About Jeff | Jeff's Schedule
I learned to program in the 5th grade at public school in Tampa, Florida. I received a GED at 15 and enrolled in the University of South Florida where I received a Literature degree in 1982. I worked for Collier-Jackon, Inc. (later bought by CompuServe), Digital Equipment Corporation (bought by Compaq), and finally Microsoft (not yet acquired).
At Microsoft I worked as a Senior Writer for the Basic team on the following products: Basic Professional Development System (team lead), MS-DOS QBasic, Visual Basic versions 1.0 to 3.0, Microsoft Game Shop (team lead), OLE 2.0 Programmability (team lead), Excel VBA (team lead), and the Office Development Kit (team lead). After leaving Microsoft, I completed contract work for the following Microsoft projects: Office Development Kit, 3D Movie Maker, and the Microsoft Press MCSD/MCAD Self-Paced Training Kit for Developing Web Application in .NET (exams 70-305 and 70-315).
I have worked directly with Tim Paterson, the original author of MS-DOS; Bill Vaughn (former MS SQL program manager); Tom Button (MS corporate VP of platforms and strategy); Brian Overland (Microsoft C++ guru and VB team collegue); Francesco Balena (VB .NET guru); and many other great people. I recently joined Bamboo Solutions Technical Advisory Board, along with other SharePoint industry experts Joel Oleson, Bob Mixon, and Bob Fox.
As a writer in a programming group at Microsoft, my emphasis was on creating relevant, non-trivial examples in Basic, Visual Basic, VBA, VB .NET, and later C#. I also automated the online-to-print process for the first time at Microsoft. Later, I leveraged my programming skills to help businesses transition from COM to .NET by training their programming and working as a programming team lead.
As a consultant, I have worked on many different projects deployed in many different situations. I am even credited on the airlock decompression algorithm used on the International Space Station (ISS). I can honestly say I have code running around the globe and beyond.
Here in Melbourne, I helped Real-Time Integration, Inc. (RTI) transition from Delphi to VB .NET one year, then returned a year later to head up the implementation of message queues and services in their products. While there, I also rolled out Windows SharePoint Services (WSS 2.0) as a means for them to communicate with their customers. Finally, I built a mobile inventory tracking system using ASP.NET and low-cost PDAs fitted with bar-code SIM cards.
I’ve used WSS on my own server since 2004 to collaborate with my publishers (first Microsoft Press, now O’Reilly Media). O’Reilly asked me to write their SharePoint books based on that experience. I now host SharePoint sites for O’Reilly authors working on the next editions of O’Reilly’s C# and Windows books.
I began doing full-time SharePoint consulting three years ago, rolling out SPS for AgCert International. I have since rolled out MOSS for five other companies, most recently helping the team at Harris, Corp., with their fully scaled-out MOSS deployment. I have now deployed MOSS in the US, Ireland, Brazil, and Mexico.
Web sites
You can see some of my SharePoint work at:
http://www.sharepointworkshop.com/
http://www.essentialsharepoint.com/
http://www.usingsharepoint.com/
http://www.excelworkshop.com/
http://www.vbworkshop.com/
Education
- University of South Florida
- Oregon State University
- Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP)
Key achievements
- Programmer since 1972
- Began college at 15
- Cycled across USA at 19
- Deployed software on over 100 million desktops (as part of MS-DOS 5.0)
- Widely published and read (over 12 books, translated in 36 languages)
- Internationally recognized expert in Visual Basic, Excel, ASP.NET, and SharePoint
- Still having fun