Tom Pacyk

Alex Lewis, MCITP, CISSP, has a mixed background in telecommunications, IT, and consulting, with more than 15 years of experience. He has worked with the Lync family of products since the Exchange 2000 instant messaging service and a number of other solutions, including Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, Shoretel, and NEC. He has worked with a wide range of environments from small organizations to large enterprises requiring complex or custom communications solutions, and he is responsible for architecting and implementing some of the largest Lync deployments in the world. Alex is a strong believer in the power of business and technology alignment using technological solutions to reduce costs and drive revenue and leveraging Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) to accelerate business success. Including titles on Active Directory and Exchange, and two on Lync, Alex has participated in writing eight books from 2004 to present. He is currently principal consultant at Modality Systems, a boutique international consulting firm focused on Microsoft unified communications. He loves a challenge and brings a wealth of experience to each new engagement. In his spare time Alex enjoys scuba diving with sharks and beach volleyball.

Tom Pacyk is one of only a few people worldwide to hold both the Microsoft Certified Master certification and the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for Lync Server. Tom works as a Principal Systems Architect at ExtraTeam and is currently based in Chicago, Illinois. He began his career as a systems administrator and has moved into working as a consultant for the past seven years, designing and implementing collaboration solutions for large and small customers. His Unified Communications work began with the original Exchange 2000 instant messaging service, and he has been involved with implementations of every version of the product up to Lync Server 2013. Outside of work Tom runs a blog related to Microsoft Lync and Exchange topics, and he enjoys writing thrilling nonfiction books such as this one.

David Ross, MCITP, VCP, CCEA, CCSP, has more than 14 years of experience in IT consulting, the majority of which has been spent playing the lead architect role on network design and implementation projects throughout the San Francisco Bay area. David is currently acting as a principal engineer for Convergent Computing, and he develops hybrid solutions involving multiple vendor technologies for organizations of all sizes. Specialties for David include Active Directory, Exchange, Lync, Citrix technologies, virtualization solutions using VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, and Cisco routing, switching, and security technologies.

Randy Wintle is a Unified Communications Architect specializing in planning, architecture, and implementation of enterprise unified communications solutions. Randy has an exceptional track record for driving success on large enterprise deployments of Microsoft OCS and Lync Server 2010. He has successfully guided several large organizations in their development of strategies to enhance their business through Microsoft UC solutions. Randy is both a Microsoft Certified Master and a Microsoft MVP for Lync Server 2010, a rare combination and evidence of his technical prowess and recognition as an industry expert. Randy frequently participates in community and Microsoft-sponsored technical events. He helped develop the Microsoft training and certification programs for Lync and OCS. Randy has been previously published in the book Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Resource Kit. He has also contributed to many online whitepapers and has a very successful UC blog.