5 years ago Microsoft executives approved the existence of a group focused on guidance - understanding enterprise customer scenarios, creating a dedicated engineering team to producing guidance in the form of code,patterns, frameworks and guides, and consolidating the authoritative content that enterprises would use under an identity. This team, called PAG internally, eventually became patterns & practices.

Some of us in the team put together some wiki pages with the motivations and approaches of our group, sprinkled with candid and colorful comments about how we got here, what it's like to be outside the normal product group hierarchy at Microsoft,and other interesting facts.

This is not just about explaining p&p - It's about having a 2-way dialogue with YOU -a conversation about why we exist, and areas for growth. We put it in a wiki so you can go and tell us your perspective and your own anecdotes.

The pages include things like:
- why did p&p get created, where does it live in the MS organization, and what's it like to be there?
- How do we explain internally and externally the difference between product stuff and p&p stuff?
- What are some of the things currently going on inside of our group? What tools and methodologies do we use?
- What are the observed trends and directions of our group?

http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.PatternsAndPracticesInsideOut

(We didn't have the time to make it to short but it's light reading)

I'm thrilled to work in this group and this paper is part of our commitment to be transparent and more effective at learning how to be your -our customers'- ambassador.