Here it is, my first entry. Before I get into why I'm starting this, let me tell you a little about myself...

I started out my career in the United States Army. I trained as a UAV pilot on the Hunter UAV and an intelligence analyst. While in the Army I served a six month tour with the UN in Croatia and immediately after the Dayton Peace Accord was signed, I was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina for a year with the 1st Armored Division.

After the military I worked as a developer at numerous startups including MicroStrategy and iCommunicate. It was a wild ride at both companies! I was there for the big stock crash at MicroStrategy after we had to restate revenue for years past. Our stock dropped from an all time high of just over $300 on March 10, 2000 to about $70 by the 20th of that same month! Obviously, I didn’t stick around for too long after that.

I left MicroStrategy to join a small startup name iCommunicate. We worked our butts off building a hosted customer service portal and in April of 2001, Microsoft bought us and moved the ten of us out to Redmond. This worked out pretty well because my wife and I made up 33% of the development staff at iCommunicate! Her and I have worked at three companies so far together and she recently decided to leave Microsoft and the CRM development team to spend more time at home with our son, Gavin.

Until recently I was one of the senior developers on the Microsoft Business Solutions CRM application team responsible for features such as the Form Editor, Accounts, Contacts, Quotes, SalesOrders, Invoices and E-mail Templates, among other features. Late last year I decided to move over to the product management team (queue up the Imperial March theme from Star Wars) and I now work with our ISVs, partners and customers as a Technical Product Manager. Why did I decide to do this? While at all the startups I spent a lot of time with customers and partners and I was beginning to miss that interaction. I now get to spend most of my time interacting with ISVs building on top of our CRM product and helping drive feedback from those ISVs into the future releases.

When I’m not here at work I enjoy traveling with my family, skiing, hiking and dining at many of the excellent restaurants in the Seattle area.

So, this brings me to the section where I talk about what I hope to get out of this whole experience. I don’t know? I hope it turns into a place where I can pass on my knowledge to developers out there working with Microsoft CRM as well as a venue for them to ask questions and provide feedback. Even though I’m in the marketing group now, I tend to be pretty straight to the point when talking about the product. I don’t mince words and I’ll tell it like it is...

- Jason

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.