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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Well at long last. I can finally start talking about what I, and my team, have been working on since I joined Hotmail. As you may have read here or there, we have started beta testing the next generation web mail product code named “Kahuna”. Why Kahuna? Well in MSN we release in these “Waves” and we wanted a name that had something to do with water.
It’s been really hard to be silent for so long, and it’s been really difficult to not blog about so much of the cool work going on. Imran has an excellent post on our efforts around the User Experience we are building. While the beta is currently invite only, in the coming months more and more folks will have an opportunity to see it first hand.
So what is my role in all this? Well I am one of a few Lead Program Managers in Hotmail. My team of PMs (Aditya, Andy and Kristin) are responsible for the Architecture and Infrastructure of the Hotmail Frontdoor. The Frontdoor is essentially any Internet facing server with the exception of SMTP. There is also a Hotmail Backend team who build the Storage, and Inbound Mail delivery (including spam filtering) and Hotmail Operations who run our thousands of servers 24–7.
More specifically, my team is responsible for designing the technology for all the servers that run our Web Experience, Provisioning, Login, DAV, POP, and a few dozen other weird internally facing services. Our servers are all stateless, meaning they have no user data. We work with our development and testing team to create, test and ship highly scalable web services that can support very rich functionality in a variety of Internet clients. Right now I am actually sitting in the driver seat for this project which means I’m responsible for coordinating the work of all the smaller teams inside the Hotmail FD, as well as a million other details that you can find out about in The Art of Project Management which covers my day to day activities in about 300 pages . I just started a few weeks ago after Reeves did his stint (and survived!) getting us to where we are today. It feels a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose .
Over the past year, my team has been focused on rebuilding (from scratch) the code that supports the Web Experience. The actual chrome and functionality that the end user might see is lead by Reeves and his team of PMs as well as some other folks on the Hotmail PM team. Finally, we have a team that is dedicated to making sure that the current product gets a lot of attention to improve quality, reliability and customer satisfaction. That team helps us stay focused on building the new thing without getting sucked into the current thing.
It’s not often that you get to start with a clean slate, and it takes serious commitment and investment on the part of our executives, and our business. This is also the most exciting year I’ve enjoyed at Microsoft. I can’t even begin to tell you how much fun it is to build something as important as a communications service (that supports 200 million users) with the latest and greatest technologies at a world class software company. We have invented and created so much in the past year that it’s mind boggling to see just how far we’ve come since we were white-boarding how this thing might work and look like.
What we have built is a solid foundation (in .NET of course) that should provide our service a great footing for the next 10 years (Hotmail turned 9 this year, and the current code started to show its age). And yes, Kahuna makes heavy use of AJAX (when we started using JavaScript, DHTML and XMLHTTP it didn’t have a fancy name) and the MSN Frameworks that we have partnered with Scott Isaacs to build. More and more MSN properties will benefit from the awesome collaboration going on between Spaces, Hotmail, and the start.com folks to build out a new web development platform.
We’ve been using the product with our production accounts (along with a few hundred MS employees) for a while now and people love it! This is also the first time in Hotmail history that we’ve had a dogfood program internally or done a beta! These things will result in a really high quality product. So to all you folks out there who have been waiting patiently for us to do something cool with our service, thank you for waiting. For those of you that left, we hope you come back when the house is finished being built!
And last but not least. We have a team blog. Check it out!