Instructor Bios

Steve Smith

Instructor

Steve Smith ( MVP-SharePoint Server ) is the owner of Combined Knowledge in the UK and Combined Knowledge Asia Pacific providing Microsoft SharePoint Technical Training courses and Consultancy.

Steve is well travelled spending most of last 20 years travelling in the US and South Asia for the companies he owned and worked with including achieving his first qualification with Microsoft technologies on NT 4 and IIS 3 in New Delhi India in 1998 whilst based there for 3 years.

Although tinkering with computers since early Teenage years Steve has specialized with Microsoft's systems since 1996 and been involved in many Microsoft Beta programs including Windows 2000, Exchange 2000 and SharePoint. The last 6 years however has seen a majority of his time with SharePoint and running the Mindsharp and Combined Knowledge SharePoint courses in the UK, Europe and Asia Pacific, also helping many UK based companies with their SharePoint Implementations including the US Air Force, The Ministry of Defence and Several Blue chip companies. Steve is a Co Organiser of the UK SharePoint User Group www.suguk.org and Co Author of the SharePoint 2007 Administrators Companion from MS Press

Steve lives in South Leicestershire, England with his wife and 3 children and can be contacted on steve@combined-knowledge.com

Penny Coventry

Instructor

Penny Coventry (MCSE Windows 2003, 2000: Security, MCSE+Internet -NT 4 & 3.51, MCSA, MCDBA, MCSD, MCAD, MCT, CTT+, MSF, ISEB IT Infrastructure Management, IT Project+) is an independent consultant based in the UK.

Penny has more than 25 years of industry experience and currently focuses on the design, implementation and development of SharePoint Technology based solutions. She has produced SharePoint related courseware for Mindsharp since 2002. Penny has led a team of four SharePoint consultants, for the ATLAS Consortium on the Defence Information Infrastructure (Future) project.
She provides consultancy services to UK Microsoft Gold partners Combined Knowledge and ICS Solutions, where she provided consulting services to Zurich Financial Services, Twinings, North Hampshire Primary Care Trust, England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), and Thomson Directories Ltd. She has worked for Coventry University as their Portal Strategist, and trained consultants, administrators and end-users on Microsoft/HP led SharePoint projects for the World Health Organisation (WHO) and The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (TGF).

Penny co-authored Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Administrator's Companion, January 2007; Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit, July 2004; and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Step-by-Step book, January 2005. She is currently writing chapters for the next version of the WSS Step-by-Step book.
Penny proctored at TechEd 2004:
San Diego and Amsterdam and was a Technical Learning Guide at TechEd 2006, Boston. At IT Forum 2006, Barcelona she was again a proctor and also assisted on the Ask-the-Experts stand.

Penny lives in Hinckley, Leicestershire, England with her husband.

Spencer Harbar

Instructor

Spencer, a MCSD for Microsoft .NET, MCSE and  MVP for Office SharePoint Server, has over fourteen years commercial experience of architecture, design, development, deployment and operational support of Web based applications and hosting platforms for some of Europe's largest organisations.

Spencer currently specialises in SharePoint Technologies 2007 in particular Information Architecture, Security Configuration, Server Farm Topologies, Web Content Management, Business Data Catalog and Forms Server. He also maintains www.mcmsfaq.com, a Content Management Server resources portal, and continues to offer community support to MCMS customers. In 2006, Spencer co-authored Enhancing Microsoft Content Management Server with ASP.NET 2.0. He is currently working on a number of SharePoint related books to be published before the end of 2007, and frequently represents Microsoft at leading industry events such as TechEd.

Andrew Woodward

Instructor

Andrew Woodward has been a SharePoint Consultant since Tahoe. Now Principal Consultant at 21apps, a small consultancy with an emphasis on providing community support and expert consultancy around the expanding MOSS 2007 platform. Andrews day job is usually as Technical Architect for large SharePoint deployments and migrations; having architected some of the largest deployments in the UK, if not globally. Andrew is currently working in the Education arena and has a specific interest in the community initiatives Microsoft Learning Gateway, SharePoint Learning Kit and the Community Kit for SharePoint. 

Andrew has a development background and is passionate about agile approaches to development;  he has taken on the challenge of providing developer courses for Combined Knowledge to help other people get the most from their SharePoint development and to help people through the challenges this can bring.

Nick Swan

Instructor

Nick, a MVP for Office SharePoint Server, has been developing on top of the Microsoft technology stack since 2000. After creating one to many ASP.NET web sites and Winform applications Nick decide to look into another area and since 2005 has been concentrating on SharePoint.

Nick spends the majority of his time developing SharePoint tools under the umbrella of Lightning Tools. They specialize in BDC development tools and web parts. Having a background of consulting and commerical product development certainly allows real world experience to be bought into the classroom when Nick is delivering the SharePoint Development track.

