The profile

Dave Van Gool.

Microsoft 365 and Power Platform builder. I work out what the business needs, build it, and hand it over to the people who will run it. For Belgian companies since 1998, and now for yours.

Years in IT
28, since 1998
SharePoint and Microsoft 365
12, since 2014
Stack
Power Platform · Power Apps (canvas and model-driven) · Power Automate · Dataverse · SharePoint Online · Microsoft 365 administration · Microsoft Graph · PowerShell · Entra ID · Microsoft 365 Copilot · Copilot Studio agents · Copilot licence governance
Availability
On request. We can also provide other freelancers from our team.
Where
Remote from Cyprus, EU time zone. Belgian and UK hours covered. On site as a one-off.
Rates
Rates on request.
Book a call

You get an answer within one working day, in English or Dutch.

On site as a one-off: a kick-off, an onboarding day, a workshop. A weekly desk is a different job and one I no longer take. Rates: it depends on the length and the shape of the work, and it is a number you get within a working day.

Certifications: PL-100 Power Platform App Maker · Prince2 Foundation · ITIL Foundation · former Microsoft Certified Trainer. Languages: English and Dutch for delivery. French, enough for a meeting.

You contract with OFFICE LAB (CYPRUS) LTD, Paphos, Cyprus.

Twenty-eight years, one station per chapter

Walk along it. Every station is a place where the same thing kept repeating and somebody had to fix it.

The field years

1998 to 2014

Service engineer and IT consultant at Splendit, Econocom, Wincor Nixdorf, ITSS (Compaq / HP), Acom and Getronics: server engineering, field support, IT service management.

Sixteen years of server rooms, client sites and support desks, where the same fault came back on a different machine every week and the ticket rarely said what had actually happened. I learned to ask the person at the desk first, before touching anything, because they always knew.

Took away The person who does the job knows where it breaks. Ask them before you open the toolbox.

Six thousand users

2014 to 2018

De Lijn, the Flemish public transport company: SharePoint specialist, a two-person team for more than six thousand users.

Two of us looked after SharePoint for an organisation of over six thousand people, and most of what reached us was the same paper form, approval or document hand-off wearing a new coat. I built the workflows and intranet solutions that took the forms, the approvals and the document routing off the email chain and put them inside the platform where they belonged.

Took away A team of two survives six thousand users by removing repeats, one at a time.

The government desk

2018 to 2020

Flemish Government, Het Facilitair Bedrijf: workplace manager for Microsoft 365 adoption across multiple departments.

I led the support team for Microsoft 365 adoption and owned the governance policies, the licence allocation and the onboarding, which meant the same questions arriving from a new department every month. I wrote the rules down so they could be read in one sitting, sat in the GDPR think tank turning the regulation into things a department could actually do, and became the one desk everyone knew to ask.

Took away Governance is a page somebody reads. Anything longer becomes a rumour.

Remote from day two

2020 to 2021

Synergics: modern workspace consultant. Started two days before Belgium's first lockdown.

I started on a Monday, the country locked down on the Wednesday, and the training courses, the SharePoint and Dataverse builds and the intranet rollouts all went remote in the first week. It turned out the distance changed nothing about the work and quite a lot about the commute.

Took away Remote delivery has been my normal since the spring of 2020. It is not a concession.

Name on the door

2021 onward

The Office Lab BV, Belgium: owner and freelance consultant in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Early assignment: Teams and SharePoint rollout with user adoption at Spikes.

I set up my own company and took the whole chain on myself: finding the work, scoping it, building it, standing behind it, and sending the invoice. Among the first builds was one I still like, a shift-planning solution where stewards pick their location and shift length on a phone, adjust their start and stop times within a fixed total, and management sees the whole plan in a model-driven app.

Took away When your name is on the outcome, you scope differently. Smaller, sooner, and with the user in the room.

Fileserver to SharePoint

2022 to 2023

The Flow (Cronos Group), March 2022 to November 2023: modern workspace and migration engineer. Client: a school board.

A school board's file servers had to become SharePoint, and every folder tree carried years of people's own filing habits, none of them written down. I wrote the PowerShell that restructured and moved it all, built Power Apps on top, and then trained the people who had to live in it.

Took away A migration is finished when the users stop looking for the old drive letter.

The licence machine

2023 to July 2026

YPTO, the IT department of the Belgian railways (NMBS and Infrabel), via Titans: technical analyst, and technical lead for a three-developer PowerShell team.

Copilot licences in a large organisation were being assigned, forgotten and requested again, and somebody chased that by hand across several teams every week. I sat with the stakeholders until the real pain was on the table, then designed and built a governance tool on Microsoft Graph, PowerShell and Dataverse that assigns the licences, reclaims the dormant seats and puts the usage in front of management, while setting the conventions and reviewing the code for the team around it.

Took away Discovery first, then the build is the easy part. It usually is.

The lab, Paphos

2026

OFFICE LAB (CYPRUS) LTD, Paphos, Cyprus: owner. Remote delivery across Europe and the UK, EU time zone.

In September 2026 I moved to Paphos and set up OFFICE LAB (CYPRUS) LTD, the company you contract with, working remotely in English or Dutch in your hours. Between assignments I had been building LLM agents in my own lab, retrieval over real operational data and tool-calling, on Claude and on local models, and that work now sits next to the Power Platform work as the AI layer of what I offer.

Took away, and the offer Twenty-eight years of Microsoft 365 and Power Platform delivery, from the analysis to the handover, remote from Cyprus. If you have an assignment that fits, send it. If it is quicker to talk, book the call.

Book a call

For IT firms

Capacity under your name

Microsoft 365 and Power Platform capacity for IT firms whose own people are full, delivered from Paphos, Cyprus, in your time zone.

If you have a client project waiting on a senior builder, read this section and then send us the shape of it: what, for whom, from when.

We deliver under your name if you want it that way, we never contact your client on our own, and every piece of work comes with the documentation your team needs to carry it on.

Three ways to work with the lab

Capacity.

Senior Microsoft 365 and Power Platform hands, per project or per month, when your bench is empty and the client will not wait. Analysis, build, handover. You keep the project management, or we take it, as you prefer.

White-label.

Your name on the work. We use your email domain, your templates and your project manager, and we stay invisible to the client. Your client sees your firm delivering what it promised, which is the point.

Referral.

A client comes to you with a process problem that is outside what you sell. Send them to us, we do the work under our own name, and the referral fee is agreed in writing before anyone starts. It works the other way round too: what is yours, we send to you.

Who does the work.

Today that is Dave Van Gool plus a small circle of freelancers we have worked with for years. We say who is on the job before it starts, and it will never be someone you have not been introduced to. If the project needs more than we have, we say so at the first call rather than the last one.

The promise.

Your client stays your client. We sign whatever you need. We do not pitch your client, we do not connect with their people on LinkedIn, and when the project ends we still do not. If your client asks us for something directly, the first thing we do is call you.

The close.

Tell us the shape of the project and the date it has to start. If we can do it, we say so within a working day. If we cannot, we say that faster.

Book a call

Send me the assignment

We need this one to write back to you.

We need this one to write back to you.

We need an email address or a phone number to write back to you.

Or a phone number, if you prefer a call.

Please confirm that you have read the privacy notice.

Received. OLi, our assistant, files it and a person from our team reads it, usually the same day. You hear back within two working days. If you would rather talk than wait, the calendar is the fast lane: pick a slot and we take it from there.