The Experts Conference

David Sengupta joined Quest Software in 2002 and currently functions as chief architect for Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA). He plays a key leadership role in the continued development and communication of Quest’s technology strategy and vision. He speaks regularly at industry conferences on a wide range of topics including messaging, e-discovery, cloud computing, and systems management. He also serves as Exchange conference chair for The Experts Conferences (TEC) in North America and Europe. As part of the Office of the CTO, Sengupta reports to Eckhard Voelcker, vice president and CTO of the Windows Management business unit. A seasoned software industry veteran, he has served in a broad range of roles in private and public organizations for more than 15 years. He is one of only a handful of people who have received Microsoft’s Exchange MVP award annually since 1998. He has authored and contributed to books and articles on messaging, directories, systems management, and history. Sengupta speaks English, German and French, has a master’s degree from Tyndale Seminary and a B.Sc. from the University of Ottawa. As a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists (CIoJ), he also serves as an analyst for Ferris Research, a columnist for SearchExchange.com, and Exchange editor for Windows IT Pro Magazine.

As a General Manager for Exchange, Kevin Allison’s team owns the engineering efforts for Exchange’s adoption by customers both on-premises and in the cloud, deployment/setup, sustained engineering, and the customer/support cloud service experience. He is also accountable for the integration of localization, help systems, localization, globalization, interoperability, and the user assistance teams (content) into the core product. Allison has been in the Exchange product team since 2004, and he joined Microsoft in March 1994 as a Technical Account Manager (TAM) in Premier Support. As a TAM, he was responsible for providing support services to Enterprise customers adopting Microsoft products and technologies. Over the course of 10 years Allison advanced from a Technical Account Manager to General Manager of Premier Services in the United States. Prior to his current role, he was mainly responsible for the localization and user assistance in the Exchange product team as a Product Unit Manager for the Exchange Server 2007 release. Prior to joining the Exchange product team he drove business planning for Microsoft Consulting Services and Premier Services in the US. Previously, he ran his own consulting and services business focused on small businesses in the Greater Puget Sound. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Whitman College. In his spare time, Allison watches and travels to many soccer events, spends as much time as possible with his three children, tinkers in his wiring/server closet, and tries to read a good book as often as possible.

Nicolas Blank is a Microsoft Infrastructure Architect specializing in Exchange, Active Directory, architecture, systems management, migration and scripting. He is a Microsoft MVP for Exchange and spends what spare time he has writing, blogging and talking about Exchange and associated technologies.

Paul was the Release Manager for Exchange 2010. He owned the overall project and quality management processes in the development team. Paul’s role included designing engineering schedules, ‘warteam’, partner integration, dogfooding, and customer adoption programs for both on-premises and cloud versions of Exchange.
Paul has been part of the core Exchange development team since 1999 and has held several positions such as running the worldwide Joint Development Partner (JDP) program, and designing the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA). Prior to joining Exchange, he worked in Microsoft Consulting Services, designing enterprise-scale Exchange Server networks for Fortune 500 customers.
Email seems to run in Paul’s blood. Before joining Microsoft, he spent 5 years teaching and consulting in Exchange, cc:Mail, and MS-Mail. When not at his desk, you can find Paul either driving around his yard on a tractor, or at the electronics store buying the latest mobile gadgets.

Jerry Camel has more than 18 years in Information Technology and has demonstrated expertise in bridging the gap between infrastructure and development solutions by providing leadership in both areas.  Jerry’s rare perspective and development background has led to several innovative solutions involving technologies like Windows Workflow Foundation and Identity Lifecycle Manager.  Jerry and his wife, Leigh, reside in muggy Florida where they are enduring a self-imposed exile from the southwest.  He blogs at digitalcamel.blogspot.com on topics including .NET development, Identity Management, and the general lack of minutes in the day.

Keri Farrell is a product manager at Quest Software, where she is responsible for global e-discovery and recovery strategy for messaging and Unified Communications systems. She has worked in IT for 13 years, including a specialization in Microsoft Exchange and legal discovery pertaining to e-mail systems. Prior to joining Quest, Farrell had substantial hands-on industry experience at Microsoft, Iron Mountain, Boston Scientific and Safety 1^st. At Microsoft, Farrell served on the Exchange PSS team focusing on database recovery technologies. Farrell has authored numerous technical publications on legal discovery, recovery, archiving and enterprise data protection. Currently based in the Boston area, she has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in Computer Information Systems from Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I.

