We are 4 years old!

[The_Exchange_Team]

Yes indeed, today marks the 4 year blogoversary of our blog! Can you believe it? Here was the first post! We get all mushy and kind of proud around here this time of the year... It has been a really wild ride for us, and we hope that you have enjoyed it too. A few things that show how far we have come:

• Since the very beginning, we posted 836 blog posts; that puts us at around one post every other calendar day.
• Those 836 blog posts had 634 screenshots/illustrations in them.
• We had around 200 different people author blog posts for you. Note that for every one of those, there were at least 2 other people that reviewed the post before it was posted.
• You have posted about 7300 comments on our blog posts.
• We get around 7 million page views a month. Thanks for coming back!

Pretty cool, huh! Yeah, we are very impressed with our blog over here... Now, how do we celebrate? We have some Exchange Server swag to give away! We are still figuring out exactly what we will give away, but we will give away some Exchange branded stuff, one way or the other. Probably a few items each for people that impress us with their humor. The best one gets something extra special. What do you have to do, you ask? In the past, we had a few limerick contests (see here and here), so this time we wanted to try on a different kind of funny stuff. How do comics sound? We were inspired by Office Offline blog and the simplicity of creating comics if you use this Visio template that David Salaguinto provided. If you don't have Visio right now, you can get an eval from here. We ask for only one thing: that your comics be themed around email/messaging. Client, server, anything in between... there are so many possibilities. Somehow, you should incorporate it in. Have fun. Make us all laugh! We'll take your submissions for next 2 weeks. Send them to the following email: ehlocont AT Microsoft DOT com. Putting "comic submission" in subject would be appreciated. Our panel of expert judges <g> will pick the top 5 funniest comics and post them here. We'll contact the top 5 through email once we made our selections, to get your snailmail address so we can send you your swag. Microsoft-internal submissions qualify for honorable mention but not the swag pile. Of course, we have to be proper here, so we also wanted to say this: By submitting your comic to Microsoft, you agree that you are doing so voluntarily, and that Microsoft shall be free to copy, edit, modify, license, publicly display, create derivative works, and otherwise use your submission in whole or in part at any time and as it sees fit, entirely without obligation or restriction of any kind to you or any third party. - The Exchange Team