Back at Microsoft, and the Music won’t stop.

There’s been an awakening, have you felt it?

A long time ago, in a cubicle far, far away… Ok, maybe not so long ago, and not so far away, but nearly a decade ago I decided to leave Microsoft on a bit of a walkabout in search of my passion.

I entered the world as a professional software developer somewhere around 1993 – 1995. I always had a passion for it, and it allowed me to express my creativity in more than one way or another.  In 2000, I joined Microsoft as an Escalation Engineer. Though not a development position, I was honored to join the Microsoft family and the position still allowed me to use my development skills in my role when working on some of the most challenging issues the company faced. I initially debugged and supported Outlook and Exchange.

In 2001, I attended some training for a product code named “Tahoe” and became instantly intrigued.  As you may or may not know, SharePoint evolved from projects codenamed “Office Server” and “Tahoe” during the Office XP development cycle.

“Office Server” evolved out of the FrontPage and Office Server Extensions and “Team Pages”. It targeted simple, bottom-up collaboration.

“Tahoe”, built on shared technology with Exchange and the “Digital Dashboard”, targeted top-down portals, search and document management. The searching and indexing capabilities of SharePoint came from the “Tahoe” feature set. The search and indexing features were a combination of the index and crawling features from the Microsoft Site Server family of products and from the query language of Microsoft Index Server.

SharePoint Portal Server 2001 needed a place with the support organization, and since it utilized the Web Storage System that Exchange used, various engineers within the Exchange group were elected to help support this emerging product. After discussions with my manager, we determined I that I would join the very select few (Maybe only 3 Escalation Engineers in the US) to help debug and support customer issues with SharePoint. And the rest is history.

At the beginning of 2007, I decided to leave Microsoft and pursue some of my other passions. Since then, I have missed my Microsoft family and the work I performed debugging, tracing, and helping our customers.

SharePoint has grown and matured into an amazing product.

I am delighted and extremely happy to be returning to my Microsoft family as a Senior SharePoint Escalation Engineer.

The music will NOT stop.  My music is an essential part of me, and I will continue driving this passion of mine as well. Expect some exciting news on this forefront in the next couple of months or so. Many great things are in the works.

Always follow your dreams.  You will always have your ups and downs, that’s just part of life. But never give up, and align yourself with people and environments that respect you; embrace your skills; and challenge you to be the very best you can be.

I’m just Keeping the Dream Alive

Have an awesome day!

– Keith