What are you going to do now?
<edits for minor grammatical errors>
It isn't entirely what you are thinking. My time as a beta engineer has come to a halt. I was fortunate to work the entire Communicator Web Access beta and the team graciously provided a Ship It award to me for my involvement. This is a plaque that holds up to 8 small metal squares with the product you helped have an impact on for shipping. While you might think that a beta engineer would get this routinely we don't. If you ship a lot of products due to be a developer this might be another plaque in the office but for those of us who don't get them it is an honor to receive that recognition. I know a group that lobbied for their team to get them and I have to say they put a lot of effort in it so having the product team do this without a prompt really made me feel as though the efforts were worth it.
I also worked on the Communicator Mobile release, near the end my other team mate Matt stepped in to back me up when I was on vacation and he really stepped in strong. He put together our training webcast of walking through setup and logging. He also built a virtual machine with Visual Studio and device emulation already configured for the devices we support.
While on these betas I also got looped in on "Live" Server, now Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (or as we say OCS) but that was such a long product cycle I knew my time was short lived. Beta 2 was the cutoff so the 3rd week of July was my last week supposedly to help with the 3 weeks of deployment. Well it is now the 3rd week of August and I think the 3 team members are just now starting to see customer issue volume. I went to TechReady3 by invitation of Jerry in our readiness team. He requested I co-speak in a chalk talk on telephony, specifically the remote call control (RCC, or 3rd Party Call Control 3PCC). Anyone who knew the 4 of us up there knew the Bob and Sam were the talent and Barry and I were the good looking ones ;) Seriously Bob and Sam came from other companies with real deployment experience and they KNOW this stuff.
So I then had a week of vacation since I didn't really get one in my time on beta (hard for the 1 support guy to not be there) and this week I was working on cleaning out our hardware closests, this of course because I wasn't scheduled for phones or customer time. Given that we have the family beach trip at the end of the month my manager and I have been discussing what next. The thought is of course to leverage my knowledge of LCS (given I have supported since the day it released) and to focus on this technology heavy, you have to know that our team supports all networking stuff (wireless, dns, dhcp, wins, network browsing, vpn, rras).
So this week I inherited a Mac Messenger with SIP issue and a PIC issue. Next week I get a few cases from team members on vacation and other issues that have hung around too long.
So the answer to the question has not been given yet, I expect it to be more of the same but you never know what other ideas management has with increasing scope and impact.