Hello from Cathy!

In my previous lifetime I was a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) living in Silicon Valley. SMS and TCP/IP were my specialties. Yeah, I like training the stuff that makes people’s eyes cross from the complexity. During the .com boom I taught a heck of a lot of people how to subnet. I took the SMS 1.0 course and finally started teaching the 1.2 version. Man, that was a complicated class to teach! It was sort of like a first year anatomy class in med school - this service connects to that service. We still had some of that in the SMS 2.0 course, which I taught for several years. Even with eight days of courseware, it was hard to convey all that they needed to know about SMS.

 

I started at Microsoft as a courseware writer. I did some preliminary work as a vendor on an earlier incarnation of the 2596 course, back when they were going to try to teach all the ops and planning in five days. After I left that project, they got some user feedback that it just wasn’t possible. As a full time employee (what we call a “blue badge because the badges have a blue background) I worked on some security courses, and also on a new type of course offering from MS Learning called a Workshop. But I always missed my SMS roots and was eager to get onto the SMS writing team.

 

My first project on the SMS writing team was working on the KB content for the SMS 2003 MOM Management Pack. I think my favorite thing was writing the first version of the SMS 2003 technical FAQ. It was one of those things were we all said, hey, we need this, and we just got it done. I also wrote the Scenarios and Procedures for SMS 2003: Security. Well, wrote and rewrote. Paul Thomsen wrote most of the original content for the Concepts, Planning and Deployment Guide but we wanted to pull out that content and try to make it more “actionable”. In the other S&P guides, we did a lot of flow charts, but the security guide didn’t really lend itself to a flow chart so I did some checklists.

 

When we started planning v4, I moved into being a project lead for that. I wrote the vision and the master doc plan for the v4 content and am trying to nudge the project through its milestones. I don't manage the writers - that's Steve's job - I just lead the v4 core doc work. I’ll still write the v4 security guide, though I’ll have help covering some areas because the security concepts in v4 are *much* bigger. I’ll also do a lot of the odds and ends content, and I supervise things like the UI text scrub. More about that in a future blog entry.

Enough said for now. Please write back and let us know what topics you'd like us to blog on!

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  In my previous lifetime I was a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) living in Silicon Valley. SMS and TCP/IP...