Time is ticking for SPBiz with 5 weeks to go, and time for another in our series of great interviews with the SPBiz speakers.
I think you will all agree this series is really helping to get a true insight in to the speakers their background and what makes them tick.
Please welcome Vincent Biret, our friend and Sharepoint MVP from Montreal in Canada.
SPBiz: Hi Vincent thanks for, thanks for spending the time talking to us. So you know we are looking for honest answers to honest questions so our community and conference members get to know a bit about the real Vincent Biret…..onto the first Question:
If you had a super power what would it be?
Vincent: I’d really like to be able to teleport myself instantaneously anyplace in the world. I love traveling, visiting new places and meeting new people and if I could do that I’d spend my life traveling.
SPBiz: That would at least mean no more airport security. How would you best describe your day job outside of speaking at events?
Vincent: A Lot of time spent debugging in Visual Studio… I’m a tech lead at Negotium for the products team. We build products around SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure. My role is to make sure we build them in a proper way. So yes my days are spent between outlook, visual studio and meetings.
SPBiz: Who have you found most inspirational in the SharePoint world? E.g. who do you follow most closely?
Vincent: I’d like to thank @jthake and @LoungeFlyZ for the work they’ve done over the past years to make SharePoint/Office 365 more web friendly, more opened to the community and so on. With them I also follow @williambaer to keep up with what’s coming next.
In the community @andrewconnell and @ScotHillier are kind of “the tech gurus” to me, they’ve a lot of great ideas about what the product should be on the technical side and impact on it. I’ve been impressed to finally meet them in person at MVP summit and SPSNYC2014.
@GeekTrainer has done a great job adding lot of content about SharePoint/Office 365 on Microsoft Virtual Academy.
@ngeorgeault and I have been looking forward to working together for several years now, and that’s something we’ve been doing for a year now. He has a great vision and lot of ideas. Often he pops at my desk and says “hey Vince, I’ve had this stupid idea for our roadmap, what do you think? And how long it’s going to take to code it?”.
More recently the guys from @pimpthecloud also joined my company, check what they do (most of it in French sorry) it’s kick ass!
SPBiz: I am sure they will be all grateful for your recognition. Ok so onto a not so serious question....EMP has hit and a society without IT is once again being created, what work would you like to do for a living in that world?
Vincent: I used to sail boats during summer when I was young. And I miss that a lot. I’d probably be a professional skipper either to sail around rich people or to bring their boat to the right place at the right time.
SPBiZ: Sounds blissful, I am pretty sure I would end up damaging someones pride and joy....How did you get into SharePoint?
Vincent: 7 years ago I was working as an itpro for a company designing electric plans and robots for factories. One day the CEO came and said “we have plans and documentation everywhere, we need SharePoint, here are the DVD’s, make it work”. Obviously I knew nothing about it at that time and got tricked by the patching (back these days server updates did not include foundation ones, and I did not know that). I let you imagine the disaster that first implementation was. I took that as a challenge and started studying the technology and I started to like it.
SPBiZ: Wow thrown in at the deep end then....What is the most common business problem that you see and/or help business solve when using SharePoint?
Vincent: Well, as you probably already know we’re building one product to manage multilingualism in SharePoint and another one to improve search (automatic metadata extraction). So that’s probably two things I already helped a lot of companies to solve.
Other than this, I’m a very technical guy so when my boss sends me to customers most of the time it’s like “it’s broken, important customer blablabla fix it” or “they don’t know how to do that, find and explain how”. But every time I do something for a customer I try to give them as much insight as I can about what’s coming next and how they should build the thing in order to be “future proof”.
So I’d say the most common problem I see is businesses lacking of vision about what’s going to be the product in a few years and keeping on doing things like we use to do in 2010 for example.
SPBiz: I think that must be a common problem in most sectors....If you could tell someone to avoid ONE thing in the world of SharePoint that could be a pain for their business what would it be?
Vincent:Only one thing? That’s a difficult question ;-) They should avoid not planning their implementations when talking about SharePoint. Way too often staff is not trained enough, sizing/load is underestimated, governance has not been even drafted and people in the company put tons of data in SharePoint. That leads to disasters very costly to fix.
SPBiz: Music Time: What was the last Single, album or piece of music you bought or downloaded?
Vincent: Fu Manchu – the whole discography (any SharePointer fan of Kyuss, QOTSA, Hermano, Jack White out here?)
SPBiz: Not one I am familar with but will be my next search on spotify......Where do you think SharePoint will be in the next 3 years?
Vincent: On a technical perspective I think SharePoint will reassembled little by little in Azure. We’ve come a long way and there’s still a lot to do but think about it a minute: isn’t a website in azure (considering slots and everything) just a V2 of the WFE role of SharePoint? Worker Roles and/or we jobs are just better timer jobs, other services (like translation, search…) in Azure are just the equivalent of service applications and so on. The only big difference is that Azure is way more well designed for the web and the cloud. We’ve already seen pieces of SharePoint going to Azure like the cache, the content databases and other things.
On a functional perspective it’s just going to be a brand + UI + API’s for the clients.
So I don’t expect SharePoint to become less complex in terms of number of technologies involved but easier to operate because more adapted to the web.
SPBiz: It will be interesting to keep a close eye on in the coming years....right back to more serious questions...What day-to-day item, gadget or belonging could you not live without?
Vincent: Probably my laptop, it gives me access to so many things, I wouldn’t know what to do all day without it. The only periods when I don’t use it for a long time are when I’m traveling.
SPBiz: We are of course ABSOLUTELY delighted to be able to host your session during SPBiz, what do you think is the main takeaway that you want your audience to leave with?
Vincent: Thanks for giving me this opportunity to reach the community. My session is going to be about the Office Graph and how businesses can use it to transform the way they access/store/use information in their organizations. In IT we regularly have some new game changing paradigms that kind of start a revolution in the way we work day to day. I think the Graph (not only Microsoft’s one) is one of these.
After decades we’ve come to the conclusion that relational databases and directories are not the best answer to get answer about “connected” information. We’ve also realized that we have many places where the information is stored and it’s hard to get pieces of information spread in different systems to work together. Finally we also learnt that the “I’m going to need a nuclear power plant every night to ETL data from everywhere and be able to analyse it” paradigm is costly, not very efficient, and hard to change once in place.
So here comes the Graph to provide you information from everywhere, that you don’t even have to search for it, in a very cheap and efficient way and so on.
My session will explain what’s a Graph, what’s Microsoft’s implementation of it, what can you do in your company with it and provide demos (both for power users and developers).
SPBiz: Thanks Vincent, we are looking forward to that one. Also thanks for talking the time out of your busy schedule to answer these questions and allowing the SP Community and SPBiz attendees to get to know you a little better.
Vincent: Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to introduce my session and interact with the community! .........I’d like to use this opportunity to interact with my audience, if you guys have any specific question before I give my session, please tweet @baywet I’ll try to take that into consideration preparing it.
There we are another great insight, we hope you enjoyed what Vincent had to say. Keep an eye out for the next in the series of interviews.
by Fraser Beadle via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community
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