Nick also co-organises the SharePoint User Group (www.suguk.org) which has 2,600 active members with monthly meetings organised with presentations, and has been known to write the odd blog post at www.sharepointnick.com/blog.

Nick lives in Reading with his fiance Sophie and cats Fluffy and Carragher.

Craig Carpenter

Instructor

As one of the founders of Combined Knowledge, Craig Carpenter (MCSA, MCSE, MCT) has over ten years experience of training and consulting on Microsoft platforms. Craig started his IT career within the education arena, a start that provided an exceptional breadth of knowledge for, as Craig says, "in education you are expected to do everything". From there, Craig moved into industry working for several companies both large and small, before becoming a Microsoft trainer for 4 years.

Over the past two years, Craig has been concentrating on SharePoint, being on the TAP program for MOSS 2007, and contributing to the Mindsharp courseware.

A self confessed gadget nut, Craig enjoys everything technical, especially if it also happens to be expensive, and lives in South Leicestershire with his partner Alice, and one and a half cats.

Brett Lonsdale

Instructor/Developer

Brett Lonsdale (MCSD, MCAD, MCT) is a Microsoft SharePoint Developer & Instructor. Brett has been providing Technical Training on Microsoft Products since 1997 and has a wealth of experience in a wide range of Microsoft Products including SharePoint, Visual Studio, SQL, and Windows. In 2003 Brett formed Combined Knowledge in the UK to provide SharePoint Technical Training with two partners Steve Smith (MVP) and Craig Carpenter. We formed a strong relationship in 2004 with Mindsharp and worked closely with Bill English and Todd Bleeker to provide excellent training materials so that we could provide second to none SharePoint classroom training. Brett also helped Bill English with the SharePoint 2007 Administrators Companion which was launched early 2007, and Todd Bleekers ‘Developers Guide to Windows SharePoint Services’.

In May 2007, Brett made the decision to spend more time on SharePoint development and has formed a company called Lightning Tools Ltd with Nick Swan (MVP). Lightning tools is the official provider of the tool ‘BDC Metaman’ and Brett & Nick are also spending every spare hour writing new tools to help the SharePoint community. Brett will be spending the majority of his time developing from home in the Sarasota area of Florida as of November 2007, although will still continue to provide classroom training for Combined Knowledge in the UK and for Mindsharp in the US.

Prior to living in Florida, Brett’s home town is Welford, Northamptonshire, UK with his Wife ‘Vicki’, daughter ‘Rio’, and dog ‘Dude’.

Russell Norton

SharePoint End User Trainer

Russell has been delivering IT user training, development and consultancy on a wide variety of applications – including the Microsoft Office Suite, MS Project and Visio, the Adobe Suite, Lotus Smart Suite, to name but a few – for more than 5 years, as well as having management and project management training and facilitation experience. Within this period, Russell oversaw large scale training roll-outs for the likes of Heinz UK, Aggregate Industries and the NHS, amongst others. During the latter part of his training career, Russell has begun to specialise in SharePoint, delivering our 2007 and 2003 Power End User courses.

Gary Yeoman

Instructor

Gary (MCSD, MCSD.NET, MCSE, MCDBA, MCTS and MCT) provides consultancy, training, development and mentoring on a range of Microsoft products including SharePoint Server, BizTalk Server, SQL Server and .NET development. He has been delivering various SharePoint 2003 and 2007 courses for Combined Knowledge and Mindsharp for the past 3 years.

Gary prefers a balance between training and consultancy and has been instrumental in implementing Web Content Management solutions, Document Management solutions and Portals using ASP.NET, MCMS 2002 and SharePoint 2007 for various organisations including Accenture, Cambridgeshire County Council and EasyJet.

Gary co-authored the Developers Guide to Windows SharePoint Services V3.0 and has contributed courseware modules for both Microsoft and Mindsharp. He has also spoken about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management for both the VB User Group and SharePoint User Group.

Glen Smith

Instructor

Glen (MCT, MCSE, MCPD, MCSD.NET, MCAD.NET, MCDBA, MCTS, MCDST, MCITP-DBA, MCTS-MOSS,WSS,Biztalk) has been teaching and consulting SharePoint from the early days before 2001, when it was a product called Digital Dashboard.

As a freelance consultant, Glen has spent more than 20 years trotting the globe coaching and consulting in the use of Microsoft Technologies for organizations such as Harrods, Infineon, Bertelsmann, BT and Masterfoods.

He is passionate about teaching, and tries to get a good balance between consulting and teaching. as he shuttles between the UK and Germany. 

As well as teaching SharePoint to the Microsoft field engineers, Glen creates Visual Studio 2008 teaching videos for MSDN and does technical writing about Net 3.5 for Microsoft.  When he is not doing postgraduate work at Oxford and UNISA, he is to be found ballroom dancing with his wife or playing football with his son.

