Tuesday, May 30, 2006 8:46 AM
Kevin Beares
SBS Community Survey Update
Well, we are now into the second week of the SBS Community Survey. We have 375 responses so far. I am a little surprised to only see this many. There are almost this many people in the Montreal User Group alone that specialize in SBS. We get close to seven thousand posts in the SBS Newsgroup in a month. Can someone explain to me why the number of responses are so low? Is the experience of having to take one more survey going to drive someone over the edge? I know that there are numerous surveys out there and everyone's time is very important, but I think this one is very special. This survey is targeted directly to the SBS Community. I promise that I will take all the responses in the survey very seriously.
My plan is to keep this survey active for 4 weeks. After that, I plan to blog the final tabulated results on my blog and the The Official SBS Blog. It may take me a couple of weeks to do this given the amount of comments that have to be read. I have already started to summarize the responses.
So, please spread the word about this survey. Please help get people to take the few minutes and share their thoughts with us. We are listening.
Thanks,
Kevin Beares
SBS Community Lead
WSSG
About Kevin Beares
Kevin Beares joined Microsoft in July 2001 as a Product Support Team Manager and has been in the Community Lead role for over 5 years. Before joining Microsoft Kevin worked at Webridge, Inc based out of Portland, OR running their support operations. Kevin started out in 1991 as a Quality Assurance engineer for Micro Focus, Inc. providing technical assistant to VP of R&D coordinating and building testing programs for their DB2 compatible XDB Database Server product as well as running their beta program. Kevin quickly moved into a Customer Support role supporting the latest XDB Database Server product. In 1994, Kevin moved to Portland, OR to work with Serena Software, Inc as a support engineer and later as a Support Manager providing advanced technical support, on-site consulting and training for over 750,000 customers in the continental US, Canada & Europe with product support team of 40. Kevin then moved on to a start up, Webridge Inc. in 1999 to create a support team from ground up to support a new fully transactional Microsoft COM-based object application server for rapid development of Enterprise level intra and extranet Web Portal solutions called the Webridge Framework.
While at Microsoft, Kevin started as a Product Support Team Manager supporting the Visual Studio Data Access Components. Kevin then moved over to manage one of the five US Based Solution Integration Engineering (SIE) teams. SIE was an Elite Escalation Team dedicated to providing support to the most critical customer cross-product integration issues. In 2003, Kevin moved over to the Microsoft Operations Manager team as a community Lead and finally moved to the Windows Server Solutions (WSSG) team to be the community lead for the three products that they were developing, Windows Home Server, Small Business Server, and Essential Business Server. High Performance Computing was added in early 2008. As a community lead, Kevin drives the community engagement strategy for the WSSG Product teams, running the Feedback, Influencer, Online communities, and outbound communication plans.
Kevin graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1989 with a Bachelor's of Arts in Sociology.
