« [Windows Live @ edu] Identity Management | Main
June 22, 2006
[Windows Live @edu] Windows Live Mail
Omar Shahine - Lead Program Manager
Windows Live Mail - Past, Present and Future
adding a petabyte of data per month in new storage. majority of accounts are on a win32-based backend. Currently at 240 million accounts, getting a million new accounts per day.
"microsoft is a great place to work when you have a strong competitor" (speaking of gmail)
Windows live mail is rebuilding the hotmail web UI.
A lot of people on the Windows Life Mail team came from the Entourage team. Started with one intern, one developer, one PM. Built software that compiled C# to javascript - bringing the server API to the client. Much of this moved into developer tools as Atlas.
First milestone was getting t an inbox - 4-5 months working with a very small team. Goal was to get to beta product - hotmail had never done a beta. had to start small. designed to let small number of external users use it - 4k users. Also expose next version of product to all MS employees ("dogfood").
Set out list of features they wanted to build (245 features) and 5 milestones lasting two months each - with every milestone they increase the number of beta users by an order of magnitude.
Traditional Microsoft development methodology wasn't working - oriented towards long ship cycles for products like Office. They moved to using Scrum (book - Agile Project Management with Scrum). Quick release cycles were critical for the beta - getting quick fixes out to users so they can see movement in the product.
Omar quotes Getting Real on work in iterations - "iterations lead to liberation"
There are a lot of examples where they guess what the right way to build something is. They found through user testing that 9 messages is the right number of messages to show a user at once - they tried it in a beta, and then got a lot of feedback that this was not correct - so they changed it in the next milestone.
Don't optimize for scale until you see where the actual scale issues are through early releases.
sounds like they don't have plans to release IMAP any time soon. :(
they're thinking about the issues of being able to integrate campus directories from AD or LDAP.
Technorati Tags: microsoft, WindowsLive@edu
Posted by oren at June 22, 2006 11:28 AM
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