New Access Product Manager

From memory, in the past few years, the Microsoft Access PMs have included:

  • Michael_Aldridge
  • Ebo_Quansah
  • Michal_Bar
  • …

Well, we have (for a short while now) had a new Microsoft Access Product Manager, Linda Lu Cannon.

She has taken over the reins and will be the new guiding light for future Access development.

You’d think this would be worthy of some type of post on the official Microsoft Access Blog, yet there is no mention of her or the change in ‘management’.

Maria Barnes recently shared with the rest of us MVPs a link to the recording of the Access User Groups lunchtime meeting from September 26th, 2023 in which Linda briefly presents herself, around the 30:45 mark:

In the first half of the video, Linda is there to present information about Accessibility. After that, Linda finally presents herself and mentions that she is the new PM. She goes on to explains , that in this new role, she will be devoting a total of 10-15 hours a week on Access related matters. She explains that she has 4 roles and thus Access Product Management get about 25% of her attention.

For the first time, she also officially mentioned that the Access Dev Team is only comprised of a total of 6 people (including herself)!

  • Kelly Bowen (Linda’s boss – not part of the count, but still mentioned in the video)
    • Linda Lu Cannon (Product Manager)
      • Dale Rector (Engineering Manager)
        • 4 Engineers
          • Shane Groff (a man who needs no introduction and everyone knows!)
          • Joe Jimenez (he has moved onto other things)
          • Sachin (taken from AWF Reply By isladogs)
          • Courtney Owen (taken from AUG Meeting)
          • Tushar Jain (taken from https://youtu.be/aKqZX4eE5NA?feature=shared&t=315 — Access News 7, Oct 2023)

She then goes on to mention that we will be getting, at some point in time down the road, a new SQL Editor, a few other items (audio was bad and I didn’t quite understand what she was saying) and also confirmed that Access was still actively under development, so alive and well. So Access is NOT dead.

She then states that she has been actively working on the latest debacle regarding the New Outlook loosing VBA interoperability. Let’s hope she has gotten the other PMs (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, …) to also get involved in this matter and beat (not physically of course!) some sense into the Outlook Dev Team.

It will be interesting to see how Linda decides to manage the Access Blog and Roadmap to communicate with the developer community at large.