Category: Microsoft

Yesterday we released the public beta of Office 2010, you should go download it right now.

There’s a bunch of new stuff, so it’s really hard to predict what’s going to be exciting to you, but here’s the top feature for me: ignore. Yep, ignore. Outlook has built in a big, beautiful chunk of anti-social awesome. You know when you get added to that really long e-mail thread that won’t go away? The one people keep replying to, dragging it on until it sucks the air out of your office through your monitor. Now you can just right-click, select ignore and the thread goes away… even future mails to the thread.

Another of my fav Outlook features: the Quick Steps. They are, at their heart, macros. Select a message and click a quick action to create a task, mark the message read and dump into into a folder all in one button press. I’m currently working on giving my quick steps the GTD treatment.

It’s the nature of my job, I live my life in Outlook. There is, however, a ton of goodness in all the apps. Go checkout the beta site for a run down of what’s new in each of the Office applications. There are features to make your life easier (e.g. multi-user editing of docs) and features to make you look good (e.g. spark lines in Excel).

But can you really use it? Absolutely. I’ve uninstalled Office 2007 on all my machines and only run Office 2010. Sure, it’s a beta, it’s not perfect. But it never stops me from getting my job done. So, If I can live using only the beta, you should feel comfortable at least trying it out for a bit.

Have you ever wondered what kind of people work at MS and what makes them tick? Hop on over to Microspotting to get the dirt. While you’re there you can also really get to know Dan, a great dev who started as an intern on the Entourage team when I was a test lead there, Omar, a PM from the Entourage team (and also, coincidentally an intern there too), MC, who was on Mac office (Entourage was part of Mac Office)…. hey, this is just becoming a trip down memory lane. Clearly my friends haven’t been pimping their fame (or I simply couldn’t be bothered to read their blogs… of course, I blame them).

At any rate, it seems Ariel has a great knack for finding the personalities at Microsoft, and isn’t shy about stalking them to get the story. Geeks and stalking? How can you pass that up?

Why not join us?

Earlier this week we launched a microsite for our team here in Dublin.  The new site is chock full of informational goodness.

The new site was built under the watchful eye of Dan and the end result is quite slick.  It even makes me want to re-apply for a job.

So, if you like the sound of great benefits like 31 days of paid vacation (yep, 6 weeks) and being within spitting distance of anywhere in Europe… review the job list then click one of the “e-mail your CV” links on the site to submit a resume.

Now, that you’ve applied, it’s time for a little hide-and-seek… can you find the picture of me on the site?

I gave you a rough idea of what I do… but here’s a little information about where I do it.

A week back I went searching for a picture of my MS building on the web (I was trying to provide a visitor with a picture of the front of the building). What I found proved quite educational.

The first image which came up on my search was one from the web site of the Institution of Structural Engineers for the Republic of Ireland (our as everyone’s favorite newsman, John Stewart, would say: “NAMBLA”).  The short article goes into some interesting technical details of the project, including that 22,000 cubic meters of granite were excavated to build the structure. 

I know… interesting to whom?  I’m a geek.

Read all about it: http://homepage.eircom.net/~istructeroi/news/news17/ms17.htm

Well… my ten year anniversary with Microsoft was actually back in November of 2006, but due to my move to Ireland the award was slightly delayed.  After a long journey it’s resting comfortably with my other stuff.

Yep… my camera phone sucks.  I’ll have to bring in my real camera on Monday.

I’ve moved to Ireland… Hotmail is in Mountain View, California.  The observant reader may put 2 & 2 together and think: “Hotmail has moved to Ireland!” Fortunately most people who read this blog are observant and  intelligent (you do read this blog, after all 😉 ). 

While my original plan was to bring some development resources with me to Ireland, I ended up instead joining up with a growing team here which is building components for a new web analytics project code named “Gatineau”.

Gatineau will be Microsoft’s entry in the the web analytics market.  While the nuts and bolts of the operation are in Redmond, here in Ireland we’re building some cool, extra bits to pile into the mix.  I wish I could provide some more detail as I’m really excited about what we’re doing (both here and in Redmond) but for now, things are under wraps.

One of our new planners, Ian, has provided a quick run down of what’s going on, it’s not a tell-all by any stretch, but it does give a bit more information.

Way back in the day ICQ allowed people to put a little snippet of HTML anywhere they liked and it would show their presence.  That was very cool.  Yahoo can do it too. AOL offers it. Now Skype is doing it too.  Why, for the sake of all that is geeky, can’t we (Microsoft) do this for messenger? 

Wait, I know, I’ll use a buzz-word: it’s viral! (it’ll happen for sure now).