The role of program manager at Microsoft is unique. I say that because very few external candidates who interview at Microsoft have done the job of a PM and quite a few have never heard of it before. I also say this because if you ask ten different PMs at Microsoft to define what it is a PM does, you will likely get ten different answers (and they are all right). My favorite definition goes something like this: there are three classic roles at Microsoft that do product development. You have the developers who write the code. You have the testers who ensure that code is correct. And you have PMs who don't write code or test it. Seriously though, I can provide some basic statement that PMs formulate plans and execute them but that just isn't a satisfying answer for many.
You can imagine then how difficult it can be to train PMs or learn to become one yourself. I haven't found anything more effective than try, fail, learn, repeat. But you can arm yourself with some basic knowledge to make the failures softer and the learning more productive. I thought I would share my favorite reading material that I consider essential for any PM. This started as an e-mail I was going to send my team internally but then I thought why not share this with the world ;-)
The Art of Project Management, by Scott Berkun
This one is a no brainer. Written by a former and very successful Microsoft program manager, it's the PM 101 primer. I don't agree 100% with everything in it, but there is more to learn than to discount in this book. I actually hand most new PMs a copy of this to start. Thank you Mr. Berkun.
A Whole New Mind, by Dan Pink
nosce te ipsum. There are a whole class of books out there that fit this mould and this is just a great example of the genre. Know Thyself. Self-awareness is a critical skill for any PM and this book does a great job revealing a whole different side of us. Also check out Blink
The Ten Faces of Innovation, by Thomas Kelley
IDEO wrote the book (literally) on innovation. I enjoy all of his books, but this is the most directly actionable one that I have read so far. Ideas are easy; innovation is tough. We like to go big at Microsoft and this book has some great tips for going beyond the ordinary.
Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds
As a PM, you do a lot of PowerPoint presentations, most of them poorly. Read the book to understand why.
The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman
Bad design is easy, commonplace, and unnecessary. This is a very quick introduction to a rich and complex topic, but hopefully it puts you in the right frame of mind at least.
Rebel Without a Crew, by Robert Rodriguez
Some people use the word "passion" almost casually. To be successful at anything (including a PM), you should have an appreciation for what passion is really about. This book is as good an explanation as I have found.
Awesome. Twitter meets INSTEON in the strangest combination of technology to-date. Check out the particulars here: http://www.vimeo.com/1025711?pg=embed&sec=1025711
If you thought that was strange, check out this: SIP for Light Bulbs Using SIP to Support Communication with Networked
I have to admit, I'm pretty intrigued myself about the possibilities especially if you were brave enough to publish your Twitter account for this.
Great set of videos on how folks use their Chumby over at YouTube. I'm still working out how to hack together a simple intercom system using my Chumby and Windows Live Messenger. In the meantime, I'm going to use a text based system via Twitter. Very easy to do and amazingly useful. In a nutshell, my chumby is a alternate sidebar display which I can stream just about anything to and I don't have to have my laptop nearby.
Recovering from a hard drive crash tells you a lot about yourself. What do you backup? What do you miss? And what can't you live without as you start to re-create your digital life (or laptop)? I at least had advanced warning from the intermittent BSODs that usually occurred during a critical e-mail writing storm. Rising from the ashes looked something like the following for me:
- Replace hard drive (good first step, right?)
- Install Vista Enterprise SP1 from the network (PXE)
- Plug-in ethernet cable (wireless not working yet...)
- Join myself to the corporate domain
- Reboot
- Add myself to the local administrator's group
- Install ISA Firewall Client from Intranet
- Auto-Enroll for wireless certificate
- Wireless is now working and I can un-tether myself again
- Install Office 2007 (gotta get that e-mail working again)
- Autoconfigure Outlook .... ready to start downloading several GB of e-mail
- Install FolderShare (the absolute easiest way to recover all the files I have backed up on my other machines)... 10 minutes later, I'm functional again
- Now time to install those other applications you can't live without
- Install Office Communicator so people realize I'm back in action
- Install VPN client
- Install Adobe Reader
- Install Adobe Flash
- Install Adobe AIR, so I can ...
- Install Twhirl
- Install Silverlight
- Install PowerShell (passionate hobby ;-)
- Install Zune (not critical, but I much prefer this to WMP)
- Install Windows Live Writer (how else would I write this?)
Done. I'm probably overlooking some things, but so far I haven't missed them.
It's that time of year already when thousands flock to sunny Orlando to experience VoiceCon. Last year, I got to see the world's largest phone:
Kinda silly when you think about it but you can't help but stop and stare. Stop by the Microsoft booth to see some really interesting phones (in a more convenient size). In addition to cruising the conference floor and hearing some great presentations and keynotes, I'll be sitting on a panel on Wednesday talking about SIP standards and interoperability:
To what extent is SIP viable -- or required -- when deploying a converged, multivendor IP communications network? To help you answer that question, Ed Mier, a leading independent expert on SIP will give you a detailed report on SIP interoperability, based on the latest annual survey of SIP-supporting vendors: How many and which features interoperate, where interoperability still falls short, and where we stand with SIP "extensions." He'll discuss his conclusions with a panel of vendor representatives and the audience.
