It seems everybody in the Microsoft network is doing the RoadMap thing today - I have over 90 hours left of ‘classes’ to follow, so I know what I’ll be doing the next few days (perhaps even weeks).
Today I already completed a few courses about pretty interesting stuff.
“Are You Ready For People-Ready” was a session about The People-Ready Business (PRB) Campaign, which seeks to answer the question “Why Microsoft” in business terms for business audiences. Then after that I switched to a course about “Speaking Intellectual Property”. This was a session where you could find out what intellectual property is, why it matters to Microsoft, and, most importantly, why it matters to your customers. That was really enlightening. One if the things that struck me was that Microsoft has over 4000 filed patents and pays roughly $1.4 billion every year to use patented ‘products’ from other companies. Wow.
[edit: for the clarity of the matter, the exact phrase I wanted to quote from a question list goes as follows: “In 2004, Microsoft paid over $1,4 billion to license other’s intellectual rights” - just to get it straight]
Then I did the ‘Understanding Microsoft’ training, and there’s still a few of those ‘general’ sessions left to do. It’s quite important for a new employee to know how to do things and who to ask if you need something done. Microsoft has a really strong corporate image, and obviously it’s important everyone acts according to the guidelines. There’s more than enough space to be yourself though, and that’s just great.
In the last days of last year, I also completed the “WorldWide Privacy 101″ session, where I was provided with targeted content based on my business group and job role to provide actionable and relevant guidance, as a Microsoft employee, about my privacy responsibilities. It is fundamental that every employee within Microsoft is aware of Privacy, how it emerges in their every day jobs. Everyone is personally accountable for upholding Microsoft Privacy policies, and it’s important to learn how to deal with privacy issues. I thought it was very interesting to have a ‘behind the scenes’ experience of this. Before joining, I was ‘just a consumer’. It’s nice to know what actually happens with the things you fill in in the registration forms and what happens to the data that has been collected.
Right now I’m doing a session about Enterprise Search and SharePoint 2007 (with the Server and Search versions included). I’ve been playing around with SharePoint before I joined Microsoft, so I’m pretty excited to see this thing from the inside out. But like I said in the beginning of the post, it looks like everyone is doing RoadMap today, so this session is taking me quite some time to get through it. I think I’m going to wrap it up for now and retry tonight from home.
