Richard Wilson's Personal Space

Interesting.

The good news is that I'm going to be blogging again.  The not-exactly-bad news is that I'll be blogging over at  http://mikefizmaurce.wordpress.com.  Actually, that's good news.  I'll be blogging elsewhere because in 90 minutes, I'll no longer be a Microsoft employee.

I'm heading to Nintex, a great SharePoint partner, as their Vice President of Product Technology.  Nintex is in the business of creating solutions that augment SharePoint technology.  They have a great workflow solution on the market for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007.  You may remember that, back in the bad ol' days of SPS 2003, they provided SmartLibrary, a product that added undelete, audit trails, and approval routing to document libraries.  They're clever guys that way.  And they're about to release something that's just as clever, if not more so, for IT Pros.  Follow me to http://mikefitzmaurice.wordpress.com and I'll tell you all about it.

But this isn't supposed to be an ad for my new employer.  It's a farewell message.  So here goes...

I haven't been blogging for a year and a half.  There are reasons for that, though.  The most important one is that the reason I started blogging, which was to share info with you on what's going on and to advise you on smart developmet investments, has been subsumed into the SharePoint Team Blog.  When I started, that blog didn't exist.  If you wanted inside, informal, unvarnished info, it was my blog or Arpan Shah's.  Since then, the whole gang has gotten involved, and guys like Lawrence Liu have become cheerleaders and coordinators of those efforts.

The second reason is that I stopped working in SharePoint Marketing almost a year ago.  I've still been part of the team, but I took on a role that essentially had me acting as a liason between the product group and Microsoft's field sales teams, providing technical and competetive assistance when things got escalated.  I'd done technical marketing for five years, and while I loved it, I needed to do something different.  Acting as a competitive strategist and technical diplomat was perfect.  But that job was focused within the company, so blogging outwardly became even less urgent.  I still lobbied the dev teams incessantly, and some of the blog postings you've read were influenced by things I've coaxed or pushed them to write.

This departure isn't motivated by a desire to leave Microsoft, though.  I like the job I've had for the last eleven months, to be honest.  But this opportunity was dropped into my lap and was too good to pass up.  The guys behind Nintex have been good friends, and their company's culture mixes productivity with fun.  Plus I get to evangelize and steer product development.  And help build things that augment a great platform in a very agile environment.  It just feels right.

I started Microsoft in late 1997 in Microsoft Consulting Services, often creating collaboration and messaging solutions using MAPI, Exchange client and server add-ins, Outlook development, and plenty of other things. I was part of the consulting squad that helped the very first early adopter customers beta test "Tahoe", which would become SharePoint Portal Server 2001, and was part of a team that authored best-practice deployment solutions for optimal usage of SPS 2001 and SharePoint Team Services in a corporate intranet.  I became a Technical Product Manager in time to bring SPS 2003 and WSS 2.0 to fruition, and haven't strayed from SharePoint-land ever since.

And I'm not straying from SharePoint-land now.

I'll be blogging about workflow as a general subject and on specific uses of Nintex Workflow to solve problems.  I'll be blogging about solutions to enhance IT productivity, organizaitonal intelligence, development issues, and a lot more.

But give me about a week.  I'm going home to Canada to visit family before I jump on the Nintex bandwagon, just in time to see everyone at TechEd.

Love & Kisses,

--Fitz

I'm Back -- Just In Time To Move On...
MikeFitz
Thu, 22 May 2008 05:19:00 GMT

Interesting statement

While all the interest Microsoft’s potential “transaction” with Yahoo  is getting, it’s easy to forget that online advertising isn’t Microsoft’s only strategy for monetizing its current and future Web-centric services.

Subscription licenses also are going to be a big piece of Microsoft’s cloud-monetization puzzle. Microsoft already is selling Microsoft-hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint to large enterprises. In March, it started beta testing Microsoft-hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Office Communications Server that will be sold to smaller companies, as well. The new subscription plans for those Microsoft-hosted offerings should be on the price list some time in the latter half of this year.

Microsoft seems pretty confident that its customers are going to stay in the fold by moving from on-premise Microsoft business apps to Microsoft-hosted versions of the same. From a recent Reuters story:

“In five years, 50 percent of our Exchange mailboxes will be Exchange Online,” said (Microsoft Senior Vice President Chris) Capossela, who expects a portion of Exchange Online customers to come from customers switching from International Business Machines’ Lotus Domino system.”

What’s your take? Is Capossela’s projection overly ambitious? Too conservative (in that it shouldn’t take five years for this move to happen)? Or does it sound on the money, to you?

Microsoft: Half of Exchange inboxes to be Microsoft-hosted in five years
Mary Jo Foley
Mon, 19 May 2008 19:03:52 GMT

Hi. I’m Rob Silver, a writer on the IT Pro content team for SharePoint. I’d like to inform you about some content I recently researched and authored about governance with respect to SharePoint Server 2007. Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that you establish in your enterprise to guide, direct, and control how it uses technologies to accomplish business goals. To strike the right balance between the needs of the SharePoint users in your enterprise and the IT professionals who deploy and operate SharePoint Server, we recommend that you form a governance body that includes representatives of all stakeholders in the SharePoint deployment. This body can then create and enforce rules that govern the use of SharePoint.

Here are some topics to help you determine the aspects of your SharePoint deployment to govern and the methods to use:

• What is governance? defines governance and introduces two key areas to govern: IT services and information architecture.
• Establishing and governing a SharePoint service describes typical elements of an IT service hosting Office SharePoint Server 2007, suggests key success factors in governing the service, and provides an example of a three-tiered service.
• Implementing and governing information architecture introduces the concept of information architecture, recommends how to govern it, and presents an information architecture case study.
• Governance features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 reviews a set of Office SharePoint Server 2007 features that your organization can use to help govern your Office SharePoint Server deployment.

I’m very interested in your feedback on this new content. Do you find it useful? Is it the right level of detail? Do you agree or disagree with particular recommendations? Is there additional content you'd like to see added? There are three ways you can provide feedback. First, in each topic you will find a "Was this information helpful?" control with a text box for supplying feedback. Second, you can send us mail at "o12ITdx [at] microsoft.com". Third, you can use the "Leave a Comment" interface on this blog to provide feedback, either on this blog entry or on the governance content.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you and to evolving this content in partnership with you.

Thanks,

Rob Silver

Office SharePoint Server IT Pro content team

A great video. Thanks Brad for showing me.

Ever wondered what Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft might look like? If you have a few minutes, you might want to check out this short video depicting just that. (And you thought everyone at Microsoft was just business 24X7) Enjoy and I hope you get a few laughs out of it.

Thank you and have a wonderful day,

Eric Ligman
Microsoft US Senior Manager
Small Business Community Engagement
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

A picture of Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft
mssmallbiz
Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:26:00 GMT