Back again ;)

Long time no post. A sentence more than true for this blog. It’s been a while since the last post and yes you are guessing right, some things have changed.

Don’t’ be afraid I’m still in the whole SharePoint space, actually I think I’m more connected to the product than any time before. At our company we did some great progress in the field and are now a team of about 25 with four Microsoft Gold Competences. Three of them relate to SharePoint and the other one to Lync. At this point I want to shout out a big Thank You to all my colleagues and friends at Solvion. I think we’ve created an creative and engaging environment that suits us perfect and our team spirit is protecting us from misunderstandings and huge conflicts. Also I still consider my work to be fun first and job afterwards. Ad multos annos.

At the time of my last post I guess I was working the most time within Visual Studio. Probably producing code my colleagues had to rewrite as a whole again every now and then. That changed some how. I think I never opened VS in 2012, so no more code for me. As the new quality of code shows a wise decision. My day to day routine changed to project management, facilitating workshops and getting some work done in the pre sales area. By today we are using Scrum as our development method and innovation games to make our workshops more interesting. We have two certified Scrum Masters and two certified Innovation Games facilitators now. So we really invested in learning something new and also took the chance to learn from some experienced guys in each field. Getting the certificate of some field is a nice thing, but way more important than that is the time spent with the smart guys in such a course. You can ask real world questions and they get answered by real world experience. And you get some days off, focusing only on the new techniques and mind sets.

Reading my old posts I can feel the pride I had back then, showing some of our cool work. By now we have 15 SharePoint extensions, three Lync extensions, a product called “Customer Service Desk” and a product called “Contract Management” in our portfolio. You can check out some of our work in a short video here.

I really hope I’ll start posting now on a regular basis. But as one last thing in this second “you are welcome” post of this blog I want to say thank you to Andrew from 21Apps. I got the chance to met Andrew in person at SharePoint Conference Slovenia 2009. His commitment to SharePoint impressed me and changed my mind set. Looking back on the things we did over here, scrum and innovation games for example you can really see what a big influence he had. Also I like his tweets. Topics: SharePoint and football, how much better it can get? Thank you Andrew!

Next post will be about the SharePoint Conference Vienna last week. Solvion had five guys speaking there including my colleague Stefan Hager and myself with a session called “Boost your SharePoint”.

I would like to close this post with some famous words from a big Austrian who grew up in the same town I’m living and working by today … “I’ll be back!”