KEY QUESTIONS
Which traditional voice features can be supported with approved SIP-standard specifications? What features can't? To what extent do SIP elements from different vendors truly interoperate? Are the newer SIP-based systems backward-compatible with earlier products that were based on proprietary protocols? In which areas of the network are SIP implementations most likely not to interoperate? What sorts of features are being implemented as SIP extensions, and why? Will SIP extensions always be with us, or will most if not all features become standardized over time? Speaker - Ed Mier, CEO, MierConsulting, LLC
Panelist - Tony Rybczynski, Strategic Enterprise Tech, Nortel
Panelist - M Raza, Product Management, 3Com
Panelist - Sean Olson, Principal Group Program Manager, Microsoft
Panelist - Paul McMillan, Director UC Strategy, Siemens Communications
If you like what you hear and want to learn more, please stop by and see me. Or check out our new interoperability site.
I worked on Unix systems for probably close to a decade before coming to work at Microsoft. The common denominator among them all was that the command line was way more interesting than whatever GUI they might provide (the two exceptions being the NeXT cube and SGI's IRIX which were years ahead of their time). My perspective was a bit biased being a programmer since scripting at the command line brought me an efficiency and range of functionality that could not be met with any point and click GUI. Simply put, it was way cooler to get things done with the command line than any pretty boy UI. For these reasons, I became acquainted with dozens of command line scripting options and expert in more than a few.
Bourne Shell and all its brethren are where it started for me: ksh, sh, Bash, zsh, etc. Writing scripts that could work on a variety of systems to automate a bunch of manual tasks. In that environment you don't learn one tool, you have to learn several to get anything useful done: grep, awk, sed, ps, kill, ls, sort, uniq, count, more, etc. You master the syntax of the input/output of each of these commands as well as the format of all the useful files. The mantra that everything is a file in Unix serves you well as long as you (a) know where that file is and (b) know the structure of the file.
This was tedious but it worked. The tedium came from learning a bunch of tools and how to string them together as well as how to work around the idiosyncrasies of these tools on all the different flavors of *nix. Then came the most wonderful invention: Perl. Hard to believe that it has been twenty years already! Perl was wonderful because it replaced all those tools and gave you a consistent regex notation for parsing all those text files. Perl 4 still sets the bar for maximum functionality in minimal lines of code. Perl 5 raised the bar by creating a vast library of re-usable modules to handle all those common administrative tasks and more. No more re-inventing the wheel over and over again.
Perl has an elegance to it once you grok the syntax. You can work some real magic with Perl hash tables and dynamic evaluation. Perl is never going to win any beauty prizes though. For some folks, it's just not their cup of tea. Python could be viewed as an alternative to Perl for those who prefer a more "pure" scripting language. I first came into contact with Python while working at NASA. There are some incredibly brilliant Python folks there. I love the way Python handles objects (though my favorite is the original prototype concept in JavaScript). Python too has a vast library of re-usable modules. Some would argue that the way Python handles libraries is cleaner than Perl but they both get the job done.
Fast forward to when I joined Microsoft six years ago. Love the interface of Windows compared to X Windows, but when it came to command line scripting, it was like going back to the dark ages. Not a big fan of cmd.exe or the WSH but it does get the job done. Partly because of past history I turned to ActivePerl to fill my scripting needs on the Windows platform. It's an awesome product but using Perl on Windows always leaves you feeling like something is missing. Part of the problem is that everything is not a file on Windows. Management in Windows means understanding other things like WMI, Active Directory, COM, etc. The other part of the problem is that Windows fundamentally handles file paths differently and it can be a hard transition from using Perl on Unix to using Perl on Windows. Using the command line in Windows was definitely not cool.
This all changes with PowerShell. I was skeptical at first. Could Microsoft really create something that could compete with Perl or Python and fill this aching gap in their command line story? I think the PowerShell folks have done just that. They've borrowed a lot of the great concepts from those languages while introducing some novel concepts of their own. First off, I can do things in PowerShell with about the same number of lines of code I would use in Perl. Secondly, I can leverage the entire functionality of the .NET framework. Re-read that again. I can't overstate the importance of this piece. No more re-inventing the wheel here. There is a ton of functionality in those libraries that you can use directly in PowerShell without having to learn any new syntax. For example, retrieving a file from a remote HTTP server is trivial and you don't have to know anything about HTTP. Third, PowerShell is built for Windows by folks who really understand Windows. All that WMI, AD, LDAP, and XML that is a routine part of managing a Windows system is easily accessible from within PowerShell. And I've never seen an easier way to access COM objects from a scripting language. Finally, you have to try the object-based pipeline in PowerShell to fully appreciate what this means in terms of power and efficiency. Simply put, you don't have to spend all your time parsing text anymore. You think in objects and not regular expressions. Beautiful.