Kathy Hughes

Instructor

Kathy Hughes, a Microsoft MVP, consults and trains on SharePoint throughout Australia. Her main area of interest is in architecting and customizing SharePoint, and .NET deployments. She holds a Master of Interactive Multimedia, having majored in Web site usability and design.

Kathy has developed and designed Web solutions for over 15 years and has worked with Microsoft collaborative technologies since SharePoint 2001. She has globally deployed and customized SharePoint Portal Server 2003 since beta inception and has customized and deployed SharePoint Server 2007 since beta release. She is a published technical author and has co-authored several books, including the Microsoft Press SharePoint Server 2007 Administrator’s Companion and soon-to-be released Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices

Kathy's Blog

Ruth Jennaway

Instructor

Ruth Jennaway (MCT, MCSD.NET, MCSD, MCTS Team System, MCTS-MOSS, WSS) is a Microsoft SharePoint Developer & Instructor. Ruth has been providing Technical Training on Microsoft Products since 1996 and has a wealth of experience in a wide range of Microsoft Products including SharePoint, Visual Studio, Team System, MCMS and Web Technologies.

As a freelance consultant, Ruth has spent more than 15 years coaching and consulting in the use of Microsoft Technologies in the UK, Europe, and Russia for organizations such as Microsoft, Accenture, the London Stock Exchange, NHS and local councils.

She is passionate about sharing best practice as well as providing the best training possible for clients, including trouble-shooting and mentoring sessions for clients who are mid-project. She also provides tailored courses and has often authored extra custom-written training material and handouts (particularly for large roll-outs or larger development projects teams).

Ruth has worked with SharePoint and Microsoft’s collaboration products since Site Server and Digital dashboards, and was on the first Microsoft roll-out program for Content Management Server in 2001. More recent involvement in a MS partner program on “Office 2007 Beta for Developers” allowed her to evangelise some SharePoint 2007 features to about 100 developers prior to the official launch.

Ruth is based in Yorkshire with her husband plus numerous cycles, canoes, skis and mountaineering equipment.

Rainer Wittmann

Instructor

Rainer (MCSE, former MCT) co-founder and CEO of Spirit EDV-Beratung AG had his first contact with SharePoint back in 2001 when it was called Tahoe Server. As a long time CorasWorks partner, and a well known added-value Company in the SharePoint community, Rainer delivered architecture workshops around Europe and Australia to demonstrate the ease of working with modular building blocks in contrast to custom development. This fable for reusable modular building blocks drives his passion when it comes to SharePoint Designer. Rainer’s always happy when he can convince people to use a SharePoint Designer solution incorporating the data form web part in favor of a solution built using Visual studio.

Although Rainer admits, that going beyond the basics of what SharePoint Designer allows you to do, requires some decent knowledge of XSLT, but this knowledge becomes quite handy when you reuse it in other areas of customizing out-of-the-box web parts like content query or core search results.

Rainer lives in Niederkassel, Germany, a small town close to Cologne and Bonn, which makes it convenient to travel as the airport is less than 15 minutes away. When he’s not on-the-road working, his wife Iris and he enjoy motor biking and travelling with a fairly old VW-Bus throughout Europe.

James Hamilton-Adams

Instructor

James (MCT, MCSE, MCTS, MCITP) first started training over twelve years ago and has  been training and consulting on Microsoft products for over seven years, in addition to being a PRINCE2 Practitioner.

Over the last six years James has focussed on delivering training and consulting for messaging and collaboration solutions, including Microsoft Exchange Server, Office SharePoint Server, Office Project Server, and Office Communications Server. James’ projects have included SharePoint Server deployments, Exchange migration and cluster deployments, Project Server implementation & configuration, and Active Directory design & implementation.

James is also an experienced course designer and author, creating bespoke courses for organisations on Microsoft products and has written official training materials for Windows Vista, Office Groove Server, and Windows Server 2008.

Linda Ough FCCA CTA

Instructor

Working as a consultant and trainer, Linda has a background of providing internet and intranet services, knowledge management and collaboration services in an international firm of Accountants where she developed a number of innovative solutions including the provision of online training courses. She helped develop the firm’s strategy in knowledge sharing and was also involved in developing a business taxonomy. Linda’s major involvement in SharePoint began in April 2004 when she joined a global project to use SharePoint 2007 as the knowledge management and collaboration platform throughout the firm worldwide. As a core member of the team, she built prototypes, authored training materials and conducted training sessions for all levels of user from Site collection owner to end user. She also provided briefings for key board members on the benefits of using SharePoint. After completion of the project she assisted with the implementation of the solution in a number of geographical locations and the development of core training materials.