January 27, 2018

365 Saturday London: recap of the Community Event

As I anticipated in my previous post, this weekend I attended the 365 Saturday event in London (http://365saturday.com/dynamics/london-jan2018/), if I need to describe the event in one word? EPIC.

This 365 Saturday was a 2 days event, the first part on Friday afternoon with the Hackathon and the second part on Saturday with many sessions (there were 5 tracks!) from early morning until 6pm, practically a full day of Dynamics 365 content.

The Friday Hackahton was divided in two tracks, the first one regarding Field Service by @BenVollmer from Microsoft the second track was focused on various aspects of Dynamics 365: Machine Learning, Microsoft Portals, Xamarin and XrmToolBox, the must-have tool for Dynamics professionals. Personally I followed the Field Service part of the Hackathon and during the breaks I snooped into the other track :)

The Hackthon was very interesting but Saturday has been off the charts. The day started with the keynote of James Phillips, Microsoft Vice President in charge of the Dynamics products and he dropped the big news of the day: Microsoft decided to revert the deprecation of the the Outlook Client, I will not go into the details as I am sure in the next days there will be detailed blog posts regarding this important announcement.

As I don't have the gift of ubiquity (yet) I was able to attend only few sessions, I started with the one by Ramón Tébar Bueno and Baris Kanlica regarding Dynamics 365 v9 I did a speech at CRM Saturday Milan back in November about the same argument, but this session confirmed me one thing: Dynamics 365 v9 is full of new features and is difficult to concentrate all of them inside 1 hour.

The second session I followed was the "GDPR Considerations" by Mohamed Mostafa GDPR is a delicate argument and the deadline (25 May 2018) is near the corner, we (Dynamics professionals) should focus more on this topic and Mohamed session was very helpful to understand some of the key points of the regulation.

The next session was "Resource Scheduling Optimization" by Ben Vollmer, a different session was scheduled for this slot but the speaker was not able to attend, so Ben kindly step in and delivered this unexpected session regarding Field Service RSO. Resource Scheduling Optimization is a very interesting tool and I'm glad that I learned something about it.

The last session was about PowerApps, Flow and PowerBI, delivered by Darshan Desai and Rory Neary The first part Darshan talked about PowerApps and Flow and the second part was delivered by Rory where he presented an interactive PowerBI dashboard embedding a PowerApps app designed for James Bond (the event was in UK, logical choice), the session was the right mix between technical content and entertainment.

Last but not least, the 365 Saturday supports women in tech, Janet Robb who works for Microsoft and helped in the organization of the event is our advocate for this important cause: I'm very happy that I joined the first 365 Saturday of 2018, I met old friends, made new ones and meanwhile I learned something new about Dynamics 365, it's amazing. Last thing: don't forget to check their website (http://365saturday.com/) for the upcoming events!

January 22, 2018

365 Saturday in London and what I have been up to

This weekend (26 and 27 January) I will be in London to attend the 365 Saturday event (http://365saturday.com/dynamics/london-jan2018/).
I'm sure that 365 Saturday will be a big event, not only because is the first one with the new brand (it was previously known as CRM Saturday) but the speaker lineup is impressive: in addition to several MVPs that will go deep-dive into various subjects, James Phillips (Microsoft Corporate Vice President) will be the keynote speaker and Ben Vollmer (Microsoft Global Field Service Lead) will host a workshop regarding Field Service.

Registrations are now closed for the London event, but check their website (365saturday.com/) to find the next events, like the one in Amsterdam next month or the one in Dallas in March (first time in the USA).

And now just a quick update on what I did in the last months regarding Dynamics CRM/365:
  • 25 November 2017 I was one of the speakers for CRM Saturday in Milan, big thanks to Stefano Tempesta for organizing the event. I did a session on the new and deprecated features of Dynamics 365 v9, I had a great discussion with the participants and soon it's UPGRADE TIME!
  • Still in November I was invited to the CRM Audio podcast (episode here) for a little chat regarding Dynamics. CRM Audio hosts several podcasts like the one about PowerBI or the "Implement This" series, check it out.
  • Dependent OptionSet Generator: After the V9 release I decided to update my solution for dependent optionsets (download here). The big news is the support for the Multi Select OptionSets. The demo has also been updated for this release.
  • Dynamics Weekly (www.dynamicsweekly.com): Back in December I decided to start a newsletter regarding Dynamics, the idea is to organize fresh content (articles, tools, videos, podcasts released in the previous week) delivered directly to your inbox. This morning I sent the 8th issue and there are nearly 200 subscribers.
Posted on Monday, January 22, 2018 | Categories:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)