Where has David been for the last week?

You have probably been wondering where I have been for the last week as there have not been any blog articles posted.

Well, on top of my normal load of support case, I have been really busy with a week's worth of internal training as well as working on the upcoming build 15 of the Support Debugging Tool. For the training we had Kelly Youells from the North American System Support team in Fargo fly down to Sydney for a week.

For those of you who don't know the team I work with, let me introduce you to them. In Sydney we have Marian, Allan and Robert and then you have me based in Perth.  We cover the Asia Pacific region which covers Australasia (Australia & New Zealand) and South East Asia. Our team covers support for Dynamics GP from India through to New Zealand... that's about 8 time zones. Below is a picture of the team with Kelly in the Sydney Microsoft office in the suburb of North Ryde.

Marian Verzosa, David Musgrave, Allan Cahill, Kelly Youells and Robert Dei Rossi

Kelly had a great time in Australia, she arrived early enough to have the weekend to settle into the timezone and go visit Taronga Zoo and see the Koalas. However, she did not get to see any Drop Bears, the vicious cousins of the koala. She also took the opportunity to do the BridgeClimb on Sydney Habour Bridge. This an amazing experience that is definitely worth having on your Top 100 things to do "Bucket" list. Here is Kelly at the top of the bridge with the Sydney Opera House and Circular Quay behind her:

Kelly doing the Sydney Habour BridgeClimb

For more great photos of the bridge and the harbour, check out the Photo Gallery.

I asked Kelly what she thought of her trip and this is what she said:

Australia ROCKS!!! There is so much to see and do I just have to go back! The bridge climb was an experience of a lifetime! Being able to see the city from the top of the Harbour Bridge was amazing! The Microsoft office is also beautiful! I love the funky, cool, bright colors! THANKS to all the wonderful Microsoft folks in Australia! You are all LOVELY! Hope to see you soon!

Thanks Kelly for making the long trip down and for a great week of training and knowledge sharing. 

The other activity that has been taking my time is working on Build 15 of the Support Debugging Tool. If you were at Convergence 2011 in Atlanta and attended one of the sessions on the Support Debugging Tool, you would have seen that the Security functionality had been expanded from just dictionary resources (Windows, Reports and Tables) to now include all the non-dictionary resources such as Document Access, Posting Permissions, Navigation Lists, etc.  It also included security objects from SmartList. There were 39 changes listed for the beta build demoed at the conference. Since Convergence there are now another 39 changes listed, including the additional support for security objects from SmartList Builder and Extender.  Anyhow, the coding is completed (unless any issues are found by my beta testers) and all that is left is to update the manual to incorporate the 80 (approx) changes to the tool. More details will come when build 15 is released.

Thanks

David