MVP Takeover – David Martos

David Martos was selected as ‘MVP Takeover’ for the month of October. David tells the European SharePoint Community about himself and what content and information he found or finds useful. Read on to find out more!

David Martos

David Martos

 

After working for some small companies as a .NET developer, David joined Spenta in 2004 for building software products for Local and Regional Government. Some months later Spenta and Microsoft started a collaboration for building some solutions accelerators and this is when David began working with SharePoint and other Microsoft products. After several years of collaboration and a lot of learning; which was shared with the community in several ways through open portals such as the Citizen Service Platform or the Street Scene projects.   David and Spenta then decided it was time to face a new challenge.

In 2010 there were early signs in the market that Social would be the next wave on inovation and the company decided that it would be a good idea to invest in Social Corporate Networking and commenced on opeartion Beezy, a product that is already consolidated in the SharePoint ecosystem. Time confirmed there idea was right and now big companies, including Microsoft, have also invested in that area.

Recently David started his new position as CTO at Spenta and he is now working on the next wave of social networking tools along with his colleagues, but this is still a work-in-progress.

From a community point of view, David has been collaborating with the Spanish SharePoint community for years, and became SharePoint Server MVP in 2010. At this time of writing, he stills keep this award. Although he isn´t really active in international events, his role as a software architect in collaboration with Microsoft solutions accelerators development made him work closely with SharePoint communities all around the world. You can follow him on his blog or on twitter.

Top 5 Twitter Accounts they would recommend the community to follow

There are several individuals that everyone connected with SharePoint should follow, but I’m pretty sure that the majority of people reading this article are already following them. Instead of giving you the top 5 people you may be already following I will list the top 5 SharePoint spanish talents. They don’t normally write english content but, anyway, it’s worthy to follow them.  Sadly I can´t include everyone I want to on this list, but hopefully they will forgive me.

  • @adiazcan:He is possibly the most talented Spanish SharePoint MVP, if we aggregate his knowledge on development and administration.
  • @ekapic:A rare human being. He is this kind of person that is able to talk about SharePoint from a user or business perspective and, even more weird, he can do it using as many languages as you can imagine.
  • @enriccarrion:The most talented SharePoint developer I have ever met, althought he is not aware of it. Not really prolific at social networks but, anything he says should be treated as  dogma.
  • @jcgm1978:The opposite of Enric, he is the most prolific spanish SharePoint expert. His twitter account can be used as a guide to be connected with every happening related to the SharePoint ecosystem.
  • @migueltabera:A SharePoint systems encyclopedia. He knows almost every single detail of every single version of SharePoint.  Furthermore, if you ask him anything and he doesn’t know the answer, he finds it without batting an eyelid.

Featured eBook – an eBook that they have found to be beneficial

It would be nearly impossible for me to highlight one e-book. There are several spanish books that I would feature here, however, if I needed to select the title of a book for the generic audience, I would say Professional SharePoint 2013 Administration. Perhaps for those of you that, like me, live in the development side of the story, having this information handy makes our life that tiny bit easier.

Featured Video – A SharePoint video that you believe would be of interest to the European SharePoint Community

A long time ago we published this video to show people what Social Corporate Networking means to us. Of course this talks about our product but the important part of it is understanding the concepts and why it’s so important to be able to collaborate in a more natural way with our peers.

Top 5 SharePoint Articles

As with the top e-Book and the top twitter accounts to follow, it’s really difficult to highlight a list of SharePoint articles I’ve ever read. First because I’m pretty sure that if I try to think about that, the top 5 articles would be related to what I’m currently working on. Second because I have a list of hundreds of articles marked as “mandatory” and selecting 5 of them would take me hours of reading. I will try to select 5 good articles. Although some are quite old, they helped shape my learning and could lead you to great new content.

1. Waldek Mastykarz’s post – Programmatically provisioning Variations in SharePoint Server 2010 Programmatically
I found Waldek with this article and followed him since then. When it comes to SharePoint development and WCM, he knows what you are looking for.

2. Spenser Harbar’s post – Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization
Everyone who worked with SharePoint 2010 gets scared at “I have problems with the User Profile Synchronization” words. After reading Spencer Harbar’s article you will still be scared but, at least, will know how to face these problems head on.

3. Chris O’Brien’s post SharePoint 2013 – my view on what’s new (particularly for developers)
This is a nice summary of what we, as developers, found when SharePoint 2013 was released. Of course you will find several other interesting posts on this blog, especially regarding ALM, where Chris is a real specialist.

4. Tobias Zimmergren’s post – SP 2013: Some new DelegateControl additions to the SharePoint 2013 master pages
To be honest, I wanted to highlight a post from Tobias but this is an imposible task. This is, in my oppinion, the best SharePoint development blog. Articles are interesting and clear, and the look & feel is great. Take this article as an example but do not hesiste to browse other articles.

5.Kirk Evans post –  ALM for SharePoint Apps – This article is part of a series on ALM and SharePoint that I found really useful as a starting point for people asking me for information on this topic, especially if you are planning to use TFS as the continous integration service.

Highlight a cool SharePoint tool

Of course I would naturally highlight Beezy as the coolest SharePoint tool, because it helps user adoption in any SharePoint deployment. However, taking into consideration the audience and my background I will highlight AutoSPInstaller, from @brianlala and other developers. This tools helps you automating SharePoint farms’ deployment and I have to say it changed my life when I first heard about this awesome tool.

Guest MVP’s choice of content to highlight

Over the last few months there have been three different hot topics in the SharePoint world. SharePoint and Yammer integration, the decision to retire some of the existing certification paths and the new development model. If I wanted to highlight one of them, I would highlight the new development model.

As a developer who has been working with SharePoint for nearly 10 years, it has been hard to accommodate for such a big change. As many others I can see the benefits, but also as many others I feel we are not yet ready for what Microsoft is pushing us to do, especially because of the lack of documentation. People that started working on the sandbox solutions when they appeared (and were the suggested development model) with SharePoint 2010 are now scared by the fact they have been now deprecated. Well, they have been only deprecated when it comes to user code, as you can see detailed here.

Of course you can do a lot of stuff by using apps, as Liam Cleary explains here.  There are still a lot of things you can’t do with apps (and most of them will never be possible). If you are thinking about being in the Cloud and working in Office365, you must start thinking in apps. Nowadays a lot of organizations, especially the big ones, are not willing to to this movement and they still need a lot of heavy customizations and high-trust development that can be only possible with the legacy farm solutions model. The good news is that this is still possible, so we can continue to invest there, but we nee

d to be careful because just a few years ago the sandbox was the future and now it doesn’t look like something you should be investing on. Nobody knows what will be the next accepted development model.

Do you have feedback or a question for David?agree with David? If so, please leave a comment below.

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David Martos spoke about ‘Enhancing SharePoint 2013 Social Capabilities’ at ESPC14. Check out his session now>>

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