Office Intern Party 2005

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Seattle: July 20, 6:30PM

Just got back from our our intern party and Jillian's which is a great place on Seattle's Lake Union. Every year we host the interns from the Office team with unlimited games, food, and (legal) drinks. This year also features a big screen XBOX and DDR, which I learned we have quite a few experts--let's give it up for the Party People!

The party is amazing since it is a chance to meet all the interns in a cool environment and get to talk in depth about their projects and the good time folks are having at Microsoft. With over 50 different colleges represented (including Cornell!) there is an incredible cross-section of schools from US, Canada, and Mexico and of course students from all over the world. One cool story this year is that two of our interns who are from India and went to grade school together, but actually ended up at different high schools and colleges actually ran into each other and work 20 feet apart on the Office team--now that's a cool experience! We also had a number of local high school interns as well, which is super cool. Also present at the party are all the vice presidents in the Office group (a couple of them former interns) who also join in for many of the intern events.

Of course the coolest is hearing about all the projects folks are working on. Interns in Office work on real features, real code, and real software that we will ship in the next release of Office (code named Office12, due to ship in 2006). In a future blog, I'll share some of the types of projects folks work on, but right now all the features are under wraps until we start talking in public about Office12. Our projects are on all the information worker software used by over 400M people -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, InfoPath, Publisher, Project, SharePoint, Content Management Server, Visio, Live Meeting, Live Communications, FrontPage (which is how I'm typing this entry), and of course all the core Office shared features that go into all the products.

Thank so much to all the interns for such a great time, and to the folks I beat in pool, I'm really sorry I am such a shark!

I wanted to include a few pictures from the party on my MSN Space.

See you soon,

Steven

PS: Tomorrow is Q&A with all the interns -- I got a lot of challenging questions this year. Check back for some of them and some discussion.