This is my first posting on my brand new TechNet blog, and it's probably best to kick this off with at least a little bit of "who I am" and "why am I here?"   

I joined the IT industry in 1983 after 8 years of manufacturing leather and canvas goods.  Just how do you migrate from saddlemaking to PC software???  It's a long story that I'll be very happy to share with anyone who wants to hear about it, but will be astounded if anyone asks.  Let's just say that in '83 there was lot's of opportunity for PC hobbiests down under and the financial opportunities and working conditions were definately better than factory work.

After a mixed bag of PC related roles in reseller and distributor land I joined Microsoft and have been here for over 13 years now.  I joined the Australian sub in 1991 as a business unit manager "bum" in the product support services group and then  moved across to the internal IT group. Ultimately I had the good fortune to land the role of IT director for South Pacific and led a wonderful team of smart and committed IT specialists for nearly a decade.  Sensing that I could more effectively stir the pot at head office I transfered to the Redmond (Seattle) campus in 2002.

Just over a year ago I left our IT group and assumed a role where I believe I can apply my experiences in IT to driving a better experience for our customers.   Today I'm a group program manager in a team called the Core Infrastructure Solutions (CIS) group.  This team builds guidance and automation to assist customers and partners to design, build and operate IT infrastructure using Microsoft and 3rd party products and technologies to support common scenarios.   You'll find our content at two locations - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/default.mspx and http://www.microsoft.com/security/guidance

In this role I have two primary responsibilities:

  • Product Planning - the planning role provides the processes and infrastructure that help the solution teams ensure we build the right content to meet the most importand needs of our customers.  I'll talk more about this in future posts, because I'm looking for lots of input and feedback
  • The CIS Lab - to build our solutions we need to be able to replicate the environments of our customers and my team maintain an infrastructure of over 500 servers, 16tb of storage, 2,000 VLANs, and a plethora of typical datacentre hardware and software.   My lab team and I are planning to share more information about how we run our lab infrastructure in the future, so watch this space, and by all means if you have specific lab or datacentre topics you'd like to hear more about, let me know.

Well that's me in a nutshell and I'll end this post now before I lose your interest.   If you got this far, please say g'day and tell me a little bit about you and what your interests are.

Cheers

jd