Dynamics365Saturday event was good...

Author: Ana Demeny

better than chocolate type of good.

I like weekends. I know everyone does, but I reaaaaaly like them. They're my chance to sleep, or travel, cook, read or see a full series in one day (Grace & Frankie is out!). So it wasn't easy for me to wake up at 6:00 and go to a CRM conference. But I had reserved my spot a month ago so I went, and boy was it good.

It started with an intro and then a Q&A with James Phillips. This was at 9:00 when the room was already quite full.

Once that was done, you could go to either one of the two theatres, the CafeX workshops or the Hackathon room. Basically, there were so many interesting sessions, there was no way you could have done everything.

I chose to start my day in the Hackathon, where Marco Amoedo did a presentation on Azure Functions and Logic Apps. The information was detailed and presented in a very down to earth way. He showed us how to move attachments out of CRM. This is a great scenario, as most online organizations suffer from lack of space. In the second part of his presentation, Marco synchronized two CRM organizations, using Logic Apps. Every time a Contact got created, the Logic App would pick it up and copy it across (this was set to run every minute).

I then went to Neil Parkhurst's presentation on USD. He's got ALL the knowledge on Unified Service Desk. Anyone who's seen one of his presentations knows what I'm talking about. In the last few months, I think he's written one CRM blogpost every day, which is impressive to say the least. How do you do it, Neil?

Wael Hamze had a session on CI for Dynamics CRM. He demonstrated two ways of automating CRM deployments. His room was packed. I had to steal someone's chair: sincere apologies to whoever tried to save a seat by leaving their coat on the chair.

After this session, I went to look for Janet Robb who was kind enough to listen to my ideas on sharing knowledge, coaching and bringing more people over to the dark side of CRM. I can't begin to describe how excited I got for all that. Janet introduced me to so many interesting people, helped me explain why I think we should start a program to lay the ground of CRM knowledge for people who have never seen it before. This will fit in nicely with my Learn, do, earn with Dynamics 365 series. More details coming soon!

When I cooled down a bit, I went over to the CafeX room, where I learned about how CafeX works, how to set it up, how we can use it with Ms Bots. Immensely useful for anyone who wants their website to have a chat that feeds directly into CRM.

For a final session, I went to Darshan Desai's session on Citizen Developers with Power Apps. I was surprised to see how many companies use no-code apps created by their users.

In the end, my day proved to be too shot, as there was still so much I would have wanted to see. Choosing what presentations I attended was not an easy task. I would have liked to go to the GDPR session, the Field Service one, TDD, the New Features in V9 and many more. No wonder the event was fully booked:

There were some girls there as well:

As we can clearly see in the picture above:

  1. Even though not many girls attended the event, the ones who did, looked very happy.
  2. I need a haircut.

Ladies, take advantage of these events. I know they only serve sandwiches (that you don’t really eat) and not knowing anyone there might be daunting, but don’t miss full days of FREE training. The events are really good for networking as well, everyone is very nice and approachable.

That being said, you can still register for CRM UG Birmingham 22 Feb and London 1 March.