dwinter's Bio

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Who is Dan Winter?

I have been with Microsoft full-time for close to 5 years now... I started out on the Exchange 24x7 team in product support where I enjoyed a near 4 years of mentoring peers, training new-hires, taking on those tough issues, and being one of those go-to folks. While there, I enjoyed contributing to the Exchange Team Blog at blogs.msdn.com/exchange ... you can find some of my entries still up there. I have since enjoyed a short stint on the SharePoint/WSS support team and now am on the Escalation team for SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services. As an Escalation Engineer (EE) we represent the last line of support for the most demanding of issues related to SharePoint. As an EE we are tasked with:

  • Resolving the most the most technically and politically challenging customer issues
  • Engaging and being a resource to the larger SharePoint PSS group.
  • Researching, diagnosing, and writing code to further diagnose and resolve customer’s issues.
  • Employing advanced tools and diagnostics to analyze source code.
  • Making recommendations to the development team on improvements to product
  • Isolating defects to the faulting line(s) of code.
  • Writing tools to further analyze problem or improve the overall SharePoint experience.

All of these things within very compressed timeframes. What this really means is on a typical day the vast majority of my time is spent mentoring, debugging and researching issues I am currently involved in, and overall contributing to the success of those around me. By using knowledge of software design and programming in conjunction with general product knowledge, it allows people in our group to bridge the gap between the typical end to end support troubleshooting methodologies and the very focused, specific code level knowledge of a developer.  I do enjoy coding in my spare time and have ADModify to my credit as well as helping with many other smaller tools.