Welcome to my Blog

Hello,

After reading so many other blogs, I figured that it was about time for me to start one of my own. Since I'm undertaking this, I should probably introduce myself.

I joined Microsoft as a full-time employee in March 2004 as a Rapid Response Engineer (RRE) as part of the ROSS Team. The ROSS Team provides Rapid OnSite Support to customers. We later merged with the SIE (Solutions Integration Engineering) team and became Engineering Services, but I was still a Rapid Response Engineer. Last year, we merged with the Alliance Team and became Premier Field Engineering and I became a Premier Field Engineer (aka PFE). Same job, different title. Though I am a Seattle native, my wife & I were relocated to Cincinnati, OH in order to take the job as an RRE. Our son was born a few months after we moved to Ohio. We finally moved back to the Seattle area in December 2006, right after the wind storm hit and took out power for most of the area.

Before becoming an FTE at Microsoft, I spent a year working as an "A-" (contingent staffer) on the Directory Services team in PSS providing phone support to customers and supported Active Directory and a few other technologies. Before that, I was a Systems/Network administrator for a company based out of Bellevue, WA and managed their AD Domain, the network infrastructure, the Exchange servers, and other aspects of the IT infrastructure. I've also been the Systems Administrator for a different company in Bellevue and managed both UNIX (Digital UNIX & Solaris) and Windows machines (NT4 & W2K) and was a developer at that company as well. Originally, I was supposed to be a high school math teacher, but graduated the one summer when no districts were looking for math teachers.

So, back to being a PFE...We are the onsite arm of Microsoft's Customer Support Services. I do onsite visits ranging from CritSits through AD RAPs, and many things in between. A CritSit is a "Critical Situation" case opened by a Premier Customer with CSS that is a Sev-A (Severity A) case and a server is down. If the case isn't resolved, someone from my team may end up being dispatched to go onsite and assist with resolution. These are last-minute requests that cause my cellphone to ring at all hours of the day & night that would require me to get onto the next airplane to head onsite. We also can be requested by a customer's Technical Account Manager to help with other reactive issues that aren't a CritSit as well as to assist with proactive sorts of things. One of the proactive visits that I do is an AD RAP (AD Risk Assessment Program), where we run some tools to help customers identify potential issues with their AD environment, help teach them about AD, and help to make their AD environment as resilient and redundant as possible.

While I tend to do a lot of traveling for work, I am usually at home about 2.5-3.5 days per week.

More ramblings to come...

John