“You can leave a lightbulb on all the time, but if you leave the room when the light is on, it’s wasted energy,” Berard said. “What we do in the operating system version of that is to turn the light off when you’re not in the room.”

Berard, a senior program manager for the Windows Kernel Team, is the recipient of Microsoft’s quarterly Environmental Action Award for his work making the Windows 7 platform, including Windows 7 running as workstations as part of systems running on Windows Server 2008 R2, more energy efficient.

Berard has been at Microsoft working on energy-efficiency projects for more than five years. Before that, he worked for American Power Conversion for 12 years as a software engineer and architect designing datacenter power-management products. 

What kinds of power-management features did you work on for Windows 7?

Berard: My main focus for Windows 7 was related to server power management. Our goal was to improve the overall power consumption of servers. We wanted to take the technologies we use in the mobile and laptop space and apply them to servers. As a result, we delivered a server operating system that is more efficient and more manageable than any other version of Windows.

Using Windows Server 2008 R2, administrators are able to monitor energy consumption just like any other performance metric in Windows. This enables them to adjust power settings to suit the needs of their business. Further, using tools like System Center Operations Manager, administrators can manage and monitor literally hundreds of Windows Server systems across their organization.

What was the biggest challenge or hurdle you faced working on your feature?

Berard: Our greatest challenge was gaining industry support for our feature among our server partners. In order to provide energy-consumption reporting, we needed support in hardware. Today there is a lot of focus on energy efficiency and green IT. Naturally, as a result, it’s an area of competition. As a result, there were a lot of proprietary solutions in the market and little in the way of standards. What we needed to do was to strike a balance between what we deliver in Windows and what our partners could provide.

Our mission was to create a solution that provided real value to our customers while enabling our partners to build and extend upon it. We didn’t want to replace vendor-specific solutions, but we did need some amount of standardization. Our approach was to engage early with our partners across the entire server ecosystem to gather their requirements and feedback. This required an amazing amount of communication.

What’s the thing you’re proudest of in Windows 7?

Berard: Delivering on what we promised, when we promised it. While it sounds trivial, it’s not. People had high expectations of us. I’m extremely proud that our team delivered on our promises.

How did you get customer input about Windows 7 power management?

Berard: Microsoft is a part of a number of industry groups such as the Green Grid and Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI). These groups provided an excellent opportunity for us to interface with the industry. We also worked with our server OEM partners very closely. So we were able to get their input, as well as input from their customers. Finally, we worked with our field staff to get direct customer input. 

Was teamwork important developing power management?

Berard: There were a lot of moving parts that all needed to be in place for us to be successful, so teamwork was absolutely essential. For example, to report energy consumption, we needed the server platforms to support this in hardware. This required development relationships to be set up with our partners. Our development team needed to specify and develop the necessary support in Windows. We coordinated this with our hardware partners and their development teams. And our test team needed to make sure that what we shipped was absolutely reliable. We wouldn’t have been able to do what we did without the enormous effort of all involved.

What was a typical day like working on Windows 7?

Berard: It involved a lot of conference calls, lots and lots of them. We had to do a tremendous amount of coordination and evangelism in order to deliver our features. That required a huge amount of communication and coordination. Amazingly, we did the majority of this via teleconference using tools like Microsoft’s Live Meeting rather than jumping on a plane to meet face-to-face. For me, it was an example of the team’s dedication to our environmental goals. 

What do you need to do your best work?

Berard: Being part of a team with good leadership and peers that are smart as hell is essential. Being able to walk down the hall and bounce ideas off of some really smart people is key. A good team will challenge you and, as a result, help you to deliver your best work.

I also tend to be a pretty intense person, especially when I’m focused on a task or key deliverable. Having a work space where I can close the door and work undisturbed is key for me, not to mention really strong coffee! 

What’s next for you at Microsoft?

Berard: Right now I’m working in Paris at a Microsoft subsidiary. My wife had a wonderful opportunity to relocate to France for a few years. While it was really tough to leave my group in Windows, it has been a tremendous opportunity for me. I firmly believe that we grow the most when we are forced to step outside of what we know and do something different. 

What do you do when you’re not working?

Berard: I am a really dedicated cyclist and spend a large amount of my free time riding. For the past five years I have trained and raced for a Seattle-based cycling team. It’s a great way to relieve stress and stay both mentally and physically fit.

My wife and I are foodies, so we also enjoy cooking and entertaining whenever we can. We also love to travel and often spend our vacations in the south of France—usually with our bikes!

