Welcome!
Hi there!
My name is Charles Eliot, and I'm the Group Program Manager for Release Management for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM team, which is just a fancy way of saying that I'm the lead project manager.
I joined the CRM team in late 2001. I started at Microsoft in 1992 as a contract tester, and was hired on full-time about 6 months later as a test lead. In 1994 I jumped over to program management, and have been a program manager (PM) ever since. From 1992 until I joined the CRM team I worked entirely on email products: MS-Mail 3.2, Exchange 4.0, Exchange 5.0, Exchange 5.5, and finally Exchange 2000.
I joined the CRM team as the lead PM for system management tools (including workflow), but I started taking on release management responsibilities almost immediately. When I joined we hadn't shipped anything yet, so it's been a blast to have been involved in all the CRM releases to date: v1.0 in January 2003, v1.2 in October 2003, and most recently v3.0 in October 2005.
I'll be blogging about whatever strikes my fancy. You can expect lots of stuff about the challenges of managing large software development projects, but I'll also be writing about the CRM field in general, and of course Microsoft Dynamics CRM in particular.
