Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. 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 2010, Omar Shahine
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Working at Microsoft, and not working in Redmond means a few things. 1) I spend a fair amount of time traveling back and forth, 2) I spend a lot of time calling in to meetings and usually can't hear what is going on and 3) I spent a lot of time trying to get our VTC system to work (50% of the time it doesn't).
Let me tell you... calling into a meeting is very unfulfilling when you are collaborating with folks.
Even though Microsoft is a technology company, when it comes to collaboration, 9 out of 10 times you need to get your butt in a plane and go if you care to participate in planning.
Well today I saw, and used something that changed all that. For the first time in 9 year I participated in a meeting that was held in Redmond while sitting in my Office.
Some of the new conference rooms in Redmond have a Microsoft RoundTable. RoundTable is a combination conference phone like a PolyComm but it also has a set of cameras arranged in a circle. A person in the room connects their laptop running Live Meeting 2007 and what I can see on my end is a panoramic view of the entire room AND a camera view of the person who is talking. You can see this below.
I can't tell you how natural this feels. I can literally feel like I am there. And the folks in the conf room can see me on the projector since I had a webcam. No phone was used at all.
This technology is simply amazing. It is going to have a huge impact on me and I hope a lot of folks in Redmond take advantage of this.
It's days like this where I come to work and just go Wow... I can't believe we made this. There is a pretty good review of it here.
PS - If you haven't tried Office Communicator 2007 you should. It's the best IM/Collaboration software I have ever used. It has killer features like delivering missed conversations to your inbox and letting you reply later. More on that in a future post.