Microsoft on Microsoft: How the Software Titan Uses Its Own Tech

I've often wondered why Microsoft doesn't spend more time and energy explaining how it has truly moved the old Silicon Valley adage "We eat our own dog food" up to the Puget Sound area, and made that motto its own.

Somebody must have been reading my mind, because Microsoft has now launched an IT Showcase (subtitled "How Microsoft Does IT") that digs deeply into lessons learned and tools used to keep its mammoth IT environment humming along.

The numbers included on the home page banner for this new online asset make it pretty clear that Microsoft's own internal infrastructure demonstrates a profound application of the company's platforms and technologies.

Off the top of my head only the United States government (most notably the Department of Defense) can claim to be working at a scale that's an order of magnitude above what we see here.

Most other "to scale" enterprise users are either in Microsoft's ballpark, or not that far beyond it. So this is somewhat akin to the Wizard of Oz — or perhaps more appropriately, the Wizard of OS — posting a detailed, coordinated behind-the-curtain walkthrough on his own blog.

The latest blog post from the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) brought this treasure trove of "inside baseball" information to my attention. Titled "Looking for real-world examples from a global enterprise?", the post raises a question to which I and most other IT pros working the Microsoft patch can't help but respond, "Heck yeah!"

By any metrics you might like, Microsoft qualifies as a "serious enterprise environment" for IT.

What's really interesting and useful about this post (beyond pointing to the IT Showcase and its many online resources, all worth investigating) is a series of IT Showcase courses now available at MVA (with more no doubt in the offing). Here's a direct lift of the course links and blurbs straight from that blog post:

Cloud at Microsoft: Find out how Microsoft approaches cloud adoption and embeds cloud business processes to drive business success.

SharePoint at Microsoft: Learn how Microsoft implemented strategies for SharePoint search, taxonomy, governance, backup, and disaster recovery, and much more.

Skype for Business at Microsoft: Examine past, current, and future IM, voice, phone, social networking, and conferencing implementations, in this practical look at Skype for Business.

Enterprise Mobility at Microsoft: Focus on the best practices that we developed while deploying and running mobile devices as a key part of the Microsoft infrastructure.

I spent a few minutes auditioning the cloud and enterprise mobility offerings, and found them useful, informative and — as is typical of MVA courses in general — well crafted and equally well produced. I can only hope they'll also lift the cover on databases, data mining, and virtualization technologies at Microsoft.

This is a great new online resource from Microsoft, and one that most IT pros (enterprise and otherwise) are almost certain to find downright fascinating. Be sure to check it out!