About the Authors

Bob German is an architect at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) near Boston, Massachusetts, where he helps customers create and prove out solutions that fit their business and technology needs. Bob works on SharePoint solutions for customers in a wide range of industries and technology environments. He also advises independent software vendors who are looking to build products on, or integrate them with, SharePoint technologies.

Bob’s career began as a systems programmer in the minicomputer industry. Eventually he became a project leader and architect specializing in network protocols and distributed systems. In 1995, he took his networking and development experience to Microsoft Consulting Services. This soon led to web development engagements, including a knowledge management web site for a major industry analyst. The site was based on Site Server 3.0, a precursor to SharePoint.

In 2000, Bob joined the very first Microsoft Technology Center and provided consulting services in an incubation environment to the burgeoning dot-com industry. This involved quite a bit of performance and scalability testing and plenty of troubleshooting because most of the applications crashed under load testing. It also involved helping out with some pretty cool web sites, although not all of them saw the light of day.

Bob has specialized in SharePoint technologies since a major project in 2002 threw him head-first into the SharePoint 2003 beta. He’s helped many customers get started and regularly develops SharePoint and Silverlight solutions for proof of concept and demonstrations. Bob is a frequent speaker at conferences such as TechEd North America, the Microsoft SharePoint Conference, and MIX, as well as at user groups and SharePoint Saturdays.

Paul Stubbs is a Microsoft Technical Evangelist for SharePoint and Office, where he focuses on information worker development community around SharePoint and Office, Silverlight, and Web 2.0 social networking. He has authored several books on solution development using Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and Silverlight, several articles for MSDN Magazine, and has also spoken at Microsoft Tech-Ed, PDC, SharePoint Conference, DevConnections and MIX conferences.

Paul has also worked as a Senior Program Manager on Visual Studio in Redmond, Washington. Paul is a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) and frequently participates in the developer community on the Microsoft forums. Visit Paul’s blog at blogs.msdn.com/pstubbs for deep SharePoint developer information.