The First Five Years of Fun at Microsoft

Today (actually yesterday) marks five years for me at Microsoft.   It’s been an amazing adventure so far and as usual for anniversaries, it seems like both yesterday and a lifetime ago that I started.

At the time, I was a Microsoft MVP in File System and Storage technologies – which is the closest category that they could find for a guy who likes to back things up and restore them.

I joined MS to be the “Technical Product Manager” – a.k.a. corporate subject matter expert (SME) and evangelist – for Data Protection Manager (DPM), whose v.1 product had released to market about a month prior.  This was the perfect job for someone who had been deploying, selling and marketing backup technologies for fifteen years.  For nearly ten of those years, I had hoped to join Microsoft in one role or another.  The DPM gig was truly perfect for me not only in its subject area (backup) but also because Microsoft was willing to allow me to be a telecommuting PM, which meant that I didn’t have to relocate to Redmond.

While DPM has usually been my primary product focus, I have also had some great opportunities to work on some other technologies in addition to DPM:

	Of note is that DPM 2006 was the first product branded “System Center” … which meant that while I was explaining why and how Microsoft was delivering a backup product, I was also able to start painting a vision of what System Center was.   :-)
	The DPM and Windows File / Storage folks were combined for a few years, which was an amazing chance to also work on: File Services     an OEM appliance     File Services
	With the DPM team re-merged back with the rest of the System Center team, I had the opportunity to work on the complete SC management story – for our midsized business customers
????	This year, it has been very exciting to be a small part of bringing in the newest technologies of the SC family – AVIcode !     … and it is an honor to now be working on the next generation of one of the most popular products in the System Center family – Operations Manager !!

And along the way, I even had a chance to write about some of my favorite video games on Xbox.com.  Where else can a server guy write about video games than Microsoft ?!?  

These days, OpsMgr and AVIcode are filling much more of my time than DPM … which certainly makes me look forward to what other cool technologies that I will have the chance to work with for the next five years!

I cannot say enough – THANK YOU to Microsoft for the opportunity, to my managers and co-workers for the daily opportunity to be challenged and grow … and to you, the blog readers (and book purchasers) who have been on a good bit of this adventure with me.

As always, thanks for reading !!