Starting a New Project

My team and I, plus numerous others not on my team, are starting to build a new version of the demo that we will have running in all of the Microsoft Technology Centers around the world.

Our goal is to roughly expand our 16+ server infrastructure (mostly in virtual machines) to improve how we demonstrate most parts of the demo, such as portals, SOA topics, BI, information worker stuff, the benefits of Active Directory, mobility, workflow, and certainly a handful of other things.

We’ve gotten our small team divided into Project Manager, Build Manager, Release Manager, Test Manager, Lead Program Manager (we all play some program manager roles), Developers, and Product Manager. We’ve got our rough schedule in Project Server and are working on the Vision/Scope document right now, while also adding improvements to the “platform” with things like product updates. With a small team, so many products, and a short time frame (3 months until we release it), we have to blur our MSF roles a bit, but we do pretty good with it.

It should be a fun ride and I’ll report on anything interesting that comes up. Of course for the next few weeks, I’ll be in Salt Lake City then Costa Rica on vacation, so I doubt I’ll be working on any of this until mid-January.