I'm Back -- Just In Time To Move On...
The good news is that I'm going to be blogging again. The not-exactly-bad news is that I'll be blogging over at https://mikefizmaurce.wordpress.com. Actually, that's good news. I'll be blogging elsewhere because in 90 minutes, I'll no longer be a Microsoft employee.
I'm heading to Nintex, a great SharePoint partner, as their Vice President of Product Technology. Nintex is in the business of creating solutions that augment SharePoint technology. They have a great workflow solution on the market for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. You may remember that, back in the bad ol' days of SPS 2003, they provided SmartLibrary, a product that added undelete, audit trails, and approval routing to document libraries. They're clever guys that way. And they're about to release something that's just as clever, if not more so, for IT Pros. Follow me to https://mikefitzmaurice.wordpress.com and I'll tell you all about it.
But this isn't supposed to be an ad for my new employer. It's a farewell message. So here goes...
I haven't been blogging for a year and a half. There are reasons for that, though. The most important one is that the reason I started blogging, which was to share info with you on what's going on and to advise you on smart developmet investments, has been subsumed into the SharePoint Team Blog. When I started, that blog didn't exist. If you wanted inside, informal, unvarnished info, it was my blog or Arpan Shah's. Since then, the whole gang has gotten involved, and guys like Lawrence Liu have become cheerleaders and coordinators of those efforts.
The second reason is that I stopped working in SharePoint Marketing almost a year ago. I've still been part of the team, but I took on a role that essentially had me acting as a liason between the product group and Microsoft's field sales teams, providing technical and competetive assistance when things got escalated. I'd done technical marketing for five years, and while I loved it, I needed to do something different. Acting as a competitive strategist and technical diplomat was perfect. But that job was focused within the company, so blogging outwardly became even less urgent. I still lobbied the dev teams incessantly, and some of the blog postings you've read were influenced by things I've coaxed or pushed them to write.
This departure isn't motivated by a desire to leave Microsoft, though. I like the job I've had for the last eleven months, to be honest. But this opportunity was dropped into my lap and was too good to pass up. The guys behind Nintex have been good friends, and their company's culture mixes productivity with fun. Plus I get to evangelize and steer product development. And help build things that augment a great platform in a very agile environment. It just feels right.
I started Microsoft in late 1997 in Microsoft Consulting Services, often creating collaboration and messaging solutions using MAPI, Exchange client and server add-ins, Outlook development, and plenty of other things. I was part of the consulting squad that helped the very first early adopter customers beta test "Tahoe", which would become SharePoint Portal Server 2001, and was part of a team that authored best-practice deployment solutions for optimal usage of SPS 2001 and SharePoint Team Services in a corporate intranet. I became a Technical Product Manager in time to bring SPS 2003 and WSS 2.0 to fruition, and haven't strayed from SharePoint-land ever since.
And I'm not straying from SharePoint-land now.
I'll be blogging about workflow as a general subject and on specific uses of Nintex Workflow to solve problems. I'll be blogging about solutions to enhance IT productivity, organizaitonal intelligence, development issues, and a lot more.
But give me about a week. I'm going home to Canada to visit family before I jump on the Nintex bandwagon, just in time to see everyone at TechEd.
Love & Kisses,
--Fitz