Well, now on to some discussion of the sessions I attended and some of the new Microsoft Dynamics functions, modalities and information I acquired at Convergence 2010 in Atlanta. As a strategic advisor at SetFocus and member of our leadership team there were a few tasks and goals I had set out to accomplish with my attendance at this event including meeting vendors and exploring GP and CRM in more depth for our use and reviewing the new tools for external and internal communications.

This meant I had to learn more about Dynamics SL  too, a “project based” ERP solution for midsize companies which streamlines specialized business processes. I accomplished these and much more.

As a big purveyor of social mediums and communications I was excited to see how the buzz words “unified communications”, which I first heard last year, and then again at SharePoint 2010 in San Francisco, extended themselves across Microsoft platforms and tied so nicely “together” in the today, tomorrow, TOGETHER, Microsoft mission statement that was the Convergence tag line.  

Moving forward there is so much more available and accessible from a self service perspective, especially as many of the new services can be accessed online “in the cloud” not just on premise. On prem in Microsoft speak. The many new team collaboration features available let you build out a repository of individual’s information which will mean new ways to source internal talent and better ways to communicate across teams. It will also let us build out and extend our external candidate pool and allow us to provide more resources to our hiring companies and make candidates more directly accessible. 

There’s wonderful new behind the scenes functionality and version control on the metadata that can be filtered and moves with the content which creates searchable content you can share and unstructured content you can find. Love this! You can also automate workflows with shared documents, and wait until you hear about what PowerPivot can do.  You can analyze with slicers, and sparklines and create dashboards and charts and graphs, in a click, and there’s autofill.  Ooh lalala. You can sign up for our FREE Excel Power Pivot Seminar being held May 14th from 1-4 p.m. EST ( http://slidesha.re/9496fp ) to learn more.

One session I attended on communications server and office communicator presented by Jennifer Kim and Sameer Athalye, with Erika Palmer, had some really informative use case scenarios and live demos using Exchange Server 2010 and OCS 2007 R2, OCS 14 coming soon. There’s voice to e-mail , text in e-mail and a mobile wipe device and OCS basically eliminates having to email conference call info. You can invite attendees through communicator and control their presence and their status. How cool is that?

There are lots of new social connectors, and jellybeans, to indicate what’s what and whose where. Communications are unified across IM, voicemail, video conferencing, telephony, web conferencing, e-mails and calendars, and audio conferencing and I can’t wait to get them up and running. Combined with Azure, Silverlight and WPF, these tools are all “it” and there’s no mistaking Microsoft is “all in” the cloud now.

I’m really into mobile platforms and the new e-commerce and advertising applications and was thrilled to see all the new formats supported here also. We’ll go into those next time.

Another awesome presentation I was at included the Support Debugging Tool presented by David Musgrave and Mariano Gomez: blog links below. I have to share this with our network guys and trainers.

David Musgrave:

http://blogs.msdn.com/developingfordynamicsgp/archive/2008/09/03/support-debugging-tool-the-wait-is-over.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/developingfordynamicsgp/archive/2009/06/05/support-debugging-tool-build-11-released.aspx

Mariano Gomez:

http://dynamicsgpblogster.blogspot.com/

It has a low footprint and doesn’t write SQL features. Their recommendation was to set it up on all workstations, using a single set up with a shared location.

You won’t believe the shortcuts built into this and all the dex and ini. configuration information it supports and the security information it can provide.. role, task, identifying table, field and form with one click drill down. It runs queries directly and can export.  Excellent tool.  Thanks guys.

I also took some time out to volunteer and was honored to be able to paint the head of a seahorse for a multiple canvas painting for the Foundation for Hospital Art: http://www.hospitalart.com/

It was a great event and there is so much more still to tell. I’ll be back with more Dynamics information and will definitely look forward to attending Microsoft Dynamics Convergence again next year.

PS:  Did I tell you, that according to Kevin Schofield, GM for Strategy and Communications at Microsoft Research, Microsoft is making a NUI for me? A natural user interface so I can talk and touch instead of type!!! I’m a genius, right?  Thanks Microsoft!