Other articles in this series:

• Benefits of MCM (Part II) - Community
• Benefits of MCM (Part III) - It Definitely Pays Off

This is the first article attempting to provide some insight into the value you can hope to realise by completing the Microsoft Certified Master course.  It covers the most important aspect - knowledge.  For, although you may think that the qualification is the main purpose of this intensive program, it barely makes a distant third place, with knowledge a clear winner, followed by the networking opportunities.

The content below is not going to make you an Exchange expert. It merely serves to give you an idea of who are the people that will.  Although there may be only a few lines on each of them, firing up your favourite search engine and typing their names in is very likely to provide you more information.  Some of them feature in the video about the MCM program.

David Bjurman-Bjur - Program Manager

David is likely to be your first contact with the program and is likely to remain the main contact both during and for a while after the course.  He is involved with every aspect of the experience: arranging instructors and sessions, preparing each student's working environment, organising exams, setting up the final lab (and ordering lunch for it), as well as vetting each course candidate.  He is available for advice on everything from passwords you need for various systems to which restaurants serve the best steaks.

Oh, yeah, he is also a Microsoft Certified Master and Microsoft Certified Architect and will readily jump in to cover a part of the course if there is a scheduling issue... On top of which, he is a very nice guy.

Greg Taylor - Client Access Server

Once David gives you the welcoming bit on the first Monday, the first instructor you will see is Greg.  He is one of the two Brits you will meet on the course. Greg covers Client Access Server.  Don't expect kindness and sympathy.  He used to run the program before David.  But, unlike David, who is kind and caring, Greg would be better suited to holding a whip and a chair and shouting at a herd of elephants.  He is very much responsible for the current structure of the course, for the questions in all three exams and for the final qualifying lab.  In short, his name is the one you will curse the most before the end of the course.  You will also learn everything there is to know about CAS from him. Not just during the course, but afterwards as well.

I suppose I could say that Greg is a very nice guy... once you get to know him.

Brian Reid - Transport

The second of the Brits you will meet on the course. Brian, like all the instructors, knows his stuff to incredible depths and he will keep you in the classroom well after bed time to ensure he can pass his knowledge to you. His presentation is very illustrative, but it wouldn't be fair for me to talk about it here. It's far better when experienced with the EHLO effect.  If you want to see a part of Brian's module - have a look at his video presentation of the Exchange Headers Firewall. And to learn more about him, head over to his company's site at: http://www.c7solutions.com.

Apart from above, Brian also authored the Exchange 2003 Resource Kit and is a genuinely nice guy.

John Rodriguez - Database Internals

John lives in Hawaii, has landed on aircraft carriers and is a rabid Arsenal fan (or was it Manchester United... probably Man U, in fact).  As the name of his topic implies, he covers database internals - yes, the gooey, sticky, smelly stuff that every Exchange Information Store has, where it churns all the data.  He will show you how the data is eaten, consumed, stored for nutritional value and occasionally lost due to poor diet management.  Oddly, he makes it all very interesting.

John is a Senior PFE and has been involved with the program for 5+ years and is a mostly a very nice guy.

Tim McMichael - High Availability

Tim McMichael is a Senior Support Escalation Engineer, based in North Carolina and his specialty is High Availability, more specifically - Database Availability Groups.  The topic he covers was of great interest to me, notwithstanding the vastness of the material and the pace at which slides appear to go past your eyes.  Like majority of the instructors, he is heavily involved in the community. You can find his Exchange-related posts at: http://blogs.technet.com/b/timmcmic/.

Tim is also an EMS volunteer, which confirms what I have always known - that he is a very nice guy.

Paul Robichaux - Unified Messaging

Paul is one of the foremost authorities on Unified Messaging and has written a number of books on Exchange.  He is all about "M": Messaging, Marine, Mormon.  You can find out more about him, as well as some very useful stuff on UM by going to  http://paulrobichaux.wordpress.com.

Oh, I almost forgot, he's also a very nice guy.

Andrew Ehrensing

Andrew's profile says the following: "Solutions Architect in the Office of the CTO Microsoft Public Sector. Provide services pre-sales assistance, technical quality assurance on proposals and in-flight projects, and technical leadership to the Unified Communications community in the Public Sector group."  It doesn't say that he's been MCA and MCM since Exchange 2003.

It also doesn't say that he always attempts to offer extra information in every topic to ensure better understanding and provide real-life reference... which makes him a truly nice guy.

Robert Gillies

Robert Gillies is a Solution Architect at Microsoft in the US Public Sector Services CTO organization focusing on Unified Communications. Robert has been at Microsoft since Nov 1999, and spent most of that time as an Exchange consultant in the US Dept of Defense and US Federal Civilian space, helping customers deploy and manage all versions of Exchange from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2010.

Robert is a Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) in Exchange 2003, 2007 and 2010 and Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) in Exchange 2003 and 2007, has been involved in the "Exchange Ranger" community since January 2003, has instructed some of the Exchange Ranger rotations, and has developed material for and instructed in almost every Exchange MCM rotation to date (he didn’t instruct in the rotation he just attended). Robert has spoken on Exchange at several internal Microsoft and external events (TechReady, TechEd, Interact), has developed material for and presented Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 Ignite/RAMP training, has written/co-written multiple entries on the Exchange Team Blog and has contributed to the Exchange 2010 IP and service readiness documentation.

If Chuck Norris wanted to deploy Exchange Server, he would hire Robert Gillies... Mostly because Robert is a very nice guy.

David Zazzo

David works on some monster projects with 6-digit seat numbers, which provides great examples for the topic that he covers during the course. In the case of our rotation, that was mostly in the arena of heterogeneous environments: federation, cross-forest deployments and migrations.

Even from our brief encounter, I can safely say that he is a very nice guy.

As ever, it would be great to hear from instructors themselves, as well as from experiences from other students.