About

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For my first post, I thought I’d share who I am, what I do at Microsoft what this blog is all about.

Who:

First, I’m a developer. I’ve been fascinated by software since my first computer back in 1982, an Apple II+. I’ve been designing, developing and maintaining software professionally since 1992 (“What, you’ll pay me to do this?”) and joined Microsoft in 2000 (a long held dream of mine since visiting the Redmond campus back in the early 90’s).

What I Do:

I’m the Technical Evangelist for the Unified Communications (UC) platform. To me, an evangelist is someone who has a passion for something and wants to share that passion. That’s me, I love the potential that software has on changing the way people live their professional and personal lives. I also love meeting and exchanging ideas with other developers. It’s the best way to learn both what you know (when presenting, sharing code, etc.) and to learn what others are doing.

My role in the company is to act as a conduit between the product group and the developer community. My job is to learn as much about the platform as possible from the people who build it, boil that knowledge down into easily consumable points (in this blog, at conferences, user groups, etc.) and share it with you in the form of a discussion. From that discussion, I take your feedback from your experience using the platform back to the product group so we can make you more successful.

The intent is that both of us will create better software that way.

What this Blog is About:

UC is made up of servers (Office Communications 2007, Exchange 2007, Office Live Meeting), clients (Office Communicator 2007, Office Communicator Mobile, Office Communicator Web Access) and most importantly APIs that allow you as a developer to integrate IM, email, voice and video into your applications.

I joined the team after one of the PMs on the UC Team, Kyle Marsh, walked me through some scenarios that are possible with the 2007 wave of technologies and we started talking about how you can integrate those same scenarios into your Windows and Web apps. Very cool.

More on that coming soon.

Just a short post to get things started.