Unified Me

You Want This

Sean Olson — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:55:06 GMT

In case you haven't seen this already, the PowerShell Cmdlet designer is now available for download as Open Source. Anyone doing any large scale cmdlet implementations can benefit from this. And it makes it a lot easier to browse a cmdlet module :-) Kudos to the PowerShell team for releasing this in the wild.

The Web Scheduler is here!

Sean Olson — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 21:46:04 GMT

It’s here… for situations where Outlook is not your preferred way to schedule meetings, we now have an alternative available. The web scheduler is cross-platform and even works for you Lotus Notes fans ;-) Enjoy:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6d6848ec-e7d6-41f4-82d9-5bed3526fcbd

Highly Available OCS 2007 R2 Deployment Guidance

Sean Olson — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:23:10 GMT

There is a new whitepaper out that you may want to take a look at that provides detailed guidance on how to achieve high availability and disaster recovery between regional datacenters. This is a non-trivial problem and requires a bit of know-how to get it established. Fortunately the whitepaper does a good job of walking you through this:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c930febb-3a44-4bf3-969d-1c52675a7063

Technorati Tags: UC,OCS

What I Wish I Knew at 21

Sean Olson — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:38:21 GMT

Having recently suffered a personal loss, I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching and along the way realized a number of things I wish I had known when I was 21. I wouldn’t ordinarily post something so personal but as I started to think about it, there are some hopefully useful tips in there which might help other aspiring PMs or Microsofties-in-training.

Failure is key to success

You will fail way more often than you succeed and too often people focus on the ratio but ignore the lessons that failure provide. My greatest successes have always followed a failure, sometimes catastrophic failures. Don’t use failure as an excuse to stop or hesitate.

Invest in yourself

Always give yourself time to grow, learn new things, meet new people, and expand your comfort zone. Invest time, money, and energy in yourself because it always has the best rate of return. For those who have a hard time with this type of selfish activity, realize that your ability to help others is limited by how you yourself grow. I find that this is especially hard as a parent but even more critical (applies to any “leadership” role)

Know your weaknesses

Self-evident. What may not be so obvious is that this is an ongoing exercise. You never stop learning new things about yourself, at least as long as you never stop looking.

Plan if you need to, but don’t stop executing

Plans, like slide ware, look good on paper but never beat actual results. Not to say that planning is not important, especially as a PM, but don’t get lost in the plan or be afraid to improvise.

Fear or discomfort are signals to try something new

Listen to what your heart and mind are saying …. but don’t always follow them. You will not grow if everything you do is comfortable.

Everyone is smarter than you

I mean that in a literal sense – the sum of the experience, skills, and knowledge of the people surrounding you will almost always surpass what you individually can contribute. Don’t hesitate to tap into that pool of knowledge. Ask questions. Learn.

Be skeptical and trust yourself

Don’t accept everything at face value, especially if it is “common knowledge”. Innovation comes from questioning the norm. Genius is often proving conventional wisdom wrong. Your gut instincts are usually pretty good and worth trusting if they are telling you something is wrong.

Do something different every day

Make a change in some part of your routine on a daily basis. Habits become ruts and your presumptions become blind spots.

Play and work

No one successful is boring. They all have passions outside of work as well as being passionate about their work. Your external perspectives are what make you unique and give you an ability to solve problems in your own special way. Don’t let work prevent you from playing.

Pick what defines you very carefully

If that is your job, make sure your job is your passion – something you truly love. If it’s not your job, that’s OK too, but know that and make an intentional decision. Don’t settle. I once told a PM in my team that you shouldn’t work at Microsoft unless you are working on something really big – the next cool thing that will change the world. Do not come to Microsoft unless you intend to change the world. Do not stay at Microsoft unless you think you are changing the world. Do not settle.

The most important impact you will have will be on someone else

It’s all about people. Never forget that. Easy to lose site of that because we work on software/things. The end goal is always about people. The impact you have is about how you touch those people you work with, live with, and work for.

You have only one chance to live your life

There is nothing worse than regretting the action you didn’t take, the words you didn’t say, or the opportunity you passed up. When you come to that decision point, ask yourself whether or not you will look back and regret not saying Yes.

