I am a little late blogging about this, by last month I attended the inaugural Microsoft Evangelism Academy (#EvangelOz) which was organised by Andrew Coates (@coatsy) and Sarah Vaughan (@sarahvaughan) at Microsoft DPE. The goal of this program is to take 8 of us to the next level with our presenting! It started with 3 days of coaching, it will continue until August 2011 and will include:

• Monthly conference calls
• Monthly 1 on 1 catchup over the phone with a mentor
• 1 day of group training in Melbourne every 2-3 months
• Talk at UserGroups, Conferences and whatever we can!

I was lucky enough to attend with:

• James Bannan (@JamesBannan)
• Windows Desktop Experience MVP
• Steven Nagy (@snagy)
• Windows Azure MVP
• John O’Brien (@soulsolutions)
• Windows Live MVP
• Jeremy Thake (@jthake)
• SharePoint MVP
• Chris Walsh (@ChrisWalshie)
• Windows Phone 7 guru
• Bronwen Zande (@BronwenZ)
• Windows Live MVP
• Mark Rhodes (@MRhodes)
• SharePoint Infrastructure guru

Over the three days I made some new friends, and learnt a lot about the art of presenting. We covered many areas including Motion, Gestures, Eye Contact, Voice, Stance, Visuals, Content and much more.

I found the whole exercise quite challenging and have to say thanks to Steve Herzberg (@nrgsteve) and Melony Dos Remedios from NRG Solutions. They were great mentors, and I look forward to catching up with them again in February!

Hopefully I will post some video’s/pictures of the course over the few weeks, but in the meantime you can have a look at any of the others blog posts about EvangelOz =)

• http://mrhodes.net/2010/12/22/a-few-days-at-the-microsoft-evangelism-academy/
• http://demonictalkingskull.com/2010/12/microsoft-evangelism-academy-day-1/
• http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/Blog/tabid/73/EntryId/670/Day-1-at-the-Evangelism-Academy.aspx
• http://wss.made4the.net/archive/2010/12/16/microsoft-evangelism-academy-australia-evangeloz.aspx