About Wes

idubbs is Wes Preston.

Wes is owner and principal consultant for TrecStone, LLC., founder of L5 Profiles, organizer of M365TC (previously: SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities), and has been a Microsoft MVP since 2009. I am based in the Twin Cities – Minneapolis, Minnesota – working remotely or on-site as needed.

I am an evangelist, a business solutions analyst/architect/builder, a product specialist, a sales support person and an IT Pro – who used to be a developer.  I am a board member for the Twin Cities SharePoint Saturday event – currently rebranding to M365TC.  I have been a coordinator and frequent presenter at the Minnesota SharePoint User Group.  I’m a consultant, a dad, a husband, a friend, a Christian, a brother and son – to name a few things.  We’ll stick with the work-related stuff from here on out.  🙂

As an ‘evangelist’ (thank you Microsoft for bringing that term into the technology lexicon), I spend time telling people, organizations and companies about technology – usually SharePoint or something related – and how that technology can fit into their world and hopefully make it better.  I’ve done lots of ‘SharePoint 101’ presentations and answer a lot of “what if I want to do …?” inquiries – usually answered with my response of “ooh, you could do X, Y and Z with SharePoint that would do that and more for you”.  (I love those kinds of questions…)

As an analyst, I work with people and organizations to identify what they are doing, what they are trying to do, what they’d like to do and what the best way to do it is – usually aligning with SharePoint, but sometimes not.  I work with clients throughout an engagement from education, to envisioning, to planning and implementing.  I spend a lot of conversations about best practices – usually around the IT Pro topics, but I do get pretty passionate about governance topics.  By ‘governance’ I refer to the idea of what it REALLY takes to implement something like SharePoint in an environment – it’s not something you just turn on and leave.  Success is dependent on proper planning, execution, communication, monitoring, etc…  So much to do, but so much to gain.

I love to learn.  This works well with the SharePoint world because there is so much to learn and will continue to be for the foreseeable future – even without spending too much time on the development side.  Oh, I do enjoy and dabble with development, but have been fortunate to work with some rock star developers that are WAY better than I, so I get to focus on the other stuff and let them do what they love and do better than I.  With the experience and knowledge I have, I’m able to focus on what products like SharePoint can do out of the box and know when solutions need to cross that line into custom development.  I enjoy finding creative ways of using the product before getting to development.

I love to teach.   Anywhere from the user groups to deep dive sessions, to community and Microsoft events – I love to present to groups big and small.  I love to do knowledge transfer sessions with clients and provide mentoring with my co-workers.  I love it when the person that came to me with questions 6 months ago comes back tomorrow with some tidbit, approach or anything new that I didn’t know.  I can totally relate to this quote:

“My whole life I’ve been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered the interruptions were my work.”  – Henri Nouwen

I am a ‘computer guy’ that has spent most of my time since 2003 working with Microsoft SharePoint technologies – first building Target Corporation’s SharePoint farm, then moving back to consulting so I could learn more and do more with a technology that I was having so much fun with.   Prior to Target, I worked for a smattering of companies as either a consultant or developer.  My education is in engineering (not software) but I never wandered far from the computer world since my parents opened the Byte Shop computer store in Milwaukee in 1978 (the oldest computer store in Milw, WI for 17 yrs).