Today was day one of three ‘newbie’ days. A really nice lady from HR made a lot of time and effort to inform us about what went on ‘inside Microsoft’. After a brief introduction about the history of Microsoft, from 1975 until today, and the key points in the markets which caused major changes, the local organization was completely analyzed. The 7 departments were explained with a brief note about who was running it and what they did, and then the breakdown into the subs was explained as well.

Then we got a talk about the core values of Microsoft. About integrity & honesty; about passion for customers, partners and technology; about the willingness to take on big challenges and seeing them through; about being open and respectful while being self critical. About how you have to be questioning and be commited to personal excellence and self improvement, and about being accountable for the commitments you make, and being accountable for results and quality to customers, shareholders, partners and fellow-employees. High Expectations. Sometimes I think of all these things and I wonder how I’ll ever live up to it. I guess the only thing you can do is be sincere and try to do just that little more than ‘just your best’.

Apparently Microsoft has a deal with two (maybe soon three) gyms in the near surroundings of the offices, to motivate employees to stay fit. Well, the deal is like this: Microsoft invests in sports facilities to offer employees the opportunity to have some physical activity, to relax from work stress, and also meet their colleagues in an informal manner. If you show your MSFT badge, and mention the name at the entrance, you can participate for free. Obviously, the use of the sport facilities is meant for ‘out of office’ hours, but I like the gesture. Too bad I already have a yearly membership at the gym in my town. However, I’m thinking of setting up a competition between the DPEs, just to spice up the work atmosphere a bit. :)

Later in the afternoon we got a talk about the Complaint Explorer, an online tool where you can log any problem you encounter, and about how important it was to log issues customers point us too, before those issues can escalate. It was a short talk, but the essence was quite clear. The fact that a customer tells you there’s something wrong isn’t bad. Obviously it would be utopic to have no complaints at all, so if they tell you there’s an issue, that creates the window to an opportunity to fix things and learn from it in order to prevent it from happening in the future. They could’ve gone to the competition as well without telling, but since they’re telling you (even if they are a little mad or upset), you should try to get things fixed sooner as possible. It’s just common sense, but I think it’s cool we have a department especially for that.

Then we got a session about Finance, how that works, what they pay, how Microsoft makes money, what departments bring in the money and so on. Apparently the Belux (Belgium + Luxemburg) branch brings in 0.6 percent of the total MSFT turnover. I’m not going to go in detail because there were waaaaaay too many numbers on the slides to make sense of it, so I’ll probably say the wrong things anyway. Anyway, it’s good that I’m not in Finance. I’d go crazy from all those digits. Respect to all accountants worldwide who spend hours looking to their complicated Excel sheets. I get dizzy from looking at it for a few minutes already. I think I’ll stick to pie charts.

Busy day. Lot of info. I finally got my official ‘Welcome Map’ with in it a welcome/greeting card digitally signed by Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. I’m going to sell it on eBay or so when I’m 65. By then it’ll be worth more than Google’s stock. Heheh.

Tomorrow there’s an entire day in IT wonderland, including the pizza lunch. They’ll point out how to find our way through the massive intraweb, the IT policies and security. We’ll get some training and introduction sessions for EPE, the IT web, MySite, SharePoint and some workshops in the afternoon about how to get the most out of your smartphone and how to use the corporate tools like MSVacation and MSExpense. It’s going to be another day filled with information and goodies. I love this stuff really.

I think I’ll leave early tomorrow so I can complete another course in my RoadMap because yesterday I only scored 73% on my test on Enterprise Search and SharePoint 2007, and I need 80% to pass it. I have to get one more question right, but I’ll have to re-read the entire course in case the questions are different, because maybe I won’t know all the details anymore and then I’ll maybe miss another question I answered correctly already. I can’t take any chances. I have to move on.