Becoming a full-time employee of Microsoft (or "MSFTie") is often jokingly referred to as "joining the collective" in public and even within our cybernetic halls.

I mentioned awhile back that we'd gotten some additional team-members on the Setup/Admin/Ops QA team, and (as James recently enlightened me), one of them just started blogging. Welcome to the land of the blogs, Abdelhamid! As he said in his first post, he started last fall, and he's done some truly wonderful work in the months since.

In fact, one of the first projects we tossed at him was creating a tool to automate the installation of Team Foundation Server. This includes installing pre-requisites, installing and then upgrading from Whidbey (TFS 2005), optionally installing and configuring SharePoint, and fully supporting our many configuration options (single- vs. dual-server, SQL named instances, remote WSS, etc.). This tool has really improved our effective bandwidth in testing setup, and we're even thinking about turning it into a Power Toy Power Tool - would people be interested in something like that?

Abdelhamid completed the 'official' training requirements for the job by now, but I haven't run him through all of our unofficial training courses yet:

1. Watch Office Space until you can recognize and/or quote memorable lines. IMHO, this is a must-have for any desk job.
2. Watch all six Star Wars movies and be able to correctly rank them in order from best to "suckiest". For bonus credit, explain why "Han Shot First" is so important to the movies and to culture at large.
3. Frag me in - well, anything, the standard typically being Halo 1/2/3 or Counter-Strike. Most team members have failed to complete (or even attempt) this course, but several other TFS (and ex-TFS) staff have no trouble with this one (namely Patrick from the Team Build team).

I'm pleased to say he has already completed one course with high marks - Bojangles Appreciation. Bojangles and I were born in the same year; coincidence? I think not.

Blowing with the wind of change...