The Experts Conference

David Sengupta has been a Microsoft Exchange Server MVP since 1998, and has worked with Exchange since its inception. He is director of unified communications at Quest Software. A leading expert in messaging and unified communications, David has written for many print and online publications, contributes regularly to books on messaging and Exchange, and speaks at major Microsoft events and conferences, including TechEd and IT Forum.

David Espinoza is a Senior Program Manager for the Exchange Ship Team at Microsoft.  Prior to working in the Exchange Product group Dave was a Group Manager of Messaging Engineering for the Messaging & Collaboration Services Group. He was responsible for delivery of technology platforms, testing of vendor solutions, and documentation for new designs and architecture for corporate e-mail systems. The engineering team makes recommendations to development groups for improving existing products and design configurations.

David has been with Microsoft for 15 years and has a wealth of IT experience. He started as Service Manager for Telecom operations, and later managed a variety of operation teams including Exchange Server operations, Network operations, Server operations, Telecom operations and Data Center operations.
Prior to joining Microsoft, David worked for AT&T for 15 years where he managed many groups from Main Frame operations to Central Office teams and Service Management.

David has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science with an emphasis in Information systems.

Juergen Hasslauer is a senior consultant with infoWAN Datenkommunikation GmbH in Germany. He supports companies to define the architecture of their IT solutions. His current focus is designing high available Microsoft Exchange environments and infrastructure optimization using virtualization solutions. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as Microsoft Exchange Connections and a coauthor of the book, Designing Storage for Exchange 2007 SP1. Prior to joining infoWAN, Juergen worked 9 years as a technology consultant with HP.

Lee Mackey started his career with the United States Army in 1991 and has held various technical and management positions at Charles Schwab, Zhone Technologies, Openwave Systems, Zenprise and most recently HP. Currently he is the Chief Technology Officer for HP’s Global UC&C Program. Before his work at HP he ran a consulting company supporting various Microsoft technologies. He has also spent a great amount of time in the mobile world to ensure customers weren’t working harder and were able to eat dinner at home with their families.

Scott Schnoll (MCT, MCSE, MCSA) is a Principal Technical Writer on the Exchange User Education team at Microsoft where he authors content on a variety of topics related to Exchange Server, including clustering, high-availability, storage and performance. He is a frequent speaker at major global industry conferences, such as Microsoft TechEd, Microsoft IT Forum, Comdex and MCP TechMentor. Prior to joining Microsoft, Scott authored Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Distilled (Addison-Wesley, 2004) and he was the lead author of Exchange 2000 Server: The Complete Reference (Osborne McGraw-Hill, 2000). Scott is a former long-time Microsoft MVP for Exchange Server, Windows and Rights Management Services.

Brett Shirley in his own words: I started as a programmer (aka Software Engineer / SDE) in 1999 on Microsoft’s AD Replication team. During my tenure there I worked on AD Replication, some little known tools (such as repadmin.exe, dcdiag.exe), App Partitions, AD Backup/Restore, and AD/AM. I moved to the ESE (Extensible Storage Engine) team in summer 2004 where I work mostly on the Buffer Manager and OS Abstraction Layer. I do not have a Ph.D like Dmitri Gavrilov, ergo I’m much less interesting to listen to.

Within the Exchange Server Product Group, Ross Smith is a member of the Customer Experience team and has the following focus areas:

• Help resolve and preempt critical customer escalations
• Assist in defining improvements to, implementing, and running Exchange’s next-generation Sustained Engineering Experience process
• Collaborate to produce documentation and provide customer, Microsoft Services, and Product Group coordination and education.

He joined Microsoft in 2001 as a Messaging Systems Engineer working for Microsoft IT focusing on Exchange Server 2000 and SharePoint designs. After a stint in Microsoft IT, he moved to Premier as an Alliance Support Consultant supporting and designing a variety of customers’ Exchange and Active Directory implementations. Prior to joining the product group, Smith was a Senior Messaging Technology Architect in the Exchange Center of Excellence (ECoE). The ECoE’s goal was to provide high impact, value, and volume expertise to Microsoft customers, Microsoft field personnel, and the product groups. While within the ECoE, he developed intellectual property (IP) used to develop solutions like the Exchange Risk Assessment, Desired Configuration Monitoring, and Service Level Management offerings. His deep focus on all aspects of Exchange including storage, high availability, security, client access, and transport has led to IP being developed and leveraged as best practices in customer presentations, whitepapers, blog postings, Exchange Masters training, and field readiness areas. Over the last few years, he has published quite a bit of content, including the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Storage Requirements Calculator and the Continuous Replication Deep Dive Whitepaper. Smith regularly presents at industry conferences on Exchange and is also a trainer for the Microsoft Certified Master | Exchange Server program.

I started out teaching little old ladies in the UK how to use PC based Point Of Sale Systems in a retail chain. I eventually became the IT Manager for that training company. I broke a lot of computers in the early days. In 2000 I got into consulting, working for a few different Gold Partners over a few years before I joined MCS in the UK in 2005. I was fortunate to go through the Exchange Ranger (MCM) Program in 2005, achieved MCA | Messaging certification, and after a few years of working with some of Microsoft’s biggest customers, I ended up running that program. Early in 2010 I moved to the Exchange Product Team where I am currently a PM in the Customer Experience team working in Redmond, where my role is to deal with customer escalations, produce guidance on how to work with Exchange, and I’m lucky enough to get to do presentations as well, where I strive to baffle and bamboozle my audience with deep information about Exchange that up until that point, they couldn’t even have imagined. It’s an art.

Ilse Van Criekinge has recently joined Microsoft as a Technology Advisor – Microsoft Unified Communications. Before that she worked as an ICT Trainer and Consultant for Global Knowledge. Being an MCT, she has offered several companies guidance in their Exchange and MOM deployments, as well as auditing the disaster recovery capabilities in their mail environment. During the last three year she has ignited many IT Professionals with the power of Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010, by delivering training and by co-founding a new user group Pro-Exchange in Belgium, focused on Microsoft Unified Communications, http://www.proexchange.be. Ilse has held the Exchange MVP award for three years since April 2007. Van Criekinge has co-authored an Exchange Exam Prep Guide, written Sapien’s Exchange Management Shell: TFM book, and is looking forward to the new challenges on the Microsoft Unified Communications roadmap. In 2007, Van Criekinge won the Speaker Idol award at Tech•Ed EMEA IT Professionals, appearing as a speaker at Tech•Ed EMEA 2008 and 2009, and presented last year at the first TEC for Exchange in both Las Vegas and Berlin, and will be back in 2010! She is located in Belgium, where she lives together with Serge and their son Robin. You can follow her experiences at http://blogs.technet.com/ilvancri.