My name is Charles Eliot, and I’m the Group Program Manager for Release Management for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM team, which is just a fancy way of saying that I’m the lead project manager.
I joined the CRM team in late 2001. I started at Microsoft in 1992 as a contract tester, and was hired on full-time about 6 months later as a test lead. In 1994 I jumped over to program management, and have been a program manager (PM) ever since. From 1992 until I joined the CRM team I worked entirely on email products: MS-Mail 3.2, Exchange 4.0, Exchange 5.0, Exchange 5.5, and finally Exchange 2000.
I joined the CRM team as the lead PM for system management tools (including workflow), but I started taking on release management responsibilities almost immediately. When I joined we hadn’t shipped anything yet, so it’s been a blast to have been involved in all the CRM releases to date: v1.0 in January 2003, v1.2 in October 2003, and most recently v3.0 in October 2005.