Mark Bower

Past

Lead Program Manager / Product Manager at Microsoft
Principal Consultant at Microsoft
Program Manager, Office 2007 Launch at Microsoft

Senior Consultant at Microsoft
Software Engineer at Microsoft
Senior Analyst Programmer at travelstore.com
Senior Software Engineer at RCP Consultants

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Education

Birmingham City University
Aston University

Recommended

5 people have recommended Mark

Connections

144 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Websites

Mark Bower’s Summary

An accomplished, customer facing technical leader with 15 years experience in the Software Industry. A strategic thinker, strong communicator of both business and technical concepts, from board level through to developers, combining technical knowledge with business and commercial awareness.

Mark Bower’s Specialties:

SharePoint, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Outlook, Communities, Web 2.0, Blogging, Office, Workflow, Portal, Search, Collaboration, Windows SharePoint Server, MOSS, WSS, Program / Project Management, Business Analysis, Solution Architecture, Software Development Processes, Managing Teams

Mark Bower’s Experience

Lead Program Manager / Product Manager

Microsoft

(Public Company; MSFT; Computer Software industry)

August 2007 — January 2009 (1 year 6 months)

In this major project for the UK National Health Service (Microsoft's single biggest customer) I put together a team to enhance and customise SharePoint and Office for the 900,000 NHS users.

This strategy and planning role involved identifying opportunities, defining strategy & vision for product development, leading the development team to deliver on the vision, and evangelising and promoting completed product.
Principal Consultant

Microsoft

(Public Company; MSFT; Computer Software industry)

September 2006 — August 2007 (1 year )

Worked as a solution architect for collaborative applications, social software and enterprise content management based on SharePoint 2007 and Office 2007.

Customers included BBC, HBOS, DEFRA and KPMG.
Program Manager, Office 2007 Launch

Microsoft

(Public Company; MSFT; Computer Software industry)

September 2005 — September 2006 (1 year 1 month)

Overall responsibility for planning and delivery of the Office 2007 Early Adopter Programme.

I lead a team of 6 consultants in a 12-month project delivering consulting services to 22 customers and 18 Microsoft Partners. I was responsible for putting in place a delivery framework which was subsequently adopted across EMEA as a best practice, and personally delivering architecture and design sessions with most of the customers. The architectures I designed covered the whole range of 2007 Office system products and all industry sectors.
Senior Consultant

Microsoft

(Public Company; MSFT; Computer Software industry)

2002 — September 2005 (3 years )

Worked in the Enterprise Collaboration team focussed on the Microsoft collaboration technologies: Office and SharePoint.
Responsible for the delivery of pre-sales technical support, authoring proposals, architecture and design of highly available, scalable and reliable solutions, technical leadership and mentoring of Microsoft and customer staff, knowledge transfer and validation of customer solutions to ensure best-practices are followed.

Major customers I worked with included Reuters, NTL, MoD, Nationwide Building Society, NHS and Deloitte.
Software Engineer

Microsoft

(Public Company; MSFT; Computer Software industry)

2001 — 2002 (1 year )

Contract role as developer on the Government Gateway (www.gateway.gov.uk) Transaction Engine. Worked initially on contract for Microsoft, and then for Sema as the web service was deployed live to process online tax returns from citizens.

In the Transaction Engine team we were responsible for the implementation of the GovTalk document submission protocol as a massively scaleable ebusiness system capable of handling 1000 documents per second with asynchronous document processing and EAI with participating Government departments.
Senior Analyst Programmer

travelstore.com

(Leisure, Travel & Tourism industry)

2001 — 2001 (less than a year)

An interesting exercise in being inside a failing company during the dot com bust. When I joined, the company had just started a high profile TV ad campaign. Withing three months it was clear there was no money left. I soon figured out my future lay elsewhere.
Senior Software Engineer

RCP Consultants

(Information Technology and Services industry)

1994 — 2001 (7 years )

Progressed to this position from graduation. Worked in a variety of software development and team lead roles, designing and developing software for the then all-new Windows platform across a number of industries: Banking, Healthcare and Media.