Google OS

Sean Olson — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:35:48 GMT

Wow, has this ever stirred things up! :-) Is anyone really surprised though? This has been expected for at least 2 years now. If Win7 didn’t have a SKU for Netbooks, this might even be interesting. Having used Win7 for several months now, I can’t see any reason I would go for such a downgraded experience as a Chrome-based OS. Still, it will be sure to continue to generate news and I’m curious to see how things work out.

Technorati Tags: Google,OS

What’s Innovative about Microsoft

Sean Olson — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:42:33 GMT

There’s an interesting thread going on inside Microsoft about what are the cool and innovative things we have done as a company over the last decade. I think about this quite a bit as well. Working inside Microsoft you see both sides of this discussion. On the one hand, you can look around inside Microsoft and see absolutely phenomenal innovation taking place in virtually every group across the company. On the other hand, you see how rarely that gets recognized outside of the company. I personally think that is partly because we sometimes make the mistake of focusing on technology rather than the core problem and so non-technophiles don’t get what’s so cool about we have delivered. But we are also getting much better at what I call sub derma innovation. That is innovation that lies below the surface. Put another way, we innovate by making really complex problems look easy. And in that light, it’s easy again for non-technophiles to miss the great work that has happened and think “What’s so innovative about X? It’s just this simple thing…”.

But I do believe we have done some remarkable things that most folks would realize as innovative whether you like the product or not and even if you may not know all the hard problems under the cover that had to be solved to make it a reality. Some of my favorites are:

OneNote – I don’t know how I lived without this before. It transforms ordinary conversations or thoughts into action
PowerShell – Pure light and goodness :-) It makes me yearn to be a programmer again
Xbox – Yeah, you could look at this and say it was just another gaming console with different hardware, but that misses what Xbox Live brought to the table as well. No one has come close to duplicating this online experience.
Windows 7 – I’m cheating since it is only in Beta, but even at Beta, it is the best OS I have ever used.
OCS – clearly I am biased and time will tell if I’m way off base. Not everyone will use the product in the same way that I do, but I have finally gotten rid of my business phone

What would be on your list?

Top 10 Things to Know About OCS 2007 R2

Sean Olson — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:59:32 GMT

Our virtual launch is coming very soon, but I thought I would share some tidbits of information that you should know about OCS 2007 R2. Just something to whet your appetite …

10. 64-bit

We’ve made the switch to 64-bit at last. Industry trends all point to this being the right time to make such a switch. The cost and availability of 64-bit hardware is unbelievable. In just the short time between the release of OCS 2007 and the release of R2, hardware has grown by leaps and bounds. We wanted to take advantage of that hardware and the only way to truly unlock it’s potential was to go native 64-bit. This is not just a recompile. There are significant changes involved. For this and many other reasons, we have decided to bid farewell to the 32-bit server.

9. Windows Server 2008

Customers demanded it and we have delivered – R2 has been re-designed to work effectively on Windows Server 2008. This is also not just a simple recompile. This means leveraging things like the improved (default) firewall in Windows Server 2008, IIS 7.0, EEC certificates, and much more.

8. Consolidation

In OCS 2007, we had two different options for deploying our Enterprise Edition: consolidated and expanded. Consolidated was simple to deploy because every server was running all the services (instant messaging, presence, conferencing, and voice). But it was limited in scale at the time (30,000 concurrent users per pool) and so our largest customers would deploy expanded instead. Expanded meant we took the resource intensive workloads (mainly web conferencing and audio/video) and offloaded them to dedicated servers.

Moving to 64-bit meant we could take advantage of the natural improvements in hardware and suddenly we could have the best of both worlds: easy to manage and scalable. We now recommend consolidated configuration for all deployments and we have the scale to match: 100,000 concurrent users per pool. (Or 200,000 if all you need is IM and presence)

But we didn’t stop at the core server roles. We also consolidated the Edge Server role so that there is now a single server role to deploy and you deploy multiple instances for scale.

7. No More DNAT

We use load-balancers to effectively scale out deployments and most load balancers support two different modes of operation. Load balancers inherently implement a network address translation (NAT) function as they attempt to make a single virtual IP address distribute across multiple physical servers. There are two obvious ways to do NAT: based on the destination address/port (DNAT) or based on the source address/port (SNAT). In OCS 2007, we supported either mode. In R2, we no longer support DNAT.

