About Us
Microsoft Community of Practice
Hi, and welcome to the home of the Microsoft Community of Practice within Capgemini Belgium. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? A community of practice within Capgemini is a community of people with similar interest that gather frequently, in our case the similar interest means Microsoft technology. Such a community crosses organizational boundaries and is open to anyone who wishes to join, this means that we have all kinds of people in our community, developers, package implementers, database administrators, and many, many more…
Through this blog we hope to give you some insights into how we are organized, what we are doing on a day to day basis and what technologies we use, with the ultimate goal of convincing you to join us of course. We are always looking for people with the same interests as ourselves, and as honesty is one of our core values, we like to admit this as well, 
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Meet the team
Our complete community is made up of about 85 people, and because it is impossible to manage all aspects of such a community alone while still performing a regular day job at our customers, a core team has been assigned to manage it. The core team consists of about 15 persons whom each manage a single responsibility, this way the work has been distributed nicely and we can still have a life outside of work. Below you can find a short introduction of each core team member, in which they desribe what their responsibilities are.
Yves Goeleven is our community leader, which means that he’s responsible to keep things rolling, bringing the correct people together in order to get some work done. Furthermore he’s also responsible for the technical aspects of our ‘Assembly Line’ effort, which is a framework that captures quite a number of development best practices, architectural guidance as well as development process guidance. Yves’ main areas of expertise cover Domain Driven Design, Service Oriented Architecture, Event Driven Architecture and development for the Windows Azure platform.
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Bart Reyserhove is responsible for the process aspects of the assembly line stream. In that role he works together with other mscop members to define the development process and to develop guidance for team members that will use the development process in projects. Bart is passionate about agile software development and is one of the founding members of the Belgian chapter of the agile consortium.
Gunther Verheyen was introduced into the world of Agile in September 2003, when he was asked to urgently take on a project as project manager. Customer approval was late but the predicted delivery date remained (December). A 15 min introduction convinced him of the use and efficiency of eXtreme Programming. Because so much was incorporated that was traditionally easily forgotten or overlooked. Management was convinced (it’s often easier in a crisis situation), a team was composed and development was launched (October). After 3 iterations (of 3 weeks) Gunther’s team delivered… in time and on budget! In 2004 Gunther started using Scrum as the overall process and certified as a ScrumMaster. During follow-up projects Gunther and his teams kept using eXtreme Programming as engineering practices, as well as the XP-role of Coach. In line with local tradition, the obligation to operate in fixed price concepts was unavoidable. So additional practices, tools and views were embedded, to finally become the ScrumPlus framework. Effort was also put into convincing customers to accept the notion of ‘negotiable scope’ in addition to ‘fixed price’. Gunther joined Capgemini Belgium in order to further promote Agile practices as a way to improve Capgemini’s Engagement Management and software delivery.
Community Bloggers
Of course the most important people in our community are its members, and the prime goal of this blog is to give you a view into their day to day work. Therefore we would like to introduce to you our community bloggers.
Tom Van Gaever is a passionate SharePoint consultant. His main competence area is the development of collaboration solutions with SharePoint and .Net. Tom’s expertise lies in designing, development of ,and providing training for, SharePoint solutions . In fact, showing people how technology can make their daily job easier delivers his greatest on-the-job thrills. You can find out more about Tom by reading his blog on http://www.tomvangaever.be , in which he documents his daily solutions about solving problems, he’s the leader of the SharePoint Special Interest Group at Capgemini and a frequent contributor to the developer community sites.
Bart Lannoeye is an enthusiastic consultant for the Microsoft technology stack, mainly focusing on custom .NET and SharePoint development. He’s always open for a new challenge and eager to learn. Bart also keeps a personal blog at http://www.bartlannoeye.be/blog/ on which he describes his interesting discoveries and findings on the problems he encounters during his daily tasks.
Mara Clerico is a committed and enthusiastic senior software developer with Microsoft technologies, mainly focusing on Windows and web client-server applications in C#. She is open minded and interested in new technological developments that bring added value to their users as well as all around software architecture.
