By Michelle Glennie, The Partner Marketing Group
Summit is always a great time for Microsoft, partners, ISVs and end users to meet up, learn from each other and take away new knowledge that can be energizing for all involved. Whether you attended Summit this year for #GPUG, #CRMUG, #NAVUG, or #AXUG, the keynote, sessions and expo were filled with more people than ever before, or at least it seemed to me. From what I heard, there were over 6000 attendees. Given all this buzz from the event, I personally had two key takeaways:
- Summit has become the go-to event for Microsoft Dynamics attendees since Convergence has sailed into the sunset and become Envision.
- Microsoft made the announcement that Dynamics 365 would be released on November 1, 2016. This initial launch will be available as an upgrade for current Dynamics CRM Online and Dynamics AX 7 customers. From a marketing perspective, a branding change in product names was also revealed as you can see in the picture below I took at the keynote session.
Enough about what I took away from Summit, I know you really want to hear what other partners and ISVs took away! When I asked a select few for their feedback from Summit 2016, here is what they had to say:
“One of the most intriguing takeaways from Summit 2016 for DynamicPoint this year was the showcase of PowerApps during the Microsoft Vision Keynote session. We have recently created a PowerApp for our SharePoint Customer & Vendor Portals for Dynamics and to see the Microsoft team demonstrate the ease of use of the new tool highlights their investment in enabling companies to extend their applications in a mobile-friendly format without writing code. We learned some new tricks we didn’t realize existed but moreover it continues to reaffirm our investment in the Microsoft platform! PowerApps is a game changer to rapidly extend data from SharePoint into a user-friendly business automation tool and we are taking notice!” – Tiffany Allen, Account Executive, DynamicPoint
“Walking away from GPUG Summit gives me a great amount of pride. When you can watch your clients and teammates present their Dynamics experiences to others, it’s remarkable to simply hear knowledge sharing. I’m so proud of everyone who comes to this conference – conversations, demonstrations or directions on what to do can change a person’s career or value to their company. They are doing it as volunteers who want everyone in the community to use these tools to the greatest. That is what I love about GPUG Summit – it’s the community servanthood to the max!” – Kim Peterson, Director of User Experiences, InterDynBMI
“GPUG Summit is growing exponentially and is a great resource for Dynamics Users to learn about how to use their Dynamics system more efficiently and get tips from other users. For ISVs like ours it is a great place to get in front of those users and talk about how our add-ons can make their life even easier. My main take-away would be that this would be the main event to go to for Dynamics users and ISVs, kind of replaces Convergence.” – Marleen De Winter, Director of Marketing, Integrity Data
“The Summit had a great vibe with a lot of focused energy. Our expo team was delighted with the traffic and product interest. The Dynamics 365 messaging, while necessary from a marketing standpoint, added confusion across the partners and ISVs.” – Michael Burnham, President/CEO, Panatrack
Now we want to hear from you! Did you attend Summit in Tampa? Please add your comments to this post so we can learn what your key takeaways were. To up the ante, we will give away a few fun gift cards to some randomly selected commenters who attended the event!
Summit 2017 will be in Nashville, TN on October 10-13, 2017. See you there!
The post Dynamic Communities Summit 2016: Top takeaways from attendees appeared first on The Partner Marketing Group.