Why? Because DNAT has some peculiarities when one of those physical OCS servers behind the load balancer wants to communicate with different OCS server in the same pool and wants to load balance that communication as well. There’s no good way to make this work with DNAT. With SNAT, this works just fine. What’s the impact to you if you have already deployed? A simple re-configuration of your load balancer. No change in functionality or scale.

6. System vs. Config

We leverage Active Directory extensively. This comes directly from our vision statement where we believe a single identity is the core of any UC system. For Microsoft, that single identity comes from Active Directory. AD is effectively a smart, replicated, database. There is a lot of information stored in Active Directory in general and so this replication can be network intensive. For most deployments, this is a complete non-issue. However, for very broadly distributed global deployments, the network connectivity between all sites is not always reliable. The good news is that AD has a solution for this type of situation. It involves putting your application settings into a different container (config) than the normal default (system). The benefit of doing this is that you have a local copy of the config information that is available even when network connectivity between sites is down.

In previous releases, we gave you the option of using either (System or Config) but defaulted to System. That made sense for typically centralized IM and presence deployments. It makes less sense for global, typically de-centralized voice deployments. Our recommendation (and default) moving forward is the Config container. If you have already deployed using the System container, don’t worry. We have a tool to help you with the migration. What you should know is that you need to do this migration BEFORE you attempt to deploy R2.

5. Improved Updates

We’ve made some significant improvements in the way we handle updates to the clients and devices in R2. In OCS 2007, we introduced the Update Server role which allowed you to keep your desktop phone and RoundTable device software up-to-date. With R2, we now allow you to do the same with the Office Communicator desktop software as well. What’s more we’ve addressed most of the shortcomings of the previous implementation including:

No more Sharepoint dependency (this stuff works out of the box)
Fully authenticated downloads
Better support for remote phones outside the firewall
Support for cross-language updates (go from English to French, for example)

4. RDP-based Application Sharing

Ever use Remote Desktop or Terminal Server to access a remote machine? Works pretty well, right? Well now we use the same technology for application sharing in our product. It’s so good I forget I’m even using it. This is really fast, high fidelity, silky smooth application sharing – the way it’s meant to be. And it works in a web browser… on a Mac… from anywhere.

3. Dial-In Conferencing

You use them all the time. Audio Bridges are a natural way people work nowadays. Only now you no longer need to buy a separate bridge or pay per month or per minute. The nice thing is that this is fully integrated with the rest of the UC solution. You don’t have to worry about forgetting your PIN or remembering what your special meeting ID was meant to be. And you have complete control over who can join which calls – something that is hard to impossible to do in other systems. More on this to come …

2. Group Chat

We acquired a company called Parlano over a year ago. Since then, we have been busy integrating this world-class group chat product into our overall UC solution. With the release of R2, we are proud to announce the first Microsoft release of the new group chat functionality. Why is this important? Because IM has become mission critical at many companies but they aren’t tapping the full value of those IM conversations. With group chat, you get an indexed archive of these group collaboration sessions which you can search at any time. The institutional knowledge that was once lost can now be preserved and leveraged.

1. We’re Not Done Yet

We are still busy putting the finishing touches on things like SDKs, localizing into more languages, improving the planning tools, building the best documentation ever, and some pleasant surprises which I can’t discuss (yet). I will share more as these pieces fall into place over the next few months. There are some really exciting announcements coming at launch.

Practice Practice Practice

Sean Olson — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 07:07:12 GMT

Yeah, what he said: http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/12/hard-work-and-practice-in-programming.html

One thing to add is this is not learning by rote. This is discovery and creation that only surfaces through practice. The same applies equally to being a program manager. There is no substitute for practice (and by extension, experience). I need to go practice now.

Technorati Tags: PM,Microsoft

Snow Day

Sean Olson — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:55:04 GMT

Like most of the country, the Pacific Northwest is seeing a bit more snow than usual. In Redmond, we fear snow. For the greater part of the year we have very moderate weather and so most folks here don’t know how to drive on snow and ice. Today is particularly bad because the quantity of snow makes driving a Herculean task even for those accustomed to it.

I’d guess that at least 20,000 of the 30,000+ folks who work at Microsoft in Redmond are working from home today and that is an unexpected challenge for our VPN servers not to mention the local DSL/cable networks. Things are slower than usual but still working. If you can avoid doing a VPN connection, it’s a wise idea.

