I was pleasantly surprised recently when, only a day or two after first creating my blog, I was contacted through it by a member of the MVP (Most Valuable Professional) community. (An MVP is a non-Microsoft employee who is an advocate/evangelist/subject-matter-expert in Microsoft products and technologies, and who is selected to participate in the MVP program from Microsoft.  More info here; and here.) I knew I had registered my blog so it would be visible to the world, but I was still shocked that someone paid me attention, and so quickly!

The interesting thing was, the MVP who contacted me is working alongside MSFT with a major Enterprise customer, to help the customer consolidate the several disparate test labs it has scattered across the country.  They're looking to move to one central test facility, standardize on hardware and procedures, and ultimately save some money in the process.  The MVP on the project happened to pick up the first entry in my blog, where I happened to talk about what we do at the EEC, and he gave me a quick ping to see if we could chat sometime about how the EEC does what it does and how he could learn from us to help his customer.  Two days later, the MVP and I are on a concall along with some of the EEC's managers, discussing our best practices and lessons learned and how they may be applicable to this customer.  He took several pages of notes in the short time we had on the call, and we followed up with other documentation in email.  He was very optimistic that the info we provided him would help his customer greatly, and we're looking forward to hearing about the success of their lab consolidation project.

This isn't a usual case for the EEC;  normally we're the test lab to which MSFT customers come to test out their deployment plans and integration scenarios.  When a customer is so big that they warrant building their own test lab, that's a big deal.  When that customer wants to model it after the EEC, that's huge - to me, anyway.   This customer will be able to test its own custom LOB (line of business) applications in-house, isolated from their critical production environment, and do so more efficiently and accurately than before.  We just hope they keep the EEC in mind when they're looking at MSFT product deployments and infrastructure upgrades - after all, we've got those test resources very handy.