reIMAGINE 2014 – Day 3

Day 3 technically is the last day of the conference, unless you are taking some of the post-conference training. All of the content was at the Holiday Inn since there were fewer sessions overall. There were 9 sessions + the work room 1 on 1 things again.

The Big Reveal

The first session of the day after breakfast was a general session called the Big Reveal. After some initial housekeeping items from Joe Carroll, Errol Schoenfish kicked off the Big Reveal by showing us his second plaid shirt. Luckily there was more than that!

One of the biggest things he emphasized was what they have been saying would happen and when, has been occurring so far… they’ve been consistently hitting the targets they are setting for new releases, timelines on releases etc.

Some things I picked up on (there were lots, I’m sure I missed a lot of details here…)

• The vision is all devices – phones, tablets, desktops – and multi-platform – Android, iOS, Windows
• Jared Hall talked about new OData connections, which is an open data protocol to make data available to Excel Online for refreshable excel reports in Office365
• Jen Ranz talked about the new homepage and the tile-based look, making it easier for different types of devices to access the data, both touch and mouse
• She also showed a new All In One viewer, which appears to allow you to search for something (like an invoice) and view all related items to it (PO, Receipt, Payments etc.) all in one window. Pretty neat!
• Chad talked about the web client and HTML5 UI, allowing any browser support and enhanced UI.

The session finished with Errol telling us they will always be telling us what is coming up in the next year. Beyond the next year things change too frequently to be predicting out that far.

Morning Sessions

The next session I wanted to attend was Office 365 & Dynamics GP. Clearly a lot of people were interested in this as well, as it was overflowing with people so I decided to bail on that, since I wouldn’t be able to make notes effectively on what I learned. I hope the PowerPoint presentations will give me enough of a flavour of the content!

I also attended a pricing & licensing session with Pam Misialek. This was a repeat session, since it too was overflowing the day before. I don’t sell software much myself anymore, not being a reseller anymore, but it’s helpful to know what is going on in the pricing side of things, and current promos for existing clients that might be able to take advantage of things. Some of the key takeaways that we’re allowed to share are:

• Personal Data Keeper (PDK) and Business Portal will not ship with GP2015
• Some functionality is moved into the Starter Pack (Employee Profile, Time Management app when it releases, Smartlist Designer, Excel Reports, Services Based Architecture, Identity Management and Workflow)
• Not too many changes to the Extended pack except to remove business portal functionality
• There are currently Full users and Limited users, and with GP2015 R2 a new Self Serve user type will be added. This will be a named user which is intended for the self serve functions where they might have been business portal type users in the past, such as Time Mgmt, Requisition Mgmt or Workflow approvers etc.
• The Self Serve user will be on the price lists when GP2015 is released, but no functionality will exist in the product until GP2015 R2. In the meantime it will need to be managed manually, meaning when R2 is released, any S/S users would need to be changed from Limited (the only option after the initial release) to Self Serve.
• There were several details around what existing clients “get” on transitioning to GP2015, and I recommend following that information on Partnersource in case I didn’t get the details exactly right in my own notes.
• Promotions again, see Partnersource, but the general note I took away is they will let us know what the promos are for the entire year up front, so we can plan marketing and sales accordingly, and help customers purchase at the appropriate time depending on upcoming promos.

Post-Conference Training

The rest of the day I was sticking around for the Reporting Deep Dive training that was offered. I’ll cover more of this in the Day 4 blog post since it’s a split day, half day on Wednesday, half day on Thursday.