hyper-V Chef/Puppet in Datacenter Container Management Linux in System Center/Operations Management Suite	System Center Configuration Manager & Microsoft Intune Identity and Access Information Protection Remote Desktop Services	Windows for IT Surface for IT	Office 365 Exchange SharePoint Skype for Business Yammer Microsoft Teams Access Excel OneNote Outlook PowerPoint Visio Word OneDrive Project Microsoft Stream	Dynamics NAV Dynamics GP Dynamics 365 PowerApps and Flow

With these enhancements to the MVP Award, MVPs and Microsoft are in an even better position to help people and companies around the world make the most of their technologies.