After 5.5 years, I am leaving Microsoft.

When I first joined, it was after 15 years in the backup/recovery and high availability market.  I joined to be part of DPM v1, which had been in market for about a month, because the idea that Microsoft producing its own backup solution could change how Windows administrators dealt with backup – and it did.  It has been an amazing time and I am very proud to now see DPM as a mainstream option for many Windows environments.  DPM 2012 (v4) is almost in beta and it just keeps getting better !

Along the way, it was a privilege to work on several other technologies, as well:

File Services & Storage Solutions			File Services & Storage Solutions

Along the way, I even had the opportunity to accomplish one of my career goals – to author and publish my book on Data Protection and Availability.

It’s been an awesome adventure – I have learned much, done some cool things, seen some amazing places, and made many friends – all of which, I am extremely grateful for.

So, where I am headed next?   I haven’t decided yet.  I am taking part of the summer off to spend with my family and rest up – but I have started a few conversations with some great partners that have some cool technologies and some big visions.  I intend to make some commitments by the end of July and be back on the grid in August.  In the meantime, please keep in touch:

Linked-In       www.linkedin.com/in/JasonBuffington

You can also follow me on my new website -- and a continuation of my blogs and tweets.

Thanks for reading.   JBuff, signing out.

At TechEd 2011, we announced that the OpsMgr 2012 Community Evaluation Program (CEP) is now taking applications.

What is a CEP

Many of you are likely familiar with Microsoft TAP’s, Technology Adoption Programs, where a small pool of customers partner with our engineering teams to preview and provide feedback on pre-beta software.  TAP participants provide our engineers with some early guidance and validation of next generation software, prior to us releasing publicly-available beta software.   TAP is a great program, but it starts very, very early on and usually fills up quick (and waay before beta).  The OpsMgr 2012 TAP has been very active in helping us with early builds, but it is unfortunately full.

The Community Evaluation Program (CEP) has recently been created to provide a broader range of customers with an in-depth experience with our upcoming beta software.

Essentially, a CEP is an organized way of bringing our subject matter experts (SMEs) from our product teams, our community (like MVPs and experienced users) and those interested in taking a deep look at our v.Next software for evaluation and preparation for deployment purposes.

About the OpsMgr 2012 CEP

Starting around the time of public-beta, the OM12 CEP will offer private and focused topic discussions, whereby the entire enrolled community will all look at one key feature/enhancement at a time.   This will give you, as enrolled participants, not only in-depth insight to the new OM12 features, but also access to the community of SMEs who can help you get the most out of Operations Manager 2012 (and 2007 R2 in some cases).

We are taking enrollment applications now, and will kick off the community reach-outs as we get a little closer to the public beta release.

We’ll start off looking at some of the features that you have heard a lot about so far, such as Network Monitoring or Application Monitoring.  Then, we’ll dig into some of the new topology changes, as well as upgrade scenarios, and then just keep looking at different facets of OpsMgr 2012 moving forward.

How do I apply

Information on all of the System Center and Forefront CEP offerings is available here

For an overview of the Operations Manager 2012 CEP, take a look at the OM12 CEP overview datasheet.

For questions on the OpsMgr 2012 CEP itself, you can send email to OMCEP@microsoft.com.  (no, we can’t yet answer ‘when’ questions)   :-)

Click here to Apply for the OpsMgr 2012 CEP

We will notify all accepted participants as to the OM12 topic schedule and how to access the CEP discussion forums later in June.

A note of special thanks to all of the OpsMgr 2012 session attendees at TechEd 2011, some of whom enrolled even during the sessions themselves!

Good luck and we look forward to working with many of you on OpsMgr 2012 !

Last week, my friends at TechNet EDGE released an interview that we did at TechEd 2011 in Atlanta last month:

As always, thanks for reading (and watching),