Itself the result of two years of testing, the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC) opened its doors in April 2002, during the Windows Server 2003 beta. The EEC is the brain-child of George Santino, the Product Unit Manager of Windows Integration Scenario Tests at Microsoft, who wanted to establish better criteria for long term product testing. It's located at Microsoft's Redmond campus, and was designed to let the company's customers duplicate their specific environments in a lab setting and see how various Microsoft software upgrades, migrations, and deployments perform using those company's real-world data and systems. The EEC is made available at no cost to customers.

"We built this facility to allow us to engage with customers while products are still under development," Santino told me, as we walked by a massive bank of servers at the EEC. "We wanted to test products directly with the customers that would deploy them, and understand their network topologies and the issues they're trying to solve. This helps Microsoft make products that are more enterprise-ready for these customers when they ship, and it allows us to engage customers directly." Microsoft benefits from the EEC by ensuring that its products work in the real-world scenarios that, in the past, weren't fully tested until those products were actually released. And customers benefit from one-on-one interaction with the product teams responsible for the products in question.