The 22nd – 24th of May were some very busy days when it comes to various Power Platform/Dynamics 365 / Microsoft 365 areas. And I was lucky enough to get selected for the very first DynamicsMinds conference in Portorož, Slovenia.
It was a 3 day Dynamics 365 and Power Platform conference with over 100 speakers all over the world. With a mix of 45 minute sessions and 2h or 4h workshops, there was a lot of knowledge sharing and possibilities for networking as well. The conference took place in the st. Bernardin hotel with beautiful views to the Adriatic sea.
And the theme was magical. We had witches and wizards everywhere and everything held on to the theme very well. All decorations and merch was mystery / magical theme, all entertainment and awards as well. Truly something different and new, that I definitely have not experienced before.
My sessions
I had the most packed conference schedule, that I have ever had. I delivered:
- A GDPR together with Dynamics 365 Marketing workshop. I talked about the various rules that we have combined under the GDPR title and how dynamic the rules actually are. Then we looked into the Dynamics 365 Marketing system to see what possibilities there are for making sure your company becomes or stays GDPR compliant.
A great workshop with 10 people, good feedback and discussions, it was great to also hear from the attendees experience with GDPR and some of the struggles they have faced with trying to automate some of the processes.
- A panel about how we have messed up in projects. I joined Andrew Bibby, Malin Martnes and Sara Lagerquist in a panel session about our experience with things that have gone wrong in projects or deliveries. There were many things to discuss 😂 But it was also great to hear some experiences from the audience and hopefully we will all be learning from the communication, delivery or adoption mistakes that we discussed.
- A session about co-authoring within Power Apps. A feature I had hoped would be generally available by now, but unfortunately not everything goes as we hope 😁 But the session still happened, although with warnings of preview material for the model-driven apps part. Also brought out that there is not the same possibilities / features for co-authoring for model-driven and canvas apps. The possibilities for canvas apps are really lacking the copresence possibilities and being able to save changes in real-time.
- And finally a session about conversational intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales. A great added feature that is a great help for all team leaders to help coach and measure how their sales team is doing. All of that based on collecting and analyzing the phone calls that get recorded between the sales person and customer. There are pros and cons, like with any other thing, but one, that I would primarily point out is the amount of calls you get the chance to process, within the biggest licenses within Dynamics 365
Sessions visited
Besides delivering sessions, I also learned a lot from the other sessions that I attended. As it was such a busy schedule, then I unfortunately didn’t manage to be at all the sessions I wanted, but I still managed a few:
Roundtable: Use Microsoft technology to create a Customer Experience that makes you stand out – Guro Faller, Sara Lagerquist
An interesting session about what makes great customer experiences within projects. Which tools to use and also pointing out different tricks in for example Azure DevOps, to ensure better experience. Sara and Guro also mentioned a bit about what to look out for in projects, bringing out a few miscalculations that resulted in no one using the apps / solutions that were created.
DynamicsMinds keynote – Hosted by: Dona Sarkar and Mat Batterbee
This was a keynote like no other. It had magic, music, performance and also updates from Microsoft. There were updates and presentations from Roger Gilchrist, Georg Glantschnig, Monique Hayward and Mike Morton. They were all backed up by a comedy performance band that was later on also joined by Dona (playing the triangle) and Mat (squeaky chicken 🤷♂️)
As very appropriate to the theme of the conference we also got a magic show. We had floating people that didn’t want to stop floating and playing music with instruments that clearly could be made very compact.
All in all, a very fun and entertaining keynote with surprise video greetings from DUG and Heather Cook.
Before everyone was welcomed to the keynote hall, there were also offered potions to be able to keep the spirits up after a long day. I am not sure what it was, but it was blue and strong 😁
How to quickly go from Zero to Hero with your D365 Marketing skills? – Guro Faller
Great session about the different features in D365 Marketing, also pinpointing out which are the basic/ core functionalities and which is more advanced. Guro demonstrated how users can quickly get started with D365 Marketing and which tools / functionalities to use. There were great questions and she also showed some new updates and possibilities that have recently come to the platform that can prove to be very useful for users. Like AI suggested content.
Creating Exceptional User Experiences for Dynamics 365 – Thomas Berkvens
Session focused on UX and showing tips and tricks on how to make the UX better within Dynamics 365 apps and also Power Platform. With great examples about PCF controls and Custom Pages. There is a lot of functionality within Dynamics 365 that admins can use to help make UX better within model-driven apps. As they are not very flexible to make completely yours, there are still great possibilities for better data and information visualization.
Thomas took us through different control and visual corrections you can make with just a few steps, but your users will get a huge value out of it. A great session 😊
Express Yourself: Intro to Expressions in Microsoft Power Automate – Fausto Capellan Jr
I have been using Power Automate for some time now, but I have never really looked much into the different expressions available there. So this intro session was perfect. Fausto brought out the different possibilities there are, what and when to use them and with examples and demos, also showed us how using expressions will make your flows much more efficient.
I found myself in many of his examples on how sometimes Power Automate can be tricky, for example automatically created For Each loops.
He also provided a great overview of content conversions that I have now saved to use in the future.
Parties
The parties we had require a whole section just for them, because they were something really great. We started with speaker boat trip and dinner on Sunday, which was very nice way of getting to know the team and some speakers that I had never met before. But we didn’t know then, that it was just the beginning.
We had parties both Monday and Tuesday evenings, with dinner, drinks and a live band.
Everyone was given tokens to pay for drinks and for some reason, my token pile just kept growing 🤔, although I did use a fair share 😁
As usual with parties, it takes a bit to start up and it definitely does not want to end afterwards. This was also true here. Once the band stopped playing, a playlist was put on and the dance floor was full of people until the music was turned off. I am sure, I got my weeks worth of training right there.
Monday party theme was karaoke and we had around 6-7 people from the conference stand up on the stage and sing. I was very amazed by them, because in the end it felt like I was at a concert. It was a great mix of karaoke and people that clearly have singing talents that I did not know of before. It was very fun and the audience cheered everyone on. Magnuses dance moves are still out of this world and need special shout out 😁
The Tuesday evening party started also with dinner and drinks, an amazing sunset and award ceremony. Awards were given out to the most exceptional wizards and sorceresses in the categories of: Dynamics 365 FO, Dynamics 365 BC, Dynamics 365 CE and Power Platform. Besides that, Mark Smith and Steve Mordue took home an award for all of their contributions to the community.
Conclusion
A great experience and an amazing conference. A lot of effort went into it and it turned out really well, so huge thank you to the Docentric team and all the speakers/ team members / attendees / sponsors that helped to make the first edition of DynamicsMinds a great success. I am very honored to have got the chance to be a part of it and looking forward to what the team will think of next 😉
