Meet Our Contributors

	Jeff Adkin Jeff Adkin is a Premier Field Engineer with an MSCA and MCITP in SharePoint. Jeff has over 12 years working experience in IT support in various technologies. He began working with Microsoft in 2005 with the Forefront Online Services for Exchange (FOSE), helping customers setup their Exchange environments. He moved from there to SharePoint in MSIT (Microsoft’s internal IT organization) and gained a passion for the SharePoint technology. He has worked on 4 cycles of SharePoint from SharePoint 2003 to 2010 and Office 365 in his 5 years with MSIT. Contact Jeff:
	Pedro Alves Pedro joined Microsoft in 2004 supporting Messaging technologies. There he found his passion for helping customers solve their Messaging issues. In 2006, he joined Microsoft Premier Field Engineering (PFE). In this role he feels like a happy fish in water, and spends most of his time visiting customers and spreading the word of best practices and supportability, either through assessments, workshops, chalk talks, or any other customized format his customers may need. Around the same date he joined PFE he also started sharing his passion for Messaging with another technology – System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) – where, as much as Messaging, he tries to provide the same results for his customers. In the last couple of years, he became the worldwide community lead inside of Microsoft for DPM. Contact Pedro:
	Michel Audet Michel joined Microsoft in 2011 as a Premier Field Engineer in the Systems Center space, bringing in over 10 years of experience with a large number of Microsoft Technologies in the retail sector. Before joining PFE, Michel held various roles in the IT industry from helpdesk to IT Project Manager and has had the privilege to get involved in many facets of Corporate IT, including governance and finance, which gives him the big picture perspective of IT. Michel is based in Toronto, Canada. Contact Michel:
	Frank Battiston Frank currently manages a group of Microsoft Premier Field Engineers. He’s also the primary editor of OpsVault.com. His career spans delivery and sales of IT solutions to large public and private sector organizations, along with delivery and sales management of high performing teams. He’s based in Toronto, Canada. Contact Frank:
	Daniel Brunet Daniel Brunet, who goes by the nickname “Dano”, started at Microsoft in early 2008 after working ten years at a major Canadian law firm, where he went from support to development, document management to portal design and last, as the development team leader. Already a fan of Microsoft development technologies, he is now a Senior SharePoint Premier Field Engineer (PFE). In his own words, PFE ended up being the greatest organization to hone his skills and the best place for him to be. “Every day I use my past experience with my customers and the richness of Microsoft’s internal knowledge. On top of that, I have great fun.” He’s based in Montreal, Canada.
	Richard Case Richard joined Microsoft as a Premier Field Engineer in 2010 and works in the Premier Mission Critical (PMC) team in the UK. He comes from a development background and has 11 years experience developing software. He specializes .NET and BizTalk development and more widely in a number of Microsoft development technologies and tools. On the geeky side he has a weakness for compilers and robotics. He works with mission critical customers trying to improve their solutions so they get the most out of their technology and helps them avoid any issues (and fixing these if they do happen). Contact Richard:
	Nick Collins Nick has worked at Microsoft for over 15 years in various support roles and currently manages the Mediaroom PFE engineers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). He manage two types of engineers: those based on customer sites called Dedicated Support Engineers (DSEs), and Support Engineers that work on Microsoft Premier Support customer issues remotely. If you have a Microsoft Premier contract and have either an on-site DSE or have raised a support case in EMEA, then you would have worked with one of my engineers. If you have any queries or feedback on the EMEA support team, please feel free to contact Nick directly. Contact Nick:
	Mike Davies Mike is a Premier Field Engineer based in Manchester, UK. He has 17 years IT experience supporting a wide range of products, and specializes in Messaging applications and has an MCITP in Exchange. Mike has spent the last 8 years supporting and deploying messaging solutions. He has worked for Microsoft for 4 years supporting customers in the UK. Contact Mike:
	Steven Dixon Steven joined Microsoft in 2007 as a SQL Server expert, and he’s currently working as a full time Dedicated Support Engineer in the UK for a large network operator. He’s been working with SQL since 1995 and support customers in their use of SQL Server and Mediaroom. He also created SQL workshops and presentations for the Mediaroom Service Catalogue and helps out fellow colleagues with SQL-related queries.
