Happy Birthday MSBLOG-1 Year OLD!!


Wow…its hard to think that one year ago today we were making the first posts on MSBLOG and introducing ourselves for the first time… A couple of months before I had just been accepted into the Microsoft windows server 2003 R2 beta. I was a young naive tester who didn’t know one single tester in amongst this fabulous group. Everyday I would check newsgroups and make the odd post. One day I stumbled across a post made by a one Patrick Elliott with pictures of his sweet server test setup (i still have them somewhere). Fascinated I added him to messenger… The two of us got talking-it seamed we shared common interests etc-one thing lead to another and we became good friends. Patrick introduced me to Jabez-we ‘clicked’ and also became good mates. I was then introduced to Andre N & Joseph-now both good friends of mine/us. From there we all met Zack-a guy who was pretty clued up on Microsoft in general. Then I met Dennis (because he claimed he submitted 100+ bugs for server within a day [I didn’t believe him, but boy was I wrong ]-the competition between Andre N and Dennis was on for most bugs submitted.) Dean later joined the team after reading our blog and getting in touch with us.
The test group was formed…Patrick put his awesome server setup to use…we could all remote in and test any time of the day… This was a key part of our success in R2. One day in a multi-convo chat between Patrick, Jabez and I we decided to start a blog on windows server tech. MSBLOG was formed. Our original authors consisted of our test group. So it began…armed with a windows server 03 os, a schools T1 connection, a virtual machine, word press and our “know-how” we gave life to our project…introductions were given then we got into the midst of blogging. Like anything new we started small…we made our name for ourselves by talking about a piece of operating system software (beta) that no one else had the inside information or skill in the blogging world. MSBLOG quickly became a resource for users to get inside technical information. While our blog was in the back of our minds something great happened to THREE of our fellow test group friends…Patrick E, Jabez and Zack were awarded the title of Windows Server 2003 R2 mentors!(what an honour-good on you guys)
MSBLOG continued to grow…new themes were applied and bloggers came and went. (ill name you new guys later =]) Finally the day windows server 03 r2 ended (how I miss that beta :'( ) We migrated to windows codenamed longhorn (so we see each other day to day still) MSBLOG is still going and growing.
We met new writers Kristan, Kenlin and Daniel who added a great deal of life to MSBLOG to keep it still going strong. Jabez offered to move us to his server (BLIZHOSTING) and we have never looked back since with this excellent uptime etc we had all the ingredients necessary to expand. We also acquired the MSBLOG.ORG domain thanks to Andre moving on from MSBLOG.RESDEV.NET Which brings me right here to today… Look where everyone is now… Patrick E is working for Microsoft as a Test Engineer on the Vista team, Zack is working for Microsoft on the Live team, Jabez is studying at College, Dean is studying, Joseph is studying, Dennis works with Network systems whilst he studies and me…I study too. (sorry to the guys I forgot)
Things have changed A LOT in the space of 1 year. I miss the R2 beta day to day but I am very happy I am privileged enough to know the people on this great team. Happy Birthday MSBLOG and well done Gang we have done it…One year done hopefully many more to go =D
Patrick Squire
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Oh and what of the blog stats… We havecurrently 604 posts and 1,949 comments, contained within 35 categories and counting (Not one Spam comment in sight-1949 comments is not bad 🙂 )
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