Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, mostly in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC. I am currently a Senior Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Hotmail Frontdoor team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for the User Interface of Hotmail as well as some of the Infrastructure and Architecture. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2008, Omar Shahine
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Back when I shipped versions of Mac Office it was obvious when you were done... it was also obvious when you could walk into a store and see a shrink-wrapped copy of your software sitting on a shelf. Man what a cool feeling.
Well, when you've continually shipped updates to a product over a 2 year period, you can almost miss the moment when you can say you are "done", but knowing that "done" is completely relative. You're never done and we'll ship an update to Windows Live Hotmail a couple more times this year (everything from small hotfixes to releases).
But... today is the day we are launching Windows Live Hotmail world wide. I've worked on this project since the very beginning and I'm really proud to have been a part of this first complete re-write of the hotmail frontend code base since its inception. It's been an amazing opportunity and one I'm glad I was fortunate to be a part of.
The best part of it all is how much I've learned from the folks I work with, and from the customers and beta testers that gave us feedback. We worked tirelessly the past few years to deliver something that our users want, and something that is architecturally sound...
We made a big bet on .NET and a lot of new Microsoft technologies along the way. We are running all of these things at a massive scale and have hopefully improved a lot of the technology and infrastructure that ends up shipping in lots of other products.
You can head on over to the Hotmail blog and read more.
One of the things I'm most excited about is that we are FINALLY going to deliver rich connectivity to Outlook 2003 & 2007 for FREE. As an Outlook user you will have a first class experience interfacing with your Hotmail account. I plan to blog more about this in the coming weeks. IMHO this experience will be unmatched by any of our competition.
Well I'm off to bed now, but tomorrow will be a fun day.
PS - if you look through all the team pictures on the hotmail blog you will find one of me reading a .NET My Services book. I thought that would be pretty funny.
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