So Paul, what is it that you do at Microsoft?
Summary: I get that question a lot. Well except from my mother, who long ago gave up on trying to understand what I do... But for you guys the answers used to be easy: I do what you do. Computer management. SMS administration of various sorts. ConfigMgr 'engineering'. That sort of thing. But things change.
Sure, working here I get to work very closely with the ConfigMgr product team. And I do that 'dogfooding' stuff. And we have 250,000 clients. And our networks are wonderful. So there are differences, but every organization has its differences. Basically we all did the same thing. Now my story is a little more complicated.
For a few years now the broad team I work on has been learning how we can help some customers by doing their computer management for them. That's been done by a bunch of people, but originally I stuck to the Microsoft IT side of the story. In the last year I've been drawn into the external-facing efforts. Especially for the client health part.
So what does it mean for Microsoft to do computer management for some organizations? Basically, it's a software-as-a-service scenario, which you've probably heard a lot about lately. Our marketing guys put SaaS in context like so:
And how is that good?:
In fairness, the leap between those two parts of the story is large. How does SaaS "accelerate" the journey to goodness? They've obviously got thoughts on that, but the real explanation will come in the delivery. We look forward to proving the point (as our peers in Exchange Online have already done).
In the meantime, the answer to the question of what I do is basically service building, especially in the client health space. After all, would anyone pay for a computer management service without a high degree of accountability for all the clients? As per my recent presentation at MMS, that builds on years of client health efforts throughout the industry and recent improvements, and will lead to great solutions and guidance for all of us. So it's an honor to have this job.
But at the same time I help out with related tasks such as dogfooding, proving our solution works, documentation (I have some background as a tech writer...), presentations, and misc. other bits. Fun stuff!