Last week marked the one year anniversary of my employment with Microsoft in sunny Redmond, Washington. It’s been an honor and a privilege to work with the SharePoint product team after so long as a partner and community member. It’s really amazing how much work goes on to make SharePoint the best product it can be. And, I had no idea how much work went into content design, both the in-product experience and writing and maintaining user assistance articles. I’m surrounded by both top industry veterans and top new talent just entering the workforce.
One of the things that’s made the strongest impression on me in the year working hear is the positive attitude of the employees and company culture. Microsoft is working to make a more diversified tech community a reality in the future. Accessibility is a big focus with a lot of great work going on. There is more effort to listening to the community than I believe has been going on in the past. And I’m really impressed how Microsoft Cognitive Services are bringing new capabilities in computing to everyone. I learned about that first hand in the OneWeek Hackathon. And, I had no idea how much Microsoft employees give to the community. I participated in the October giving campaign, volunteering to clean up a playground, but so many gave so much more.
It seems fitting that my anniversary week was highlighted by some great community events. Johnathan Lightfoot, co-author on my first big book project, SharePoint Foundation 2010 Inside Out, was in town and we went to the Office 365 Seattle Meetup together. Johnathan was filming some soon to be released Microsoft Virtual Academy courses on SharePoint. O365Sea April was SharePoint Admin month. What a coincidence. SharePoint Product Marketing Manager, Bill Baer, gave a security and compliance talk. And Microsoft IT’s Jared Shockley gave an infrastructure talk. Great stuff! Before the meeting, I took Johnathan, author of SharePoint 2013 Plain and Simple, to sign the #ShareQuilt.
Bill Baer at Office 365 Seattle Meetup
Jared Shockley at O365SEA
Johnathan Lightfoot at the ShareQuilt
Plain and Simple, signing
