Kind of 🙂 Myself, Stefan Dingemanse & Patrick Kohler starting this newsletter over 3 years ago, now when we initially launched the WVD Commuity. We had huge amounts of fun doing this, creating content, hosting a podcast, speaking at multiple conferences together.
At the time we were all employed pretty much as consultants for employers, deploying AVD (or WVD back then as it was) and we have all grown personally and professionally during that 3 year period. Here is our first ever proper newsletter that we published back in April 2020 – https://virtualdesktops.community/2020/04/wvd-weekly-blogpost-5th-april-12th-april/

During that 3 year period, life has changed drastically for all of us and the rest of the world. Some good, some bad. We had COVID, we had close family members pass away, we all went to work for vendors during that time period, we all gained a Microsoft MVP due to our work, there were also births, marriages and lots more. It’s crazy to think it’s only been 3 years, ALOT happens in 3 years!!
Azure Virtual Desktop has also grown drastically during that period also. We had big plans for the community stuff, but with my role as Field CTO for Nerdio, Patrick landing a role at VMWare, and Stefan starting his own business and also starting a young family, it just did not happen due to time constraints from all of us. Recently there have been 3 seperate newsletters and communities running which we thought wasn’t really providing the community with what it needed.
Soooooooooooo, we have made the decision to combine the 3 communities into 1!! The virtualdesktops.community, AVD news of the week run by Johan Vanneuville and the AVD Community recently launched have all decided to combine into one, which is the avdcommunity.com We hope by doing this we can provide more content as there is more of us, and we are providing people with the content that they need. You can find the latest newsletter here – https://avdcommunity.com/avd-community-newsletter-16th-march-2023/
There is much more planned, hopefully bringing back more videos, podcasts and meet ups etc. The AVD Community is made up of:
- Aresh Sarkai
- Christian Brinkhoff
- Jen Sheerin
- Johan Vanneuville
- Marcel Meurer
- Neil McLoughlin
- Stefan Dingemanse
- Thomas Marcussen
It’s been one hell of a ride, and lots of fun writing this newsletter every week, and I want to thank Stefan and Patrick for all their help always. This is definetly not goodbye, we will continue to keep on doing what we do over at https://avdcommunity.com. I will be posting more on my personal blog site which is https://virtualmanc.co.uk
I want to thank you all for the past 3 years, and we will continue to do what we do, just bigger and better in another place.
Over and out!
Neil & Stefan.