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I’m here to kick off the new BizTalk Server Team Blog. Before I get into what we on the team are going to do I want to take a moment to recognize and thank he who came before us. Of course I’m speaking of Scott Woodgate. His Business Process, Integration & Workflow Outbursts blog was the precursor to ours and really showed all of us how powerful honest and engaging conversation from the product group could be. The community rallied around Scott’s blog and adopted him as the symbolic community leader.

As you likely know by now Scott left the BizTalk Server team in January to pursue another opportunity at Microsoft. I am happy for him. He did a great job of sheepherding the product for 5 years and deserves the chance to tackle new challenges but I must say that I do miss working closely with him. His new office is just down the hall and I still get to see him regularly. Even so it’s not the same. I’ll bet he’ll have a harsh word for me (at least as harsh as he ever gets, which isn’t very) for bringing this up again. He’s not as outwardly sentimental as I am and I think he was glad to get the fanfare behind him. Be that as it may, here’s to Scott. I thank him for his dedication and mentoring in the past and I hope that his future is a ringing success.

Now on to the new blog: It’ll take four of us (or so we believe) to live up to the sheer abundance of communication that the community had grown accustomed to. This will be a team blog. It will not however be a random, semi-obscure group of individuals who hide behind a group name.

We are:

  • Kris Horrocks – Senior Technical Product Manager
  • Steve Sloan – Product Manager
  • Mark Berman – Senior Technical Product Manager
  • Michael Woods (me by the way) – Senior Technical Product manager

We own this space together and are committed to making it a success. We can only hope to win the trust of the community but succeed or not, the buck stops with us.

I’m the elder statesman of the group and thus get to introduce the blog with this first entry. I’ll let the others introduce themselves with follow on posts. Here is a short bio for me:

I work in the Application Platform & Developer Marketing group. I own partner and competitive strategy for Microsoft’s growing integration and business process management business. I’ve been at Microsoft for 12 years, the last 3 and a half plus years on the BizTalk Server product group. Prior to my current role I was an Architectural Advisor in the .NET Developer Solutions Group, working with customers and partners on early adoption of the initial .NET Framework release. I also spent 4 years as a Microsoft field Technology Specialist based in New York City.

I intend to bring to this space a sense of where Microsoft, the BizTalk product group, the greater Connected Systems Division and Application Platform & Developer Marketing groups are going. I’ll talk about strategy as well as interesting technology from time to time and I’ll report on noteworthy team info such as open positions and other triva (we have some open positions now – details forthcoming).

I unfortunately know nothing of New Zealand rugby. I do however have quite a bit of historical perspective on BizTalk Server and Microsoft in general. I hope to share that here as well.

Thanks for reading so far and I hope that you’ll find here pleanty of interesting information and engaging conversation!

Regards,

Mike Woods