We're back. Did you miss us?

Hey all, David here.  Now that we’ve broken the silence, we here on the DS team felt that we owed you, dear readers, an explanation of some sort.  Plus, we wanted to talk about the blog itself, some changes happening for us, and what you should hopefully be able to expect moving forward.

So, what had happened was….

As most of you know, a few months ago our editor-in-chief and the butt of many jokes here on the DS support team moved to a new position.  We have it on good authority that he is thoroughly terrorizing many of our developers in Redmond with scary words like “documentation”, “supportability”, and other Chicago-style aphorisms which are best not repeated in print.

Unfortunately for us and for this blog, that left us with a little bit of a hole in the editing team!  The folks left behind might have been superheroes, but the problem with being a superhero is that you get called on to go save the world (or a customer with a crisis) all the time, and that doesn’t leave much time for picking up your cape from the dry cleaners, let alone keeping up with editing blog submissions, doing mail sacks, and generally keeping the blog going.

At the same time, we had a bit of a reorganization internally.  Where we were formerly one team within support, we are now two teams – DS (Directory Services) and ID (Identity).  Why the distinction?  Well, you may have heard about this Cloud thing…. But that’s a story best told by technical blog posts, really.  For now, let’s just say the scope of some of what we do expanded last year from “a lot of people use it” to “internet scale”.  Pretty scary when you think about it.

Just to make things even more confusing, about a month ago we were officially reunited with our long-lost (and slightly insane, but in a good way) brethren in the field engineering organization.  That’s right, our two orgs have been glommed[1] together into one giant concentration of support engineering superpower.  While it’s opening up some really cool stuff that we have always wanted to do but couldn’t before, it’s still the equivalent of waking up one day and finding out that all of those cousins you see every few years at family reunions are coming to live with you.  In your house.  Oh, and they’re bringing their dog.

Either way, the net effect of all this massive change was that we sort of got quiet for a few months.  It wasn’t you, honest.  It was us.

What to Expect

It’s important to us that we keep this blog current with detailed, pertinent technical info that helps you resolve issues that you might encounter, or even just helps you understand how our parts of Windows work a bit better.  So, we’re picking that torch back up and we’ll be trying to get several good technical posts up each month for you.  You may also see some shorter posts moving forward.  The idea is to break up the giant articles and try to get some smaller, useful-to-know things out there every so often.  Internally, we’re calling the little posts “DS Quickies” but no promises on whether we’ll actually give you that as a category to search on.  Yes, we’re cruel like that.  You’ll also see the return of the mail sack at some point in the near future, and most importantly you’re going to see some new names showing up as writers.  We’ve put out the call, and we’re planning to bring you blog posts written not just by our folks in the Americas, but also in Europe and Asia.  You can probably also expect some guest posts from our kin in the PFE organization, when they have something specific to what we do that they want to talk about.

At the same time, we’re keen on keeping the stuff that makes our blog useful and fun.  So you can continue to expect technical depth, detailed analysis, plain-English explanations, and occasional irreverent, snarky humor.  We’re not here to tell you why you should buy Windows clients or servers (or phones, or tablets) – we have plenty of marketing websites that do that better than we ever could.  Instead, we’re here to help you understand how Windows works and how to fix problems when they occur.  Although we do reserve the right to post blatant wackiness or fun things every so often too.  Look, we don’t get out much, ok?  This is our outlet.  Just go with us on this.

Finally, you’re going to see me personally posting a bit more, since I’ve taken over as the primary editor for the site.  I know - I tried to warn them what would happen, but they still gave me the job all the same.  Jokes aside, I feel like it’s important that our blog isn’t just an encyclopedia of awesome technical troubleshooting, but also that it showcases the fact that we’re real people doing our best to make the IT world a better place, as sappy as that sounds. (Except for David Fisher– I’m convinced he’s really a robot).  I have a different writing style than Ned and Jonathan, and a different sense of humor, but I promise to contain myself as much as possible.  :-)

Sound good?  We hope so.  We’re going to go off and write some more technical stuff now – in fact:  On deck for next week:  A followup to Kim’s blog on Loopback Policy Processing.

We wanted to leave you with a funny video that’s safe for work to help kick off the weekend, but alas our bing fu was weak today.  Got a good one to share?  Feel free to link it for us in the comments!