It’s time for another MVP takeover!
About me
Toni Frankola
I have been a part of the Microsoft ecosystem for 16 years now, during which time I’ve been awarded a SharePoint/Office 365 MVP for the last 6 years. Thinking about it, a great part of my life has been dedicated to SharePoint and helping the SharePoint community, which eventually turned from passion to business, so for the last 7 years I’ve been working as the CEO for Acceleratio (https://acceleratio.net/), a software development company I share with my co-founder and friend Frane. You may have heard of Acceleratio as the creator of SPDocKit (https://www.spdockit.com/), SysKit (https://www.syskit.com/) or CloudKit 365 (https://www.cloudkit365.com/), tools for SharePoint On-Premises and Online administration, as well as for monitoring the health of your SharePoint servers.
When working as a consultant myself back in the day, or now when I’m running Acceleratio, my ultimate goal has never changed: to provide the best solutions to simplify the daily tasks of SharePoint and Office 365 administrators and consultants. I like to think that we are doing a good job, which more than 2000 of our satisfied users can confirm.
Meeting with colleagues inside the community as well as the end users working with SharePoint and exchanging our knowledge and experience is a great joy for myself and my team, so we often visit different SharePoint events. For most of them, I’m often there as a speaker as well. This year’s SharePoint Europe is no exception. You are welcome to visit my session, “Prepare for SharePoint 2016 – IT Pro Best Practices for Managing Your SharePoint”.
You can reach Toni at: tfrankola@acceleratio or via his Twitter handle @ToniFrankola.
Top Twitter Accounts to Follow
A little shout-out to my SharePoint friends, here is a list of the top 5 accounts (in no particular order) I follow when it comes to SharePoint and Office 365 topics: @wictor (Wictor Wilén, a fellow MVP from Sweden, covers a broad range of topics with fun comments), @toddklindt (Todd Klindt, a fellow MVP from the USA, follow him for all the IT PRO related stuff), @wonderlaura (Laura Rogers, a fellow MVP from the USA, follow her for all the Power User stuff), @SharePoint (the official SharePoint account), and @spdockit (the ultimate SharePoint admin tool has its own Twitter account).
Top Blogs to Follow
Spence Harbar – http://www.harbar.net/ – the ultimate IT PRO resources and troubleshooting guides
Andrew Connel – http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog – a lot of useful stuff for developers
Stefan Goßner – https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/stefan_gossner/ – a lot of useful information about SharePoint patches and updates directly from a guy who works for Microsoft support
Chris O’Brien – http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/ – yet another great SharePoint development blog
Waldek Mastykarz – https://blog.mastykarz.nl/ – and a final great blog for developers
All the guys mentioned in the Twitter section also have their own blogs and you should take a look at them too.
Featured Video
I cannot pick a single video here, but I would say in recent years Microsoft has put a lot of investment into Channel 9, and everyone thirsty for high-quality video content about Microsoft technologies should tune in here: https://channel9.msdn.com/
Cool Tool
Not to brag, but I’ve heard only great feedback about CloudKit 365 so far. It is our newest edition to the Acceleratio product family. CloudKit 365 is a cloud service created for Office 365 administration, with a large focus on SharePoint Online reporting. There are two other tools you should take a look at, too. The first is the main repository for the community-driven Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices (PnP) initiative https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP and the second tool is SPCAF (https://www.spcaf.com/) – a code analysis tool for SharePoint and Office 365 solutions.
Final Thoughts
The good news is that SharePoint is back. It is really nice to hear about all the new stuff coming from Microsoft, and to see how the community has embraced all the new cool stuff that was and is to be released. With the release of SharePoint 2016, we are going to see a lot more investment in hybrid deployments and further integrations with services in Office 365. So yeah, 2016, is going to be an exciting year for everyone working with SharePoint and Office 365!
