Abstract: Lately the word “evangelist” which is traditionally related to religion, has begun to be used more and more often in a new context, as an evangelist of ideas, and ideas which are far away from religion. For instance, Richard Stollman is often called an Open Source evangelist; official position of Anton Nossik in SUP is again an evangelist. Russian Microsoft subsidiary, which, by the way, introduced this term in the new context in Russia, has a special division of technical evangelists. The goal of this session is to describe what evangelism really means, how beneficial it can be for a software development company, what kind of projects are most suitable to be evangelized and how to effectively and efficiently integrate evangelism efforts to the software development process

Bio: Alexander Lozhechkin leads a team of technical evangelists in the Department of Platform and Evangelism group in Microsoft Russia starting from January 2007. Before this Alexander had been an Architect and Developer Evangelist in Microsoft since 2004. Before Microsoft Alexander was leading software development team of document management solution DocsVision in Digital Design company. Alexander holds master’s degree in Electronics from Saint-Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation, PhD in Computer Science from University of Railways Communications.