Hello Social, goodbye Project! #msproject #yammer

Dear Microsoft Project Community,

It’s with emotion and excitement that I’d like to announce a career change from the Project marketing team to the SharePoint marketing team as the Social product manager effective on December 10th.

Looking back it’s been a fun 5 years on the Project marketing team and it’s hard to find words to summarize the amazing journey I’ve lived during that time… Some random stats: launched two product releases, a TFS connector, delivered over 80 sessions at various Microsoft events (TechEd, SharePoint Conference & Project Conference), released a dozen CodePlex solutions including the famous timesheet statusing code sample, wrote over 700 blog Project posts since December 2006 on various MSFT blogs, responded to countless emails/Forum posts/Twits, spent hours talking to customers and partners, compete, and more… Bottom line you have kept me busy, smiling, and most importantly I have learned something new every day from you all, so from the bottom of my Project heart THANK YOU/MERCI!

You might be wondering why leave now with a historical Project Online release just around the corner and plenty more Project Portfolio Management (PPM) innovations from Microsoft in the future. The answer revolves around two factors: new challenge and timing. As you might have noticed I am fairly passionate and I felt I was ready for a new challenge & learnings in my career and like many things in life the timing was right to make this move now. Following SharePoint conference, Microsoft’s Yammer acquisition last summer and the general trend around Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) in the industry, I felt I had a very good new challenge in front of me that I had to take.

Au revoir Project et Bonjour Social,

Christophe, November 29th, 2012.

PS: if you or know someone who knows their PPM and is interested in joining an awesome marketing team with a leading product and a landmark release please let me know ASAP, we are hiring.