Thursday, September 07, 2006 10:41 AM
Kevin Beares
I'm Back
So, I am now into my second day back to work. Man, so many things to get caught up on and so little time in the day.
My little Soleil is still adoreable and already has been under her spell and she is only 6 weeks old. It is kind of hard to justify putting in long hours getting caught up when you have such a precious present to go home to every night. Soleil along with my two boys, Haven and Schuyler will get a lot of daddies time when I get back tonight.
We had the first meeting of the Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 Partner Group Tour - Microsoft takes to the road in Redmond last night. We had about 120 people show up. It was pretty cool. We kick the rest of the tour off next week in Portland. We hope to drive our interaction with the User Group Community more this year then we have in the past. We have done tours like this before and we plan to continue them. What I hope we can add is a more open level of communication with the User Group Communities that are in place today and help people in the community create new User Groups where there are not.
The SBS Community Survey revealed a lot of things and one of the top areas identified as vitally important by the survey was User Groups. So, I am looking for ideas on how we can improve our interaction and engagement with the User Groups. If you have ideas that you would like to share either publicly or privately, drop me a line. I would love to hear from you. You can either post a comment on my blog or drop me a line at kbeares@microsoft.com.
Thanks again,
Kevin
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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.
