I’m getting ready to leave Fargo for another year and head home after a long but great week of learning and networking. For those that may have missed my earlier posts, here are the 3 posts I wrote after each day of the Dynamics GP Tech conference:
Today, my flight isn’t until late in the afternoon so I’m just hanging around the hotel and catching up on things like this (blogging) as well as getting my notes in OneNote updated for what I learned this week, filling in gaps etc. I decided not to wander too far today, but I did plenty of that this week, getting in over 86,000 steps in 8 days (not including what I’ll get in the rest of today)! The funny part is that isn’t even a record for me. In Tampa at GPUG Summit 2016 I got in over 100K steps in 7 days. Boy, my feet were tired by the end of that week!
I was hoping to golf today but didn’t get organized in time to coordinate with others in the commmunity local or otherwise who may have been interested. If I come back next year, I’d like to make that happen! Send me a note if you’re interested and I’ll start a list of potential golfers. So far Angie Ryan from DCI and many of the eOne Solutions team are on my potential golf outing list!
Pennies for Taylor promotion(s)
I wrote a piece about who Taylor is on Monday on the Day 1 GP Tech conference recap. Taylor is Shawn & Jennifer Dorward’s son. Shawn’s one of our fellow Dynamics GP MVPs, active blogger in our community as well as a GPUG All-Star, and an all-around awesome guy. From what I’ve followed in reading his posts and watching his videos every day around Taylor’s drowning accident, I can see that his entire family is awesome. It’s incredible the amount of love and support they’ve shown, the positivity they’ve expressed in a situation where the unthinkable happened to one of their kids. Many others would be nowhere near as positive about what has happened.
Taylor drowned on July 4th and his friends and EMT saved his life. His journey back is nothing short of incredible considering the initial expectations and level of brain damage the doctors believed had occurred. He is still mostly without vision, although when you see the updates, there are bits around that where there are glimpses of hope pieces are coming back. He is still missing some memory. One example Shawn told us this week is they got a dog a couple of months ago and Taylor doesn’t remember having a dog yet. But in other ways, there are some videos of him singing Frank Sinatra songs and he knows the words so other parts of his memory are there.
The “Pennies for Taylor” part started with adding a penny to a jar for every new thing Taylor did, no matter how minor it seemed, to remind them how far he’s come in his recovery.
Here is the video that was shared on Day 1 at the opening session. You may want to have kleenex on hand… it’s also on YouTube here. (Shout out to another MVP, Belinda Allen, for her work on creating the video for this event.)
David Musgrave, another one of our Dynamics GP MVPs, has his own product line as an ISV (independent software vendor) under his company Winthrop Development Consultants. He has generously started a promotion now through to the end of September 2018 where he will be donated 10% of all new sales of his products to the the Dorward family.
If you are a partner and want to help: consider promoting David’s products GP Power Tools and/or Batch Posting Service Toolkit, to your clients to drive some new sales!!
In his post (linked above), he mentions that Ethotech may be doing the same but I don’t see anything linkable on their website yet. If they or any other ISV accept David’s challenge to help raise money for a fellow GP community member, I will happily update this post to list them and links to the details on their websites.
That wraps it up for me in Fargo! Hope to see you all next year!
UPDATE: August 30, 2018 - More ISVs joining in on the Pennies for Taylor promotion!
As an update to my original post above, there are now 3 more ISVs and consultants offering to donate a portion of their sales or profits to Shawn’s son’s medical & recovery costs. So far all of these are valid for new sales up to the end of September 2018. If you were considering one of these vendor’s products, please look at it sooner rather than later to have the bonus of raising some money for Taylor’s medical costs.
- David Musgrave, MVP (initiator of the promotion) - Winthrop Dexterity Consultants
- Products: Batch Posting Service Toolkit, GP Power Tools
- Mark Polino, former long-time MVP (& hopefully someone to be re-awarded again soon) - his article
- Product: Historical Excel Reporting
Please support these ISVs if you are interested in the products they offer!