First Post. My Intro...

Hello friends! Welcome and my name is Mark Garcia. I am Technology Solution Professional (TSP) for Microsoft specializing in Unified Communications (which is comprised of OCS 2007 and Exchange 2007) and SharePoint for US Education customers. I am only two weeks into this role so I am in information firehose mode right now but I have already learned quite a bit in the few education customers I have worked with thus far. I am not new to MS since this is year 15 but I do feel like the new guy since I have to learn many new internal acronyms, org structures, sales processes, etc.

Prior to this new role, I was in Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) for 11 years where I focused on Microsoft infrastructure and implementation at Fortune 500 customers. Before that, I was in Premier Support (aka CSS) for 4 years supporting cool technologies like DOS 4.0, DoubleSpace, and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (aka Snowball).

In my next few posts, I will talk about my experience on implementing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC0, along with deploying 64-bit Exchange 2007, OCS, MOSS, SQL 2005 and SQL 2008 ctp on a 64-bit Windows Server 2008 guest. I have been building out my quad core Hyper-V demo server for my job and I have documented the entire process. I also have had some useful feedback from the Hyper-V product team.

Let me close out my first post by saying I hope to share relevant UC and MOSS information which any customer can use but I will also focus on education specific Microsoft solutions for K-12 school districts and higher education. Both my Mom and sister were teachers so I am glad I can also contribute to education in some way.