I am a big into Skiing and Ski nearly half of the time alone. While riding chairlift, I often have opportunity to talk to different people. I find it difficult that many folks don't know that they could use office online for free. To get them started, I would tell them to go to SkyDrive.com (now http://OneDrive.com) but I realized it is very difficult for folks to know and learn about office online. OneDrive is not a place that anyone would go to if they need to use office online, who don't already know about it, and even when they go to http://OneDrive.com, office online is not very obvious. With new changes to http://office.com, I am very pleased to announce that we have made it very easy for folks to discover and easily get started with Office Online.

If you have not already clicked on http://office.com yet. Here is what you are going to see when you navigate to there:

You have bunch of different options (on the right) to click on. To showcase, I have clicked on Word Online and here is what you would see.

You can choose from three options here. I have chosen to click on blank new document. Note that at this point, if you are signed in using Microsoft account, you would see the page below otherwise you will be asked to login with an existing account and if you don't have one, don't worry, you will get the option to create one, which you can also do by going to http://signup.live.com.

You are now in and good to go. Your documents are saved to http://OneDrive.com that you can access from anywhere, share them with friends and family, and collaborate.

Still reading... Don't waste any time! Go checkout Office Online at http://office.com and let us know what you think.

1. Logon to the machine with a machine administrator account (assuming this issue is with a domain account, if not logon to the machine using another account with administrative privilege).

2. Move the machine to a workgroup from domain. (If it was part of one workgroup then change it to another one or join a domain.) You could do this through Control Panel\System and Security\System and then Change Settings.

3. Restart the machine and logon with a machine administrator account.

4. Delete your user profile data (or move it a different location) completely from c:\users. "C" in my case is system directory but if you have a different one then use that one.

5. Join the machine back to domain account (or to workgroup that the machine was originally joined to), and restart the machine.

6. Logon with your domain account that you were having trouble with. Keep fingers crossed.

If all goes well, you should be logged on.

Since this error may happen under different conditions so the above may not be a solution for all but if it helps even a single soul, I would consider my time writing this blog worth spent.

Cheers,

Mohammad

1. Be clear about strategic reason for partnership/collaboration
2. Show respect to each other. Avoid you need me and I don't need you attitude or I am better than you feelings.
3. Identify main point of contacts on both sides who are accountable for the collaboration to be successful
4. Establish rythm of communication and collaboration
   1. Frequency of the meetings both online and face-to-face
   2. Capturing and sharing of meeting summary notes
   3. Common place (sharepoint) for storing collaboration related documents with each other
   4. Set up Distribution Group with all the stake holders for email communication
   5. Establish how help and assistance will be provided to both sides.
   6. Frequency of progress update that will be sent to all parties.
   7. etc.
5. Go out of the way wherever and whenever you can to (re-)establish good faith and trust in each other.
6. There will always be conflicts so jointly agree on how conflict of interest will be resolved
7. Don't take any unnecessary dependency on each other
8. Frequently check on how the collaboration is going, what challenges and issues are being faced, what actions on both sides needs to be taken to address any issue/challenge
9. Don't give up easily. Mistakes will likely happen - it is part of being human - so be prepared. Learn from the mistakes and move on.
10. Celebrate successes.

By any means these are not exhaustive list so if you have other tips, please share with me.

Last week, I had the opportunity to work on filling 7 vendor positions to work on Silverlight testing. As Silverlight is a developer platform, we need strong developer(s) with high testing aptitude/skills to work on effectively testing it. The challenge that I took on myself was to interview all the candidates in one day to fill all the positions to avoid prolonged distraction to my team and interviewers plus there was a business reason to get all the vendors started as soon as possible. On a short notice to four different vendor companies to send me their strongest candidates to fill all the positions, I received nearly 40 resumes. After screening resume for skill and experience match for the positions, I short listed 35 candidates for interviews.

Interviewing 35 candidates in on one day, with possibility of 50-70% candidates going through multiple rounds of an hour long one on one interview, while having only a few interviewers seemed like an insurmountable challenge. This meant I needed to be creative to be able to pull it off in one single day. 

After giving some thoughts on how to optimize the interview process, I came up with a written test that had a problem solving, coding, and testing question. While I was putting together the questions, I had to think about the complexity of the questions that I was going to ask. I thought why screen candidates with a lower bar that is insufficient for hiring. My goal was to hire only qualified people and not interview a bunch of candidates so keeping the end goal in mind; I decided to put the complexity of test equivalent of the bar that I had set for the positions. 

Next instead of asking all the candidates to show up in the morning and go through the test, followed by interviews, which could have meant for some of the candidates to wait until evening to go through the interview that meant to me showing lack of respect of candidates time, I decided to split the 35 candidates into two groups of 17 and 18 candidates and called first group in the morning and the second group at noon for the screening and interviews. This meant candidates had to be there for maximum of 3-4 hours to go through the screening and interview process.

So how did it go... After screening first group, we shortlisted 7 candidates for interview. Out of seven, for two of the candidates, we debated whether we wanted to put them through the interview loop because they fell into grey area. We decided to let them go through the interview process so we can get additional data to make an informed decision. So after the interview, we had selected five candidates who met the hiring bar for the positions. However, second group did not do as well as first group (not sure how much morning versus afternoon difference played the part) and after screening we selected 4 candidates for interview. Again we were on fence with two of the candidates. At the end, only one candidate met the hiring bar.

In summary, we spent nearly 13-14 (single man) hours including homework and logistic arrangements to fill six vendor positions through this process in a single day.

Here is the test automation system architecture for running .Net Compact Framework tests on Nokia S60:

As you can see in the above diagram, we are making use of same test harness, transport layer and device agent that we developed for Silverlight testing for Nokia S60. Please see Silverlight Testing on Nokia S60 (Part 1) for details on test harness, transport layer, and device agent.

For running a set of NETCF tests, we start test runner, which is test harness. Test runner establishes connection with S60 device/emulator via transport layer and sets up the device/emulator with product and test bits. It also starts device agent on the device/emulator. Once device agent starts, it connects with desktop via either TCP/IP (for emulator) or USB (for device). This connection is important for test harness to send commands to device/emulator to do test operation. Once connection between device agent and test runner is established, test runner reads test metadata information file and starts executing tests sequentially. For each test case, test runner reads the metadata information for the test and then copies test files for the test to the device/emulator. Test runner then sends command to device agent to run the test under a test host. Test executes and results are captured in a log file. Once test execution completes, test results are copied to desktop.

This week and next I am going to be spending majority of my time working on annual reviews so I don't plan to blog much during this time. Once I am done with reviews, I plan to write a blog on how annual reviews work at Microsoft from my perspective.

Stay tune for some real interesting topics in the coming week(s).