	Samuel Drey Samuel is a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft and holds a master’s degree in Computer Science. Based in Ottawa, he has 11 years of IT experience in Microsoft France, during which he performed as a Pre-sales Engineer, a Support Engineer, a Premier Field Engineer, a Consultant and a Technical Account Manager. All these experiences helped Sam uncover a great understanding of helping customers though all phase of the IT lifecycle, from projects envisioning, architecture design, deployment, and operational and proactive consulting. Contact Samuel:
	Dan Erelis Dan was a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft and holds a degree in Telecommunications Engineering. He specialized in Messaging applications and services and is an MCITP and MCTS charter member. Dan spent the past 11 years supporting and designing Microsoft Exchange environments in a variety of industry sectors spanning the global market. Dan’s in depth focus centers around Exchange performance, storage design, architecture, archiving and data retention. In addition to the technical breadth, Dan also engaged in high level operational consulting through the Microsoft Exchange Risk Assessment Program which assisted customers in moving from a reactive to a proactive support model. Contact Dan:
	Mark Farrugia Mark is a Senior Premier Field Engineer focused on Microsoft Windows desktop technologies. He has over 14 years of working experience within the I.T. industry, the last 5 of which have been with Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft Premier Field Engineering, Mark worked in the Microsoft Consulting Services group, helping customers to design their deployments and migration strategies to Windows 7. He is based in Toronto, Canada. Contact Mark:
	Rod Fournier First of all thanks for your interest in what makes me tick, I hope you like what you read. In all honesty, there really is not much to say, though I do talk all the time in person. I am certifiably crazy, I mean nuts – luckily to date the authorities have not caught up with me and put me away. I love computers; that is all I do and know. I am been working in the field for over 28 years now (I am 46 years old, so yes my whole Adult life). I eat and breathe computers. I am boring as hell at a party. I can’t discuss politics, religion, current affairs, etc. I think in hex, I tell binary and clustering jokes, I see the world as a bunch of sites yet to be configured. I am pretty much a geek full time. During the business day I am a Senior Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft. My focus is on Windows Server, Active Directory, Security, Clustering technologies, Exchange, and infrastructure design. I currently live in Gravette, Arkansas. I firmly believe every US citizen should live in the South at some point in their lives. The only problem would be nobody would live in the North. Hey, I am still a damn Yankee; I talk too fast, drive too fast, and think too fast for the folks down here. But don’t get me wrong, while the South is pretty darn neat – I am a Northerner (as anybody from the South will tell you)! My wife never wants to leave, so I am pretty sure we won’t. I was born at Henry Ford Hospital- Detroit, Michigan. I love Michigan and would live there today if not for my NASA, and now Microsoft job. I love sports, so my favorite teams are the Detroit Red Wings, The University of Michigan – Wolverines, Detroit Pistons, Detroit Lions, and the Detroit Tigers. Besides computers, I will talk about sports, but only the teams listed above GO WINGS!!! Cheers and God Bless You! Contact Rod:
	Guy Groeneveld Guy Joined Microsoft in 1997 supporting Microsoft Exchange. He then became an Escalation Engineer digging in the source code to solve issues. In 2006 he decided it was time to take on a direct customer facing role and moved to the Microsoft Premier Field Engineering team. Guy’s whole working life passion has centered around his passion for messaging. He worked on Exchange since he joined Microsoft, and in 2005 he passed the Ranger certification (now called MCM, or Microsoft Certified Master) for Exchange 2003 and passed the upgrade for Exchange 2007 in 2009. He is currently Certified Master for Exchange 2003 and 2007 and Certified Architect for Exchange 2003. The upgrade for Exchange 2010 Master certification is planned for the beginning of 2012.
