Yesterday evening, I bumped into Microsoft UK’s John Howard (not to be confused with the current Australian Prime Minister). For the last year and a half, I’ve known John as an “IT Professional Evangelist”, covering a variety of Windows infrastructure topics, but anyone who’s seen him present on virtualisation will understand it is one of his main interests.

Back at the end of January, John had told me that he’s moving to Redmond to join “Corp” and take up a position as a Program Manager in the Windows Virtualisation team and whilst it wasn’t the biggest secret in the world, he did ask me to keep quiet until it was all confirmed. Well, it’s confirmed – John’s published the news on his blog, so it’s okay for me to talk about it now!

It’s a big move, selling up in the UK and moving the whole family to North-West America, so I’d like to wish John all the very best for that, to say thanks for all the help and advice – and thanks for being a friendly face around Microsoft UK.

I still can’t say who’s stepping into John’s shoes but I worked it out for myself at a recent event so it’s not that difficult. Purely by coincidence, I was idly wondering a couple of months back if there were any positions vacant in the IT professional technical evangelist team at Microsoft UK (it sounds like a great job to me), but I didn’t see the post advertised externally and I’ve not been back at Fujitsu for long so I plan to be staying put for a while – anyway, I’m an unofficial Microsoft evangelist right here!

As for John’s blog – a lot of what he’s doing will be Microsoft confidential; but he did say that, together with his colleagues Ben Armstrong, Mike Sterling and Mike Kolitz he’s hoping to start a Virtual Server team blog – along the lines of the Exchange Server team blog (you had me at EHLO) or the Internet Explorer team blog (IEBlog). I guess that will be the space to watch and catch the latest details on the development of the Virtual Server hypervisor technology.