(via Microsoft News Center)

As senior development lead on the Windows Client Performance team, Aaron Dietrich had toiled to make sure Windows 7-based PCs would fire up like rockets. But he was surprised again and again when praise for the faster start-up performance popped up repeatedly in the press and in the blogosphere.

Dietrich, who came to Microsoft nine years ago after completing graduate studies at Rochester Institute of Technology, worked with Windows 7 features teams to keep the operating system lean enough to clock significantly faster start-up times.

What was your role working on Windows 7?

Dietrich: For Windows 7, I was on the Windows Client Performance team. Rather than owning a specific feature, we kind of work as a liaison with many different teams within Windows to help them analyze and resolve performance issues with the operating system.

How did you increase start-up performance in Windows 7?

Dietrich: There were a couple of key features that allowed us to get better boot times. The first was we introduced what we call the fast boot feature, which allows some parts of boot to happen in the background while Windows is discovering and initializing devices. That helped us gain up to 25 percent of our boot time over Windows Vista, depending on the hardware.

The other big one was that we significantly reduced the size of the operating system required to be read from disk in order to boot. Whereas Windows Vista required somewhere on the order of 220 to 240 megabytes of operating system code to boot, Windows 7 requires anywhere from 140 to 180 megabytes, depending on the configuration of the system.

What was a typical day like working on Windows 7?

Dietrich: As I said, we worked with other teams to try and help them design the right features and do analysis to make sure they were performing the way they expected them to. As the teams built their features, occasionally regressions in performance would come in. Bugs do happen. We have a lot of checks in place called "perf gates" that run on every build produced daily in Windows. That monitors everything from boot times to shutdown time and a bunch of other metrics.  If any of them ever regressed, we jumped on that, did some analysis, and tried to help teams resolve the issue.

It’s very sinusoidal. You go through these relative periods of calm where you’ve got all your ducks in a row. And then you always have those periods leading up to milestones, where everyone is crunching through things, and it gets a little bit hectic.

How important was teamwork to your job?

Dietrich: Teamwork is absolutely critical. There’s no way we could have gotten faster boot times just by my work alone. I was more of the ambassador trying to evangelize the best designs and changes to these teams. But I also needed to be able to maintain those positive relationships to make sure the agenda we were trying to drive on the performance team was moving ahead the way we wanted it to.

All that cross-group work does naturally take a bit of time, but it is rewarding to work with so many different types of people on so many different types of projects. It’s not a place where you own one feature and can dive into it and see it to completion. You get to work and you get to wear lots of different hats. That’s one of the biggest rewards of being on the performance team.

What was the most important or surprising thing you learned while working on Windows 7?

Dietrich: The amount of time it takes to work with so many different teams. It’s not just firing off an e-mail and waiting for someone to get back to you to say "Hey, I did it." It really takes continually working with these folks, going and meeting with them, building that personal relationship. I always thought that was valuable, but I never really realized just how important that aspect was until I had gone through that cycle with Windows 7. The PM [program management] team on the performance team played a key role supporting me here during the latter parts of Windows 7.

During that final stretch—when it was crunch time—those relationships became more and more important. Having those folks support a fast-boot agenda rather than having them feel like they were being dragged into it was key. I wanted to get them excited about the work they were doing rather than feel as though any time they get an e-mail from me, it was a tax.

What’s the thing you’re proudest of in Windows 7?

Dietrich: All the positive reviews we’ve gotten out of boot. While I was happy with the work we did, I never really expected it to get as much positive press as it did. I didn’t think people would get that excited about it, I guess.

What’s next for you at Microsoft?

Dietrich: After Windows 7 shipped, I moved to the Fundamentals Ecosystem team. That’s within the same fundamentals organization as the performance team, but now my team specifically supports the OEMs [original equipment manufacturers]. That’s so we can ensure we don’t just have a rock-solid OS in the shrink wrap that we build, but that the operating systems that actually get out to our customers when they buy an OEM system are of the same high quality that we have in the core OS.

What do you do when you’re not working?

Dietrich: I have an 8-year-old daughter and a lovely wife I love to spend time with. I like to do some hiking when I can. I’m also starting to learn how to ski, but not very well.

(via Microsoft News Center)

The senior program manager loves her job connecting spokes and keeping the wheel turning. For Windows 7, the wheel Deutsch helped turn was to develop a brand new feature that allows users to more quickly jump to frequently used destinations.

