Bjoern H Rapp is MVP of the Month! See the top Twitter accounts he thinks you should be following, cool SharePoint tools, resources, content and more!
Bjoern Rapp
Dear fellow SharePointers. I’m Bjoern Harald Rapp and I live in Oslo with my wife Mayya , 3 kids (daughter Maria, sons Brian and Adrian ). I have worked with SharePoint and related technologies more or less exclusively since 2009, primarily as a developer and Consultant but recently I have gradually been climbing up the ladder to a more Senior Architect and Advisor role. I’m also a Microsoft Certified Trainer and I’m frequently hired as instructor at classes
Being part of the worldwide SharePoint and Office 365 community has been one of my great joys the last years. The combination of travelling around, meeting friends, submitting tips and at the same time learning a lit myself can’t be matched. I have become a regular speakers at smaller and bigger events like SharePoint Saturday, SharePoint Connect and SharePoint Fest DC. I’m the founder and previous organizer of SharePoint Saturday Oslo and a member of the board at the biggest local user group the Norwegian SharePoint Community (NSC).
I have a passion for apps, mobile development and technologies like Angular, CoffeeScript and Node, always trying to think up ideas how to make life and work easier using Office 365 and SharePoint solutions. I have a blog at www.sharepointviking.com where I share both my technical findings, my journeys and general perspectives on life. I received the SharePoint MVP award for the first time in 2013 which was renewed in 2014.
Fun facts about me…well.. For many years I have kept the Private Pilot License and my dream is to upgrade to helicopter before I’m getting too old. In younger years I was also an avid climber and polar enthusiast, and I’m probably the only MVP who has crossed the Greenland ice cap on skis.
Top 5 Twitter Accounts you would recommend the community to follow
@sympmarc: Marc Anderson is a great developer and the man behind SPServices, but a person who also possesses deep insights on the business side of things.
@andrewconnell: Andrew Connell, AC, is always in front when it comes to development. Via his great blog he has been one of the prime contributors to the SharePoint community for years.
@mikaelsvenson: If you are looking for insights on what’s going on under the hood on anything related to SharePoint Search and related cloud technologies like Delve and Office 365 Video, Mikael is the no.1 source.
@harbars: Spencer Harbar is widely recognized as one of the world’s most SharePoint authorities. His blog harbar.net is my primary source for anything that is not documented on Technet.
@buckleyplanet: Christian Buckley is the king of social computing in the SharePoint and Office 365 sphere. His insights and thoughts can be read on both his own blog and several others like itunity.com and CMSWire.
Featured eBook – an eBook you have found to be beneficial
Even though I’m enthusiastic about programming, I would never recommend a coded solution if there are easier ways to solve a problem in SharePoint. For that reason I have often found the SharePoint Composite Handbook useful. It contains tons of information on how to create fully functional solutions, using nothing but SharePoint OOTB functionality
Featured Video – A SharePoint video that you believe would be of interest to the European SharePoint Community
Top 5 SharePoint Articles
Although it’s a 2010-related article, Spencer Harbar’s Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization is probably the most useful one I have ever read. Making User Profile Synch to work correctly used to be one of my biggest headaches…before I saw that article for the first time
Here comes the search King! Mikael’s Rock your SharePoint Search with 13 Easy Tune-Ups, and everything else related on search from the same guy are must reads.
For those of you who have difficulties differing between the SharePoint app model and the Office 365 API’s and when to use each…have a look at this great article by dev rock star Chris O’Brien.
I love Power BI and its approach to self-service reporting and analysis using familiar tools like Excel and integration in Office 365. John White always delivers content on this topic with great insight, like this one on Scheduled Data Refresh
And not to forget, have a look into Andrew Connell’s series on Navigating the New World of SharePoint Online, Office 365 and On-Premises, guiding the good old SharePoint On Prem devs and admins into the new world of Cloud, Office 365 and Azure.
Highlight a cool SharePoint tool
Simply the best code analysis tool out there. SPCAF made by my fellow MVP and friend Matthias Einig and his colleagues at Rencore, has really made it a lot easier for me to keep my coding at a high quality and also to stay in tune with best practices within SharePoint and Office 365 development
Guest MVP’s choice of content to highlight
I’m currently focusing on presenting sessions that are focused on app development, in particular to highlight the options that are currently possible using the Office 365 API to consume Office 365 Services like Mail, Calendar and OneDrive for Business in apps running on tablets and mobile phones. I plan to run several presentations this year and will continuously update them with new functionality. One of the tool I’m especially fond of is Xamarin, a cross-platform development environment for mobile solutions running on iOS, Android and Windows Phone, made by the great people who once developed Mono, the open source implementation of the .NET Framework.
Mobile apps will be more and more the prime tool to access and work with your data, wherever you are, and developers working with SharePoint and Office 365 solutions will most certainly have trouble avoiding them!
Frontend development using client technologies based on javascript is something every SharePoint developer can’t ignore. Creating effective apps using tools like jQuery and Angular.js are other presentations I will focus on ahead, and these have always created lots of interesting discussions that are a great motivation for me to continue improving them and to always keep the content up to date.
For education content from Bjoern H Rapp check out this blog Power on BI 1: Self-Service BI in the cloud – Read Now>>
