Happy New Year!

Hi there. My name is Nate Baum and I'm a long-time blog reader, first-time blogger.  

Happy New Year? I know it's July, but this week marks the beginning of a new fiscal year at Microsoft - what we call FY10. As a SharePoint Technology Specialist working with customers in Michigan, it's an exciting time.

Windows 7 (which I've been running for nearly 6 months now) is awesome - and scheduled for general availability this fall!   Bing just launched last month. It's fantastic. And there are a lot of other products in the hopper both on the business/dev side including Visual Studio 2010. And in the consumer space (XBOX games, Zune, etc.)

This (fiscal) year we will be releasing a new version of SharePoint and Office - the two products I'm primarily focused on. I'll be spending a lot of time getting myself ramped up on all of the new capabilities and then educating customers and partners in the field as much as possible on Office/SP10. There's already been a lot of buzz out there and more to come. The Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas will certainly be the best event to get yourself ramped up on SP10. SIGN UP NOW! 

And finally, there is a lot of exciting information and examples being released every day with regards to SharePoint 2007. We recently launched a new SharePoint product page - built with SharePoint and Silverlight. And a new site was launched recently that focuses on social computing. And every day I'm meeting with customers who are launching new SharePoint sites, and finding new and interesting ways to leverage SharePoint to deliver business solutions.

Since this is my first post, I'll wrap this with some who, what, and why about this blog.

Who am I? I'm a SharePoint Technology Specialist at Microsoft. In a nutshell I work as part of the Microsoft sales team as a deep technical SharePoint/Office pre-sales consultant for the largest Microsoft customers in Michigan and Northern Ohio. Think technical sales/non-billable. Although I'm part of the sales team and selling SharePoint is a big focus, I'm also very dedicated to seeing customers deploy SharePoint-based solutions, helping to remove deployment blockers, and general promotion of Microsoft/SharePoint in the community. I am really a developer at heart and have worked with SharePoint since 2001 as a user/consultant. Prior to my work with SharePoint I spent 6 years in Redmond, WA in the Microsoft Exchange Product Group, up until 2003. My LinkedIn profile if you are really interested:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/natebaum

What is this? This blog will focus primarily around SharePoint and Office, but may hit on other technologies. I will provide my favorite content and links, research I've done for customers, and my personal experiences working with SharePoint 2010 as more info is publicly available. I expect my customers, business contacts, and others in the SharePoint/IW community will get value out of my posts.

Why? All the obvious stuff. I want to share info more broadly, give back to the community, etc. Quite frankly, this blog is way overdue. And there is no better time to start this than a new fiscal year with so much on the horizon!

And finally, my expectation is that most of my posts will be made very late at night after the kids are off to bed, since I'm a bit of night owl, thus the blog name.

Thanks for reading!

Nate