Raising the vExpert & Community Bar, Part JC (John Troyer)

Some may call him a medical practitioner, some may refer to him as Cloud City's VMware Architect and others may know him as the VMware Stig ...

but all we know is he is the Great John Troyer!

First off I would like to wish John a Happy Birthday today and hope you have a vAwesome day!

Christopher Kusek, who you may know him as cxi on Twitter reached out to the vExpert community about a month ago regarding a secret embargoed project. We wanted a way to show John our appreciation and all the hard work and dedication he has done for the VMware and virtualization community. What better way than a bunch of blog posts thanking John from the vExpert crew!

I have known John for about three years now and have interfaced with him on many occasions from late night twitter DMs on vSpam in the VMTN blog, access to new VMware betas and embargo briefings, VMTN community forum feedback/improvements and access to VMware engineers for variety of Q/A and bug related questions.

For those of you who do not know John Troyer, he is the social media strategist for VMware, but John really does way more than that. He takes part in supporting the popular VMware Community Forums, VMTN Blogs and PlanetV12n along with several other individuals, he runs the extremely well known VMware Community Podcast every week in which he invites guests from all over to discuss all things VMware and virtualization and he is also the guy who created and runs the VMware vExpert program just to name a few.

John is a very genuine guy and really likes to help others whether it's getting someone in touch with a VMware product manager for more details about a topic or helping a fellow blogger attend a VMworld conference through a blogger's pass because he/she could not afford to attend. I think John has definitely raised the bar not only in the changes to come for the vExpert program of 2011 (which I am personaly excited about) but the VMware community bar as well.

I can not think of a single technology company that has such a great user community with an incredible amount of sharing and collaboration than the VMware/virtualization community. I think part of the reason why our community is so successful is due to people like John who fosters an active communication with the user base.

Cheers to all of John's achievements, his hard work has not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. I would like to personally say Thank You!