Purple to Blue — Joining Visual Studio ALM Product Team at Microsoft for Lab Management
I have decided to take a position as Program Manager at Microsoft to work on the Lab Management scenarios on the Visual Studio Testing & Lab Management team. This product team owns Microsoft Test Manager (which you can acquire in many editions including Visual Studio Test Professional, Visual Studio Premium, and Visual Studio Ultimate) as well as the testing & Lab Management scenarios of Team Foundation Server. Today is my first day at Microsoft and will be attending New Employee Orientation (NEO).
If you are not familiar with Lab Management, in a word — it is awesome for development and test teams. You can provision developer & test environments for use as you need them with tight integration back into the rest of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. It is a feature of Team Foundation Server and you likely have all of the licenses that you need if you have MSDN subscriptions! That means no additional license costs to take advantage of this functionality as opposed to some other solutions on the market.
Here is a high-level diagram of how it works and I have a slide deck from my 4-hour end to end Testing Workshop which includes a section on Lab Management and how it fits into the overall picture available here: https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=77DB794C0A4DFE0!23778
FYI — For those that may not understand the reference, I previously had a purple Microsoft badge (or a b-dash) as a Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Partner working closely with the product team. One receives a blue badge whenever they start on as a full-time employee.
Microsoft MVP
Having been part of the Visual Studio ALM & TFS Microsoft MVP group for the last five years, I can honestly say that it is the best group of ALM colleagues in the world. They have been awesome to work with and I’m really excited about continuing to work with this same group. Each one of my MVP colleagues brings something different to the table but the one thing in common is that everyone has been an awesome advocate for customers of TFS and Visual Studio ALM products around the world. There is a deep interest in making things succeed and I know that I am better for it having been a part of the group.
Imaginet
I have enjoyed my time at Imaginet (and formerly Notion Solutions) as the ALM Practice Technical Lead along with Dave McKinstry. It’s all because of all of the great people that I have worked with. Last year, Imaginet was honored with the Microsoft Partner of the Year award for Application Lifecycle Management. It was just a formal indication about how awesome the ALM group of colleagues is to work with but it is something I already knew.
I am extremely fortunate to have been able to reach so many Visual Studio ALM & TFS customers while I have have been in my consulting role. I am excited about taking that front-line experience and using it to drive further improvements into the product line. Lately, I have been leading our Build Center of Excellence (CoE) team as well and have learned a lot about providing builds as a service and virtual environments (Lab Management) as a service to internal engineering teams for customers. The team is doing some amazing stuff!
TechEd North America 2012
After my New Employee Orientation, my first trip as a Visual Studio ALM Program Manager is heading down to Orlando this year to work as a Microsoft booth staff member at TechEd North America 2012! I had already been planning to work at the booth as a Microsoft MVP. I won’t be speaking like I did last year with Christophe but that makes it less stressful for me!
I would love to meet up with you so please come by and we can talk about the product. I’m looking forward to hearing about what’s working really well and what doesn’t work very well for your team. I will be staffing the booth quite a bit over the week but feel free to get in touch with me if you would like my schedule closer to the event!
Take care!
Ed Blankenship
