Samuel F DREY

> My first contact with computers occurred in the 80's with the Thomson M05 and T07 (a French PC manufacturer) and the "turtle" application. We then bought a SANYO MBC 16+ (640Kb Ram, 8088CPU @ 4.77-8MHz) I discovered with a 5.25” disk MS-DOS 3.20 O/S and developed simple fun programs using GW-BASIC (Gates William Basic ? Waiting confirmation from Bill).

- Later on I completed a Master’s degree in Computer Science at the EFREI school(www.efrei.fr), the same school as one of the very first PC’s father, André Truong (he created and designed the Micral computer with François Gernelle and his team: yes, the Personal Computer was first invented in France !).

- I then joined Microsoft France in October 1999 and spent many years in different positions (Presales engineer, Support Specialist, EMEA Operations Consultant - was the very first in France and Southern Europe, Architecture Consultant, and Technical Account Manager) from where I acquired solid IT experiences in many areas such as IT operations, project management, crisis management, presentation skills. I worked with many industries, from large-scale distribution companies to financial institutions, also including public and government institutions.

- I finally moved to Microsoft Canada as an Operations Consultant specialized in Exchange server and surroundings.

Why Canada? Because Canada is a child dream (looking for both snowy winters and sunny warm summers), and also a great addition to my international experience.

Why Operations Consultant aka Premier Field Engineer ? Because it’s the best technical job ever created in Microsoft. This position includes working on IT architecture design, IT audits, troubleshooting, teaching, and anything valuable that you can give to IT customers.

> As hobbies, I love piloting planes (licensed since 1995), I enjoy keyboard playing (the instrument, not the PC stuff full of buttons) as well as acoustic and electric guitar playing for pleasure.