Introduction from Shaun Pierce

Hello all - I wanted to introduce myself to the community as a contributor
for the BIEB (Because Its Everyone's Business) blog.   My name is
Shaun Pierce and I am the General Manager of the Office Communications Server
product development team.  I have been at Microsoft for almost 15 years
and started working in the Unified Communications space ever since our group's
creation back in April of 2002, when I joined the team as a software
development lead.  Since that time, our team has shipped several successful
product releases including: Live Communications Server 2003, Live
Communications Server 2005, and Office Communications Server 2007. 
Currently our team is working on the next release of Office Communications
Server, which we internally call our wave14 release.  Prior to joining the
UC team in 2002, I worked in various software development jobs within the
Windows division for products such as: Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows XP.  
Before I joined Microsoft, I worked at a small company called Artisoft who made
a peer to peer network called LANtastic which competed with Novel Netware.

I've been asked to contribute to this blog due to my
experience in the Unified Communications space and our Office Communications
Server product in particular.   In these set of blogs, I intend to
discuss Unified Communications technologies that we've worked on in the past as
well as in the present that hopefully folks will find interesting and/or
relevant to things they work on every day.  If there are other topics you'd
like to hear more about that intersect with my area of technology, by all means
drop me a line...

In my free time, I like to work on quantitative financial automated trading
projects of my own design.  These sets of applications are things I have
written in .NET, SQL Server storage, MATLAB, and a dose of Perl applied
gratuitously when needed (some old habits like Perl die hard).

Shaun Pierce

General Manager - Office Communications Server