Rand Williams Email & Phone Number

Dallas/Fort Worth Area

Mentor and Escalation Point for front line Pro support teams in India at Wipro: Conducted proactive daily case reviews, as well as scheduled and impromptu consults for issues owned by front line support Engineers in India to speed resolution of issues. • Acted as a mentor and Escalation Point for politically hot issues and product issues from Microsoft Concierge and Fastrack teams.• Isolated, reproduced and documented product issues, then engaged and collaborated with our product group. Followed up on issues with customer and product group in order to resolve product issues.• SFBO Labs: Collaborated with another Senior SFBO Engineer to develop, test, and create detailed training documentation for lab setup of a virtualized (using Windows Hyper-V) Hybrid SFBO lab environment hosted on remote servers which allowed SFBO Support Engineers in North America to build their own personalized working SFBO labs in less than a single work day. This resulted in greatly increased efficiency for SFBO engineers in reducing their product training time and ability to understand and reproduce customer issues.

Dallas/Fort Worth Area

Managed projects with large, geographically dispersed, virtual team managing Wave 15 upgrade project for Office 365 tenants (SAS Software as a Service). Responsible for early identification of emerging critical issues and managing those issues through key stakeholders (PMs, SPMs, SEEs, EES, PG and others) to resolution, as well as managing all executive level communications.• Worked with Premier Enterprise customers, including deep collaboration with TAMs and PFEs managing CritSits into the US ESC center, identifying the right resources and working with EMs and SEEs to ensure timely responses and a focused goal of resolving the CritSit to solution or lower severity• Extensive experience with implementing, troubleshooting and migration to Office 365, Exchange 2013, 2010, Active Directory, and high availability for messaging.• Led global virtual teams consisting of key stakeholders from Customer Service and Support (CSS), Microsoft Services, and Product and Business Groups to identify the top problem areas or issues for a product/service and drove the appropriate changes with a broad impact on the customers’ perception of product quality. Improvements primarily include software features/fixes, self-help solution assets such as static and dynamic content, supportability processes/tools, etc.• Identified the top root causes for high support cost and customer dissatisfaction, created monetary impact projections and presented to executive leadership teams and devised creative solutions to drive issue prevention/resolution.• Helped the Executive team in handling multiple escalations from customers, including building post mortems and utilizing those findings to improve the support of the immediate Frontline teams.• Built strong partnerships with our vendors, working through those relationships to support and insure the success of outsourced vendor organizations.

Dallas/Fort Worth Area

Supported Mission Critical issues for Premier, and USNAT customers’ critical and political situation cases.• Owned and resolved most technically challenging and extremely political customer’s cases, provided technical leadership and training.• Escalation end point for global escalations for all versions of Exchange.• Analyzed user mode process dumps; performed Perfmon, iDNA, RegTrace and ETL Trace analysis.• Collaborated with EE, QFE, CXP, ECOE, GetHelp, and Dev groups. • Developed and recorded multiple Training Videos on key technical topics for internal training.• Worked extensively with Microsoft Windows 2008/20003/2000/NT Server Support, supporting Consultants, and Network Administrators with design/planning, implementing and troubleshooting Exchange 2012/2010/2007/ 2003/2000/5.5 network solutions. This work required a solid foundation in working with, and troubleshooting, Windows configuration issues related to Networking, and Active Directory. • Remote Consulting services Technical Lead for Exchange Advisory Services team for four years. Technical management of geographically dispersed team. Work involved providing remote consulting services for customer projects primarily involving migrations of Windows and Exchange. Responsibilities included determining scope of work, negotiation of contracts, setting project objectives, timelines, managing remediation of existing issues, and technical implementation of projects to satisfactory completion.• In-unit trainer for Exchange 2000/2003/2007. • Technical Writing - Contributed significantly to documentation development, having written over 600 public Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and pre-release content, covering complex Exchange Migration scenarios and other issues that have been used extensively by customers and Microsoft support personnel.

Dallas/Fort Worth Area

Adjunct Faculty at DCCCD, CCCCD, SMU and other local institutions, delivered training for Microsoft’s MCSE Core Windows Technologies, Networking, Directory Services, and Exchange 5.5/2000/2003/2007 course materials.

Dallas/Fort Worth Area

Outsourcer for Microsoft Corporation• Extensive work with Microsoft NT Server support, supporting Consultants, and Network Administrators with planning, implementing and troubleshooting networking solutions. • Extensive work with Exchange Server with an emphasis on disaster recovery, as well as, NetBEUI, TCP/IP, and services such as DNS, DHCP, RAS, PPTP, WINS network configuration and routing issues. • Tech Lead handling case reviews, mentoring, training delivery, assumed ownership of aged or politically hot cases for recovery or to work to closure.