GPUG Summit 2014 St. Louis - Day 1


Wednesday, October 15, 2014

After a jammed pack Academy Training day on the previous day, Summit Day 1 begins with a little stroll from my hotel down to the America's Center Convention Complex. On the way there, I cannot help but to snap a picture of the now very famous Runner Fountain at Kiener Plaza, which happened to be running a pink to red tone in support of the Cardinals.

The Runner Fountain at Kiener Plaza (in front of Jefferson National Expansion Memorial)
This is probably one of the most sought after shots for any photographer (which I'm not!), so why not.

The Runner Fountain in front of historic Old Court House and Gateway Arch
At the Convention Complex, the day opened with the keynote session where Andy Hafer and Hal Howard provided some great input into the growth of the Summit event over the years. Andy also welcomed the more than 47% of first time attendees to Summit and jumped into some of the key stats that made this the largest summit in the 10 years running.

Keynote Speech with Andy Hafer

Keynote with Andy Hafer and Hal Howard (Summit by the numbers)

It was time to turn the tides and on came funny man, motivational speaker, and self-proclaimed "attitude adjuster", Steve Rizzo, who started the day with a very cool outlook into his early childhood and key learnings from his career as a comedian. The highlight: "Feeling good is the fuel that drives motivation." Steve proposed achieving this by simply changing our early morning attitude. Focusing on the good things in life - as opposed to the non-essential and non-consequential - by getting "your shift together" makes all the difference.

Steve Rizzo
After the keynote, it was time for my first session of the Summit: Mariano's Toolbox Series: Integration Manager. This year, Kim thought it would be great to have a branded list of sessions that allowed me to showcase a few of my tips, tricks, and best practices around Microsoft Dynamics GP so, I went along!

Attendees to Mariano's Toolbox Series: Integration Manager session

My session had well over 50 attendees and showcased some of the key aspects of working with Integration Manager and how scripting can expand the out of the box capabilities - well, I believe I lost a few people here, but I think the audience was satisfied with the overall presentation.

Once my session concluded, I went over to the Ferrara Auditorium to attend the GPUG Summit General Session, MCed by Kim Peterson,

GPUG General Session
Kim welcomed premier sponsors Fastpath, Metaviewer, and Rockton Software on stage to ask them about their products and the value to the community. As is customary, Mark Rockwell certainly brought down the house with one of his now very popular product jingles.

Premier Sponsors: Fastpath, Metaviwer, and Rockton Software on stage
Then it was Microsoft's turn to showcase some of the upcoming features, roadmap, and vision surrounding the upcoming releases of Dynamics GP. Errol Schoenfish, Director of Product Management and Jeff Trossen, VP of Product Development presented some of the great features that will be released in the upcoming Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015, including but not limited to, extended workflow capabilities, the new service based architecture components, Business Analyzer for Android and iOS, and some of the employee self-serve capabilities. For more information on the upcoming GP 2015 features, take a look at the Inside Microsoft Dynamics GP blog.

Microsoft Dynamics GP Vision

After the General Session, it was time for my second session of the day: Mariano's Toolbox Series: Web Client Deployment. Again, this session was a real treat to those in attendance as only a couple of hands went up when asked if they had seen or work with the Dynamics GP web client. We got a chance to look at all the components, some technical implementation aspects, and definitely all related to infrastructure on premise and in the cloud.

Following my session, it was time to head back to the Expo and comingle with the ISV community.

2nd Day of Expo

By now, you are familiar with Rock-n-Rave at Summits and Convergence and this time it was no different. The venue: the Lucky's Dueling Piano Bar. However, still too much for me to go through so off I went to my hotel for a quiet night.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Intelligent Partnerships, LLC
http://www.intelligentpartnerships.com/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DBMS: 12 Microsoft Dynamics GP: 0 error when updating to Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 R2

Image
Hello all! It's been quite a while since I've actually written anything of remote interest to anyone who follows my blog, but at the same time, you will be pleased to know that I've been quite busy in the consulting front, with upgrades, server migrations, complex multi-instance postings involving 10's of thousands of transactions, wrapping up some Field Service Automation projects, and the list goes on and on. This time around I want to bring to the forefront, an issue I encountered updating  from Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 SP2 to Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 R2 plus the latest service pack. Background My client requested a server migration to a new environment where they wanted to deploy Dynamics GP 2013 R2 web client (plus the latest service pack) and upgrade their relational database management system to Microsoft SQL Server 2014. This is something I'm absolutely comfortable with (for the most part) given also that my client was sitting at Microsoft Dynamics...
Read more

Do I have to use those "Z-" currency IDs in GP?

Image
I know this seems like a trivia question, but recently I have come across a number of clients who have been using Microsoft Dynamics GP for a number of years and have been told by their former partners that they *must* use the predefined currency IDs created after adding the sample company, with no real explanation to support these claims. Case in point, my new client in Saudi Arabia, has been struggling for years to understand why they were told to prefix all currency IDs with the "Z-". So they went ahead and setup "Z-SR" for the Saudi Real. If you are familiar with Microsoft Dynamics GP and the sample company, Fabrikam, you may have noticed by now that after adding the sample company (which is not a requirement by any means), you will get a number of predefined currencies such as Z-US$ (US Dollars), Z-UK (British Pounds), Z-C$ (Canadian Dollars), Z-AUD (Australian Dollars), and so forth, accompanied by a number of exchange rate tables. If you are not familiar wi...
Read more

Microsoft Dynamics GP Scrolling Windows and Line Sequence Numbers

Image
I thought I would write about something meaningless that no one really thinks about. However, I realized that this is a compelling topic since it makes for some interesting discussion around the ability to insert line items withinin most transaction scrolling windows. Let’s take some time to understand where Line Sequence Numbers come from. A Line Sequence Number is auto generated by Dynamics GP and uses a seed value of 16,384 as a basis for the first line. Each subsequent line in the scrolling window is incremented by this number, so line number 2 would have a Line Sequence Number value of 32,768, line number 3 would have Line Sequence Number Value of 49,152, and so on. Since most GP transaction entry scrolling windows allow inserting rows in between line items, the newly inserted Line Sequence Number value is calculated as an average between the previous and the next line item sequences, i.e., if you were to insert an item in between row 1 and row 2 in the scrolling window -- keep in...
Read more