Moving on to the Exchange team

“Vista Gets Compromised” couldn’t be the best blog post to kick off a Microsoft career with— and yet, that happened to be my last post before I joined Microsoft. (To be fair, it wasn’t Vista’s fault.. read the comments in that post..)

Sorry for the radio silence over the past weeks— it is rather unusual.

I landed at the Exchange product group about three weeks ago. I am excited to be part of an excellent product team, and cannot seem to contain my excitement about what’s going on with the next version of Exchange. What’s more, I’ll still be working from the Bay Area.

The night before NEO, Scott Hanselman did a great job of explaining his reasons for joining Microsoft and how he feels about it. Russ and I nodded in agreement.

What about Exchangepedia?
What started as “Bharat Suneja’s Blog” close to 4 years ago morphed into Exchangepedia. I will continue to blog here, and will have even more information to share – at least about the versions of Exchange we continue to use and deploy today (2007/2003), and other issues not directly related to Exchange.

Over the years, the Exchange team folks have been great about sharing information that has found its way to this blog and newsgroup responses. If anything, I see myself being even more involved with the Exchange community in this new role.

Not an MVP any more!
One of the things that happens when MVPs join Microsoft – they can’t remain MVPs any more. Being an Exchange MVP has meant a lot to me over the past years, and given the mystery about my start dates, I was lucky to get awarded for 2008-2009 as well. Yes, the pleasure of still being an MVP as a Microsoftie was very short-lived indeed, but a pleasure nonetheless.

What about Zenprise?
Zenprise is an amazing and exciting product and I’m proud to have been a part of it. We went from no product to Zenprise 3.3 in a little over 2.5 years that I was there. Along the way, we built some great troubleshooting and monitoring functionality for Exchange and BlackBerry, and won a lot of awards for it (including Best of TechEd for 2 consecutive years). Zenprise has an excellent team, and the products keep getting better with every rapid-fire release. It was one of InfoWorld’s Top 15 Startups to Watch in 2007, and recently got named a Gartner Cool Vendor. Needless to say, it is and will continue to be an exciting company to watch.