	Mohit Gupta Mohit has been working with SQL Server since 2005, starting with SQL 6.5 and progressing to SQL Server 2008 R2. He’s been at Microsoft for over a year as a SQL Server Premier Field Engineer (PFE) in Canada based out of Regina, Saskatchewan. He’s worked in various aspects of IT including helpdesk, remote desktop support, development, and database administration. For SQL Server, he’s most experienced in administration, failover clustering, database mirroring, and performance tuning and optimization. He anticipates focusing on articles based on questions he gets asked at real world engagements, in the hope that if one person asked then others might also be wondering the same thing. Contact Mohit:
	Neil Harrison Neil is currently a Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft and is based out of Vancouver, Canada. Neil has over 10 years of experience in the IT industry ranging from support to senior infrastructure roles with several organizations. Neil is currently focused on supporting the System Center technologies and more specifically, System Center Configuration Manager and System Center Operations Manager. Contact Neil:
	Clint Huffman Clint joined Microsoft in 1999 supporting web technologies, Microsoft load testing tools, and later worked as a Testing Consultant helping organizations with load testing at the Microsoft Services Labs. There he found a passion for solving Windows performance issues. In 2006, he joined Microsoft Premier Field Engineering (PFE). Clint strives to make performance analysis of Windows as much of a science as possible and to bring it to the masses. He’s probably best known for the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) tool, which simplifies the analysis of performance monitor logs. He is also an author of many of the recent BizTalk performance guides on MSDN and spoke at Tech Ed on BizTalk performance analysis. Contact Clint:
	Warren Johns Warren is a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft who has over 11 years of working experience providing support and technical training to a wide variety of clients ranging from small businesses to large public sector departments. Warren is a Dedicated Support Engineer located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and specializes in Microsoft Mediaroom. He first obtained his Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) status in 1999. Contact Warren:
	Guillaume Klee Guillaume joined Microsoft in 2008 as a Premier Field Engineer in the Mediaroom support team. He’s been working with Mediaroom for over 6 years and is currently an onsite Dedicated Support Engineer in Switzerland for large network operator, supporting them in both reactive and proactive ways. He has also created workshops and training for Mediaroom.
	Tyler Johnson Tyler is a Premier Field Engineer who hails from Calgary, Canada. He specializes in Active Directory and Mediaroom technologies. Tyler has over 11 years of experience working with enterprise customers across North America. He has been known to get far too excited about technology, and sharing it with others. Because of this he thoroughly enjoys teaching various workshops and evangelizing the latest and greatest Microsoft technologies to anyone who might listen. Contact Tyler:
	Cheng Pei Koay Cheng Pei specializes in Microsoft Messaging and Clustering technologies, and has had global experience supporting Microsoft customers in Malaysia, South Asia and Canada. Prior to joining Microsoft, she worked for a number of organizations maintaining and building IT systems in banking, manufacturing and software development firms. She has a Master’s Degree in Information Technology from Charles Sturt University, Australia, and a Bachelor degree in Computing from University of Staffordshire, United Kingdom. She’s currently based in Vancouver, Canada. Contact Cheng Pei:
	Benny Lakunishok Benny joined Microsoft in 2007 and has since been striving to have healthier Microsoft Exchange customers and better performing Windows servers and clients around the globe. Some of his daily routines include (but are not limited to) delivering risk assessments in Microsoft Premier customers environments, teaching customers (more than) what they want to know about Exchange, performance and all that in between. He is the author of many workshops delivered to Premier customers and speaks at various events such as TechED.
	Joe Lefort Joe is a Senior Premier Field Engineer focusing on Lync and OCS. He has enough experience in the IT field to remember that Windows 3.11 was cool because it added real networking support. He found his way to Microsoft as a member of Microsoft Consulting Services in 2005, and hasn’t really looked back since. In his off time he likes to run and ride his bikes. A lot. This might be why he still doesn’t have a Facebooks or Tweeter account. Contact Joe:
	Pascal L’Huriec Pascal joined Microsoft France in 2001 as a support engineer on Exchange Server technology and quickly moved to Escalation Engineering supporting Microsoft Premier customers mainly for Southern Europe. He started with Exchange 5.5, Exchange 2000 and then 2003 with migrations scenarios which he liked. He found visiting customers onsite was always interesting, so he decided to move to Microsoft Premier Field Engineering (PFE) in 2009 where he currently works as a Dedicated PFE for several world-wide companies using Exchange 2007 and 2010. His main focus is supporting them in both a reactive and mostly proactive manner in order to maintain their messaging infrastructure in the best operational health, providing advice and assistance to them in their evolution projects. He has 16 years IT experience and is based in Paris, France.
