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17/8/09 Sixth Week

On Monday I had a meeting with Andrew Fryer, an eccentric techy who specialises in database software. He took me through two of the products my department deals with, Windows Server and SQL Server. Basically Windows Server is an operating system like XP or Vista but for Servers and SQL is an application like Word that allows you to do something with the hardware (server). SQL takes data and turns it into information that we can understand and analyse. Later I met with a lady who used to be on the sales grad scheme to get her thoughts on the programme, which was very interesting. Between these two meetings I did what every other Microsoft employee does and went to war on their gargantuan inbox.

Tuesday and Wednesday were taken up being trained on a programme called Seibel. There is a very structured way that a lead is tracked from the first contact through to the closure of the sale at Microsoft and I needed to learn how this worked in order to progress with what I’d learnt from the ‘Deep Dives’ the previous week. With this new knowledge I began to build ‘dashboards’ in order to monitor what has happened with the marketing generated leads.

24/8/09 Seventh Week

I had a 4 day week this week as I had a Friday Ticket to Reading Festival which is just down the road! Monday – Thursday was filled with more Seibel and Excel work relating to the sales/marketing pipeline project. Normally I do not like this business analytical work but owning this project and fully understanding why I was doing every task in Excel made it a lot more interesting. Building a case to prove an argument with figures that you have compiled will be very interesting when they are scrutinised by people that may have differing opinions to you.

Friday: Reading festival was amazing and it took all day Saturday to recover.

31/8/09 Eighth Week

Monday was a Bank Holiday and I’d headed down to Devon with my mum and dad for a couple of days. The reason for the spontaneous trip was that I’d been invited last minute by the Microsoft Sailing Club to join them on one of their trips. I’d joined the group in the first week and said I’d love to get involved, nothing was available at the time but someone had dropped out so I thought I would try out my sea legs. We sailed from Salcombe to Portsmouth over 3 days and the experience was truly memorable. I learned the very basics of the boat and took the helm for some time, this was limited though due to the conditions. I also learnt that wind is measured from 0-12 and the majority of the time we were sailing at 6-7. When we moored up in Portsmouth it was beginning to blow a 9, 12’s a hurricane… Being a complete adrenaline junkie, seeing the 4m swell rush up on us and make the boat peak and trough was fantastic and something I want to get back and do again.

This was also a fantastic networking opportunity, one of the other guys on board was my manager so it was nice to get to know him better outside of work and the other blokes were a laugh, I plan to stay in touch. On the trip I was also invited to join the 2 week sailing trip around the Caribbean, although it sounded very appealing, price wise it was probably a bit out my budget.

Till next time..