So who am I and I what do I do at Microsoft

  • Article

Great question Mr. Rhetorical, firstly

 

Who am I?

Nathan Mercer, I work for Microsoft New Zealand and am a 5 year Microsoft 'veteran' now. Most recently a Technology Specialist (TS) and previously (same role, different name) as a Systems Engineer.  Essentially a technical pre-sales job, it is an awesome position, covering all of Microsoft infrastructure products (SMS, MOM, Windows Server, ISA, Exchange, Tablet PC, Windows Mobile) through NZs enterprise customers.  Very exciting stuff.

 

 

What do I do now?

Microsoft NZ just recently got a brand new head count, and since May I now work in the Developer & Platform Strategy team at Microsoft NZ, official role/title is an "IT Pro Evangelist".  So I'm really the guy on the platform side of things, not so much the developer side given my background in security, management and infrastructure.  No so sure on the official title of IT Pro Evangelist - personally I'm trying to come up with a title that’s a little more NZ-ish, more on that in a later post

Our team is really interested in three core things:

    • Helping customers to adopt our technology
    • Building evidence to support the benefits available from MS tools
    • Driving up the satisfaction of the Developer and IT Professional audience

When we use that buzzword IT Professional or IT Pros - its actually quite a wide range of individuals who work in IT: Infrastructure Specialists, Systems Engineers, Architects, Technical Consultants, and of course many others.

Our team also runs many of the technical events that Microsoft New Zealand is involved with, including: MS Connect and TechEd and also the community programs like MSDN Connection, MSDN Flash and soon to be TechNet Flash (yes that’s to be my baby)

Personally I've very excited about the rest of the year:  SQL 2005, Visual Studio 2005, Windows Server 2003 R2, Longhorn beta1, maybe even another LH beta.  What a great line up of products to be involved with and evangelising.

 

It's a very exciting role, in some ways getting back to the good ol' days of some of the really fun things I did at Microsoft 4-5 years ago.  Remember the quarterly TechNet Briefings and the SysTech bi-monthly events? - well no promises yet, but we hope to start those types of things up again.  Certainly I'm very much looking forward to getting out and about in the community and talking as well as listening.  It's been a while...