	Sean McNellis Sean is a Microsoft CRM Premier Field Engineer. He joined Microsoft in January 2004 supporting Microsoft CRM 1.0 and 1.2 and continued to support CRM through versions 3.0, 4.0, and most recently, the 2011 release. While on the Microsoft CRM Support team he’s worked as a Support Escalation Engineer and transitioned to the Dynamics PFE team in July 2008. Prior to Microsoft he attended college at North Dakota State University where he studied management information systems (MIS). Contact Sean:
	Rhoderick Milne Rhoderick is currently a Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft, based out of Mississauga in Ontario, Canada. With 15 years of IT experience, his specialities are in the realms of Messaging and Virtualization. Prior to moving to Canada Rhoderick worked in the UK’s largest financial institutions and has a proven track record in consulting and training. Rhoderick is a Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) in Exchange 2007 and 2010 in addition to holding regular MCSE+I and MCITP credentials. He is currently engaged with multiple enterprise customers in Canada in both transactional and Dedicated Support Engineer (DSE) roles to drive customers to fully leverage their technology investments. Contact Rhoderick:
	Kip Ng Kip was a Principal Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft and a Microsoft Certified Architect and Master in Messaging. Kip has over 14 years of working experience in IT support with an in-depth technical skill set across various products. Able to converse fluently in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Bahasa Malaysian. He has worked in multiple geographic regions before and provided support to many companies across the world. He has broad experience in Microsoft’s Cloud Computing technologies, including Hosted Exchange, Hosted SharePoint, Hosted OCS and Hosted Messaging and Collaborations. He is also highly knowledgeable in Microsoft Mediaroom. Contact Kip:
	Andreas Pacius Andreas is a Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer who has been working for Microsoft in various support roles for twelve years. For six years he has been working onsite at large network operator as a Mediaroom Dedicated Support Engineer, supporting them in reactive and proactive ways. He also creates workshops and training for Mediaroom.
	Nicolas Pasquali Nicolas Pasquali was a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft Canada, based in Ottawa. He has over 10 years of IT experience, including 5 on the Microsoft System Center suite in France as a system administrator, support engineer, account manager and consultant. Thanks to this rich experience, he understands and advises customers on concerns about product lifecycles and business needs and constraints. Contact Nicolas:
	Pri Patel Pri is a Principal Premier Field Engineer, currently working in the Microsoft Premier Mission Critical (PMC) Team. He joined Microsoft in 2007 straight into the Microsoft Mediaroom support team, based in the UK. He spent 5 years working with Mediaroom customers and partners across the globe. In his time with Mediaroom he created the first set of health checks for Mediaroom, plus helped create the service catalogue, both of which are now available to all Mediaroom customers globally. Most recently he is focused on improving the operations and health of mission critical systems of Microsoft PMC customers around the world. Contact Pri:
	Ben Pearce Ben is a Premier Field Engineer based in the UK and specialises in Platforms, Virtualisation and PowerShell technologies. Ben has worked at Microsoft since 1999 and prior to working in PFE spent 5 years working in Product Support Services. Ben actively contributes to several Technet blogs including http://blogs.technet.com/benp and http://blogs.technet.com/mspremuk. Over the years Ben has delivered many workshops, engaged with many customers and presented at many events including TechEd Europe and TechEd North America. Contact Ben:
	Sadeesh Poovalur Sadeesh is currently a Senior Premier Field Engineer based in Toronto, Canada. He’s has been at Microsoft for 10 years and has worked in multiple geographic regions with Microsoft and provided support to many companies across the world. His areas of expertise are high availability, scalability, and performance tuning. In his role as a PFE he has worked extensively with many enterprise customers on SQL Server Migration and SQL Server performance tuning and optimization. Contact Sadeesh:
	Gerald Ramich Gerald is a Senior Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft and a Microsoft Certified Master for Exchange 2003/2007/2010. Gerald has been working with computer and e-mail systems since 1989, and possesses a wide range of skills from hardware to more advanced networking and e-mail systems which has been his main focus since 1994 during the MS Mail days. Gerald has been with Microsoft since 1998. Contact Gerald:
	Adrian Schofield Adrian has been working for Microsoft in various support roles for sixteen years. For six years he has been an Escalation Engineer in the Mediaroom Support team. Day to day he works with customers on reactive issues and liaises with the Microsoft product team where patches are required. His primary blog focus is on how to use the APIs that Mediaroom exposes to simplify the management of different aspects of the platform. Contact Adrian:
	Chris Stevenson Chris has worked at Microsoft since graduating in September 2001, having worked as a placement student in the Microsoft UK Office GTSC team. In the last 10 years he has supported and implemented Microsoft Exchange from versions 5.5 through to 2010, as well as implementing solutions for Windows from NT 4.0 through to 2008 R2. Chris joined PFE in April 2007 and has worked on huge migration projects including the largest deployment of Exchange 2007 worldwide, supporting a migration from IMAP of nearly 400,000 users, scaling up to 1.2 million users in total. Chris has also specialised in OCS 2007 and Lync for the last 2 years and is currently the PFE team-lead for Lync in the UK.
