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.