Online Services Strategy Manager... What the heck does that mean?

stoey — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 03:38:07 GMT

Hello blog, long time no write...

For those of you who haven't heard, last year I took on a new role at Microsoft Canada as Strategy Manager for Search and Online Services. It's a very cool job as it spans a LOT of product teams, technologies and business units at Microsoft. At the same time, it's a bit daunting as... well umm... there are a lot of products and business groups to deal with :-) So last year I was pretty heads down doing a lot of internally focused coordination on some key areas, like Enterprise Search with SharePoint 2007, as well as working very heavily with the Online Services Group on some very exciting stuff you'll hear a lot about shortly.

If you're curious, here's a bit of a breakdown of where I spend my time (and therefore what you'll see surfacing on this blog)

Software and Services Strategy
- This is pretty much the centre of gravity for my role. Essentially I spend a lot of time being a bridge between our Enterprise product and sales teams and our Online Services product and sales teams.
- As Ray Ozzie put it:

"Services is going to be a critical aspect of all of our offerings from Windows and Office on the client to Exchange and SharePoint and Dynamics and other things on the server, and in order to gain leverage across all of our offerings, we're taking a platform approach to services, giving each of our products the common benefits of cost, speed, scale and monetization that a platform approach offers."

Commercial offers based on Windows Live
- This has been, and will continue to be, a big part of my time. My group is working with our Online Services Group and creating commercial offerings around Windows Live. Here's a few examples (and I'll elaborate on each of these in the near future)
Live Search
Live Maps
Windows Live product suite
Enterprise Search

and trying to keep up with lots of other interesting things like AdCenter, adlabs, livelabs, Microsoft Research, and of course that crazy DPE team I'm still on ;-)

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows Live, Software and Services

Microsoft Research - Search Result Clustering (SRC)

stoey — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 09:09:00 GMT

Last week I installed the Search Results Clustering toolbar from sandbox.msn.com and I'm lovin' it! Imagine you do a search, and in addition to the normal results you'd expect, you end up getting a bunch of grouped results on the left. I've found it adds a new dimension to my search results. Where I might normally go straight to altering my search parameters, now I find I can glance at the groupings on the left and quite often drill into an interesting grouping of results that I normally would've never seen (or even thought of). Try it out here.

Here's the official description I pulled off sandbox.msn.com

MSRA SRC is a tool for searching web with the Search Result Clustering (SRC) technique, that was developed at Web Search and Mining Group in MSR, Asia. On-the-fly it clusters a search engine's search results into different groups, and provides meaningful and readable names for these groups. SRC changes the traditional representation of search results into a non-linear way, so as to facilitate the user's browsing.

Traditional clustering techniques don't work for this problem because the documents are short, the cluster names should be readable and the algorithm should be efficient for on-the-fly calculation. The method takes on the whole problem in a different way and overcomes the difficulties in traditional clustering methods. It tries to first identify salient topics by identifying distinct and independent keywords, and then classifies the search results into these topics. Check out the associated research paper and their toolbar.

Ryan Storgaard's Blog : Search

Online Services Strategy Manager... What the heck does that mean?

Microsoft Research - Search Result Clustering (SRC)