“Pocket OneNote” and some misc. updates

  1. This is what I was reduced to yesterday:

  2. I was in meetings all day and did not want to distract myself with running my tablet so I did the next best thing and made a hipster PDA out of some cover pages I dug out of the printer recycle bin, rebranded it and put it to use. Everyone got a laugh.

  3. The meetings I was in covered our "post mortem" analysis of how well we think we did with delivering OneNote 2010. No big surprises and everyone was more or less ready to analyze what we did and how we can continually improve in the future. It just so happened I had two such meetings yesterday which took all day to get through. Overall, though, it was time well spent.

  4. Holding a post mortem does not mean we are "done" in any sense of the word, though.

  5. Here's a partial list of work items that are being completed by the test team:

  6. Automation cleanup is starting to wind down. We need to clean up all our "TODO" items and then reassess where we can get the most return on our investment time.

  7. Some new testers internally transferred to the OneNote team. We have a variety of tasks to complete here which includes everything from training them on the unique aspects of OneNote to simply getting office space assigned.

  8. This reminds me - I need to order some furniture for this.

  9. An intern is starting in a few weeks so we're gathering hardware for her, getting her an office and finding some (stunningly great) work to complete.

  10. I'm still trying to get my head around the new blog servers that were upgraded last week. Feel free to chime in if there is some aspect of this blog you want to see - I'll see what I can get done.

  11. We are updating documentation. 'Nuff said about this task.

  12. We upgraded some of our server hardware - mostly just adding lots of hard drives to give us more space. The standard theory that the amount of data you need to store expands to fill the given hard drive comes into play here.

And we also have all of our ongoing tasks still chugging along - test the application, filing bug reports, assist others, etc… These are the tasks that define the bulk of our job.

So even though the DVDs with Office 2010 are being shipped to the stores, early adopters already have OneNote from MSDN subscriptions and the general release is approaching, I kept wondering why I felt really busy. After reading this list of items here, I think I know why (cue the world's smallest violin to play for me being busy at work)…

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John