Agenda

Alistair Speirs

Alistair Speirs is a Technology Specialist for Office at Microsoft Australia. Before joining Microsoft, Alistair worked with technology start-ups and later, as a consulting developer. With experience from excel automation, forms and workflow using InfoPath and development with SharePoint Products and Technologies Alistair has a wide understanding of the Office Platform and where organisations can get even more out of it. He maintains a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/alspeirs

Allyson Skene
Business Productivity Solution Specialist

Allyson Skene is a Business Productivity Solution Specialist focusing on the Communications and Financial Services industries. She has been involved with the IT Industry for nearly 20 years with the focus mainly on large scale Enterprise Resource Planning solutions. Since moving to Microsoft her focus has been on helping customers look at how the Microsoft Office suite of products can provide value into their organisations from both a productivity and business standpoint. This includes the areas of collaboration, record and document management, social computing, business processes and search.

Andrew Coates

Andrew Coates is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft in Australia. Before joining Microsoft, Andrew was an independent consultant specialising in database applications using Microsoft technologies including SQL Server, Visual FoxPro and Microsoft Office.

Andrew's wide range of experience includes telecommunications, SMB inventory, dispatch and accounting systems, using both web and rich client front ends. He has developed and delivered class room training and has mentored a number of developers in Visual FoxPro and SQL Server technologies.

Andrew has spoken at international conferences on Geographical Information Systems, health statistics and database maintenance and is a regular presenter at TechEd both locally and internationally. An MCPD, MCTS and MCSD, Andrew also holds a Masters degree in Civil Engineering. Andrew blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/acoat

Andrew Lowson

Andrew Lowson is a technology evangelist, and business professional with 20 years experience in technology with a passion for delivering new perspectives that deliver tangible improvements to knowledge management, business-to-business, business-to-employee, portal, and IT collaborations.

Anthony Woodward
Head of Compliance & Governance
Unique World Group

Anthony Woodward is responsible for Compliance and Governance solutions at Unique World and is the Product manager for RecordPoint. His professional career has focused on using and building compliance systems at some of Australia's leading organisations. Mr. Woodward is currently studying an MBT from the University of New South Wales and holds a Bachelor of Information Technology from the University of Queensland.

Denise Holehouse

Denise Holehouse is a Business Productivity Specialist and is focussed on the Federal Government market. Denise provides awareness and understanding of the capabilities of the Microsoft Information Worker technologies to Government agencies, particularly in the areas of collaboration, record and document management, content creation and management, and search. Prior to joining Microsoft, Denise was the Managing Director of a Microsoft Desktop Training Provider. Hence, she has an understanding of the challenges that organisations face with adoption of new technology, and encourages Change Management factors be considered and planned for early in an IT project’s life cycle.

Ian Palangio

Ian Palangio is a Solution Specialist for Microsoft focusing on Business Productivity – including all the Microsoft Office Client applications and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Automating business processes and creating collaborative environments for information workers is the goal of the solutions Ian works on throughout Australia. Ian likes to pursue winter sports and is currently a member of the Australian National Curling team.

Ivan Wilson

Ivan Wilson is the founder of SharePoint Gurus and a Microsoft MVP in SharePoint. He has worked on the SharePoint platform since its release in 2001. These days he provides technical architecture advice to organisations on how they can best make use of the SharePoint platform to meet their business objectives.

Originally from Ireland, Ivan sold his umbrella in 1999 and moved to Australia. His career has involved software development in everything from COBOL to C#, managing a talented team of developers and interacting with demanding clients.

Ivan started the Sydney SharePoint user group in July 2005 and is a regular speaker at industry events. His blog is located at http://guru-web.blogspot.com. His Bachelor of Science in Information Technology has not yet been revoked.

Jon Barrett
Productivity Solution Specialist | Australia | Microsoft Corp

Jon Barrett is a Solution Specialist for Microsoft focusing on Business Productivity.

He works primarily with Public Sector organizations such as state and local governments, education and health. A key challenge in these environments is striking the right balance between productivity and compliance. He was the technical lead for Microsoft’s response to the NSW GSAS IAMS tender. He also works closely with Australian partners such as Uniqueworld and Tower Software to advise them on solution and integration strategies with the Microsoft Office System platform.

One of his roles prior to Microsoft was Product Manager for a leading ECM Vendor, where he lead product design of their Records Management product, and the certification of the solution to the US DOD 5015.2 Electronic Records Management standard.

