Virtual Convergence 2009

Virtual Convergence 2009 is up and generally open to everyone. At first it was restricted to attendees only but now everyone can be part of the fun. Of course, virtual convergence doesn't have Bourbon Street or Pam and I live or that monster walk from the exhibition hall to the food, but other than that, it's the next best thing.

Convergence Speaking

I thought a few folks might be interested in what goes on behind the scenes for a speaker at Convergence. Now that the whole event is over I wanted to give people a sense of what it takes to make one session happen.

The process started way back in October of 2008. The 50 Tips presentation was a hit at our customer conference, iSight and I received a survey from Microsoft looking for Convergence topics. I added a 50 Tips presentation suggestion to the survey and followed up with both my MVP lead and one of the owners of Convergence at Microsoft.

The topic was accepted and the real work started in January. We settled on a title and description and I made some changes to the tips to accommodate a broader audience. I started getting lots of Convergence related emails telling me what to do by when. Microsoft handled the Convergence registration and access to the speaker portal, my Convergence lifeline.

Since I'm not a Microsoftie or a long time MS presenter, I had to have a co-presenter and I was fortunate enough to get Pam Misialek, the Convergence giveaway queen.

The first pass of the PowerPoint deck had to be in by mid February. Pam and I talked via phone and passed around versions of the presentation until it looked good. A big thanks to Ross, Abby, Tan and Christina for their help in reviewing the presentation!

By mid-February I submitted the draft presentation and arranged for the presentation technology I would need and the related tech checks. That's when I started practicing.

A couple weeks later, the schedule was final. I knew where I was presenting and what the room capacity was. By the first of March, legal had reviewed my presentation and made a few minor suggestions all of which were easy adjustments. With that, the presentation was submitted to the graphics company that does setup and formatting for the conference.

Then tragedy struck...twice. First I pulled down my final presentation, post graphics formatting, only to find out that they had removed all of the item numbers and replaced them with lists. 50 tips is just not 50 tips if you can't count to 50 with me! Pam Misialek talked me down from the ledge (that phrase would probably have been censored by MS legal) and told me how to get it fixed once I got to Convergence. After that, my demo crashed. Specifically, the really cool Excel connection pieces simply refused to work. Ugggh. After an hour and a half of troubleshooting, I finally set everything back and rebooted. That fixed seemed to work. I had broken Excel, not Dynamics GP.

Suddenly, Convergence was here and it was off to New Orleans! Registration, speaker check in and getting the right presentation up was incredibly smooth. After that it was speaker training time. I was expecting a small group and someone with a list of typical speaking tips. Instead, I got a fantastic one-on-one session with speaker coach Montana. I got to practice in a room, she gave great feedback and we worked on pieces until they were right. Speaker training is HIGHLY recommended.

Presentation day dawned, as did my early morning tech check. Glitch number 3 showed up here. I couldn't show PowerPoint on one screen and GP on another. Nor could I use a hard switch to swap between them because of the room configuration. Instead, tech guy Bill would be backstage pushing a button to switch. Bill was going to earn his pay in my session.

Pam and I met to rehearse and she was fantastic. We worked out our interactions and Pam provided some great ideas and ton of giveaways.

Finally, we were up on stage and the room started to fill. We ended up with just over 400 people in that session and everyone was great. They wanted something fun at 5pm on a Tuesday and that's what we were designed to deliver.

The very first tip crashed. I hadn't reset the Journal Entry after testing. Also, a system flag I needed was off ,so other sample entries I tried didn't work. The audience was understanding. They laughed through it with me, Pam gave away swag, and we moved to tip number 2. After that it was smooth sailing.The audience was in to it and we ended up with great scores and half of the audience submitted evaluations.

That's when I discovered the high of evaluations. People should really be careful with evals. They make speakers manic depressive. When you read good comments you get high, then a negative comment makes you crash. You have to learn to process all of it to make yourself a better speaker. Sometimes you adjust for the negatives and sometimes you just realize you won't reach everyone.

Most of the people got what we were trying to do. This wasn't a deep dive but it wasn't fluffy. It was all about the little things that make life easier every day. But like anything, a few people didn't get it. A few of the comments were along the lines of "they should do fewer tips" or "they should go slower". It's 50 tips in 50 minutes. I can't go slow!

All in all, the comments were fantastic so I thought I would drop a few in here.

This session rocked. I picked up at LEAST 25 tips I did not know to take back
and use right away in my organization.

This session alone is going to save me enough time to make the conference worth
the cost.

I have been working with Dynamics GP since version 2.04. I knew alot of what
they said - but I learned a few new things.

If you've been working with GP since version 2.04 and you learned stuff, we did something right!

The nerves returned on Thursday for session 2 but everything worked and the session 2 went really well. We were a little over confident though and went about 2 minutes long. Managing a hard switch between the PowerPoint and GP was tougher than I thought it would be. We did get better scores though so I have no complaints.

