I'm Back!
After a nice relaxing 2 weeks and a lovely wedding and reception, I'm back. My new name is Anandi Raman Creath, and I'm still getting used to it. I can't officially change it in the Microsoft system until I get the official copy of our marriage license so all my email still says "Anandi Raman".
I'm pleased to note several people have contacted me with interest in our MSS 2.0 TAP Program. In addition to posting the info here, I sent announcements via email to an internal Microsoft TAP Program mailing list that has a lot of our MCS and other field staff on it. I also sent this to our MSS sales staff, a contact in the developer evangelist group and to several of our existing partners who requested specific information. In addition, our very cool Marketing guy, Kevin, posted the announcement to the MSS Partner Website. Note: you need a login name and password to access the site.
I've also sent the information to our current TAP partners who participated in the R2 (Lynnwood) TAP program, which just ended. Now I'm just waiting for the nomination surveys to be returned to me. I have assembled a team of folks from across MSS to help review the surveys and select the best group of participants for our program. The team consists of me, my manager, someone from Marketing, Business Development, and a couple of Program Managers from the MSS development feature teams. We're looking for a range of application types, languages, geographic distribution, industry verticals, and hardware. Since these will be real-world deployments and we depend heavily on our TAP partners' feedback to make our product the best it can be, getting a diverse group of participants is critical.
This week, I'm just digging out of the email hole after being away for 2 weeks, and trying to keep tabs on my other projects. We've asked some of our previous TAP partners to share their speech application data with us (logs, recordings, etc.) so we can improve the product. Fortunately for us, our partners are receptive to the idea and we've even received real data from one of them. Our speech components team is very anxious to get this data and they ask me about the status of our partner agreements pretty regularly. :)
Another project is submitting requests to get Knowledge Base articles written for our recent R2 release. I've gone through several, and sent requests for about 4 new articles. I'll publish a list here when I'm done with all of these.
But my main responsibility is designing and managing the TAP program for MSS v2.0. I've got to create an actual MSProject plan next week. Wish me luck!
