Mikael Svenson was selected as ‘MVP Takeover’ for the month of February. Mikael tells the European SharePoint Community about himself and what content and information he found or finds useful. Read on to find out more!
My career started in 1996 when I was employed as a game designer for a Norwegian based games company due to the fact that I had played a lot of computer games. Come 2000 I joined the ranks of a company doing media monitoring software and services, which led me into .NET. That company spawned off a .NET based search engine and my first contact with SharePoint was making an indexing connector towards it using WSS 2.0. I sort of learned SharePoint security and rights inheritance the hard way without ever seeing or using SharePoint.
2008 was the year I went head deep into SharePoint, keeping my search focus which I had learned to love. Having also worked with FAST, the FAST integration with SharePoint in 2010 led med to fill a void in the SharePoint community, answering questions about FAST and also authoring a book on the subject. This led to my MVP nomination and first award in 2011, subsequently awarded in 2012 and 2013.
I’ve been with Puzzlepart since 2011 as a principal consultant, doing consulting, in-house App development, teaching the occasional SharePoint power user course as well as assisting Microsoft Norway as a Partner Technology Solution Professional.
Community wise I’m on the board of the Norwegian SharePoint Community as well as having spoken there numerous times, and I’m also part of organizing SharePoint Saturday Oslo which we started up last year. I have also spoken at SharePoint Saturday in Belgium and at the Microsoft SharePoint conference, all on the topic of search.
Top 5 twitter account
Twitter is an awesome source of information which I’m tapping into sporadically. Basically checking in when time allows. Since I’m pegged as a search guy I’ll highlight some other people who know their stuff on search and whom I have in my search and rescue team 🙂
@molnaragnes Agnes has so much real life knowledge of tuning search, and she knows how to troubleshoot it. And she’s also very nice in person 🙂
@matthewmcd Matthew has some great posts on working with the search UI. He combines his demos with being a K9 trainer, so there is a lot of dogs around.
@givenscj Chris is just a ball of energy and I have no idea how he manages it all. He also has that hacker gene, digging into SharePoint bits where you really shouldn’t.. my kind of guy who loves to take stuff apart.
@jopxtwits First time I met Joris was when I taught a FAST Search for SharePoint course in Belgium. Apparently he was paying attention and seems to be doing more and more search these days. One to watch!
@coreyroth If you’re doing search development, Corey will lead the way on how to write the code. ‘Nuff said!
Featured eBook
BA-Insight has published The Essential Guide to Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2013. A very good read and probably something I would have loved to write myself for 2013, but never had the time. Want to get an overview of what SharePoint 2013 can offer in search, then this is one of the best places to start.
Featured Video
SharePoint can be used for many things, and at the annual Arctic SharePoint Challenge in Norway teams are encouraged to use SharePoint in new and innovate ways. The video “Sexual Harassment Early Warning System in SharePoint” is one of the submissions my team made which led Puzzlepart to victory in 2012! Who said SharePoint wasn’t fun 🙂 Watch Now>>
Top 5 SharePoint Articles
1. Steve Curran’s post – “Understanding and Getting SharePoint 2013 Search Managed Properties to Work”. Steve’s an awesome developer, and this post gives some insight into the search schema in 2013 and how managed properties work.
2. If you’re writing Query Rules in SharePoint 2013, you have to know your variables. I accidentally stumbled upon this TechNet article and it’s been a life saver. Read Now >>
3. Until I read Vaidy’s post “How can I achieve the best freshness of search results? Introducing Continous Crawls for SharePoint” I had no idea what it really was at it wasn’t explained anywhere. Reading this article and communicating with the document team at Microsoft lead them to improve the wording on TechNet around continuous crawl – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219802.aspx
4. Alexey Kozhemiakin was the first one to write about the “hidden” page in SharePoint 2013 which show how rank score is calculated for an item. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219802.aspx A true gem, for those interested that is 🙂
5. This one is actually not search related, but Wictor Wilén’s post on how to enable PDF Previews for document libraries with Office Web Apps was something I enjoyed – especially since I managed to dupe his post with my own over a month after his one.
Cool tool
The SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool is a must when creating search based solutions. I’m also a contributor on the tool myself, and expect a new release around SPC14 time with some cool new features!
Topic to highlight
With SharePoint 2010 came a REST API to work with Excel Workbooks. With SharePoint 2013, this became even more awesome due to Office Web Apps. Even using SharePoint Foundation this API can be used to pull out graphs, cell ranges etc., much like the Enterprise only Excel Viewer web part. But that’s not it, you can also manipulate data in the Excel sheet real time by posting data to cells, building appliations tapping into the calculating and graphing power of Excel.
Stay tuned for more SharePoint content by joining our community or by following us on twitter or facebook.
For more expert advice from Mikael, why not attend his ESPC14 session ‘Rock your Office 365(SharePoint Online) Search With 13 Easy Tune-Ups‘ in Barcelona Spain from 5-8 May.
