Common Engineering Criteria - Consistency and Predictability
Over the past nearly 4 year Microsoft's Servers have been going through a transformation. Many are the times that we have talked about better together, integrated innovation, etc. In 2003, some of our executives decided that now was the time to do something about it.
They decided to start a process - or a program called "Common Engineering Criteria". The whole point was that all server teams would agree on doing certain things across all their products in certain releases.
The simple idea being that our customers and partners could expect a certain level of consistency across all Microsoft Server products within a release year and that we would be very public about what we were going to do and when. Even to the point that we would maintain a public scorecard that listed the status of the individual server products vis-a-vis the common engineering criteria.
It sound really simple, but this needed to work across 20+ products with different target markets, different levels of maturity in the market, different degrees of complexity.
Adding to the complexity was also the fact that computer software aren't developed in weeks, but years. The effort required the various groups within Microsoft to agree on what should be done in all server applications and how up to 2 years in advance.
The first list of Common Engineering Criteria was published in the summer of 2004 at TechEd in the US. This represented the common technologies and features of the 2005 products. this may sound strange but as you may know, Microsoft names the enterprise server products after the year (actually the Microsoft Fiscal Year) in which they ship. Consequently, the list of Common Engineering Criteria announced applies to SQL Server 2005, Live Communications Server 2005, Virtual Server 2005, and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. Maybe not an impressive list, but a start nonetheless.
In the years since the summer of 2004 we have been adding more server products and more criteria.
It's important to explain a couple of ground rules. As a general rule all server product shipping in a given model year will comply with the criteria for that year in addition to the criteria from the previous years. However, some times there are reasons why a particular product cannot comply with a certain criteria.
We have a process for handling those exceptions and can grant a given product group an exemption for the complying with the criteria if our executives decided that there are good (business and/or technical) reasons why aparticular server product can't comply with a particular criteria. For example, the criteria from 2005 requires that all server products be tested to run inside Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, both in test and in product. Well, as you may have guessed Microsoft Virtual Server cannot run inside Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. The hardware simply will not support it (besides the fact that it would be completely and utterly ridiculous to run Virtual Server inside Virtual Server). Needless to say, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 was granted an exemption and you can find both exemption as well as the explanation why on the Common Engineering Criteria Website listed below.
We have strict requirements as to when we start disclosing what server product will comply with the criteria and what exemptions may have been granted. As you can see on the website, we begin tracking the individual server products when they ship their first public beta.
Also, core to this process is our wish to be as transparent to our customers as we possibly can as to what we are going to do with our server products, so we up until last year (2006) we published the additional criteria and the new products that would be measured against them every summer at TechEd. Last fall we decided to change that such that we would announce them a full 2 years in advance. So at IT Forum on Barcelona we announced the 2008 criteria following our announcement of the 2007 criteria at TechEd in the summer.
We come a long way, but there plenty work for us ahead. As you can see from the website we now track 10 of our server products (about 50% of the target server products) and the list of criteria is growing year over year. Not only are we adding server products and criteria to the list, we are not growing the number of exemptions at the same pace, which clearly indicates that the initial concept behind the Common Engineering Criteria is working.
If you wish to give me feedback as to what additional criteria (common features or technologies) we should consider in the years ahead feel free to post comments to this blog.
For more information go to the following site:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/cer/overview.mspx