Here comes the obligatory plug for OCS ;-) I’m not using VPN for the most part. I don’t need it for Outlook and can do e-mail, share files, schedule meetings, etc. just fine. I don’t need it for OC and so I’ve been in meetings all day long using VoIP and application sharing in our soon-to-be-released R2 product. Alas there are some internal tools and web sites which I can’t completely avoid and so I dip my toes into the VPN waters occasionally. What I’m finding though is that set is shrinking over time.

Working remotely is becoming a more frequent occurrence for me (aside from the odd weather around here) and I’ve become addicted to this flexibility. I’ve done IM from Maui, international calls from San Francisco, working meetings in my PJs, and even full day workshops remotely. It’s not a perfect experience, but what I miss most are things we are actively working on. Next time I get snowed in, I will probably enjoy it ;-)

Technorati Tags: UC,VoIP,OCS

VoiceCon is almost here

Sean Olson — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:53:57 GMT

In two weeks, VoiceCon San Francisco will kick off. After our announcement of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 at the VoiceCon event in Amsterdam, I'm expecting quite a bit of excitement and questions about our upcoming release. Microsoft will have a strong presence at the event as always and I myself will have a chance to attend and be part of a panel discussion around "Leveraging VoIP Investments for Unified Communications". Unfortunately my schedule only allows me to be there for a day since my day job (shipping R2) keeps me busy. Please swing by the Microsoft booth if you have a chance and drop me an e-mail if you will be there on Wednesday.

Now Hiring

Sean Olson — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 02:46:00 GMT

Shameless plug :-) We're looking for a rockstar PowerShell program manager to join the team here in Redmond. Got what it takes or know someone who does? Shoot me an e-mail: sean dot olson at microsoft dot com

UPDATE: Thanks for all the references I have received. I've found my rockstar PM :)

Free at Last

Sean Olson — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:09:10 GMT

At last we are free to start blogging about our upcoming R2 release of OCS 2007. We've made a formal announcement at VoiceCon Amsterdam and the lid is off on this release which we've been cooking for over a year now. I'm especially proud of the customer focused nature of this release. There is not an ounce of fat in the release. No superfluous features, no pet projects, no easter eggs ;-) Seriously, every last piece of this release has come from detailed and repeated feedback from our customers. 64-bit support, Windows Server 2008 support, PSTN bridging, Boss/Admin support, and much much more. This is our best release to date. And this couldn't come at a better time. As folks are starting to tighten their belt during these tough times, OCS 2007 R2 offers some tremendous cost savings. Our own internal deployment of R2 is going to save us million$ just with the PSTN bridging feature. That is some awesome ROI. Beats my 401(K) for sure ... I'll be posting a ton of more stuff about R2 in the coming days.

The Future of the Voice Conference

Sean Olson — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:09:00 GMT

I've attended just about all of the major voice related conferences in our industry to date but of late it seems like the buzz that drew so many to VoIP and SIP in the "early" days is starting to wane as the industry matures and SIP is no longer a question but an assumption. So I'm quite intrigued to see what eComm can become. I've read some very favorable comments about the inaugural event in 2008. I'm now blocking off my calendar to attend next year's event. Like Microsoft's own Interact event, this sophomore effort is not one to miss. Ping me if you plan on attending as well. Would be great to meet as many folks as possible there.

The Minbar for Applications

Sean Olson — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:21:19 GMT

Perhaps I'm getting spoiled, but I've gotten used to some basic features in any application I used nowadays and I'm really surprised by any new application that doesn't have these:

Automatic, in-place upgrades: why make the user work so hard to see your hard work?
Dock to systray: no app is so important that I shouldn't be able to get some screen real estate back when I need it
E-mail invitations: if I'm excited about your app, make it easy for me to share that excitement
Roam my data: preferences, settings, etc. I have more than one machine. So do a lot of folks. Make it easy to keep those in sync
Connect to my data: don't make me re-enter stuff that's already in obvious places like Facebook, Yahoo/GMail/Hotmail, etc. If I have to build one more list of "friends" ...
Don't ever ever lose my data: wow, this still happens waay too often

Essential Reading for PMs

Sean Olson — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:44:00 GMT

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.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Program Manager