#GPPC PreGAME at #CONV14

March 3, 2014 - GPPC PreGAME

PreGAME is an event hosted by GP Partner Connections (GPPC) focused on the partner community and preceding the Microsoft Convergence 2014 Atlanta event.

This year, I have the fortune of having Microsoft Convergence 2014 Atlanta being hosted in my home town. I got up this morning to go to the Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC) where I would meet up with Mark Polino (twitter: @mpolino) and the Microsoft team for the General Session rehearsal. Except for the episode where I literally passed out, everything went fairly well. After my incident, I got back on stage and went on with the show. A dosage of cough medicine on an empty stomach proved to be a very bad decision to kick-off the morning.

After rehearsal and still feeling a bit weak, it was time to go grab some lunch. My good friend and customer Mike Lupro had the presence of mind to head over to Taco Mac Sports Grill, considered an institution here in Atlanta by many. A good combination of burgers and sandwiches, along with some of the best fries around always go a long way.

Gianmarco Salzano (Reporting Central), Mike Lupro, Tom Goodspeed (Olympic System), Zubin Gidwani (Dynamic Budgets)

 After lunch, we went over to the Omni Hotel at the CNN Center for the kickoff of the PreGAME sessions. First up was the PreGAME General Session with Microsoft Product Management team on "Microsoft Dynamics GP Next". It was interesting to see Pam Misialek talking about the upcoming "Stampede to Fargo", though the name will probably not stick. Please mark your calendars for the week of November 10 as this event will be comprehensive of both sales and technical presentations.



Pam Misialek on the upcoming "Stampede to Fargo" event

After Pam's presentation, we had Chad Sogge and Kevin Racer demo some of the Microsoft Dynamics GP future vision, in what's now known as Microsoft Dynamics GP Next. The NEXT platform is the next evolutionary step following a chain of platform enhancements and aims at exposing more of the Microsoft Dynamics GP application business logic in the form of REST-based and services. In order to accomplish this, the Microsoft Dexterity development platform is being enhanced at all levels, to allow for more .NET interoperability. I will expand on this in a future article.

At the end of the PreGAME General Session and on the way out, I had a chance to catch up with my friend Craig Klapman over at Mekorma, who happened to be wearing the colors of his company... ON HIS HEAD!! I have to say that for those of us who have known Craig for quite some time, we have really come to expect something new from him at each and every event.

Craig Klapman (Mekorma)

Next up, I attended fellow MVPs Mark Polino and Belinda Allen's session, "Getting Excited About Power BI". In it, Mark and Belinda demonstrated the capabilities of Power Query, Power View, Power Map, and Power Pivot, to create stunning data visualizations and analytics on the fly. The good news is all these tools are available for free from the Microsoft Power BI site. All you need is Excel 2013 or 2010 to get going.

Finally, it was time for my GPPC session, "Experience Sharing on Web Client". My session provided a series of recollections on the deployment work we've done here at IntellPartners around Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 web client, both internally and for our customers. This session was well received and had numerous follow up questions.

It was now time for the partner reception. Trying to hold a Surface steady to take a picture while standing can be a challenge, so please take these for what they are.

Partner Reception meeting

Leslie Vail, Pam Misialek (Microsoft), Mark Polino, John Louther, Belinda Allen, Gianmarco Salzano (Reporting Central)

It's time to get some rest now, so off I went to home to get some rest. My body was sore from my early incident and I had to give the General Session material one more pass just to make sure the timing was adequate.

Sorry Mark, about missing the #MVPMingle -- yes, this is a new hash tag on Twitter.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/