Crossing Boundaries

Were you in Las Vegas last week? If you attended the SharePoint conference in the Mandalay Bay resort, you probably thought you were. But Las Vegas is famously a city of facades, illusions and well-kept secrets. Caesars Palace isn't really Rome, nor the Venetian, Venice. My favourite illusion is that much of what we think of as Las Vegas is actually not in the city at all, but in unincorporated Winchester and Paradise, NV. The city of Las Vegas itself starts just north of Sahara Avenue. So all you folks attending the SharePoint conference at the Mandalay Bay - you weren't even in Vegas, baby!

I was really in Vegas, for a couple of days. We stayed downtown on Fremont Street, visiting with Alison's vacationing parents, just before the conference, then shuffled up the strip to ritzier lodgings for the main event. It's not much of a boundary to cross, perhaps a formality in some ways, but nevertheless significant. Fremont street has its colourful fun, but it isn't the Strip: and The Four Seasons is surely not the Lady Luck.

I have recently been crossing other boundaries too. For one thing, I have a new role within Microsoft. Just like driving up from Las Vegas to the Strip, to the casual observer you may not notice much difference, but difference there is. Here's the change ...

I have always enjoyed being very close with customers, partners and the wider Business Intelligence community. Since I first joined Microsoft, back in 2001, I have been working in engineering teams, striving sometimes to keep up with the deeply technical side, but still trying to keep in touch with what our customers and partners needed in the real world. It has been a great role, but a difficult one to balance. So now, rather than being in a single vertical product team - Analysis Services, or Integration Services, for example - I'll be working in a cross-team role. My focus will be to help Microsoft articulate a vision for business intelligence, and to improving our technical engagement with analysts, partners and other teams. As part of this role, I'll still need to keep technically close to the development teams: still contributing to engineering execution and vision as I can. (I still have some patents up my sleeve!) Nevertheless, the role does change. I'll miss leading my group of Program Managers - but I'll still be working with them daily. Maybe I'll even miss the hassle of integrating trees of code, fighting bug fires, and juggling development and test resources. However, I have much to look forward to, especially as we enter a whole new area with our "managed self-service" approach to business intelligence.

If you want to keep up with my new role, and the various technical and community initiatives in which I'll be involved, please do read my blog here. It's a Microsoft blog, for sure: in the sense that it is focused on our products, and our issues. For example, my next post will cover our new PowerPivot product, explaining some of the thinking behind our direction, and behind the name. You can also read my other blog  where I'll be rather more expansive on issues of broader interest in the BI community. And you can follow me on Twitter: donalddotfarmer.

It's going to be fun. For me, better than Vegas