Thursday, May 29, 2008 11:36 AM
Kevin Beares
Announcing Small Business Server 2008 RC0 Public Preview
Just a heads up if you didn't already here the announcement, but you can go get the public preview of SBS 2008 today.
http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2008/05/28/announcing-small-business-server-2008-rc0-public-preview.aspx
What distiinguishes this public preview from the techbeta is really the location of the download and the intent. The techbeta's primary goal is and has been feedback. We are still running the techbeta. The public preview is mainly for people to evaluate and prepare for the launch and general availability of SBS 2008 in the second half of CY 2008.
We launched a new public newsgroup for SBS 2008 as well. Go to http://connect.microsoft.com/sbs08 for more details on the public newsgroup.
Thanks,
Kevin
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.
