joeware - never stop exploring... :)

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-india-stress_nu_goeringapr20,1,7771719.story

Indians may have taken over three-quarters of the world’s call-center jobs, but they’ve also taken on the stresses of those jobs: weight gain, depression, boredom and, often, relationship troubles.

The 2008 MVP Summit is over. It included some 2000 MVPs from around the world. I didn’t see and talk to most or even a large number, relatively, of the MVPs. Pretty much I stuck to the 40 or so DS MVPs that were present as well as a bunch of Exchange MVPs[1]. There were some security MVPs as well as a single PowerShell MVP (the unknown MVP) I spent time with as well. Nothing personal, you just don’t have the time in the days available to do otherwise, can’t possibly meet and see everyone you want to, the days are very very filled and busy and all of the folks I see are friends from around the world who I usually get to see once or if I am lucky, twice a year. Not every DS MVP is someone I care to see but the good far outweighs the bad.

As mentioned, the days were packed from the moment I opened my eyes until the moment my head hit the pillow again. Consequently as my life moved into last night I was nearly part of the "walking dead" universal group[2] and I didn’t even need the incredible Heavenly Bed of the Westin to let me sleep like a dead man though it certainly was nice. 🙂 If you ever stay in Seattle, I do highly recommend the Westin. Ask for a high floor, you will not be disappointed I expect. I have stayed in enough hotels at this point to know that many if not most seem to have issues with the bed and the shower, at least relative to the Westin. I use the Westin as the standard for what I expect and/or want in those two categories.

Seattle was once again a beautiful hostess to our time to catch up and see what is going on with our friends building the products we work on every day.While it was gray and rainy much of the time, its just something you come to expect out of Seattle if you come here enough. You just look at it and say… "Hey its just Seattle being Seattle."

And when I say our friends building the products, that is something I mean almost without exception. These people on the DS team are my friends. I may beat up on them occasionally but if I am not beating up on them, I think or at least hope they realize that may not be a good thing because my care and ownership in the product has left me if I am not willing to spend the energy to find out what I don’t like and debate it with them. These are people that although I see them rarely in the overall scope of my life, have great impact on my life and I would very much enjoy seeing them regularly. They are very smart people, in some cases they are scary smart people. I greatly enjoy my interactions with them and look forward to any time I get to spend with them or communicating with them.

I would like to say thanks to the MVP program for putting the summit together so I can come out and see all my friends, both MVP and Microsoft. Thanks to Sean O’ for all his work with the MVPs, I wish you weren’t leaving us but do understand and wish you great luck and success. I unfortunately don’t think the new guy will replace you, just take your old job but hopefully I am wrong. Especially I want to thank the DS Team (including the ever growing and incredibly important AD Backseat Architects) for taking time out to spend with us and talk with us and debate with us on what we should and shouldn’t be doing. I want to thank the team for taking time out to see us, trying hard to make amazing products and also for making me laugh. I wish many of the stories we heard weren’t NDA items because they are incredibly funny and it helps illustrate that these builders of the products we load on our computers are people too and make mistakes and laugh at things just like everyone else in the world.

Let me, for a moment, point out the Backseat Architects specifically… I don’t know everyone in that group but I know of at least three and these three are some of the most passionate and well informed people concerned the DS that I know of. How many companies do you know with people who leave a group or maybe never were even officially part of a group care enough about it to establish a DL to discuss the group and products from that group and help the official folks with all of it? I would love to be on that DL so if any of you figure out a way to pull that off, please do.

Overall, the people around the world who rip on Microsoft and say it and the people who work there are evil and looking to do bad things, etc simply don’t know the people inside the company. They are good people, real people, who want to make things better and do so within the confines and boundaries that exist for them. I know of no other company that I have worked with that has such passion for its products and customers. Not everyone at MSFT is like that, but certainly most of the people I deal with in Redmond certainly are and it is extremely obvious to me.

So thanks to those folks so closely tied to the DS… Thanks for seeing us, thanks for explaining things to us, thanks for debating with us, thanks for the hilarious stories we can’t share with anyone, and thanks for being who you are and doing what you do every day… Thank you ~Eric, Brett, Dmitri, Matt, Nathan, Stephanie, Moon, Uday, Dushyant, Dennis, Siddharth, James, Jason,  and all of the folks I got to meet on this trip whom I haven’t gotten to know well yet.

Several of you will continue hearing from me regularly, some of you should expect to hear from me more, probably considerably  more, so I can make sure I get my input into what you are doing because, well, because I care; I want you to continue to produce products I want to continue to use. :)  If any of you need anything from me, you know where to find me. If I don’t respond, it is simply because I am very busy and just behind or Exchange or Outlook ate the message you sent and you know who to go tap on the shoulder about that. 😉

    joe

[1] Which seem to, as a whole, like me now – ExchMbx really raised my value in the eyes of the Exchange MVPs I think. I don’t feel this was always the case, there was a time where at least some of them were upset with me because they thought I was just calling their baby ugly because I simply felt like saying it was. Over time they seemed to have realized I had some clue what I was talking about and didn’t just do it to complain, but because I wanted to see the product get better… and again, I don’t think ExchMbx hurt me in their eyes…

[2] Bad geek humour

There was, of course, a session, actually several at the MVP Summit about Power Shell and what I was, in particular, involved with, was the Active Directory Provider the MSFT DS team is working towards. At the beginning of the first session I was caught off guard and really had to laugh pretty hard… The design goal according to one of the slides in the PPT deck was… "To make all joe admins… joeware admins…". Basically what they were saying or as I interpreted it was that they wanted to make it so any admin could basically pull off what I pull off in code or otherwise with Active Directory. That was a very nice compliment from the Microsoft folks to me. I mean I have found that the MSFT devs will listen to me and what I have to say but it was very nice to have been told directly like that on a slide. Not really an ego thing, more of a wow, I must be doing something fairly right type thing.

I am not sure how much I can say about the new provider other than they are working on it which I doubt was or is a surprise to anyone anywhere – I mean they had to right? Anyway MVPs are under NDA and I, in particular, am under several NDAs for the various accesses and visibility into the company and I am not willing to risk that. I will say it is a very passionate team working on things who want to try to do the best for the admins to make them flexible and powerful. To be honest I really didn’t see anything that would make me start using PoS but then I am also not the normal product target for that type of product. This doesn’t mean it isn’t good for other people for their various uses. I offered up my services to look over specs and give as much feedback as they are willing to take that will be helpful for the product for its launch. I want them to do an amazing job with it.

Anyway we had one quick brief teaser intro session that was a portion of a larger health/baseline/management session. It was only a few minutes. The next day (Wed) we had a nice 90 minute session which picked up outside on break after the session was over and then eventually picked back up in the main room again between presentations. All total we spent at least a good 3 hours on this new component. It deserves it. This is important stuff. The AD Provider team received a flood of feedback on the product in the course of that three hours and hopefully they will be able to get everything incorporated in the first version. We want to have something that is positively amazing on release or MSFT will find people aren’t using it. We all tried to be very direct about that.

The MSFT DS Dev team needs our help. They need use cases for ADAM 2008 on Vista as well as future client OSes to push for an install that works on Vista and future client OSes. Apparently they want to do it and my response of "what are you kidding me, how come I can’t load it right now?" wasn’t good enough, they need help getting it justified and so if you have any use cases other than for developers… Let me know and I will pass it on.

Sorry MSFT Marketing, I will not call ADAM by the new name you want to give it, ADLDS, no matter how much you want me to….

I also will not call AD, ADDS….