It was a new day, Sunday, May 22 and it was time to register for Amplify. After meeting up with Pam for some brunch, I made my way to the registration area, with signs of the event placed throughout the corridors leading to the registration area.
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| Welcome and Registration banner |
As it turned out, the Mekorma Hub was also in the process of being setup by the hotel staff. I came across a few of my colleagues at Mekorma, who were in the process of supervising The Hub setup.
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| Mekorma team - Left to right: Ora Goldman, Angel Blum, Eric Karie, Craig Clapman |
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| Mekorma Hub being powered up |
The registration area was just getting warmed up. Earlier, partners had signed up for a number of free training classes and were probably getting ready to swarm the registration desk. I went ahead and claimed my badge and went on tour throughout the different rooms checking to see what was going on.
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| Amplify Registration Desk |
The first area I visited was the Expo booths, this time, a far cry from the big room that is customary or expected at events like GPUG Summit or the former Convergence. This was the first reality check as to what type of event Amplify would be. Seeing just a few booths was nonetheless encouraging as it reminds me that all major events we have today started out being small. But you could pretty much say the usual suspects were there: KwikTag, Olympic Systems, Rose ASP, Altec, eOne, Fastpath, Integrity Data, Journyx, to name a few. You can see the complete list of
sponsors here.
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| Expo area |
A short step ahead of the booths was the meal and general session area. There was space for about 400 people, again, a big contrast from the Convergence and Summit events.
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| Meal and General Session Area |
On the way out, I came across one of DCE's audio/video engineers who was trying to connect some very sophisticated cameras to an Apple TV like receiver, but was not having success with the video feeding to the computer from the Apple device. This equipment was going to be used in the first ever live stream TV from the event -- more on this later.
Back at the booth, I came across
Jay Manley, Director of Product Management and
Altonique Burton, Executive Assistant at Mekorma. Jay had just arrived earlier to the hotel from his adventurous trip from Fargo.
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| Altonique Burton and Jay Manley |
After a little kick back, it was time for the partner reception and update. We were treated to some really cool demos by
John Dooley.
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| John Dooley on the future of software demos |
Following John's presentation, it was time for
Errol Schoenfish (Twitter:
@eschoenfish) to talk about Project "Madeira". Madeira comes as Microsoft's SaaS only solution to compete with the likes of NetSuite and Quickbooks Online and to provide an entry level solution to products like Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and even Dynamics AX.
Madeira is currently in preview and is available via your Office 365 subscription. You can access Madeira
here. You can also read my getting started article
here.
Next up was
Chris Dubkins with
Njevity to talk about a brand new solution called PowerGP Online, built from the ground up to be a SaaS based solution to access and transact with Microsoft Dynamics GP. PowerGP Online is currently available for the iPad and will be seeing other platforms soon after its release.
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| Chris Dubkins / Njevity |
After a few more drinks and hi's it was time to go for dinner. My dinner was going to be a one-on-one review with my manager and colleague Jay Manley at
Morton's.
Until next post!
MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
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