The speaking process was actually really smooth and now that I've been through it once, I would happily do it again.

Make sure that you watch the new official Dynamics GP blog where my co-presenter Pam will be doing some blogging too!

Dynamics GP Back to the Future

Looking at David Musgrave's timeline of GP releases, I'm reminded that I started working with Dynamics C/S+ 5.0 in early 1999. We skipped 5.1 and upgraded to 5.5 as our first upgrade. Hey Dave, if someone at MS can remember which Convergence had the famous Marco Polo speech I would appreciate it. It was either 1999 or 2000 and that was my first introduction to Convergence.

The Dynamics GP Community and Convergence

Community continued to get a boost at Convergence this year.

• The Dynamics GP folks are finally on board with an official GP blog and they are very willing to work with other bloggers.
• There was a session on Dynamics communities (blogs, twitter, newsgroups, forums) this year that actually showed folks how to subscribe to RSS feeds for common GP blogs. (Sweet!)
• Nick Hovan of Microsoft tirelessly worked the community lounge pushing community efforts.
• I've heard that DynamicAccounting.net got a plug in a BI session for the GL Table References file.
• I heard Dave Musgrave's blog mentioned by several people.
• Lots of people stopped to say hi and mention that they like blog.
• The GP User Group (GPUG) had a good week though there are still some logistical struggles with Convergence. Last year their rooms were too small, this year they were too far away. I suspect next year will be juuuuusssst right.
• I added a significant number of Twitter followers this week.

It was fun to see the emphasis on community and to see that this year, it's not just talk. There is some real action around this. We first saw the community emphasis at Convergence 2005 and Microsoft is finally catching up to the rest of us.

Convergenge CPE

CPE forms for Convergence are at info booths. They are supposed to be online as well but I haven't found the link yet.

Someone email or comment if you find link please.

Update: CPE form can be found online at:

https://www1.msconvergence.com/resources/content_files/Convergence%20CPE%20Form%20-%20FINAL.pdf

You will need your Convergence login to access the form.

Convergence Thursday Update

My stint as booth candy is finally done and before I present again I've got some information and a perspective on the Conference so far.

• It is a smaller, more intimate conference. We saw fewer, but better interactions in the booth. Folks are having fun on Bourbon Street but they are NOT here for vacation. This year, people are here for solutions.
• Customers I've talked to are excited about version 11 and other products like Extender.
• There is no dedicated information worker track this year but the SQL Reporting Services, Sharepoint and similar sessions have had good attendance and reviews.
• In contrast, customers and partners are unhappy over the FRx/Forecaster/ER/Management Reporter/Performance Point mess. The road map to roll all of these products together goes all the way to 2014. The market won't wait 6 years. There was also very little clarity on when many of the pieces will get SQL Server 2008 support. For FRx it was announced that SQL 2008 support would come in the version 11 timeframe, or roughly Q2 2010. A year!?! What about the rest?
• People will be buying. In contrast to Bill Kennedy's thoughts, we are hearing from customers that they like what they see at Convergence and want more. It won't be monster ERP implementations since most people here already have a solution, but there will be lots of smaller Sharepoint, BI, Reporting and efficiency projects for partners to work on.

I do want to reiterate the point that I'm not picking on Microsoft with the negatives. Customers want the best solution and they want MS to be the best. The expectations for the Blue Monster are high, especially when someone has handed them the core of their business. Microsoft needs to make sure that they are meeting those high expectations.

50 Tips for Dynamics GP is a Hit!

Pam and I finished the first run of 50 Dynamics GP tips in 50 minutes yesterday. Based on the feedback and surveys so far, the session was a huge hit. Its currently the number one rated session at Convergence 2009.

A big thank you to everyone who attended! An even bigger thank you to the guy who stopped me on Bourbon Street to say that be enjoyed the session. Dude, you made my night!

You can still catch the repeat of the session Thursday at 2 pm. By Friday morning I'll have the Convergence 50 tips PowerPoint up on this site.

Convergence 2009 Initial Thoughts

I thought I would tak a minute to highlight some good and bad from Convergence 2009 so far.

• The staff, venue and Microsoft folks have all been great.
• Attendance is definitely down but I think that it is a function of the economy, no major releases at this Conference and maybe even the European Convergence.
• I think that the lower attendance will give users greater access to Microsoft people.
• I've already seen a lot of people I wanted to connect with and I think the lower turnout helps.
• Folks are here, they are just sending fewer people and being creative with the budgets to get here.
• The green initiative is great, as is the water bottle, the environmentally friendly bag is terrible.
• The number of flyers in the bag was reasonble. We weren't drowning in paper.
• Last night's MS party at the aquarium was a hit. I should have seen that beer, wine, food and fish all go well together. It was odd to have it before Convergence really started though.
• The Expo feels like it's in Mississippi, and the MS Store is storage closet.
• The hotels all seem to be great and everything is reasonably close.

All right, that's all I've got for now.

