My Role in Certifications

I thought I could raise a bit of controversy by announcing that I’ll be spending a reasonable chunk of my time working on certifications.I teased the twitter-verse with a few hints, wondering if the wolves would pounce on me, but 1) I don’t have that many followers, and 2) since I’m always pissing people off, I don’t think anybody really cared that much.

I don’t talk that much about what I do in my day job on the Lync team. Among a variety of other things (that I really should get to in future blog posts), I’ve recently committed to some significant certification work.

No – not tester certifications – did anyone bite?

I recently accepted the role of chair of the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) working group on testing and certification. Basically, that means I’m going to work on testing tools and ideas (and eventually some sort of certification) for making sure UC software and devices from different vendors play nice with each other. I did some work with self-certification of embedded hardware when I worked on Windows CE, so although the work is a bit outside of my normal realm, at least I have an inkling of what’s in store for me. The rest of the working group members all (I assume) have a lot more experience in UC, but I’m hoping I can rely on my testing experience to help us figure out exactly what needs to be done.

If anything significant happens (including me being de-chaired for ineptitude), I’ll post it here. I’ll go back to my normal rants shortly.