reImagine 2016 – Day 1, Part 3

Continuing on from Part 1 and Part 2, here is the remainder of Day 1.

Session 4 – What’s Microsoft Azure? – John Dooley

This was a presentation John also did at Amplify in May 2016. It was a different approach from other Azure presentations I’ve sat in on, and I don’t know if it resonated more with me because I’ve already dabbled in Azure, or if it was just a better approach to the subject.

The basic gist was to start with the environment or topology you want to achieve. Do you have an AD server, a mail server, a file server, a SQL server, a web server? What are you trying to do? What you would need in Azure isn’t all that different, but you need o start with what your network looks like today. In Azure there are VMs and Storage which is where you need to learn the Azure equivalent and go from there.

Dynamics Pros

I missed the end of the day sessions and had a meeting with Joe Carroll and John Lowther instead, talking about Dynamics Pros stuff, where we are, where we were a year ago etc.

During the opening session there were a couple of big announcements with Dynamics Pros.

1. Advanced Exams announced. Still in development, the next two exams for GP will be Advanced Distribution and Advanced Human Resources & Payroll (US). The goal is for these exams to be available starting Q4 of this year.
2. Advanced Credentialed Implementation Professional was announced. This will be a credential awarded to any individual who passes 1 core exam and 1 additional exam, either the other core exam or an elective exam like the future HR/Pay or Distribution exams. There are 13 individuals who have obtained this, and I’m proud to say I’m one of them! Here’s the initial list:

The exam committee is actively looking for additional SMEs to help write high quality exam questions. If you are not already involved, reach out to see how you can contribute. If you’re unsure what’s involved, feel free to reach out to me as I’ve been on a sub-committee for several months now and can give you an idea of effort etc.

Here’s Joe Carroll’s blog post about this…

Twitter Hashtag #reImagine2016 analysis

Jon Rivers posted an interesting graphic/link earlier in the day from a site called Tweet Binder. It was an interesting analysis of the #reImagine2016 hashtag. When I got back to the hotel, I ran my own analysis on the same hashtag to pick up the entire day’s activity. What was very cool was I was actually ahead of Jon Rivers in one category: original tweets. Cool. He was blowing everyone away in every other category though!

One other interesting thing! MVP Christina Phillips joined twitter and look at this, after day 1, she was third on the list of original tweets. Way to go rookie!

Here is the Tweet Binder report I ran this evening, but you can also go to tweetbinder.com and run your own hashtag analysis. Cool stuff…

Finally, that’s it for Day 1… now for some sleep!