Oh no, not another blog...

Why do we need another blog? Because our team has some pretty unique experiences we would like to share with the world, so hopefully you can use our knowledge to make your lives better, at least as it realtes to messaging! This blog will contain the collected knowledge of the Messaging Dedicated Support Engineers (DSE) for Microsoft's communications companies. In the messaging team, we work primarily with all versions of Exchange, Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) which includes non-Windows Mobile devices like Droids and iDevices, Blackberries, Enterprise Voice/Lync, Outlook, and integration of these technologies with other Microsoft products, such as Threat Management Gateway/User Access Gateway (TMG/UAG), Forefront Identity Manager (FIM), Active Directory, and others that seem to pop up in our day to day work. Thus, you can expect to read about a wide variety of issues and recommendations about a lot of technologies that interact with Exchange but not always just the back end mail infrastructure.

So, what is a DSE? DSE engineers work as a part of the Premier Field Engineer (PFE) family, a group of specialized engineers work directly with customers. PFE has two teams; transactional and dedicated. Transactional members tend to go from one customer to another as needed, providing some excellent onsite support and guidance to them. DSE engineers, on the other hand, typically have one to four customers who they work directly with on a (you guessed it) dedicated role. We work every day with some of Microsoft's largest customers who run our products. There are DSEs for nearly every Microsoft technology, so we are a big family. We like to focus on proactive work to prevent problems from occurring, such as operational improvements like backups and monitoring, but we are also there for our customers when technology or processes does not always work right.

What can you expect from this blog? Well, inside our Communications team, we have several members who deal with some of the largest communications companies in the world, so we see a lot of issues, technology and otherwise, that we would like to share. Now, issues do not always mean a fire drill or someone messed something up, on the contrary, I use the term to indicate something that could use improvement. So, you could expect to read a blog post about how to improve backups, tweaking authentication settings, undocumented features in PowerShell, and some really cool scripts for report generation. Part of the benefit of the communications industry is that it is very dynamic with the mergers and divestitures, so we asee large company issues as well as what can occur in smaller organizations.

What we will not do is divulge any confidential information about our customers, so please, don’t ask! We will work in personal anecdotes, stories, humor, tragedy, and anything else to make it interesting so it isn’t just your standard stale tech note. You can expect stories about cars, military history, pets, kids, spouses, and living in various regions of the States as well as travel around the world. Yet somehow, we will relate it back to messaging, promise!

We will try and update this blog at least once a month, possibly more depending on what information we want to/can share. We may even invite guest speakers from other portions of Microsoft to weigh in on discussions, such as AD team members or people from the product group.

Thanks again!