This leads me to an obvious topic: when will Office Communications Server offer PowerShell as a command-line scripting interface? Like many Microsoft enterprise products, OCS 2007 today offers WMI as the primary scripting interface for the product. Combined with WSH, you can get most things done via a command line. But it's no PowerShell. The roadmap we have for offering PowerShell consists of two phases. In the first phase, you can use PowerShell's native ability to work with WMI to access all of that functionality. We have a good proof-of-concept for this in the CD that accompanies the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit. Longer term, we are going to offer a native PowerShell interface similar to what is available with Exchange 2007. To do this right takes time. We want to provide an object model and corresponding PowerShell cmdlets that maps well to the product and provides an interface that will be useful for years to come. This means rethinking our entire WMI interface as it stands today and coming up with something better. As we make progress on what that new interface will look like, I will post more information and solicit your feedback.
The command line is cool again, especially on Windows, and I can't wait to show you what comes next...
You want this tool. You need this tool. Get it now: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/0/7/207bb9fb-bffe-478f-91b7-8339d25f7fdd/OCSPlanningTool.msi.
- Answer some simple questions
- Click Finish
- See your OCS 2007 Topology
Nothing could be easier.
I finally broke down and purchased a Chumby in basic black. It was a tough decision .... I mean, it runs embedded Linux after all :O.. I managed to rationalize it to myself by saying I needed a new alarm clock. Not entirely true since my current alarm clock is just fine but I guess we all have our own vices. The potential of this device is huge in my opinion and I can't wait for it to arrive and start customizing it. If you haven't seen or heard about this device yet, take a look at their overview or hop on over to their blog. Now if I could only get Mono running on this ... ;-)
The OCS 2007 Resource Kit book is finally here. Check it out on Amazon or your favorite bookstore.
Great article over at FastCompany about high quality video conferencing. My favorite part is this quote:
The question is: how on earth are we still dealing with the awful sound quality of telephones, well into the age of ubiquitous internet, hybrid cars and Coke Zero?
Good question indeed. It used to be that the holy grail of VoIP was to meet landline telephone voice quality. Most were happy just to achieve cell phone voice quality. And now folks are demanding even more? Well, they should. Wideband audio codecs plus ubiquitous connectivity means you should get good quality audio just about everywhere. It's what we believe in.... and you should too :-) Have you heard the audio quality in Office Communicator or RoundTable? Let me know what you think about where we are at and where we could improve.
I hear this question all the time from customers. It's a fair question and a natural one since enterprise telephony has long been the province of the PBX manufacturers. In fact, this was such an entrenched mind set that most of the enterprise VoIP products out there today are just the same PBX architecture that's always been there with an extra interface to support VoIP. It's the same old dog with a shiny new collar. To answer this question, I usually pose a few of my own:
- Why would you pay good money to replace something you already have? That is, replace one TDM PBX with a new "VoIP" PBX
- Why would Microsoft bother releasing a product in 2007 that did nothing more than a product from the early '80s?
- Have your communication needs changed at all since 1876?
Office Communications Server is not a PBX. It's a product to teach that old dog some new tricks and give you a genuine return on your investment at the same time. It's also part of a genuine Unified Communications strategy. By that I don't mean re-branding your existing PBX product line with a UC name. Times have changed and so have customer's needs including web and video conferencing. OCS is the product to deliver a new 21st century experience around telephony and other modes of communication as well. This doesn't mean you have to throw out that PBX. It works and provides a good basic service. Complement that PBX with OCS and now you have: people-centric communication, instant messaging, rich presence information, application sharing, video conferencing, and more. Add in Exchange Unified Messaging and you have a 21st century voicemail experience as well.
Will OCS ever be a PBX? Probably not. I think we are reaching the end of an era for the PBX architecture (whether TDM-based or IP-based). It's time to think about a new era of Unified Communications. Time to think about people as people rather than as phone numbers. Time to replace phone tag with something more productive. Time to introduce new ways of leveraging voice in your business applications and removing this island of telephony. Time to stop paying for a PC but only getting a phone ;-)
What do you think?
Happy Holidays!
This is my inaugural post, at least on TechNet. While I've been blogging personally for some time and have even contributed to our team blog
I thought it would be good to start posting a bit on my own as well. This gives me a little more flexibility in the timing and subject matter of my posts. I'll certainly be cross-posting a bit as well since we want the Communications Server blog to be an active one. So a little about myself ....
I'm the group program manager for the Office Communications Server product, recently considered by one publication to be the #1 VoIP product of the year (CRN 2007 Products of the Year) This is quite an honor given all the great VoIP products out there today. A lot of hard work by a team of very talented folks has finally paid off and I'm proud to be part of that team. We're not resting on our laurels though as we are busily planning the next two releases. Stay tuned for more info on that as I'm able to release it ;-)
I hope to keep up with this blog actively discussing not only my product and Microsoft's Unified Communications strategy but also the general UC marketplace and any tidbits of technology I find interesting along the way. Feel free to e-mail if there is something in particular you would like to see in this blog
