Background
Day 2 started bright and early with first sessions at 09:00. People were already gathering bright and early and ready to capture the knowledge and networking that Scottish Summit 2022 day 2 will offer.
As I was also a volunteer at the event, I managed to attend only 4 sessions, Pub quiz included 😀
So let’s kick off and what’s better to start the day than a bit of Dynamics 365 with Tricia and Guro.
Day 2
Personalise you customer experience with Dynamics 365 – Tricia Sinclair & Guro Faller
Tricia and Guro are superstars with everything Dynamics 365. Therefore, I was really looking forward to their customer experience session. It was a very fun session taking us through the journey of a web shop and how it is possible to also contact the shop from the same page.
The products that they showed to illustrate a customer yourney process were:
- D365 Omnichannel for Customer Service
- D365 Marketing
- D365 Customer Insights
- Power Pages
A very informative session full of demos to actually show how the process is working through the eyes of the actual customer. At the same time, also showing what happens in the background if a customer contacts the shop through the chat on the website.
You don’t need Dynamics CRM. You need a Power App! – Nick Doelman
Nick is a legend and every time I have attended his sessions, I come back with new knowledge and good laugh 😀 Exactly, that I also had with this session. It wasn’t that much in depth about power apps and how and what, but more the process of Dynamics and Dataverse and Power Apps. As a person that works a lot with Dynamics 365, this was amazing to listen to. How the different products evolved and what they are now.
He also sent around the installation discs for the first Microsoft CRM version. It was very interesting to see the packaging and marketing on it. Which was so much different than what they market the product now 😀
The last part of the session was the demo of how to get very similar capabilities to Dynamics CRM, with a simple model-driven app. Just by adding a few Dataverse tables to it and all the UI, such as forms and search and sitemaps etc. All of this, is already there for you just with creating a model-driven app with the regular Power Apps licenses.
From the basement to the cloud – Your journey from CRM on-premise to D365 CE – Vivian Voss
And of course the last session I attended, mostly because otherwise there would not have been a session as I was the presenter. 😀 This session was based on my experience with various D365 migration projects from on-premise to cloud. There are multiple ways, and it is only you who knows what suits best.
Bus besides figuring out the technology, my experience has also been that there are far more important aspects to look at. And these can break your project way faster than choosing the right technology.
It is also all about the team you are working with, the processes and needs that have to be solved and definitely also how to keep up the communication around it all. Only, when focusing on all of the previous aspects together with technology, you will have the best possible outcome.
Ending key note session – Mental Health in IT – Dona Sarkar
So that was it for sessions for Scottish Summit. The last part of the conference, though was one of the sessions that really made me think about how I have perceived things in the workplace. And how I should in the future. For those of you that don’t know Dona, then she is the Director of technology – accessibility in Microsoft. She is very vocal about about accessibility within technology and workplaces also how to make technology available for bigger and bigger audiences, that might currently be disregarded, due to their diabilities. We should feel the responsibility to find and create solutions to include as many people as possible.
Donas sessions are also very interactive, she asks quite a lot of questions from the audience and she involves everyone. She is also sharing her experiences from how she has and is coping with working in technology. The resources she uses and the ways she communicates everything out to her team.
And of course, she had homework for us all 😀
I will shae the homework here because, it is important that we all put more focus on this in our working life:
- Make your own personal mental health plan
- Make your team’s mental health plan
- Share with Dona, either privately or publically on social media 🙂
Scottish Summit Pub Quiz – Tricia Sinclair, Keegan Stanton, Andrew Bibby
In order to really put a great end to Scottish Summit, it has to be celebrated with a pub quiz about everything Microsoft. And it really isn’t anything you can learn for. The pub quiz questions can be anything from how many datacenters Microsoft has to what is Bill Gates’s favorite music genre.
This time there were around 12 teams and I was in the Nordic Vikings team 😀 With the team captain Guro Faller, we managed to get an honorable 6th place! Very well done, as we thought 😀
There were some technical difficulties on the way and the quiz app decided to lag a bit once in a while, but it was all really fun and people enjoyed themselves. In the end it was Zoes team, that ran with the win (to be fair, they were winning already from the start), the shirts, medals and a new addition to the quiz: The trophy 🙂
Tricia, Keegan and Andrew organize a pub quiz at various Power Platform & Dynamics 365 community events, so make sure you attend the next time 😉
Summary
What an amazing experience to take part of Scottish Summit 2022 in person. I have followed the event already multiple times through web, but it does not come close to actually attending in person.
The event will now take a break in 2023, but will be back, stronger than ever, on 24th of February 2024! #ScottishSummit2024
