Something magical happens around our halls the week after our annual Worldwide Partner Conference: everyone breathes again.
I mean really breathes: all the fiscal year-end stuff is closed, and all the fiscal year kick-off stuff is, well, kicked off. Not that things are slow—just calm. Our plans for the next twelve months are locked and loaded, and now we start to execute against them.
My team has new budgets, new commitments, and even a couple of new people: each year we tweak our roles and responsibilities to align to our major commitments, and this year’s no exception.
Joining my team are Erwin Chan and Deanna Sterns. Erwin’s been around B2L for a while, managing our RSS feeds, adding stuff like Class Locator and our podcast section, and managing our team’s twitter account with CoTweet. (He’s our tinkerer.) Erwin will be focusing on our social media presence, and there will certainly be much more info and news in this regard coming over the coming months.
Deanna manages our Flash newsletters that most of you receive each month—you know, those very nice looking e-mails with news that’s typically old by the time you get it. :-) We know we can make a lot of improvements here, giving you guys control over how often you get news from us, how you get it, and what type of information you want… so look for some changes here soon.
On a sad note (for me, anyway), Sarah Grant is moving to a new team, but she’ll stay pretty close to B2L, since her new job is managing the CPLS and MCT programs for Microsoft Learning!
Tjeerd still leads our MCT community (he just no longer is responsible for the certification requirements and benefits, which lets him focus more on community development), and he’ll be embracing the MCP community now as well.
Meanwhile, Dana is stepping into a big role as our event strategist and will shortly be very busy with our next bus tour and a very, very big TechEd announcement coming soon; Joanne turns her attention to evangelizing learning and certification with students and academic faculty; and Bill focuses on readying our legion of MCTs for some very big product releases.
As for me: I’m going on vacation. :-)
I’ll be gone for the month of August (although I suspect I’ll still be checking in here from time to time, ‘cause I’ll miss you guys), and I’ll probably be using the next week or so to catch up on a lot of news and posts that have been queuing up.
So enjoy your summer--we’ve got some big, big plans for this next year, and we’re looking forward to sharing them with you over the coming months!