Extending SharePoint Patterns and Practices team with new MVP community members

We are happy to announce additional community members being included in the SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) team. We are really excited to grow the team, which will help us to address growing interest in the SharePoint community and development topics. Starting from this week, SharePoint PnP team has been extended with Mikael Svenson (Puzzlepart), Andrew Connell (Voitanos), and Andrew Koltyakov (ARVO Systems). They are all well-known MVPs who have been active in different areas of the SharePoint PnP community effort for a long time.

SharePoint Patterns and Practices Team coordinates the open-source and community driven work for SharePoint development topics in Github. This work is supervised by the SharePoint engineering, but SharePoint development community MVPs are closely involved in the day-to-day activities. SharePoint PnP has numerous open source components and controls, which are being built together with the community. SharePoint PnP team also coordinates SharePoint development samples, documentation, and other guidance.

Existing SharePoint PnP team community members are Erwin van Hunen (Rencore), Paolo Pialorsi (Piasys.com), Radi Atanassov (OneBit), Waldek Mastykarz (Rencore) and Elio Struyf (Valo Intranet). We are further looking into extending the team from the people who have been active and closely involved in the SharePoint Dev community activities under the SharePoint Patterns and Practices initiative.

Introduction of new SharePoint PnP team members

Meet Andrew Connell

Here’s Andrew C. with his own words.

Andrew Connell is a full stack web developer with a focus on Microsoft Azure & Office 365, specifically the Office 365 APIs, SharePoint, Microsoft’s .NET Framework / .NET Core, Angular, Node.js and Docker that enjoys development, writing & teaching… if it’s cutting edge web you will find Andrew there! He has received Microsoft’s MVP award every year since 2005 and has helped thousands of developers through the various courses he’s authored and taught both in-person & in online courses. Recently he launched his own on-demand video platform, Voitanos to deliver his on-demand video training.

Throughout the years Andrew has been fortunate enough to share what he has learned at conferences like Microsoft’s TechEd, Build, Ignite & SharePoint conferences, Angular’s ngConf & AngularU, SPTechCon, SP Live 360, and Techorama among many others all around the world in North America, Europe, Asia & Australia. You can find Andrew on his popular blog (http://www.andrewconnell.com), follow him on Twitter @andrewconnell, check out some of the numerous projects he’s involved in on GitHub (http://www.github.com/andrewconnell) or listen to his popular weekly podcast, The Microsoft Cloud Show (http://www.microsoftcloudshow.com), which is focused on Microsoft cloud services such as Azure and Office 365 as well as the competitive cloud landscape.

• Andrew at Twitter – @AndrewConnell

Meet Andrew Koltyakov

Here’s Andrew K. with his own words.

I am a developer, consultant, and entrepreneur at ARVO Systems. I’ve been engaged with SharePoint for years now (since 2010), delivering custom solutions for our customers. I always try adopting new technologies and tools which I consider perspective keeping in mind some strategical ideas such as “will it make my team more effective” and “what our clients will get” by starting using a specific change in a workflow and techs. In a modern world tech, people should be on bleeding edge and start adopting things which are “new today for a business” but might already become legacy tomorrow. That’s why I drive my own team being first where appropriate and never stop learning.

As a result of such approaches, I’ve been investing a lot of my time in sister technologies and automation routines, like Node.js tools ecosystem for SharePoint. These investments then are adopted by a team. I’m also an active, sometimes very active, opensource contributor. You’ll never lose by sharing your knowledge and practices, we’re are not the medieval artisans, only things driven by a community evolve and reliable on the long terms.

I consider this brought me to Office 365 Developer Patterns & Practices (PnP), a combination of SharePoint and opensource ecosystem and the desire of sharing experience and help folks. Sometimes I reach people with blog posts: https://www.linkedin.com/in/koltyakov/detail/recent-activity/posts/, but I would say that the main platform of my presence is GitHub https://github.com/koltyakov.

• Andrew at Twitter – @AndrewKoltyakov

Meet Mikael Svenson

Here’s Mikael with his own words.

I am the CTO at Puzzlepart, an Office 365 consultancy and have worked in the enterprise search field for over 15 years implementing solutions for major international corporations and for several Nordic governmental institutions, though I don’t primarily do the search on a day by day basis anymore. Being pegged a search guy has resulted in two books “SharePoint Search Queries Explained” and “Working with FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint”. I also enjoy speaking at the occasional conferences locally and abroad to validate my random blogging live 🙂

I’ve been an Office Server and Services MVP since 2011, I help Microsoft Norway locally as a P-TSP role, and I’m on the board of the Norwegian Office 365 User Group, spreading the gospel in the local community. Being a developer at heart I love hackathons and solving code challenges. Contributing to PnP over the years has been a very good experience in this aspect and has also increased my productivity due to re-use of what others have made.

You can read my tech musings at techmikael.com.

• Mikael at Twitter – @mikaelsvenson

What is SharePoint PnP initiative?

SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) is a nick-name for SharePoint Dev Ecosystem activities coordinated by SharePoint engineering. SharePoint PnP is community driven open source initiative where Microsoft and external community members are sharing their learning’s around implementation practices for SharePoint and Office 365. Active development and contributions happen in GitHub by providing contributions on the samples, reusable components, and documentation.

PnP is owned and coordinated by SharePoint engineering, but this is work done by the community for the community. The initiative is currently facilitated by Microsoft, but already at this point, we have multiple community members as part of the PnP Core team and we are looking to extend the SharePoint PnP Team with more community members.

“Sharing is caring”

Vesa Juvonen, Senior Program Manager, SharePoint Engineering, Microsoft – 28th of February 2018