The obligatory hello world post

I’m taking this first post as an opportunity to introduce myself to the great world of MSDN blogs and get my feet wet.  As you might have guessed from the title of my blog, I’m Ryan Gregg, a program manager with the Microsoft Office Outlook team. 

For those of you who don’t really know what a PM does, the MS career website says this:

Leads the technical side of a product development team, managing and defining the functional specifications and defining how the product will work.

As a program manager we drive the development of new features and provide the technical specifications that define how these features will work.  I think it’s one of the most exciting and interesting technical positions at Microsoft (but of course that’s just my opinion).

I decided to setup a blog here on blogs.msdn.com because I’ve just started working on the Outlook Extensibility team.  In other words, I work with the Outlook platform, mostly on the Outlook object model.  I hope to use this blog to provide useful and helpful insights into working with the object model and details about changes to the object model (when this information is publicly available) and to listen to feedback from our customers about the object model.   Unfortunately at this point I don’t have a lot I can talk about since my day to day activities are all involved with unreleased products.

However this is just a start, and when the time comes I’ll be sharing as much as I can about the benefits of using Outlook as a platform and the ways Microsoft is going to make that process better for developers.  Until that time, if you have any feedback about the way the object model works or the Outlook platform, leave it for me in the comments.  While I can’t promise anything, I can at least let you know that someone in the product team is reading that and thinking about it.