The Experts Conference for Exchange
Speaker Bios

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.

Brett Shirley started as a programmer (aka Software Engineer / SDE) in 1999 on Microsoft’s AD Replication team. He moved to the ESE (Extensible Storage Engine) team in summer 2004.

Greg Taylor started out in IT teaching little old ladies in the UK how to use PC based Point of Sale Systems. Being more interested in what happened behind the screen when the buttons were pressed, he moved into a helpdesk role supporting those systems, went on to manage the team and then become the IT Manager for that company. He broke a lot of computers in the early days. Around the year 2000 he got into consulting, working for a Gold Partner for a few years, then onto Avanade, the Microsoft-Accenture joint venture, before he joined Microsoft in 2005 and starting working for MCS in the UK. He spent most of his time there designing large and complex environments for customers, and filled in the gaps speaking at Tech-Ed, IT Forum and writing the odd article or two for TechNet Magazine. He eventually gave up on everything except Exchange as it was all too easy and went through the Exchange Ranger (as MCM was known then) Program in 2005, achieved Microsoft Certified Architect | Messaging certification and is currently the PM for the Microsoft Certified Master | Exchange Program, working in Redmond. He has a habit of taking over the things he gets involved in.

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. Juergen 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.

Michael B. Smith is an Exchange MVP who owns and operates a consulting firm that specializes in Exchange Server and Active Directory. Michael has had over 25 years of experience in the IT field and focuses on providing solutions that support customers goals for operational excellence. Michael is also a well-known writer for such publications as WindowsITPro, Exchange Messaging & Outlook, and others. Michael 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. Michael is active in a number of online Exchange communities and you can read his blog at http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael.