Robert Styles

During my former military career of 25 years I have been able to lead diverse teams through very challenging projects dealing with critical operations in sometimes austere conditions.

From these experience I have been able to rapidly deploy cloud services to customers who had under estimated the life and health of their server. Several of these customers had services functional in the cloud within hours of a complete Exchange failure. Essentially the exchange 'dial tone' recovery so that email would still be completely functional. We then had to migrate mail back into production from the failed systems.

I work with many customers to help them achieve cloud integration within their environment - Office 365, Azure, Enterprise Mobility + Security, and on of course old fashion on premise servers. Modernizing infrastructure using Hyper-V technology and the latest server technologies. I still get plenty of hands on with core network infrastructure technology including Active Directory, ADFS, all versions of Exchange, Windows Server 2008/2012/2016/2019. Expanding cloud reach with StorSimple and Okta secure identity technology. I also have network and firewall experience that can help me provide the whole solution.

Education & Certifications:

FAA Part 107 Certified, March 2019

Microsoft 365 Certified: Enterprise Administrator Expert, Jan 2019

Okta Certified Professional and Administrator, Aug 2018

Microsoft MCSE: Productivity, June 2018
Microsoft CIE Facilitator, April 2016
MCSA: Office 365 *Charter, February 2014
Microsoft Ranger Summit, February 2013
ANG Leadership Challenge Program, December 2009
GIAC Certified Windows Security Administrator (GCWN), 2008
SANS Securing Windows 505 (SANS Security West, San Diego), 2008
IBM Certified Solutions Expert -- U2 UniData V6.1, 2007
Novell CNE, 1997
Military, NCO Academy and Sr. NCO Academy

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science - Wesley College Dover, DE

Associate Degree, Human Resources Management, CCAF

WANT TO CONNECT?

Email me at: RStyles@StylesTech.com

Recent Projects:

Performing an Exchange 2010 to 2016 migration for a healthcare organization in Tennessee. This also includes adding an Office 365 tenant for executive and management services as well as the migration of 30K seats into an Exchange server farm.
Provide guidance and consulting for implementation of Microsoft Endpoint manager for Windows 10 workstations developing Conditional Access, Compliance Policies and Configuration Profiles to cloud manage workstations. Additionally enrolling workstations into Autopilot for full device lifecycle management.
Used Azure migrate to perform test migrations and final migrations for a company that was moving as their infrastructure to the cloud.
Installed Hyper-V server in Azure to POC an Azure Migrate project.
In the spring of 2021, I assisted several companies to implement Endpoint manager for Windows 10 workstations developing Conditional Access, Compliance Policies and Configuration Profiles to cloud manage workstations. Additionally enrolling workstations into Autopilot for full device lifecycle management.
I assisted a New England university to leverage Azure SSO for school applications, the initial list of critical services is 15 apps both SAML and Azure catalog applications.
Planned the upgrade of the Boston Medical center Domain Controllers to upgrade to Server 2019(core) and assisted with the rollout as well as the decom of the legacy servers across 5 sites and 15 servers.
I've performed many Exchange on premises 2010 to 2016 Migrations, Two of note were for a major bank in New England area and one for a Financial Firm based in New York City. Both of these included muti-server and DAG.
I have been the lead Technical Architect for many companies such as Tomy.com, ARRL, Evans Hotels, County of Dallas, Dona Ana County, SPS New England on Exchange Hybrid migrations and Microsoft 365 Organizational implementations.
Worked with Wilson Bank & Trust and Physicians Heath Plan of Northern Indiana to develop and implement Microsoft Endpoint Management policies and procedures to protect both Corporate and BYOD devices.
I upgraded the Fox Television broadcast platform (iTX) infrastructure, installing upgraded Domain Controllers and AD migration services for 14 television stations across the country. Each of the 14 stations had 2 AD servers added where I performed the domain upgrade including schema and forest prep, installation of roles and services, verification of AD heath and replication and finally after the rest of the iTX servers were fully operational, demotion of the legacy domain controllers and final AD health checks.
Helped design ADFS fully in Azure for student logons for SDBOR in South Dakota and also planned and executed their Exchange 2010 to Microsoft 365 migration.
In coordination with the Microsoft First Wave program I developed the infrastructure to deploy Windows 10s devices for the Bridgeport School District. This included creating the back-end infrastructure in In Tune to provide for rapid provisioning and Azure AD Join for control and management of the classroom PCs. This was hugely successful in displacing Chrome books and providing the students with a business class OS and Microsoft Office 365 for education. Managing a follow on project to expand the initial pilot of 50 PCs to deploy another 1000+ devices.
I have teamed up with South Dakota Universities to assist in moving the Exchange Hybrid role among Organizations in their Exchange forest to allow separate University divisions to migrate users to separate tenants.
In the fall of 2018 I upgraded the Fox TV corporate domain infrastructure of over 48 DCs across the country, which included both new equipment and OS conversion of recently purchased servers. Beginning with a server discovery and initial health check we used this information to determine upgrades or inplace installs would be performed. Installs included the build of the OS via remote access (HP iLO). Some existing servers were able to be upgraded in place. For the upgrade in place servers there was a process to decommission the server, allow replication to happen, then reinstall the new OS and then rejoin the server with fresh OS and the new DC version. For new servers the process involved adding the new server, doing the DC promo, then moving the legacy server name and IP to the new equipment. Servers were installed over several months time, adequate time delays were included to allow for replication between distant sites to ensure there was no corruption from replication. Once all servers were migrated to 2016 we brought their forest/domain functional level up to 2016.
In spring 2018 Fox TV engaged our services to have me remove 16 Exchange Mailbox clusters and upgrade their Hybrid servers to 2013. This included a lot of mail flow configuration experience and troubleshooting of mail relays that were undocumented.