Microsoft Convergence 2011 Atlanta - Day 3

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David Meego - Click for blog homepage

The day started with a late breakfast and then I met Mariano in the Speaker Room. This is a room set aside for the conference speakers to work on the materials or presentations and maybe even relax. The team that help make sure that speakers want for nothing includes Ace Martin and Tracy Stenhjem.  These guys are awesome. 

While Mariano and I were in the speaker room making sure that our demos for today working, we found DaveGaboury working on his presentations.  Dave is one of the grandfathers of Dexterity and was/is the longest tenured employee from the Great Plains. He now works with the Dynamics AX development team and is doing some great work for the Dynamics AX 2012 product.

Mariano and I did spend some time creating blog posts for the previous day. Then as the time for our session approached we went across via the connector shortcut from Building B to Building A. This took us through the Community & Learning Center in Hall A1-A2 where we met a few friends.


Mariano Gomez, Emily Roen, & David Musgrave.

 
Kim Peterson (of GPUG fame) with the Dynamics Duo.

 
Super Hero: Hands On Lab Lady (Leslie Vail) is now GPUG Woman.

Now it was time to present our 90 minute deep dive session DDGP03 Microsoft Dynamics GP Customization & Integration Tools Review. This session started with an executive overview of the seven development tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP.

The Customization Tools:

  • Modifier and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)
  • Dexterity
  • Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP
  • Extender

The Integration Tools:

  • Integration Manager
  • eConnect
  • Web Services

After the overview with a quick demonstration of each tool, we spent some time answering questions from the attendees. I can tell you that it is hard to cover seven tools in a single session, but the idea here was to provide an executive overview that would allow non-developers to have an idea of what their developers were talking about.

We did get one comment on the evaluations that there was a problem with this session..... that we ran out of Tim Tams. Well, there are only eleven biscuits in a packet, so you need to make sure you are amongst the first eleven to ask a question.  There is an inherent problem with only having eleven biscuits in a packet. Eleven is a prime number which means that when sharing them around equally, someone is always likely to miss out.

A surprise at the end of the session was a visit from Geoff Harding. Geoff used to work with me in Perth, Australia back in the Sequel Technology days.  He was originally employed to write the Equipment Series product. He now works for Wennsoft who purchased the Equipment Series a while back.  

After the session, Mariano had to go home and I visited the Community & Learning Center for the "tail end" of the Birds of a Feather Networking session. When it was over and we were kicked out of the hall, I returned to the hotel to finish writing up the blog posts for yesterday and today.

Tomorrow is the final day of the conference and the repeat session for CSGP14 Administering Microsoft Dynamics GP like a Pro with the Support Debugging Tool. If you missed the session on Monday and you will still be around for the last session on Wednesday, please join us in Room A305 at 4:30pm for an extremely worthwhile 60 minutes.

Hope to see you there.

David