What I've Been Up To

I've been away from blogging for a loong time so have some catching up to do. I spent most of last year building out the new Dallas Microsoft Technology Center while delivering customer engagements and working on a few side projects. The MTC build out is mostly done (a few items remain but I'm spending little time on it) and has turned out pretty nice. You can see a synth of the reception area here but you really have to come visit and see it for yourself. Recently, the Dallas Morning News wrote a nice article about the Dallas MTC and what we do for customers. On Friday 2/13, we hosted a minority students day here in the Microsoft Las Colinas campus (see here) and we had the kids visit the MTC where we exposed them to different careers within the tech industry. It was a lot of fun and I was surprised a few times to find out that kids have used our technologies e.g. XBox 360, Zune, Windows movie maker (hey maybe we're doing good marketing with this age group after all!). The local NBC channel was here and some of us were on the news that night.
Now that the facility is built, it's time to shape and define my team and make sure we stay sharp and on top of our game. As for what I'm doing now, I'm still doing customer engagements mostly around .NET architecture and development and SharePoint. I'm also getting a lot of exposure to infrastructure including server/storage hardware and networking as I manage the partners that provide us with equipment for our MTC. Just recently I was recruited to help build the next generation MTC tools on Dynamics CRM so I'm about to start learning CRM.  
Outside of work, I've started school again, this time for an MBA. My first course is on Operations Management which I'm finding quite interesting thus far. I'm planning to be done in 3 years assuming I can take 5 courses per year which hopefully I can do.