Microsoft Convergence Atlanta 2015 (#CONV15) - Day 3

Ok, I'm officially tired! Day 2 did not leave much room to sleep with a presentation, expo, dinner, and Rock-n-Rave (even though I did not stay long).

However, today I had to gut it out for our repeat session, CS15G024-R2 Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015: Customizing the user interface, which was scheduled for 11:00 AM.

CS15G024-R2 Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015: Customizing the user interface
Mariano Gomez and David Musgrave

We had 64 people in our session and really had an enthusiastic crowd despite the Rock-n-Rave precedent. The session went on as planned and we feel we had a bit more organization in our delivery.

Once our session finished, I ran off to Kevin and Dan's session, CS15G014 - Leveraging Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015: Service Based Architecture for better integrations.

Kevin Racer and Dan Lothspeich

This session was truly informative as Kevin and Dan walked through the evolution of the work environment and how it has been impacted by the ever increasing hours we spend working, the ever decreasing workforce age, our own understanding of the Internet, the increasing workload many of us are challenged with, and the endless ways to communicate. This all has led companies to seek increased computing resources to process massive amounts of data which cloud computing seems to deliver well via a service oriented architecture model. This service model has driven the appification of software functionality, a technique by which software functions are exposed as services to be consumed by other software applications.

This brings us to the Microsoft Dynamics GP Service Based Architecture model, which seeks to expose parts of Dynamics GP as services to be consumed by other applications, also allowing Dynamics GP to consume services.

Microsoft Dynamics GP Service Based Architecture

The key to this technology evolution has been the enhanced interoperability with Microsoft .NET built within the Microsoft Dexterity toolset and leveraged via the Dynamics GP application. Kevin then went on to conduct a short demo on the endpoint URI structure and patterns to access the Dynamics GP services and showed off some of the cool discovery tools available, while detailing the security flow and authentication mechanisms required to access the Dynamics GP services.

Then we had eOne demoing their latest product, Service Builder which allows users and developers to expose any part of GP as a service, similar to how SmartList Builder exposes GP data. In fact, the idea is to also allow users to expose smart lists as services. Other applications include being able to expose Microsoft Dynamics GP windows and the underlying Dexterity scripts as services, conceivably allowing any function within GP to be consumed by other applications.

Well, I could go on and on, but hopefully you get the point. Kevin and Dan's session is available on the Virtual Convergence site, here.

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I returned to the Expo to try and catch up with David who had attended another session, but decided to go visit some folks I hadn't seen yet. After saying hi and catching up with David, we returned to the Omni Hotel in preparation for the OneRepublic concert and to decompress from the day. I had invited a good friend of mine and I left to pick her up and return to the Phillips Arena.

The OneRepublic concert motto: "One Believable Convergence Celebration"

Once inside the arena, we quickly head to the floor area to get a good view of the group for the opening. In the meantime, we were enjoying some of the cool music being played. The group came on stage with their song Light it Up to open the concert.

The concert got progressively better with the group artists hitting some solos.

Well, the night was really a good one, but it was time to wrap up and get home.

Until next post!

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