Convergence 2009 Preview

There is a Convergence 2009 preview article up at MSDynamicsWorld.com. I was one of the contributors so if you want my pre-Convergence thoughts, that's a good place to start.

Follow Convergence on Twitter!

This year you will be able to follow Convergence on Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/MBSConvergence

I'll be twittering convergence too on my personal twitter account at:

http://twitter.com/mpolino

I suspect that Dwight will be twittering as well via:

http://twitter.com/DwightSpecht


If you want up to the minute Convergence news, twitter is definitely the way to go. If you don't want up to the minute Convergence news maybe we should talk about your priorities!

I'll be a Convergence Booth Babe

If you're looking to say Hi at Convergence I'm doing 2 sessions, Tuesday at 5 p and Thursday at 2p. I'll hang around afterward too so come by and say hi. Also, I'll be working the I.B.I.S. booth at the Expo quite a bit so feel free to stop by. With the economy being what it is I've been tasked to fill the booth babe role for part of the time. I.B.I.S. was hoping to find someone one more attractive but since Marissa Miller doesn't know GP, they settled for me. They've even promised to get me a booth babe badge!

So come by, say hi, abuse me and take a look at some of I.B.I.S.' offerings.

(For those of you unaware, a "booth babe" is an attractive person, usually a woman, hired to showcase a company's wares at conventions. Often these are aspiring models or actress acting like they understand the company's products. For the politically sensitive crowd, this term is typically viewed as slightly demeaning, however, I'm using it in an ironic way since I'm neither an aspiring actress nor model and am demeaning only myself. For the less politically sensitive, this disclaimer is intended to be sarcastic).

50 Tips at Convergence

,Ok folks, my session at Convergence,"Getting More out of Microsoft Dynamics GP, 50 Tips in 50 Minutes" now has two scheduled times and locations. This should be pretty solid as the schedule is supposed to be final. The first session is scheduled for 5-6pm on Tuesday, March 10 in La Nouvelle AB. This is your chance to start things off right with stuff you can take home and use.

If you're too jet lagged to make it, there is an encore presentation on Thursday, March 12 in Room 335 from 2-3pm. This is a good option if you want to make sure that all these tips are foremost in your mind when you go to work on Monday.

Either way, we'll try to replace some of the brain cells that you'll lose during Convergence evenings!

The Fabulous Matt G, Part Deux

David Musgrave has more on the Fabulous Matt G's departure including the full good bye email. Just remember Matt, if this whole writing code thing doesn't work out, there's a job for you as a conference host out there somewhere!

End of an Era, The Fabulous Matt G Moves On

It will be a different Convergence this year. It appears that the Fabulous Matt G is leaving Microsoft. No, he wasn't part of the layoff. I've seen his outgoing email and he's leaving to join a Fargo software shop. Since the email wasn't sent out publicly, I won't publish it unless Matt wants me too.

For those who haven't been to Convergence, the Fabulous Matt G, aka Matt Gustafson, was the long time emcee, host and resident fun guy. He will be missed. We wish you the best Matt.

Ten Reasons to Attend Convergence

My new article is up at MSDynamicsWorld.com. With Microsoft's Convergence convention coming up, I've got 10 reasons that you should go, in spite of the poor economy.

Convergence Early Bird Special Ends Today!

The early bird special savings of $300 on Convergence 2009 in New Orleans ends today, January 21! What are you waiting for? Put down that donut and register now! Its Convergence, you know, "you, me and Dynamics GP", maybe with a bourbon!

Another Reason to Go to Convergence

Well, it looks like it's official, 50 Dynamics GP Tips in 50 Minutes is coming to Convergence 2009 in New Orleans and I get to do it!

There will be some new stuff so you can't say that you've seen it all. This will be a VERY fast paced presentation designed to keep you awake. It's almost all demo. The only thing in PowerPoint is list of 50. So, crappy economy or not I'm looking forward to seeing all of you there.

Convergence 2009 New Orleans Registration is Open!

Early registration is now open for Convergence, Microsoft's premier customer event for Dynamics Customers. If you've gone to the Convergence website and pre-registered you can register now! Because you are special! Everybody else has to wait a day. For 2009, Convergence will held in beautiful New Orleans, Louisiana, March 10-13. This is a great event and if you've never been, go. You'll learn a lot and you'll have access to plenty of experts to ask questions.

Early registration saves you $300 so get this in next year's budget now, before the budget is final!

Budget Now for Convergence 2009

I see that registration will open on December 3, 2008 for Microsoft's Convergence 2009 in New Orleans. Since it's budget time for many of you, I thought that I would mention it now so that you can slot some dough into next year's budget.

Convergence is Microsoft's premier customer event for the Dynamics line of products. An awful lot of Office and SQL stuff gets covered there as well since they are part of the Dynamics infrastructure and I would expect to see some more Sharepointy stuff too.

Make sure that you get Convergence 2009 into the budget. It's worth it. Besides marketing can give up one golf trip to let uptight accountants unwind, right?