	Jeff Stokes Jeff Stokes is a Senior Premier Field Engineer based out of Atlanta, Georgia. He has 17 years of experience in the IT field. He holds an MCITP in Server / Enterprise / Messaging, and was previously in the Microsoft Customer Support escalation queue at Microsoft for Exchange Server. He has broad experience in all aspects of the Windows platforms arena but specializes in performance, both client and server. Contact Jeff:
	Cornel Sukalla Cornell has been working for Microsoft since 2008. He is based in Germany working onsite at large network operator as a Premier Field Engineer supporting them in reactive and proactive ways. In addition to that he is maintaining the Mediaroom Service Catalogue and creating workshops and training for Mediaroom.
	Chris Tao Chris Tao has been with Microsoft since 2005, and is currently a member of the Enterprise Services Division’s Premier Field Engineering Team in Canada. His geographical area of coverage spans all of North America where he visits a variety of customers to provide prescriptive onsite guidance on system architecture design and product implementation, and is primarily responsible for SharePoint Server and .NET development. He has rich field experience in project management, solution consulting and product implementations. He’s a technical professional on SQL Server and also holds MCTS, MCITP and MCPD certifications on SharePoint technologies. He has deep industry knowledge and project experience in Manufacturing (Automotive), Banking and Consumer Packaged Goods. He’s also an active community evangelist and public trainer in events like TechEd, Channel 9 webcasts, etc. He lives in Vancouver, B.C. Contact Chris:
	boB Taylor boB started his development career in 1972, programming with FORTRAN 66 on punch cards. He then spent 17 years (courtesy of the U.S. Marine Corps) doing assembly language programming on a drum based computer. Development languages evolved and so did boB’s skill set – dBaseII, C, C++, .NET languages and in 1992 – SQL Server. boB started working with SQL Server version 4.2.1a and has worked with every version ever since. boB has all three version of the MCSD, got his MCSE when NT 3.1 was out (yes 3.1, not 3.51). MCDBAs and MCITPs came along. In 2005 boB was one of the first Microsoft Certified Architects for SQL Server 2005 and also holds the Microsoft Certified Master for SQL Server 2008. boB was part of the exam creation teams for both SQL Server 2000 certification exams, all of the MCSD.Net exams, and two of the SQL Server 2005 exams. boB has been a line of business developer, a development manager, a Vice President of Software Development, and the Director of Database Technologies for Avanade West Region. boB joined Microsoft in the MSPA (ISV) practice and moved to PFE in Nov 2009. boB has also been a semi-professional magician for over 45 years and is an avid long-distance runner. boB is married with 5 children and 7 grandchildren to help keep him busy in his ‘spare’ time. Contact boB:
	Adis Tucakovic Adis was a Senior Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft and a Microsoft Certified Master on Exchange Server, most recently focused on Business Productivity and Online Suite (BPOS). Adis has over 10 years of experience in IT with an in-depth technical skill set across Windows Platforms technologies, Exchange Server and Hosted Messaging and Collaboration, Office Communications Server and SharePoint. In his role as a PFE he has worked extensively with many enterprise customers on improving IT processes to drive operational maturity and better service availability. Contact Adis:
	Liju Varghese Liju is a Premier Field Engineer based out of Ottawa, Canada. He’s been with Microsoft for 6 years, first with Product Support Services and the last 4 in PFE (Premier Field Engineering). He specializes in Active Directory and over the years he’s had the privilege of working with customers in south-east Asia and North America, delivering workshops, on-site assistance and health-checks of their Active Directory infrastructure.
	Ehsan Youssef Ehsan currently manages a group of Microsoft Premier Field Engineers and focuses on Dedicated Support Engineering services. He spent four years of his career as a Premier Field Engineer to Canada’s largest banks supporting Directory Services and Messaging with a passion for optimizing operations and improving environmental health on those platforms. His career spans support, consulting and training delivery on Microsoft infrastructure technologies. He’s based in Toronto, Canada. Contact Ehsan:
	Jaroslav Zikmund Jaroslav is a Premier Field Engineer based in Prague, Czech Republic. He has 10 years of IT experience supporting a wide range of products, and specializes in Messaging applications. He joined Microsoft in February 2009 as a Transactional Premier Field Engineer. He also actively contributes to creating Microsoft Premier Workshops and developing IP for the Microsoft Exchange Risk Assessment Program (ExRAP).