January 27, 2018

365 Saturday London: recap of the Community Event

Posted on Saturday, January 27, 2018 by Guido
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!
This entry was posted in , , , , , ,

1 comment:

  1. eekJanuary 29, 2018 at 8:33 AM

    Just 1 hour on version 9 would never be enough. I can easily spend more than that on the deprecations (ignoring the Outlook plugin) let alone the new functionality.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)