All good things must come to an end and so it is for Microsoft Dynamics Convergence 2012. The excitement and enthusiasm continued on the final day. This has been the best Convergence for content, attendance and audience. Adding to all this great event was the closing keynote by General Colin Powel (Ret.).
Closing Keynote
Doug Kennedy, VP of Microsoft Dynamics Partners and Support Services, started the closing keynote. Doug started with a summary of the event and a recap of the volunteer and community service efforts that attendees performed while in Houston. Doug mentioned there were 10,225 attendees and 268 sponsors at this year?s event, the largest Dynamics event ever.
General Colin Powell (Ret) on stage at #Microsoft #conv12, techy at heart, COBOL programmer! transformations is constant. Loves #Corvette
Gen. Colin Powell (Ret), provided the overall closing keynote. I was looking forward to this and was not disappointed! Gen Powell has had an impressive career and delivered a great speech. He was actually a funny guy and shared some very interesting stories. Interesting note for the techies, he?s started out as a Cobol programmer! He has also been busy lately giving back with a focus on America?s Promise Alliance and GradNation.? The overall themes of his talk were:
- Loves speaking with audiences
- Currently a partner at Kleiner Perkins
- He?s on Facebook!
- Love?s Corvette’s but recently sold it for Fisker Karma (great taste in muscle cars!)
- Where you came from doesn’t matter, only where you end up
- Your past is not your future
- Key to success is execution
He also shared insights on how to maintain focus, take responsibility and constantly work towards improving processes, organizations and people. Thank you Microsoft for helping make this happen with such a great leader possible. Loved it!
Developers Guide to Integrating Dynamics CRM with SharePoint
This session was presented by Girish Raja who always provides great content and presentations. He shared some great insights and tips for integrating Dynamics CRM and SharePoint beyond the out of box capabilities. Girish covered:
- Document and data collaboration
- User Experience (UX) options
- Web parts (with BCS rarely needed anymore with SP2010)
- Works great with Office 365 as well.
Future releases (end of year and 2013) will have better, more automatic integration. It will also go beyond the current Out of Box (OOB) and take advantage of document sets, workflow, versioning, and approvals.
Solutions Management in Dynamics CRM
This session was geared to those that are responsible for creating configuration and customization in Dynamics CRM and packaging them into Solutions. This could be as simple as creating some new functionality in your development or QA instance and porting them over to production. Also covered was more complex scenarios for Enterprise customers that might have multiple environments with multiple developers and heavy source code management needs. Some of the topics covered were:
- Managed and Unmanaged Solutions and when to use each
- Using the API for Solution packaging and deployment
- Tips and tricks for team-based development
- Considerations for on-premise and online deployments
- Review of what?s happening behind the scenes
Well that?s a wrap for me at this year?s Convergence. I really wish I had more time and could tele-transport and attend different sessions at the same time. There was that much great content.
As mentioned in a previous blog, in the coming days and weeks we?ll be posting following up content and examples to help you with your learning needs as well. Stay tuned!
Mike