What Am I Doing Here?
I guess any new blog should start with an intro. I'm Anandi Raman, a Program Manager on the Microsoft Speech Server (MSS) team. I've only been on the team for about 3 weeks, so bear with me as I learn about the technology. My role on the team is to run the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) and Beta programs for our v2.0 release. I'll also be helping to figure out some of our Sustained Engineering processes, and how we interact with Product Support Services.
I've been at Microsoft for about 2.5 years. Prior to joining the Speech Server team, I was on the Update and Servicing Technologies team, which is the team responsible for the update.exe installer that Windows and other teams like Exchange and SQL use for servicing their products. I completed a major revision of this whitepaper about the Installer so check it out and tell me what you think. Before that, I was in Windows Sustained Engineering, managing the collaboration request and CritSit processes, which enabled Product Support engineers to get assistance from the Windows product group on difficult customer cases.
Before Microsoft, I worked at Deloitte Consulting for almost 4 years as an SAP ABAP Developer, Web developer, and a lot of miscellaneous other roles that needed to be done on large SAP implementations. I worked on projects at ChevronTexaco, Montana Power Company, Pacificorp, and Clorox, so I have pretty good customer empathy. (IMHO)
My undergrad and master's degrees are in biology and chemistry, so none of those 6 years of higher education is really doing me any good at Microsoft. Though I did go to Caltech, which is an even more geeky environment than Microsoft, believe it or not. I think that's why I'm so comfortable at Microsoft - it reminds me of the atmosphere in college. Someday I'll tell you my e^x joke. (But only if you ask nicely.)
I'm really glad to be on the Speech Server team, as they are very customer-focused and in my short time there, I've had several team members ask me how they can get involved in helping out with the TAP program for the next release. I'm currently working on planning the program, figuring out how to get customer nominations and what the requirements are (for both the MSS team and the customer participants). I'll post more details when I have them.
So that's a short intro about me. Let me know if there are any specific topics you'd like to discuss and I'll see if I can ferret out the information for you.
