System Center WebLog by Russ Slaten : About Me

What do you do here?

rslaten — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 05:17:07 GMT

Here at Microsoft I have had the opportunity to work in different roles on several teams all of which contained very smart people. I have to say though, I am currently working with some of the most talented engineers of my career. I work with a team of rock stars and we are part of a larger, very talented, organization called Premier Field Engineering.

My OpsMgr focused peers are DSE's (Dedicated Support Engineers). This means that we work with a single customer, or a very small group of customers, and are their primary resource for everything OpsMgr. We work with our customers on projects, provide training, and also provide solutions to problems that may arise.

My current OpsMgr DSE teammates are Steve Rachui, Kevin Holman, Jonathan Almquist, and Jimmy Harper. If you are reading my blog then chances are you've also read their blogs and know about the quality of work that these guys do.

If you would like to learn more about DSE check out the data sheet available on the Microsoft Services site or send me an e-mail.

New Role at Microsoft

rslaten — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:33:00 GMT

This is my first post in 2008 and definitely won't be my last. In April I transitioned to a new role here at Microsoft. I was previously in Escalation Engineer for most of the System Center product line. I am now a dedicated support engineer focused exclusively on System Center Operations Manager 2007. I provide support, training, and consulting to customers with the some of the largest and most complex OpsMgr deployments in the world. This means that most of my upcoming posts will be focused on OpsMgr. Many of my peers do the same thing for SMS and SCCM and I work with them from time to time so I will still continue to try and post some SMS/SCCM goodness.

Who is this Russ Slaten guy anyway?

rslaten — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 21:32:00 GMT

I was looking back over some of my older posts and realized that everything I've blogged about was technical and read more like a KB article than a blog. This is my humble attempt at adding a personal touch to this blog.

I was born and raised just outside of Dallas in Mesquite, Texas. My real name is Rusty Slaten but most everyone calls me Russ. I am single and currently reside in Carrollton, Texas. I have two Labrador Retrievers and enjoy the outdoors, basketball, golf, fishing, poker, and video games (although I don't play them anymore because I don't have time). I enjoy all sports but am especially a fan of the Dallas Mavericks. I am currently reading several programming books: Assembly Language for Intel Based Computers 5e by Kip R. Irvine, Introduction to 80x86 Assembly Language and Computer Architecture by Richard C. Detmer, and Advanced Windows 3e by Jeffrey Richter.

I graduated from Poteet High School in 1995 and started working at Microsoft (Las Colinas) in 1997 as a contractor providing front line technical support for Exchange Server. Unfortunately I slowly stopped going to college and am only now going back to get a business degree and eventually an MBA (currently have about 80 hours). In 1998 I moved from Exchange support to SMS support. The current product at the time was SMS 1.2 SP3. In January of 1999 I became a Microsoft employee with the title of Support Engineer just in time to provide support for the upcoming release of SMS 2.0. In June of 2000 I became a Technical Lead which simply means that I assisted a team of Support Engineers from a technical perspective. In December of 2000 I changed roles and became a Rapid Response Engineer (RRE) which is now known as a Premier Field Engineer (PFE). In this role I was responsible for providing short-term onsite assistance to customers. I primarily provided onsite training, consulting, troubleshooting, critical problem resolution, and development for SMS and MOM 2000. In the 3 years I was an RRE I visited close to 170 different companies throughout the world. In October of 2003 I moved from a field role back to an office based role and became an Escalation Engineer (EE) on the Critical Problem Resolution (CPR) team supporting "Management" products. There is a jobcast on this role on the jobsblog which is very good (One of my peers, Jeff Dailey, did a great job on the jobcast), but if I wanted to summarize my role I would say that I solve critical and complex problems using code.

Here is a list of the products that I am (or soon will be) responsible for supporting (some are not released yet):
SMS 2.0
SMS 2003
SMS 2003 R2
All SMS and MOM Solution Accelerators
All SMS Feature Packs (OSD, DMFP, etc...)
BDD 2007
MOM 2000
MOM 2005
MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition
All MOM Management Packs
Softgrid
SCCM 2007
SCOM 2007
All SCOM 2007 Management Packs
Service Desk
SCE
WSUS
SCRM
AssetMetrix
System Center Online
SCCP
WDS

If there is anything else you'd like to know please comment!