Yair Alan Griver is the Group Program Manager for the billing stream underlying Microsoft’s Online services. Prior to that, he was the architect for the Microsoft.com community properties, responsible for creating a coherent underlying platform for properties that include blogs.msdn.com, forums.msdn.com, GotDotNet and chats. Prior to the architect role, Alan was Group Manager for the Visual Studio Data group. As Group Manager, Alan’s teams produced the tools used inside of Visual Studio .NET, Office and SQL Server that surface data capabilities, as well as Visual FoxPro. Coming into Microsoft, Alan was a Lead Program Manager and Community Evangelist for Visual Basic .NET, driving community interests into Visual Basic .NET.

Before joining Microsoft, Alan was Chief Information Officer at GoAmerica, a publicly traded telecommunications (wireless internet) company, and co-founder and CIO of Flash Creative Management a business strategy and technology consulting company. Alan is the author of five books on Visual FoxPro and Visual Basic, the creator of various development frameworks, and has developed database systems ranging into the thousands of users. He has spoken around the world on databases, object orientation and development team management issues, as well as XML and messaging-based applications.