This was supposed to be about my recent experiences of being transitioned to Microsoft's newest Unifed Communications service.
But having been in the technology business for twenty years this week, of which only the last twenty months have been in the employ of Microsoft, I have become quite sensitive to the need to avoid creating the wrong impression of me being some kind of re-programmed Borg shill whenever I happen to talk about Microsoft stuff.
Even if I do really like Windows 7, genuinely think my Xbox 360 is the 'dogs and hold several Microsoft products in very high regard, being a Microsoft employee automatically spreads a thick layer of biased subjectivity onto everything I say. I should say that I think this has more to do with other people's perceptions of Microsoft and its employees than reality. Nontheless it's there.
But first, a minor detour.
Having run this blog for the best part of nine years, from the earliest I always endeavoured to keep a break between my professional life and my personal one; initially out of a desire that one did not pollute or compromise the other, but it also felt healthy in a basic sense to have an albeit artificial divide. Beyond that, Blogging was for freaks in 2002.
And so I've actively tended to respect that decision, rarely mixing professional with personal. But not without challenge.
For example, in 2006 I ran a software company which was acquired by a private equity firm who promptly embarked upon a savage 'integration' process which resulted in around 40% of our 120 strong workforce being made redundant. Suddenly my chirpy, trivial musings about the latest iPod-whatever did not sit well with my conscience and the likely prospect of people I knew, and their families, having found themselves thrown into financial crisis and hardship - by my hand -reading about my ongoing delight with the world of tech. So, I stopped blogging for a while. And it was during this muted period that I fell out of love with the blog to such an extent that backups stopped happening and, when the server it was being hosted on suddenly died, I lost about a year's worth of posts and my blogging coma slid even deeper.
Notwithstanding all that funk, I eventually re-constituted most of the blog last year, and it stands today mostly as a record of its past as much as a home for the 2-3 posts per month I barely manage to concoct.
Which brings me almost back to my original point. The web respects no barriers and ultimately, if I wasn't coming to the web, one day it was going to come to me. And today I find this blog directly associated, by others if not myself, through Twitter and the like with my professional life at Microsoft. And I'm generally cool with that. Up to the point of talking about Microsoft products which, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, throws up a different challenge.
But context is all important, and so the fact that this sits on my personal (Apache/Linux/PHP hosted) blog and not some MSDN central Microsoft mandated site should count for some objectivity.
And so I would just like to say that having moved over last week to the full Bhuna, Enterprise Voice / Unified Communications service that MSFT is rolling out globally at the moment, I am finding the concept of intergrated IM, mail, voicemail, instant voice-over-IP telephony from my PC wherever I am, IP-conferencing and all the rest the gubbins that goes with it quite a truly remarkable thing indeed. Awesome, even, as uncool as it may seem to some.
No, seriously.
PS. If you think I just jumped the shark, do let me know.
But having been in the technology business for twenty years this week, of which only the last twenty months have been in the employ of Microsoft, I have become quite sensitive to the need to avoid creating the wrong impression of me being some kind of re-programmed Borg shill whenever I happen to talk about Microsoft stuff.
Even if I do really like Windows 7, genuinely think my Xbox 360 is the 'dogs and hold several Microsoft products in very high regard, being a Microsoft employee automatically spreads a thick layer of biased subjectivity onto everything I say. I should say that I think this has more to do with other people's perceptions of Microsoft and its employees than reality. Nontheless it's there.
But first, a minor detour.
Having run this blog for the best part of nine years, from the earliest I always endeavoured to keep a break between my professional life and my personal one; initially out of a desire that one did not pollute or compromise the other, but it also felt healthy in a basic sense to have an albeit artificial divide. Beyond that, Blogging was for freaks in 2002.
And so I've actively tended to respect that decision, rarely mixing professional with personal. But not without challenge.
For example, in 2006 I ran a software company which was acquired by a private equity firm who promptly embarked upon a savage 'integration' process which resulted in around 40% of our 120 strong workforce being made redundant. Suddenly my chirpy, trivial musings about the latest iPod-whatever did not sit well with my conscience and the likely prospect of people I knew, and their families, having found themselves thrown into financial crisis and hardship - by my hand -reading about my ongoing delight with the world of tech. So, I stopped blogging for a while. And it was during this muted period that I fell out of love with the blog to such an extent that backups stopped happening and, when the server it was being hosted on suddenly died, I lost about a year's worth of posts and my blogging coma slid even deeper.
Notwithstanding all that funk, I eventually re-constituted most of the blog last year, and it stands today mostly as a record of its past as much as a home for the 2-3 posts per month I barely manage to concoct.
Which brings me almost back to my original point. The web respects no barriers and ultimately, if I wasn't coming to the web, one day it was going to come to me. And today I find this blog directly associated, by others if not myself, through Twitter and the like with my professional life at Microsoft. And I'm generally cool with that. Up to the point of talking about Microsoft products which, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, throws up a different challenge.
But context is all important, and so the fact that this sits on my personal (Apache/Linux/PHP hosted) blog and not some MSDN central Microsoft mandated site should count for some objectivity.
And so I would just like to say that having moved over last week to the full Bhuna, Enterprise Voice / Unified Communications service that MSFT is rolling out globally at the moment, I am finding the concept of intergrated IM, mail, voicemail, instant voice-over-IP telephony from my PC wherever I am, IP-conferencing and all the rest the gubbins that goes with it quite a truly remarkable thing indeed. Awesome, even, as uncool as it may seem to some.
No, seriously.
PS. If you think I just jumped the shark, do let me know.