Tuesday, June 2, 2020

One year anniversary as a blue badge at Microsoft

cake

One year ago I joined the Microsoft Search Experiences team in Oslo as a program manager, and time has gone by really FAST (pun intended). Overall it has been an awesome experience - largely due to the great team I’m part of. It has been very different from my previous job as a consultant, thus hard to compare, but I’m not done yet and have things I want to accomplish while I’m still young.

Here’s a list of some of what I’ve been part of or accomplished over the past year – all non-NDA stuff :)

  • I’ve written way fewer blog posts compared to the last years, which was expected, but I do hope to get the volume up a bit again.
  • Released my Troubleshooting Search in SharePoint Online self-help manual on Amazon
  • Two trips to India
  • Two trips to the US
  • Three trips to Tromsø (northern Norway)
  • Written about 4,000 e-mails – yeah, I know that’s not much at all, but it is for me
  • Presented at Ignite and SPSOslo (about what I usually do)
  • Made a lot of contacts across the v-team which Microsoft Search is across
  • Organized a hands & crafts x-mas social workshop for my team
  • Worked on multiple features underway – from small to large
  • Got the Microsoft Search code base up and running and did multiple pull requests as part of a hackathon week, fixing some real but minor issues
  • Won the business value award at an internal hackathon with my fellow hackers
  • Worked to align the out of the box Microsoft Search offering and messaging with the PnP Modern Search web parts
  • Talked to a good amount of high value customers on various search topics – which is not that different from talking to smaller customers as the search issues and needs are not that different except scale ;)
  • Still trying to see if we can expose the Live Persona Card in Office 365 as a re-usable control in SPFx (not given up yet)
  • …and more

I’ve interacted and contributed on too many projects to count, and it has proved valuable to bring my SharePoint and Office 365 experience into the team. As Microsoft Search is expanding, SharePoint is still a large part of it content wise and knowing the inner workings when moving from classic to modern is never a bad idea.