For those of you who are fans of football – soccer to our US friends – you’ll know transfer deadline day can be a little hectic. Clubs are scampering across various parts of Europe to get deals finalized – often with plenty of hiccups and protracted negotiations along the way. Thankfully for us, we didn’t encounter any such problems and are delighted to announce that Microsoft MVP Tobias Zimmergren has passed his medical and joined the SPCAF team at Rencore as Technical Product Owner.
Tobias joins us with an enormous amount of experience and knowledge within the Microsoft world and was first awarded MVP status back in 2008. He’s been a consultant for the last 10 years and is an expert in SharePoint Server, Office 365 (recently voted as one of Top 25 Office 365 Influencers in 2015) and Microsoft Azure.
So having been successful in the world of consultancy what made him want to take on this new challenge? We sat down with our new signing for a quick chat. First up…
Why Rencore?
“When I was thinking about the opportunity a couple of things really stood out. The first thing was the product. Having been part of a lot of projects over the last few years – both good and bad – SPCAF was the tool we’d use to get a better insight into the health and quality of the code being produced. We’d use it to aid migrations to the App Model and would trust the tool when it would highlight what needs fixing. So from my personal experience, I know SPCAF stands for high quality and I know the full product suite is used by a lot of customers and doing a really good job at actually helping people. For me I want to be a part of that and help build on that.
The second thing was the chance to join such a skilled team. There’s a lot of talent at Rencore working on the SPCAF tool, and having gotten to know them even more over the last 8 – 9 months while working as a consultant, I really like the mindset of everyone. Everyone has the same goal – which is to help clients and deliver results they can trust. That was awesome to see and a big bonus.
The final thing was the ability to work flexibly and remotely. It’s a modern workplace – there’s no time reports and you aren’t made to sit at a permanent desk. You can work together easily by just connecting online and just doing your job, which is great”
What are you looking forward to the most?
“Being able to leverage the insights and knowledge I’ve gained throughout the years to help the team build and enhance SPCAF even more is really exciting. I also want to help other clients avoid those mistakes we all make. I’ve worked on lots of projects where mistakes have been made, I’ve made them myself, but you learn from them. So I can bring those experiences with me and help people when it comes automating their code quality checks.
For consultants I can give them a heads up to say “hey, watch out for this and that before you release your code”. For organizations, I’m looking forward to helping them leverage SPCAF to make sure their own consultants, freelance developers, contractors, whatever it might be, have the proper level of quality available and understand the best way to work.
Ultimately it’s about helping people. I want to say I was able to make company X more efficient or say we helped save them a lot of money by checking the quality of their code before deploying. Being able to do that is another big bonus for me, I want to be proud of the work I’m doing”.
You know our CEO pretty well already, how are you looking forward to working together?
“I’ve known Matt a long time, even before he was an MVP. When he came to Sweden in 2010 to speak at a conference, he reached out me to meet and it was the first time I got a look at his imagination and SPCAF. Back then it was only a fragment of what it is today, so it was hard to visualise, but I understood what it did. At the time I tested it, played around with it and liked it. It’s funny now as I didn’t use it initially because it wasn’t elaborate enough, I could do 90% of the stuff myself. Now I can’t! It’s become a full blown product which can’t be done manually, there’s so many checks, inventory bits and pieces, it’s an incredible journey and shows you how hard Matt and his team have worked.
Also – as I mentioned this week – the modern approach Rencore adopt is down to Matt. We’ve known each other a while, so there’s mutual trust already and having that flexibility to work at any given moment, from anywhere, is a mindset we both share. I’ve seen SPCAF grow from this small idea into a product which is now revolutionizing how people develop for Office 365 and Sharepoint, so it was a big draw to get involved and help it grow, I can’t wait to get started!”
So when can people come and say hey?
“I’ll be with the team at SPSMunich and at the European SharePoint Conference, so to anyone that’s attending, I’m sure I’ll see some familiar faces about, if we haven’t met, come along to our Rencore stand and say hey!”
Cheers, Tobias
And to end, a quick word from our CEO Matthias Einig 
“As Tobias said, we’ve known each other quite a while. We’ve regularly stayed in touch over the years, especially when I moved to Sweden, but even more over the last 8 – 9 months on a consultancy basis, so I’m really happy he’s joining the team and it’s great to have him on board! It’s exciting times ahead”.
Matthias
