We'll miss you, Patrick.
Patrick Tisseghem, long time SharePoint MVP and co-founder of U2U, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, suddenly passed away on September 3rd evening in Gothenburg, Sweden due to heart failure. He is survived by his wife, Linda, and daughters, Anahi and Laura.
On behalf of the SharePoint product group, I offer my deepest condolences to Patrick's family. Patrick was a leading figure in the SharePoint community, well known for his standing room only presentations at conferences and user group meetings as well as respected for his often sold out in-depth technical training courses. Over the past few years, I've come to appreciate him as one of the smartest SharePoint people in the world. He developed key pieces of content for MSDN such as Visual How-Tos, wrote the definitive "Inside Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007" book for MS Press, and provided us with plenty of constructive feedback on how to improve SharePoint. Beyond his professional contributions, Patrick was also one of the most humble and sincere individuals I know, always willing to listen and console no matter how busy he usually was.
For all that Patrick has done for SharePoint and our community, we will miss him dearly. If you would like to share your thoughts or memories about Patrick, feel free to leave a comment here or send a private message to his family via inmemoryofpatrick [at] hotmail.com familyofPatrick [at] u2u.be.
For a couple of other perspectives on Patrick's legacy and impact, go here and here and I could go on, but Doug's post really sums it up for me.
[Update 09/06/2008: Mike Fitzmaurice, former SharePoint Technical Product Manager and a very good friend of Patrick's, provides first hand details in this blog entry about Patrick's contributions during the "early days" of SharePoint that became key factors for the product's success.]
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