Day 3 at Amplify was short and sweet, to enable the travelers to avoid the traffic that the Donald Trump rally might bring, which was scheduled to be at the Anaheim convention center next door! Originally we were supposed to start the day with a 9 am breakout session followed by the closing keynote, ending the day at noon-ish. Everything got moved up by an hour, so we could get out of dodge without possible traffic delays.

Hotel guest notification re: Trump rally
Letter from hotel management that (paraphrased) says Presidential candidate Trump is holding a rally at the convention center.

Session 1 - Naked & Afraid: Re-implementing GP Security - Mark Polino

Fortunately for the attendees, Mark didn't require anyone to be naked for the session. Whew!

This session was excellent for those wishing to revisit their Dynamics GP security. Some key takeaways:

  • Design security first. Where are the risks? Map roles and processes out to see who does what and who maybe does more than they should.
  • Don't rely on the out-of-the-box GP roles. The GP tasks are pretty well put together, but the roles leave a lot to be desired.
  • Don't use the POWERUSER role, create a superuser role instead. Why? Security reports ignore POWERUSER, so if users run reports to show who has access to A, B or C, it shows only those in non-POWERUSER roles.
  • Zero conflicts or 100% segregation of duties isn't realistic; determine what external controls will mitigate the risks suitably.
  • If admins create new roles, keep existing roles until they are certain that security is working well. If admins have to go back to review a missed setting, the old roles are still there for them.
  • Test security before implementing it in production.
  • Don't forget about external systems that interact with GP. For example: if a user shouldn't be able to create a customer in GP, can they create one in CRM and does that flow to GP automatically anyway?
  • Don't forget about Account Level Security and Field Level Security. Those aren't covered by roles and tasks.

Closing Session - Bonnie Robertson

The last session was kicked off by Bob McAdam again, and Pam made some closing comments, before introducing Bonnie Robertson. Bonnie was VP of Organizational and Channel Development for Great Plains Software, and after Microsoft purchased it, was Director of Channel Strategies for Microsoft Business Solutions. She retired from Microsoft in 2004 to form her consulting firm.

The primary topic of her presentation was innovation. Here are some key takeaways from the presentation:

  • Time and money are not the primary drivers or barriers to innovation. The story of The Spire, in Chicago, was a good illustration of that. This was to be a highly innovative, 2000-foot-tall residential building, backed by the wealthiest of the wealthy. With costs to buy starting at $750,000 and up to 40 million, it was 40% sold when ground broke. It is still a hole in the ground and the project is dead.
  • Requirements for innovation are Purpose (why) + a Path (what) + a Plan (how and when). Planning must come first because, without a purpose, there is no path or plan to develop.
  • She talked about IQ and EQ (intelligence quotient vs. emotional quotient), and the graphic displayed this like an iceberg with the visible part above the water's surface as the IQ, and what's buried underneath being the EQ. She asked how many people knew someone highly intelligent who still did stupid things, and suggested that it came back to their EQ, not their IQ. To illustrate, and I didn't catch the name of the survey or study this came from, she gave stats of how many high EQ people it took to do a job vs. low EQ people, unrelated to IQ. 1 high EQ person could do the job of 3 low EQ people in a low complexity job. For a mid-complexity job, it jumped to 1 high EQ replacing 12 low EQ and for a high complexity job, 1 high EQ person could do the job of 127 low EQ people.
  • Pay more attention to the people's issues in the path (both ourselves and others)
  • The software isn't what builds or enables the community; the community is the community.
  • Fear, frustration and anger all get in the way of innovation. Recognize it, acknowledge it. Learn where it comes from and why. Write it down and then forget about it.

Final Thoughts

Bob came on to wrap things up at the end.

  • reImagine 2016 is in Fargo, Sept 19-21, 2016
  • GPUG Summit is in Tampa and has been extended, now Oct 11-14, 2016
  • Planning for Amplify 2017 was to begin right after the closing, for those interested

Overall it was a very successful conference. The small size was nice, but obviously, more attendees make it more feasible to grow the content and scope in future years. Now that the community has a sense of what the format was like, hopefully, the enthusiasm will build to make this a new annual event!

Steve Endow was kind enough to offer to drive me to Los Angeles right after the closing keynote, which was great!  From there, I spent one last night in a hotel near LAX, so I could get in one more ball game and visit one more new ballpark - Dodger Stadium! With that, I leave a parting shot from my seats on the last night! 😄

View from the cheap seats, Top Deck row 1 at Dodger Stadium!

Series Index

Here is the final index of posts:

  1. Pre-conference
  2. Day 1 - General Session
  3. Day 1 - Breakouts & Reception
  4. Day 2
  5. Day 3 - this post!