[tap tap] is this thing on?
*puff*
Man, there's a lot of dust on this thing. Doesn't anyone tidy up around here? What's the story? 3 posts, and then the guy disappears for over a year? Where did he go? What's he doing? Why do I ask so many questions?
Well, the guy who started and stopped this blog was me, Adam. He, I mean I, never really went anywhere. I wanted to use this blog to post interesting nuggets of wisdom I came across in my job. As it turns out, my job really wasn't that interesting, and the nuggets were few and far between. I kept blogging irregularly though, at a different Ad Nauseam blog, this one over here. It's decidedly non-technical, and while I find the writing fascinating, 'interesting' may not be the description others would use.
Why am I back here then? Turns out my job got a lot less boring a couple weeks ago. I've moved into the evangelism team, and my new job title is IT Pro Evangelist.
That means my job is to help IT Pros (that's probably you, since you're visiting a technet blog) find out about the way cool technology on the horizon. You may already be aware of some of the IT Pro evangelists we have around the world doing this already.
That means a couple of things. Part of my job is to make sure that those guys have the stuff they need to do their job: demos, training, etc. The other part of my job is to help build a portal that gives IT Pros what they need if they want to start evaluating future products today. For example, let's say you are the system administrator of a mediumish sized business, and you wanted to start looking at Sharepoint 2007 to roll out for use, and you have one particular project that is really excited about what they've heard, and maybe you'd consider putting the beta into production for them to try out, but only if you had good access to training/support/information that would help you do it. Or instead of Sharepoint, maybe it's Network Access Protection, or IIS 7.0 in Longhorn. Or the next release of our virtualization technology, or Vista. What if there was a portal you could go to and have access to all the resources you needed in one place?
Yeah, that's the cool part. I'm building that portal.
Which begs a question: What would you expect to find at a portal like that?
Some of the ideas we've had so far:
- virtual labs - try it online w/o having to install anything
- webcast training
- discussion forums
- resource links - blogs and community pages
- whitepapers
- presentations
Which of these would be most important to you, and what have I left off the list? Leave me a comment here and let me know!
