Add a little Development, mix in some Security, a dash of Program Management, apply a liberal amount of IIS and SQL…Part of the Recipe for MSCOM Operations’ Blog

Readers of this blog might have noticed (or been puzzled by) the variety of subject matter that we present. We have had blog posts ranging from “Why Dogfood?” to “Scaling Your Windows…and other TCP/IP Enhancements” to “Where Oh Where Did All of the Microsoft.com SQL Clusters Go?” So what drives the topics for this blog going forward?

Very recently we had a re-organization that added to our traditional Operations Engineering charter. We are now the Micosoft.com Operations and Portal Team. This new realignment coupled the traditional role of Microsoft.com Operations with a Business Infrastructure team which includes the Lab Hosting Team, Business Management, Services Management and Release Management; and the Portal Development Team which includes Program Management, Development and Test.

MSCOM Operations (the System Engineers that provide enterprise engineering) have worked with these teams for a long time. These are the functional teams that it takes to develop software, get it out into production and run it effectively and efficiently. This new tightly aligned structure allows us to take this powerful engine to a new level of performance and maturity.

The goal of this blog is still to provide IT Professionals with information that they can use. Each of several sub-teams have specific roles and responsibilities in this enterprise. Each of these teams is responsible for producing a blog that correlates to their specific area on a rotating basis. Simple math here: there are twelve of these sub-teams, which equates to one blog post every twelve weeks from each team.

Does that mean that if you read a great IIS blog from us you will have to wait for 12 weeks before that topic comes up again? Not necessarily, we encourage all of our folks to submit blogs anytime they want. Do they all deliver on time? I wish I could say that they did, those teams do still have their “day jobs” as the first priority. Despite having to actually work (imagine that), these folks regularly are providing some timely information out to the IT Pro community.

Here are the functional teams that will provide content for this blog site:

Evangelism – where we get to coordinate this blog and other customer facing interactions, web casts, articles, white papers and customer engagements.

MSCOM Ops Management – what we call “View From the Top” , that gives MSCOM management a blog forum to address various management related subjects.

Web Engineering – written by the web engineers that actually run the MSCOM IIS servers and our internet facing web environment.

SQL Engineering - written by the SQL engineers that actually run the MSCOM SQL servers and our backend environment.

Debug – a team of senior engineers that specialize in advanced troubleshooting techniques and a deep knowledge of the MSCOM Platform from the Windows Server OS level through the application level.

Program Management – an essential team that plays an integral role in our development of the next iteration of the MSCOM portal. These folks are tasked with a variety of deliverables including (but not limited to) writing specifications, keeping the projects on track and ensuring that project status is properly communicated.

Development –these folks are writing the code that will constitute the afore mentioned next iteration of the MSCOM portal among other things.

Test – the Developers best friend, folks that work to ensure the new code is bug free when it hits the web.

Release Management – this team has worked closely with MSCOM Ops for years, as an extension of the product development team efforts. They have recently been re-organized into the central services organization that oversees policy, process and business management for both MSCOM Ops and the MSCOM Portal product development team. This team is responsible for owning the Release Criteria and ensuring product releases deploy smoothly with minimal customer impact into the various Ops managed environments.

Service Management - responsible for on-boarding new customers to MSCOM, working with existing customers to provide guidance and smooth the way for releases.

Security/Architecture - the folks that are keeping the hackers at bay, hardening our infrastructure and providing architectural guidance.

Tools – we are fortunate to have a dedicated Tools team, a talented group of developers that provides us with custom applications that help us monitor, report on and manage all of our environments.

If you have a topic you are interested in send us an email mscomblg@microsoft.com.