Friday Feature: Tobias Zimmergren

 

Tobias Zimmergren     

Job Title: Product Owner – Cloud Offerings

Company Name: Rencore GmbH

MVP Profile

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zimmergren/

Twitter: @zimmergren

Website: https://zimmergren.net

 

1. Can you share a summary of your career path, and what you do?

 

When I was in my mid-teens, which seems like a very long time ago today, I started to adopt an interest for technology. Figuring out how things work, how they fit together and understanding cause and effect patterns was triggering my inner knowledge monster. When I was a teen I started to learn various programming languages to cater for my need to learn new things, which has led me onwards on the career path I am on today. The last decade I’ve worked with SharePoint and .NET to build products, Intranet- and Portal solutions and in more recent years with Office 365, Azure, docker and .NET core. During this period I have been a junior, senior and principal consultant for employers, as well as running my own business for around 9 years. In more recent years I joined a team of incredibly skilled and talented people which keeps my knowledge monster happy! I am now a Product Manager for our Cloud Offerings at Rencore, working on an analysis and customization governance product for Office 365 and SharePoint, called AnalysisCloud.

 

2. How have you helped grow others’ careers during your nine years as an MVP?

 

During my years as an MVP I’ve always seen an interest in learning new things myself, and the best way to do this has always been to share what I’ve taught myself or been taught by others. I co-founded and ran the Sweden SharePoint User Group for around 10 years, where we had meetups around Collaboration with SharePoint and Office 365. This has been an incredible source of inspiration and knowledge sharing, as well as building a fun community where there were none before. I’ve also been sharing a lot of information in my blog over the years, where I am getting a lot of contact with people who want to discuss specific issues or challenges with the SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure ecosystems.

When it comes to growing peoples’ careers, I think each individual themselves are capable, and responsible, for pursuing the career they want. For reference I know that with SSUG (Sweden SharePoint User Group) we have created many new opportunities for people, including new jobs and candidates for hire or contract work when community peers have asked for introductions or looking to strengthen their businesses – introducing people to one another happens regularly on these community events, and is a solid way to stay up to date with what’s going on in your area, and to keep up to date with what organizations are up to.

 

If your thing is SharePoint and Office 365, I would definitely recommend checking out the SharePoint Saturday events.

Two events I’ve been participating in are:

• SharePoint Saturday Munich: http://www.spsevents.org/city/Munich
• SharePoint Saturday Stockholm: http://www.spsevents.org/city/Stockholm

 

3. What tools and tactics do you use to stay up-to-date with the IT Industry?

 

Great question! I’m staying up to date in a pretty structured way, since there’s really too much information to digest it all these days.

Tactics:

I usually put a priority on feeds, networks and channels. This gives me an indication that when something of Top Priority happens, I should read it; Anything else is only digested if I actually can find the time for it. This is true for any medium or tool I use; prioritize the input channels, then decide per your own availability.

Part from the fragment of information I put into a priority bucket, I just use the social media flow from Twitter and various platforms to get the latest insights.

Staying up to date is important, so I do try to at least once a week have a sit-down to read through anything I’ve saved for later.

Tools:

• I use this to save things for later; I usually read them in the evenings or mornings, based on priority of the tagged articles.
• I get a steady stream of incoming RSS feeds, and I plow through the headlines and sort anything interesting into the Pocket priorities for later, the rest is discarded. There’s just too much content to read it all.
• TweetDeck for Twitter. Latest announcements and news are always showing up here. Recommended hashtags from my daily use: #office365, #office365dev, #SharePoint
• Events, Conferences, User Groups: Meet up with people and network with your industry peers.
• GitHub: Office 365 Patterns and Practices is a good place to start looking into what’s going on in this sphere, and to get in touch with folks in the community: https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP
• Slack, Teams & Yammer: There’s plenty of community networks available for anyone to join; I encourage you to look them up and join them, as you’ll be able to directly communicate with community peers in a relaxed atmosphere.

 

4. What was your favorite tech announcement this year?

 

There’s been so many announcements this year that I don’t even know where to start. I guess a small catered list of announcements I like would be these:

Office 365 & SharePoint announcements:

• Office 365: Microsoft Flow and OneDrive/SPO libraries: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/flow-in-spo-document-libraries.
• Office 365: Compliance Manager: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Security-Privacy-and-Compliance/Manage-Your-Compliance-from-One-Place-Announcing-Compliance/ba-p/106493
• Office 365: Security and Compliance: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Security-Privacy-and-Compliance/Bringing-deeper-integration-and-new-capabilities-to-Office-365/ba-p/109409
• Office 365: Multi-geo: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Security-Privacy-and-Compliance/Introducing-Multi-Geo-in-Office-365/ba-p/107016
• SharePoint: Microsoft SharePoint 2019 (and thus Office 2019, Exchange 2019 and Skype for Business 2019) is coming: https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/09/26/the-next-perpetual-release-of-office.

 

Azure announcements:

• AAD: Azure AD managed service identity: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/keep-credentials-out-of-code-introducing-azure-ad-managed-service-identity
• Azure: Develop Azure Functions on any platform: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/appserviceteam/2017/09/25/develop-azure-functions-on-any-platform
• Azure & Docker: Introducing AKS (Managed Kubernetes): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-azure-container-service-aks-managed-kubernetes-and-azure-container-registry-geo-replication

 

There’s plenty of more awesome announcements, but it would be an entire blog post to cover them all 😊

 

5. What’s your perspective on the relationship between business and technology?

With a successful collaboration platform for example, a business can thrive and achieve its goals a lot faster and more efficiently than without it. I am a strong believer in technology as an enhancement and enabler for any business, which is evident given what I’ve been spending my time on in the last decade.

Imagine if you could not use your mobile phone to stay up to date with friends and family, local events and happenings. It would be a lot harder to communicate and get things done. The same is true for any business – enabling a mobile- and cloud-first experience helps organizations to be available, accessible and flexible. The modern workplace is really a thing. I am working remotely every day, which is enabled by all the modern technologies we have around us today. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to help my organization in the same way I am today.