Hacking the Hacker

10Profile: Susan Bradley

I met Susan Bradley over 15 years ago, when I was selected as one of Microsoft’s early Most Valuable Professionals. The Microsoft MVP, as it’s known, is awarded to independent community leaders who show expertise in one or more Microsoft technologies and have broad interaction with end‐users, such as writing a regular blog, newsletter, or column. It was clear early on that Bradley was an MVP of MVPs. She is super smart, hard‐working, and forever helping not just end‐users, but MVPs. (We’re end‐users, too.) She was originally awarded her MVP in 2000 for Microsoft’s now discontinued Small Business Server (SBS) product, but she has broad and deeply technical Windows expertise. The annual MVP (https://mvp.microsoft.com/en‐us/PublicProfile/7500?fullName=Susan%20Elise%20Bradley) she has continued to get continually every year since is known as the Cloud & Datacenter Management MVP.

If you don’t know what Small Business Server was, just take the majority of Microsoft’s most major and complex products (including Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, Outlook, and so on), put them into one software install for small businesses, and claim it’s easy. I made a lot of consulting money helping customers who quickly figured out it wasn’t so easy. Bradley gave me technical support when I was stuck on a problem that I could not solve alone. We eventually met at some national computer security conferences we were both speaking at, and we bonded a bit because of our shared ...