Called a Jump List, the feature is activated when a user right-clicks certain icons in the taskbar or hovers over icons in the Start menu. The Jump List window then pops up with links to transport the user to frequently or recently used documents, files, Web sites and more.

Deutsch, who interned twice on Microsoft’s Windows team as a Carnegie Mellon University student, joined the company as an employee after graduating. More than five years later, she still enjoys working on the "pieces that make up the cornerstones of what the Windows operating system means to users." The News Center asked her about working on Windows 7.

What feature did you work on for Windows 7, and what does it do?

Deutsch: I worked on a couple of different areas. The Jump List feature was a lot of my focus. I also worked on the Start menu in Windows 7, which was not changed too radically but had some maintenance and targeted feature improvement, like adding the Jump List.

What is a Jump List, and how does it work?

Deutsch: The real core of it is getting you to your end destination as quickly and efficiently as possible. You’re not launching Word to see the blank document. Often, what you’re really trying to do is get to your content, task, Web site, file, album, or whatever it is. The idea of the Jump List is to reduce all those extra steps that you used to have to do to get to your end goal.

What was a typical day like working on Windows 7?

Deutsch: That’s a really hard question to answer, especially for a project manager. Our job changes a lot as you go through the product cycle.

During planning, it’s back-to-back meetings talking with small groups hashing out ideas and proposals. As you move into development, the day becomes a lot more about closing the door and sitting heads-down to hammer out the feature specifications on a page so that developers and testers can have a concrete document to work on of what they need to build.

I sometimes think of my job as being the center of a wheel with a lot of different spokes, and I need to make sure the whole wheel is turning together, going in the right direction, and getting there on time.

Was teamwork important to the Jump List feature?

Deutsch: Hugely. We had a really strong feature team that spanned across all the disciplines working together. Really, from day one we were doing brainstorms and planning meetings, and all the pieces were very critical and needed to work all together through planning and development. Beyond that, there was also a great collaboration across the project managers on our team because a lot of the pieces hinged together. A Jump List isn’t something that can live on its own, being part of the taskbar and part of the Start menu.

What do you need to do your best work?

Deutsch: It’s a little bit silly, but I’ve always felt very akin to the color purple as a soothing, calming thing. There’s a lot of purple in my office, and I wear a lot of purple, and I have a reaction that’s calming and grounding when I see that color.

There’s time of day—I tend to be more of a night owl than a morning person. I’ve kind of always done better work in the later hours than the early hours, but I’m trying to find ways to accommodate both. And there’re other people—I really thrive with a strong team and other great minds to bounce ideas off and discuss and debate. That’s where we see the best ideas, is through those discussions.

What was the most important or surprising thing you learned while working on Windows 7?

Deutsch: I am proud of the Windows 7 process going from the start to the end without losing sight of the value of what we were trying to provide. It really kind of cemented a perspective and way of working that is valuable to carry forward to future versions of Windows. It’s not about just thinking of cool ideas or changing things for change’s sake. It’s really about understanding what we’re doing so that we are grounded in our goals and the problems we’re trying to solve.

How did customer feedback help you build the Jump List feature?

Deutsch: We really did a lot of deep work on understanding the usability of our feature using the customers’ reaction and needs. We definitely got lots and lots of feedback.

We had a lot of prototyping going on early on in labs, and we brought users in to try it and sent prototypes out to real customers to use for a couple of months at a time. That was really critical in helping us hone the design and refine it so we weren’t getting huge surprises at the end.

What was the biggest challenge or hurdle you faced working on your feature?

Deutsch: As with any kind of feature development, you can get some great ideas that can balloon into huge, huge amounts of work. We were trying to home in on the core values we were trying to provide with the feature and to not lose sight of that as we were adjusting plans and implementation to make it feasible.

It’s easy during that process of scoping to lose sight of what the value of the end result is, so we really just had to make sure we were able to find ways of delivering that value in a way that we could meet our deadlines and make it feasible to build. With the Jump List, we had an idea of the feature we wanted to provide, and there were so many ways we could have implemented it—and we just had to find the right path to meet our deadline and still make it feasible and high quality.

What’s the thing you’re proudest of in Windows 7?

Deutsch: I felt like we had a super strong team that worked well together. There was a lot of debate, but in a healthy way. Everyone was really very much collaborating on the same page about making something great together rather than as individuals. I’m also pretty proud that we didn’t have any major surprises in the last minutes. It really spoke to the diligence and depth of our planning and product cycle.

(via Microsoft Presspass)