Time for a quick lesson in blog history. There'll be a quiz at the end! Ok not really, but some history all the same.
Back a few years ago when we here at Microsoft were just starting to get savvy to this whole blog thing, one of our support escalation engineers, Tim Springston, decided to start up a blog about Active Directory. You might have seen it in the past. Over the years he's posted some really great insights and posts there that are definitely worth reading if you have the time.
Of course, the rest of us decided to do something completely different and started up AskDS a little later. Rumor has it that it had something to do with a high-stakes poker game (Tim *is* from Texas, after all), but no one is really sure why we wound up with two support blogs to be honest - it's one of those things that just sort of happened.
Anyway, all this time while we've been partying it up over here on TechNet, our AD product team has been marooned over on MSDN with an audience of mostly developers. Not that developers are bad folks - after all, they make the apps that power pretty much everything - but the truth is that a lot of what we do in Active Directory in terms of feature development is also targeted at Administrators and Architects and IT Pros. You know, the people who read blogs on TechNet and may not think to also check MSDN.
After a lot of debate and discussion internally, the AD product team came to the conclusion that they really should have a presence on TechNet so that they could talk to everyone here about the cool features they're working on.
The problem? Well, we sort of had a monopoly over here in support on AD-related blog names. :)
Meetings were convened. Conferences were held. Email flew back and forth. Their might even have been some shady dealings involving gifts of sugary pastries. In the end though, Tim graciously agreed to move his blogging efforts over to AskDS and cede control of http://blogs.technet.com/ad to the Active Directory Product team.
The result? Everyone wins. Tim's now helping us write cool stuff for AskDS (you'll see plenty of that in the near future, I'm sure), and the product team has already startedpostinga bunchof things that you might have missed when they were on MSDN.
If you haven't seen what they're up to over there, go and take a look . And as we get out of summer and get our people back from vacation, and, you know, roll a whole new server OS out the door, keep an eye on both blogs for updates, tips, explanations, and all manner of yummy AD-related goodness.
--David "Wait, we get another writer for AskDS??" Beach