Wow. Last-Minute Refactoring. Releases That Take Weeks or Months instead of Years. I’m Definitely Not in Kansas Anymore.

One for the “things I don’t miss about Microsoft” list: having everyone acknowledge that a problem exists, having everyone agree that it’s serious and will result in customer dissatisfaction, that something must be done about it, and nevertheless not be able to do anything about it for up to three years (if that).

I don’t want to be unfair about it.  When you’re a giant software company and many, many interdependency issues exist among your own products (let alone those of partners), and many, many requests for good, justifiable changes get received in a steady stream, that’s a cold, hard reality.  Even a simple change could result in months of testing to make sure it does no harm.

Contrast this with what we’re opting to do with Nintex Reporting 2008.  We debuted it at TechEd North America this month.  Response has been great.  To a person, anyone who saw a demo raved about it, some in very public places.  But we also got a non-trivial number of suggestions, several of which were too good to pass up.  We also got a couple of volunteers working through database size requirements for a data warehouse covering a farm of a certain size with a certain amount of activity.

This pointed to two things we needed to do: (1) add a few extra reports, and (2) do a bit more optimizing on the way our warehouse stores data.

So we’re doing it.  Nintex Reporting will start arriving in the hands of customers next month instead of this one.  It’s for a far greater good.  And it was easy to react.  Outright fun, actually.

Welcome Joel!

We’ve secured a healthy chunk of Joel Oleson’s time over the summer to help us quickly revise and enhance Nintex Reporting 2008.  This will be good.  If we’re really fortunate, we might try to coax Joel into something more permanent.  This is, after all, a very nice place.

Holy Spit — They Actually Built It…

When I was part of the SharePoint teams, people asked me for advice all the time.  Sometimes, they even took it.  As it turns out, Nintex took a lot of it.

My stance of staying the heck out of the SharePoint databases is a matter of public record.  I wasn’t kidding then, and I’m still not kidding about it.  It’s a bad idea.  That having been said, a frequent question that came up in response involved how to report on what’s going on within SharePoint farms. 

You’ve got basically two options: walk the object model (many tools on CodePlex do this) or directly query the databases used by WSS/MOSS (don’t do this).  Or you can take a blue-sky, hybrid approach:  walk the object model and save the results to a data warehouse.  That was usually met with nods of understanding followed by cringes of understanding on just what it would take to do such a thing (no matter how much it would be worth it).

Well, Nintex did it anyway.  You’ll see it at TechEd in Orlando next week and/or on our Web site — we RTM today.

I’ll post over the next several days a few snippets about how the product works and what you can do with it (both for using it and extending it).  But the gist of it is that we — in a completely “legal”, supportable way — inspect the farm and stage nuggets o’ insight into a proper data warehouse, then provide plenty of tools for you to report on that warehouse’s contents to your heart’s content.

Details to follow.  This is fun.

Just who the heck *am* I?

I’m Mike Fitzmaurice, Vice President of Product Technology at Nintex, a company that makes products that augment Microsoft SharePoint technology. That’ll do for the moment. Visit www.nintex.com if you ‘d like to know more about that.

I spent the last ten and half years of my life at Microsoft, working in one capacity or another on information worker solutions, be that in messaging, collaboration, portals, content management, application aggregation, search, workflow, business intelligence, and a bunch of other stuff.

I started Microsoft in late 1997 in Microsoft Consulting Services, often creating collaboration and messaging solutions using MAPI, Exchange client and server add-ins, Outlook development, and plenty of other things. I was part of the consulting squad that helped the very first early adopter customers beta test “Tahoe”, which would become SharePoint Portal Server 2001, and was part of a team that authored best-practice deployment solutions for optimal usage of SPS 2001 and SharePoint Team Services in a corporate intranet. I became a Technical Product Manager in time to bring SPS 2003 and WSS 2.0 to fruition, and haven’t strayed from SharePoint-land ever since.

I haven’t been blogging for a year and a half, mainly because (a) the SharePoint Team Blog came into being and started covering content that was previously only available in my old blog or Arpan Shah’s. Secondly, my job within Microsoft changed to one that was more internally focused (I joined the SWAT team that helped Microsoft account teams with gnarly technical and/or competitive challenges), and the things I was doing weren’t really things I could share.

But I’m back now.

I’ll be blogging a lot more often now, generally about three things:

1. SharePoint technology. While I am indeed bound by a non-disclosure agreement, that doesn’t mean I received a lobotomy upon leaving Microsoft. There are plenty of things I know and very much want to share.
2. Observations of life at Microsoft and what it’s like to have just left it, what it’s like to move from an 80,000-person company to a 100-person company, etc.
3. Subject areas addressed by Nintex products, notably workflow and process automation, analysis of SharePoint farm/server/site usage, podcasting, and more.

But give me about a week before I get started. I’m going home to Canada to visit family before I jump on the Nintex bandwagon, just in time to see everyone at TechEd in Orlando (both weeks). Stop by the Nintex booth and say “hi” if you can.

Sorry, but this will have to be a trade secret-free zone…

As much fun as it it could be using this space to leak fun tidbits of what may/may not happen in the next releases of SharePoint technology in particular and Office technology in general, it can’t happen. It should come as no surprise that I signed a non-disclosure agreement with Microsoft the day I was hired way back in 1997, and as such much of what I know (or don’t know) about What Is Yet To Come will have to be placed in a cognitive lock box.

The best you can hope for is the fact that I’m obviously not going to advocate practices, techniques, etc., that won’t have a good chance of long-term viability. Similarly, if I’m bullish on something, it’s probably got a future. There’s nothing in my NDA that says I have to pursue fruitless paths just to misdirect people.

So my opinions will remain informed ones, but may often have to remain without supporting data points.