May 15, 2017

CRM Saturday Zurich: recap of the Community Event

Posted on Monday, May 15, 2017 by Guido
Last weekend I attended #CRMSaturday in Zurich, for those not familiar with the name, CRM Saturday is a series of events across Europe (but they are going global with the July event in Australia) focusing on Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (or Dynamics CRM if you prefer).

Conferences and events like this are an important part of the CRM ecosystem, when you work on a platform like Dynamics 365 that implements new features rapidly, a community event can be a perfect opportunity to keep yourself up to date learning something new or go deeper with a specific functionality.

The location for the Zurich chapter was the Microsoft Offices in Switzerland, a perfect venue considering that this was a joint event with SharePoint Saturday Events, the available tracks in totally were three (2 for SharePoint and 1 for CRM).

Stefano Tempesta, one of the organizers of CRM Saturday, gave an introduction before the keynote of Kathrine Hammervold from Microsoft Norway.
The CRM track started with the session of Baris Kanlica titled "Dynamics 365 new features and deprecations", with the upcoming release this is an hot topic and personally I learned about the use of control notifications (Xrm.Page.getControl(arg).setNotification(message,uniqueId)) The next speaker was Razwan Choudry with his session about Solution Management. How to manage solutions, how to implement versioning and the infamous "Add all assets" checkbox were some of the topics covered. The message was to put more attention on the maintenance and the deployment of a solution, and I couldn’t agree more. After the lunch break was the turn of Marius Agur Pedersen with his session about Azure. He focused on Azure Service Bus and Azure Key Vault, we can bet that Azure and Dynamics 365 will be more integrated in the future. I am often inclined to don't use Azure Service Bus, but with Marius reassurances about the bus performance I will try it again. The following session was with Jordi Montaña and his testing framework Fake Xrm Easy. Unit testing is a must for medium and big projects, but should be also a priority for smaller projects that contains only a couple of plugins. The framework he created is impressive, I know how broad and different are the CRM messages and the IOrganizationService and to mock all that stuff requires countless hours. Next to the stage was Christoph Mäder with his session to improve the performance of a Dynamics CRM/365 OnPremise instance. Many customers still prefer to have their CRM in house or they are not ready to move to the Cloud, but this doesn't mean that they can't tune their instance or take advantage of some possibilities offered by an OnPremise installation. The last one to speak was Mohamed Mostafa with the other side of the medal: Considerations for Cloud Dynamics 365 Deployments. His session went through the major aspects of an Online implementation, the compromises and the big advantages to have Microsoft taking care of your instance, considering also the upcoming EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). It was an amazing event and experience for me, I had the chance to met in person people that I know virtually from a long time. Despite some tweets that list me as speaker, I only attended and I was not involved in the organization of the event, all the credits goes to the other guys in the next picture, they used their time and energy to make this happen, I'm honored to know them and they are an inspiration for the community. CRM Saturday was free, so a "thank you" should be made also to the sponsors. Bottom line: attend the next CRM Saturday!
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