Awesome! I’ve been asked to contribute by the European SharePoint Conference folks, to the “MVP TakeOver” section.

Rodrigo Pinto

So… My name is Rodrigo Pinto, I live near Lisbon, Portugal (the most outstanding country in Europe the world!) with my beautiful 5 year old princess (the most outstanding minion I’ve ever seen – my life!).

My journey started way back in 1998 when I was invited to work in the Lisbon Stock Market as a developer: back in those days I was doing mainly “software maintenance”. Those 6 years demarked my professional life, structuring my standards of knowing & designing systems and solutions.

I remember I was bitten by the SharePoint bee hard, in 2004 with my first SharePoint hand-shake: financial institution intranet with tons of integration, migrations and features.

Been almost ten years related to the financial market, I decided that it was time for a change and accepted an invitation to work with SharePoint in a totally different market: a national tv station. We adopted SharePoint 2007 in the first beta version and it was a tough platform to deal with, back then . Although it was rough it was one of the best memories I cherish : great team, great moment, great knowledge gather by bumping head against the wall now and then.
Back in 2007, the platform itself had huge adoption, so huge that Microsoft didn’t have enough staff to support all clients, so, we as customers,created an internal network for helping each other’s.

From that umbrella our User Group was born: started with a meeting now and then, later on we did a SharePointPt Day event and we being delivering sessions and meeting every month since then.

I love to help, to share, to collaborate, to coach, I’m doing this since I can remember.
Done and doing a lot of local events in my country along with Microsoft and some international conferences such as SharePoint Connections, Iberian SharePoint Conference and of course, the European SharePoint Conference
In 2011 I’ve earned my SharePoint MVP title for my community efforts and since then, the work of spreading the SharePoint fever continue to be a challenging and reward able task!

Since the beginning of this year 2014 I toke the everis challenge, a multinational European company, so currently I’m leading a Center of Excellence focus on SharePoint, based in Lisbon Portugal and we are already delivering SharePoint specialized work, all over the globe.

2. Top 5 twitter accounts you would recommend

• @sahilmalik
Sahil Malik (SharePoint MVP) a great speaker and blogger, surprising always with the quality of his tweets and articles. A reference

• @jthake:
Jeremy Thake (Ex SharePoint MVP, now Microsoft), that’s what you get when you mix BritishAustralianAmerican flavors in delivering funtastic and rich content in a cool fashion way. A reference not to be missed

• @michaeltnoel
Michael Noel, (SharePoint MVP) outstanding human being with top notch tips regarding SharePoint infrastructure related stuff. A reference

• @danholme
Dan Holme (Office 365 MVP) This Hawaiian is pure inspiration, full of good insights and an outstanding speaker and blogger. A reference

• @molnaragnes
Agnes Molnar (SharePoint MVP) that’s a woman I love to stalk in tweets.
Great content focus on Architecture & Enterprise Search. A reference

Being a little bit rebel regarding the limit of enumerating only 5 twitter accounts but for the simple reason that 5 isn’t enough, another twitter accounts well worth mentioning are:

• Waldek Mastykarz (@waldekm) ( also SharePoint MVP) with great WCM content,
• Matthias Einig (@mattein)(another SharePoint MVP) delivering massive interesting tweets regarding ALM and SharePoint and finally …
• the great Bill Baer (@williambaer) (Microsoft) simply genius tweets and content

3. A SharePoint eBook you would recommend

Download Ch.3 Developer Tools for SharePoint 2013 from the book Professional SharePoint 2013 Development for FREE.

4. A featured video you believe would be of interest to our community

Tough choice this one.

Since my beginning (2004) in SharePoint world my tendency has been promoting SharePoint as a service platform and as a applicational frontend, leveraging external systems to do the hard work, instead of leaving SharePoint do all the heavy lifting.

I was quite surprised when Microsoft presented the (Cloud) App Model as the future of SharePoint evolution and got an “official” confirmation that I was right thinking that way, back in 2004!So I recommend the viewing of the Real-world examples of FTC to CAM transformations video from the SharePoint Conference 2014, delivered by Vesa Juvonen and Steve Walker.

5. Top 5 SharePoint articles

Not 5 articles (again being a rebel), I rather enumerate top 5 great SharePoint content source with useful tips and tricks for devs, its and business users.

• SharePoint 2013 Web Content Management?

Waldek Mastykarz is the man with a blog for it

• SharePoint Development?

Chris O’Brien’s, Sahil Malik’s and Jeremy Thake’s blogs are the spots, just check them out !

• General info

IT Unity, founded by Dan Homes is a great resource to get answers, latest news and learn techniques from and by the community!

6. Highlight a cool SharePoint tool

Recently I had the opportunity to test a cool tool from a great friend of mine Andre Lage (another SharePoint MVP, yes we MVPs tend to interact a lot). It’s a SharePoint-Hosted App that provides features where Site Administrators can manage Custom Actions, Ribbons and Scripts easily with no Xml complexity and with no SharePoint Developers dependencies. 🙂

The SharePoint App Processlynx Custom Action and Ribbon Manager Launch tool.

Just check it out and judge for yourselfs

7. Any other piece of content you would like to highlight

Personally, a content I would like to highlight is built around what’s made me a community member, an SharePoint MVP, a techy smiley guy, a father and a person.
In our never-ending struggling to help others, to share, being an MVP or not, sometimes we are forced to forget what drive us and what make us start the journey.
Sometimes we forget to … breathe

You can reach me by mail or by twitter (@scoutmanpt) feel free to drop by
PS – Remember to be happy whenever and whatever you do.