A day as an architect at Microsoft Australia

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Lots of friends and family aften ask me the question "what is it
exactly that you do?" so I thought I'd share with you what I did for
the day - Friday 26th May.

6:30-7:30am - logging in from home - clearing my inbox, 46 new items
came through overnight, mostly from colleagues in North America

7:30-8:30 - breakfast with family

8:30-9:00 - travel to first meeting

9:00-10:30 - Identity management architecture design session for a
major publishing global company, we discussed the 7 Laws of Identity,
Identity Metasystem, a demo of Infocard, and we whiteboarded a few new
business models and scenarios that are enabled through Infocard. See my
past blog on this subject matter.

10:30 - 11am - travel back to Microsoft office North Ryde

11-11:30am - built my new m400 with Jeffa's Vista Beta2 disk, thanks Jeff!

11:30-12:30pm - chatted to Dr Neil Roodyn about ViaVirtualEarth,
and what other potentially interesting VE based mashups we can build
for the Sydney community, eg. NSW Public transport information, local
council/land block information, and other cool ideas like building
tickertape info from e*Trade, blocks for access into personal online
banking sites from live.com.

We also chatted about our mutual colleague from UCL - Wolfgang Emmerich, and our past research lives!

12:30-1:00pm lunch with my cubicle neighbour Jeffa and John Warren -
they told me about their fun trips to China, and they seem to be much
better at bargaining at Chinese markets than me!

1-3pm - tinkered a bit more with the Vista machine, including the
Infocard bit, caught up with more email communications, planned out and
briefed the event manager the next meeting for the Sydney Architect
Council, and reviewed an IT&T Strategy paper for a major FSI
customer

3-4pm - chatted to Mark Pey, our FSI industry solution manager about
various latest technologies such as Atlas, Orcas, WCF, WPF, Infocard,
Expression, and more interestingly, their business value add to a FSI
organisation. I also got to find out from Mark about the latest FSI
industry trends, what Web 2.0 means for the traditional banks,
insurance companies, etc. and got a feeling for what the CXOs of FSI
companies are thinking in terms of Web 2.0 innovations. We pondered
about what we could do to help these enterprises accelerate their
adoption of the Web 2.0 innovations, what would they need to do in
creating and adopting different business models.

4-5pm - more tinkering and a bit more review done on the IT&T Strategy paper

5-6pm - heading home, tis' Friday afterall

I promised Patrick that I'm not getting online at all on Friday
evening, but I couldn't hold out any longer, and here I am - blogging
on Saturday morning!

So, that was a fun day as an architect at Microsoft Australia.