We've now properly launched our Version 1 of Microsoft Software Licensing and Protection Platform
We shipped three days early. Not a record here at Microsoft, but somewhat of a rarity in the world of software. It takes just a tad bit more effort beyond declaring code complete, test run completion and final signoff. When there's a service involved you get a chance to do a whole heck of a lot more work before you get to call it done. It's roughly the same things customers will go through if they decide to host our server... with a few notable differences. We get to do it first. Which means we are documenting, double-checking and back-tracking at a constant rhythm. Some things go faster than you expected - and others go slower. We had about 16 machines to get ready for the pre-production and production system. Loading software for the basic platform which includes virus protection and monitoring solutions. Of course before this there was sizing the right capacity and ordering. And in conjunction with putting all these machines into service was the chore of configuring for remote access, naming the servers, associating workloads and about a dozen other pre-requisites.
Since this system was never before put into production we decided to take on an extra chunk of work and do some load testing on the PPE and production system. We we're pretty certain that our app would behave as good or better than our test lab runs. "At least on paper it should," we rationalized. But you can't ever be too sure. We wanted to validate our network settings and load-balancing. As it turned out, this was a good decision. We had to make some tweaks here, and some tweaks there but at the end of the day we were able to top the numbers we saw in test. This level of confidence would have been extremely hard to come by if we hadn't taken the challenge to push for some solid metrics.
Good teamwork is essential. Mature attitudes that focus on getting the job done is the key to making a stressful period of time more interesting and rewarding. You can help drive this specific attitude by creating the right challenges. No one wants to be challenged to meet a deadline that can't be matched without sacrificing quality. However, meeting a quality bar and a challenging deadline are what constitutes interesting. The Ops team made a conscious effort to beat the date and in doing so built some time into the plan to ensure that we wouldn't have to drop quality or confidence. When things started getting tight, we were able to point to this plan, modify it ever so slightly and bring on extra help from the dev and test team. We didn't have to ask the dev or test team to bail water out of a sinking ship. It was more like we needed them to help us pitch more sails because we were bearing down on our destination.
I can write this success story almost two weeks after the event because I have the data that we all did the right thing. The service is up. It is still up. We have not had any outages and we are now getting through the backlog of work items that always crop up towards the end of the ship-cycle. A mature team of professionals is something to watch -whether it's a sports team, steelworkers sixty stories up, air-craft carrier personnel during a flight-ops or a pit crew. It's a whole other feeling however, to be a member of such a team.
Part of any product launch at Microsoft is taking your product on the road on the day you release or shortly thereafter. A group of us attended and exhibited at Software Business 2007 Conference. http://softwarebusinessonline.com/ -- I can't say enough about the interest in this service and the topic of licensing in general. I'm sure the marketing team will cover this on their website www.microsoft.com/slps - but I just want to say that the enthusiasm by ISVs. partners, and publishers for our solution was a nice reward for all the long days and nights.
Terrence Nevins - (For the entire team)
