Did you know that Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington campus has 3 treehouses as”outdoor meeting spaces”? They are wired for power and WiFi and per this article on Microsoft’s own blog, they are “part of a larger new system of technology-enabled outdoor districts”.
I saw a tweet from another Microsoft MVP Summit attendee this week sharing pictures about it and I got a chance to tour them myself. I had no idea they existed!
I’m fortunate to be attending my 2nd Microsoft MVP Summit, in Bellevue & Redmond, Washington. The first one I attended was in November 2016, shortly after I was first awarded my MVP award. It was pretty overwhelming! I was still getting used to the idea that I was an MVP let alone being able to absorb all of the content presented to us.
There was no MVP Summit in 2017, as the program was reorganized in early 2017 to change everyone to a single renewal date. In doing so, the date for Summit was changed to what I assume is now the permanent time of year from now on.
After the Collaborate Canada Toronto 2017 event, I had posted a poll on the GPUG Toronto Chapter forum to attempt to gauge, via an informal (& unofficial) poll, why the attendance was so low in Toronto that day. The premise of my poll was to attempt to reach some of the 480+ members listed in this chapter to determine why only 30 or so people attended the GP portion of the Toronto event.
A couple of people pointed out that many of the “members” in that 480+ number are not in the GTA. Some join because it’s one of the few chapters in Canada to get and post Canadian content. There appears to be an issue with chapter registration itself as others mentioned that several on the Toronto forum are actually in Montreal but cannot seem to save their default chapter to Montreal. Several on the list are members of many forums and don’t even live in Canada and some are Dynamics Communities people themselves. I suspect though, the vast majority of those on the list still should fit in my criteria generally of “customers within driving distance of an event in Toronto”. Continue reading “Collaborate Canada 2017 Follow Up”
Today was the final event of the 4-city cross-Canada tour for Collaborate Canada. In case you missed my earlier posts, the event was aimed at users of 4 of the Dynamics product lines: GP, CRM, NAV, and AX (plus 365 in the mix with it’s AX/CRM/NAV counterparts).
This location was easily my favourite of all of them, for many reasons! The city is fantastic, from getting to downtown from the airport via Skytrain (how easy is that?), to a great day off touring Granville Island and the markets and shops, to the actual event day and location itself.
Today was the 3rd of the 4 city Collaborate Canada events, hosted in Calgary, Alberta. Same as the previous days, it was aimed at users of 4 of the Microsoft Dynamics product lines: AX, CRM, GP, NAV, and the applicable D365 content mixed in.
Continue reading “Collaborate Canada 2017 Calgary”
Toronto was the 2nd location for the 4 city “Collaborate Canada” tour across Canada. I’m writing this nearly a week later (but the blog post date is backdated to the date of this event).
The audience was quite a bit larger than Montreal, estimated to be around 200 people in total between Dynamics GP, AX, NAV, CRM and 365 users and partners. It’s hard to say if the number was that high but the opening session sure seemed like there were way more people than the opening session in Montreal on November 14th.
This was the first day of a 4 city “Collaborate Canada” tour across Canada, and the event was hosted in Montreal, Quebec. The expected audiences would be users of Dynamics AX, CRM, NAV, GP or 365.
Although I enjoyed the day and the experience, I can honestly describe the day as having some “good, bad and ugly” to it.
Dynamics Communities (DCI), who organizes the conferences, expected 150 attendees and through the rumour mill yesterday, it sounds like the attendance was around that.
Collaborate Canada is a one-day event that is packed full of information for the technical and functional audiences of Dynamics 365/AX, 365/CRM, GP and NAV. It’s being held in 4 different cities across Canada, on 4 separate dates, each day with the same (or close to the same) content.
At each location, there are separate streams for each of the product lines but all of the attendees will be at the same location on the same day, to really give you that mini Summit-like experience!
The general schedule for the GP side is a general session with Microsoft around the upcoming Dynamics GP 2018 release, to start off the day, then 4 more time slots over the rest of the day, split into two streams, functional and reporting. At each time slot, you have 2 choices of sessions.
Following up on GPUG Summit last week, I thought it would be timely to write a blog to encourage others to get involved in presenting in the future! Organizers are always looking for more people to fill presentation time slots.
Have you attended Summit or a local GPUG chapter meeting, or even a webinar online, hosted by GPUG? Have you thought “maybe some day I could be doing that presentation too”?
Continue reading “Curious about presenting?”
GPUG Summit is done for another year and this is my final post on the conference, getting home and some thoughts. I’m writing this post a day after getting home since the getting home part was a long day!
Continue reading “GPUG Summit 2017 – Getting Home & Recap”
