This seems like a fear of commitment, but I swear it's not...

As I hinted a few weeks ago, I'm changing jobs again. My last role change was over a year ago, that's almost a record for me.

My new job is being the UX Manager for the next release of Exchange. I will be leading a team of designers and researchers on the UX (User Experience) team. The UX team played a big role in some of the awesome UI in Exchange 2007, like OWA, the scheduling assistant and the new administrative console and for the next release of E14 we're going to blow your mind. : -)

I don't fully transition into this role until we ship Exchange 12, but I'm starting to pick up bits and pieces of the job as some of the product team is already starting to brainstorm what we should do in the next release and I need to be involved to figure out our rough plans and priorities and coordinate the necessary research and design prototyping. At some point in the future when I get more ramped up I'll be blogging about how we do design and research, some peeks behind the scenes.

We spent a lot of time in E12 nailing the architecture - the GUI layered on top of the cmdline, the common business logic layer that ensures that declining a meeting request acts the same whether or not it happens in OWA or your mobile device or via a line of business application using web services, the transport agent architecture that we also internally consume, etc. Fortunately we also spent a lot of time investing in features and scenarios to wow administrators, end users and developers alike as you hopefully have seen for yourselves already. In the next release I look forward to doing even more of that. To quote one of our TAP customers, "The platform you've got now, the next version's going to be mindboggling."