Kirsty Wilson

Kirsty Wilson is a Productivity Solution Advisor with over 10 years of experience working in the Information Worker space both in the UK and Australia. Kirsty has worked with a number of clients on how they can improve business productivity through empowering their employees. Kirsty has a particular interest in how this can be achieved within an organisation’s Learning & Development, Internal Communications and Human Resources business units.

Lee Hickin

“Lee is a Security Technology Specialist within the Incubation Sales team at Microsoft. With 14 years experience in the IT industry, prior to Joining Microsoft, Lee spent 5 years at RSA Security as a Senior Consultant on Identity management and Authentication Services – prior to that, Lee spent 8 years in a variety of roles at IBM and Tivoli – mainly focused on the implementation and design of Tivoli Systems Management technology.

Lee’s time is spent working closely with both customers and partners around the development, design and delivery of Security solutions. Lee covers a wide variety of topics from network design, definition of security best practices and the implementation of secure technology & policy solutions to meet the increasing demand for online and remote access business capabilities.

Lee holds a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification and is a regular presenter at Microsoft and industry events.”

Meredith Rowan

Meredith Rowan has been in the ICT industry for 15 years. In that time Meredith has worked with customers to assist IT in delivering solutions for their organisations. Meredith is focussed on solutions that provide IT the opportunity to assist their businesses via leveraging technology to provide increased productivity through improvements to knowledge management, business to business, business to employee, portal and IT collaboration.

Milan Gross

Milan Gross is one of the founding partners of Synergy Corporate Technologies, a consulting and training company specializing in SharePoint technologies. Milan has over 10 years experience as an IT consultant and has been architecting and developing solutions on the SharePoint platform since 2001. He is a contributing author to both the SharePoint 2007 Administrator’s Companion and the SharePoint 2007 Pocket Consultant books from Microsoft Press. Milan is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and holds the MCSE, MCSD, and MCDBA, certifications as well as a MRP from the University of Pennsylvania. Milan is a frequent invited speaker at industry events.

Miles Gustafson

A veteran in the IT marketplace with a career spanning 25 years in both the UK and Australia Miles is an IW Solution Specialist at Microsoft Australia. With roles from Marketing, Product Management to Sales and Account Management Miles is well versed in customer needs.

At Microsoft Miles has pioneered use of a Business Productivity framework to help customers make the connection between the value of their productivity and collaborative investments to business strategy.

Nigel Watson

Nigel Watson (blog) is an Architect Advisor for Microsoft Australia, and works with the software architecture community in Melbourne. His role is to help build awareness of Microsoft's platform, tools and architectural practices, while showing how these may be leveraged to provide value in heterogeneous enterprise environments.

Prior to joining Microsoft around six years ago, Nigel worked in a range of software engineering roles over a period of nine years - mostly on Unix-based platforms, and mostly in C++ and Java. Specialising in protocols and messaging, his work included development, design and architecture of network-based software systems in the telecommunications and finance industries. Nigel holds a Masters degree in Computer Science (specialising in network and application security) from the University Of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Rick Anderson
Enterprise Mobile Solution Specialist | Australia & New Zealand | Microsoft Corp

Rick has spent the past 12 years in the IT&T industry with a concentration on Wireless technologies. Experiencing mobile products and services from several perspectives including Customer Care, Service Assurance, Training, Product Marketing, Solution Sales, Partner Management and Account Management. Currently Rick’s role as Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Solution Specialist for Australia and NZ means he is responsible for driving Windows Mobile adoption through the Enterprise space including both Direct Push email services and Line of Business applications with certified Microsoft Mobility Partners.

Richard Lees

Richard is a world leader in the Business Intelligence and Data Mining fields with his unique combination of business strategy and technical skills. He is often called upon to help customers and partners who have particularly challenging needs or just want someone with Richard’s experience and creativity to help design a solution that is valuable to the organisation.

In 2005, Richard helped Commonwealth Bank manage their Oracle RAC cluster, which underpins their front line banking application COMMSEE. Richard managed the Oracle database administrators and also built an OLAP cube that contained all the Oracle Application Workload Repository (AWR) data. This cube, which was continually incrementally loaded during the working day was crucial in the management of the cluster. For more information on the Oracle performance cube please visit http://richardlees.com.au/

Richard worked with ASB Bank to formulate a new business strategy that enabled them to exploit their 1TB data warehouse by providing nationwide business intelligence tools to branch staff. Richard was the technical lead and strategic innovator in this multi-disciplined team and provided the ASB bank with skills to ensure the continued success of the data warehouse. Case study and video - http://www.microsoft.com/resources/casestudies/CaseStudy.asp?CaseStudyID=11642