Dmitri Gavrilov is a development lead in Exchange, responsible for mailbox migration. Previously, he worked as a developer in Active Directory group. He was responsible for various code components of AD, including Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM), currently known as “AD LDS”. He was the lead for AD UI in Windows Server 2008 release. He joined Microsoft in 2000. Some exciting projects that he has participated in are AD on SQL prototype and ADAM. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked as a software developer at Axia Multimedia Corp, Calgary, Canada. He also worked as a Computational Scientist at MACI (Multimedia Advanced Computing Infrastructure), an HPC lab at the University of Calgary, Canada. Gavrilov holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Moscow State University, Russia, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada. In his spare time, he enjoys sailing and spending time with his wife and two sons.

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 Global Unified Communications Lead for Dell Services. Previously he was the Chief Technologist 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.

Tony Redmond has been writing about electronic mail since 1992 and is acknowledged to be one of the foremost commentators on Microsoft collaboration technology, chiefly focusing on Microsoft Exchange Server. He retired from HP in March 2010 after spending 10 years as a Vice President where he served in various roles such as Chief Technology Officer for HP Services. During his time at Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq, and HP, Redmond had a major influence over the relationship between the services divisions and many Microsoft engineering groups. Redmond’s books and other writing are based on the lessons learned through working with major customers to deploy technology both successfully and perhaps with less success. The aim is to understand what the technology can do and how best to deploy it to meet business goals. His latest book is Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 (including SP1): Inside Out (ISBN 9780735640610), published by Microsoft Press in December 2010. He writes regularly about technology, travel, and rugby refereeing in his blog http://thoughtsofanidlemind.wordpress.com/

Paul Robichaux has been working with Exchange since version 4.0 and still finds new things to learn about it each day. A long-time contributing editor for Windows IT Pro, he currently works as a content author at Acuitus, focusing on Exchange and security. He’s a Microsoft Exchange MVP and MCSE and teaches the unified messaging portion of the Microsoft Certified Master | Exchange program. He is the author of Exchange Server Cookbook (O’Reilly and Associates) and blogs at www.robichaux.net/blog.

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.

Michael B. Smith is an Exchange MVP who owns and operates a consulting firm that specializes in Exchange Server and Active Directory. Smith has more than 25 years of experience in the IT field and focuses on providing solutions that support customers goals for operational excellence. He is also a well-known writer for such publications as WindowsITPro, Exchange Messaging & Outlook, and others. He recently completed his second book, Monitoring Exchange Server 2007 with Operations Manager from Wiley and was technical editor for two recently published O’Reilly Media books: Active Directory, Fourth Edition and Active Directory Cookbook, Third Edition. Smith is active in a number of online Exchange communities and you can read his blog at http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael.

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.

Greg Taylor started out teaching little old ladies in the UK how to use PC based Point Of Sale Systems in a retail store chain. He eventually became the IT Manager for that training company and broke a lot of computers in the early days. In 2000, he got into consulting, working for a few different Gold Partners over a few years, before joining Microsoft Consulting Services in the UK in 2005. He was lucky to be sent through the Exchange Ranger (MCM) Program in 2005, achieving his MCA | Messaging certification, and after a few years of working with some of Microsoft’s biggest customers, he ended up running that program. Be careful what you ask him to do, he might take it over is the moral of that story.
Early in 2010 he moved to the Exchange Product Team where he became a PM in the Customer Experience team working in Redmond, where his role is to deal with customer escalations, produce guidance on how to work with Exchange, and do things like presentations as well. It is his mission to baffle and bamboozle his audience with deep information about Exchange that up until that point, they couldn’t even have imagined, then see them realize it’s really not that hard after all. It’s an art.

Anthony Vitnell is a Senior Solution Architect for Dimension Data based in New York City. He works with customers worldwide to design and implement large and diverse Microsoft solutions. His focus is on Messaging and Unified Communications technologies in the pursuit and delivery of design and implementation services for customers with specific focus on Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 and Exchange Unified Messaging telephony integrations. Vitnell is a regular speaker at Microsoft and industry events, delivering technical presentations on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007/2010, OCS 2007 and Unified Communications.