Coming Back from Microsoft Dynamics User Group Summit 2017: Fixin’ to Hit the Trail Running
This article recaps the countrifried Microsoft Dynamics User Groups Summit in Nashville October 10-13, 2017.
Well, if you wandered down the road to Music City this past week, you weren’t just hearing guitars, banjos, fiddles, and the trills of country music. You were hearing full choruses of users, independent software vendors (ISVs), and partners in the Microsoft Dynamics user group ecosystem, two-stepping their way through keynote sessions, networking opportunities, trade show floor conversations, and breakout sessions. If you were not able to attend the roundup, this article is a recap of the sights, sounds, and tastes of the Microsoft Dynamics User Group Summit 2017.
As with most of these professional conferences, perhaps especially in the enterprise technology world, it’s a chance to step out of the office to learn, connect, and research. Tips and tricks, best practices, solutions, partnerships, and so on are abundant in this context. And this year’s gathering of GP, AX, NAV, CRM, and 365 users was no different. “There was a record number of Dynamics customers and partners at Dynamics Summit in Nashville,” Solver CEO Nils Rasmussen said. “There’s excitement around Azure cloud as a platform, Dynamics 365 roadmap for 2018, as well as continued enhancements of the Dynamics on-premise products. Solver had a very busy booth with great discussions because BI360 now serves both cloud and on-premise customers.”
To be more specific, there were over 6,600 attendees this year at Summit. Presentations ran the gamut on how to best manage your technologies to produce the reporting and budgeting deliverables your organization requires. Solver presented 3 great BI360 sessions for GP, NAV and AX, with customers excited about the new BI360 cloud as an option for migrating away from on-premise solutions. There was also some notable buzz around the free BI360 Composer giveaway, delivering ad-hoc reporting, integrating to Dynamics ERPs in simple, secure, and robust ways. As a Gold Sponsor of the event, Solver co-hosted multiple partner and customer events in Nashville. Next year’s Summit gallops out of Nashville and heads west to Phoenix, and Solver is excited to sponsor again.
While cloud continues to create buzz in the Dynamics space, a majority of companies are still running their accounting system and other enterprise technology on-premise. This makes sense, right? The allure of cloud is balanced with the robust process of making that transition to the cloud. That all said, technology events like Summit are more important than ever in pinpointing organizational hurdles and identifying the right solutions to not only transition to the cloud with Dynamics, but also manage integrations and workflow for your toolbox of systems, some on-premise and some in the cloud.
One thing to remember is that while a lot of ISVs come to showcase their solutions, they are also running their own businesses – and this Dynamics community serves each other, too. The Solver team attended a demo of a customer service module in CRM Cloud. The module allows for usage from DocLink and the ability to send surveys, providing the functionality to tie sales, consulting, support, and accounting into one tool using CRM Cloud. Additionally, Summit allows teams like Solver’s to talk to many prospective customers about how tools like BI360 can help them better run their business. It’s a great place to explain and explore challenges with technology providers to discuss how different solutions will alleviate process pains – specifically how it all works. It’s also a great place for ISVs to reconnect and deepen partnerships with resellers and understand what kind of challenges they are seeing with their customers. Partners within the Dynamics community, like MSDynamicsWorld.com and The List, were available for strategic meetings to deepen their teamwork to help ISVs build and grow their business. It is also nice for teams to step out of the office and bond in the context of this fun work trip, especially with more team members working remotely.
The event was definitely not all work and no play. Country music, Nashville hot chicken, line dancing, and honky-tonks were par for the course. Lots of festive yeehaws and y’alls were heard as attendees embraced the geo-culturally-inspired theme. Summit Sponsors hosted mixers at local haunts and encouraged community building after sessions and tradeshow floor hours concluded for the day. One aspect of the conference that was a favorite of the Solver team was the local singers that set up and performed in and outside of the expo. At one point, downtown Nashville become so crowded with both the Summit crowd and the Nashville Predators game letting out at the same time. It was a really spirited city to serve as a backdrop, flavoring the work field trip with fun and building a momentum of productive energy.
And that’s the whole point of another successful Summit in the books, right? Stepping out of the office to bebop over to Nashville, Tennessee is designed to help you regroup and energize around process improvement and technology solution sourcing. This year happened to be nothing short of a riotous Dynamics hootenanny, but the true testament to another successful edition of this gathering will be your ability to translate the conversations, demos, and presentations into action back at the office. On behalf of everyone at Solver, we’re eager to help you hit the trail running. Solver enables world-class decisions with BI360, a leading web-based CPM suite made up of budgeting, reporting, dashboards, and data warehousing, delivered through a web portal. Solver offers BI360 through cloud and on-premise deployment and is reinventing CPM with its next generation solution. BI360 empowers business users with modern features including innovative use of Excel in the model design process. If you’re interested in learning more, our team is excited to hear about your organizational needs and goals.
