GPUG Amplify South Africa 2018 - Day 1


Monday, May 21, 2018

Having some fun over the weekend, while here in Johannesburg, was good, but Day 1 of the conference was now here and it was time to unleash the wealth of information that David and I had prepared for this conference.

GPUG Amplify South Africa welcome banner
The morning started with a small tech check since Bob McAdam, VP and General Manager of GPUG would be dialing in via Skype, from his hometown in Tampa, to kickoff the day's event. Katie Froeber, did a small recap of the agenda and it was all Bob from there on, introducing all the new features in Dynamics GP 2018. Although communication was spotty at times, the content was clearly communicated and attendees were rather receptive to the overall future set.

As is customary, and before the agenda was introduced, David and I got the usual "wave photo" from attendees.


Several times throughout the presentation, there were thank you notes to the event sponsors. It is worth mentioning that ISVs and VARs in attendance were more than happy to present their products in the expo area, but I feel should have gotten at least 5 minutes on stage to present their companies, products, and services.

Event Sponsors
All conference attendees were treated to 1 year of free GPUG membership, which I thought was a pretty nice gesture from Dynamic Communities. I encourage all who received this benefit to take full advantage of the perks from day 1, including webinars, past webinar recordings, chapter meetings, etc.

It was time for the main keynote speech, by Wessel Pieterse (LinkedIn), Senior Sales Manager, Azure Applications and Infrastructure at Microsoft.

Wessel Pieterse
Wessel's presentation, Transforming Business for the Digital Age (here), walked through Microsoft's commitment to cloud and how the company is transforming the global landscape with its 50 Azure regions and 100+ datacenters, along with a discussion on the Intelligent Cloud, presenting enough reasons and compelling benefits (both business and economic) for moving to the cloud. The one slide that stood out for me was this one, which outlined the challenges of running GP on-premise or in a hosted environment.


Once the keynote ended, David and I went off to present our sessions. Our first session, Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018: Customizing the User Interface was low in attendance, but we had a chance to discuss the topic in a very intimate setting, with the few attendees that came along for the ride.

After our session, we went to show some support for Alicia Weigel, from Rockton Software, who was delivering the Making Dynamics GP Work Simpler & Easier, a partner solution showcase presentation of the products currently sold by Rockton.

It was time for lunch. We mingled and took it easy for a bit before our next session.

After lunch, David and I went to deliver his partner solution showcase session, Simplify Administering your system with GP Power Tools. This was a 30-minute session showcasing the administrative features of the product and was spent demonstrating these capabilities.

Following that session we did Yet Another 25 Dexterity Development Tricks and Hacks in 45 minutes, which was well attended.

Yet Another 25 Dexterity Development Tricks and Hacks session
The previous year, at reIgniteGP 2017, we had presented both the 25 Dexterity Development Tricks and Hacks and the Another 25 Dexterity Development Tricks and Hacks sessions, which were very well attended, so this time we added yet another 25 to build up on the previous 50. All tricks and hacks presented to date are a part of the slide deck which can be found here.

After all sessions, Pieter Cornelius from Braintree delivered even more good news to all attendees by introducing the new South African GPUG chapter which he will be chairing with the help of David Joosten from Premier Foods, one of the largest Microsoft Dynamics GP sites in the region with close to 1000 GP users.

It was now time for the welcome Cocktail Reception and Expo. 




Until next post,

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP

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