The Partner Event summary for Dynamics partners

September 22nd, 2010 |

I’ve been in sunny Fargo, ND (Or as my three year old said Fardakota) for the past few days for the annual partner event. There were over 200 partner attendees gathered this year and the event was a big success. I heard several people comment that this event is their favorite of the year. The content was pretty good but the reason an event like this is so successful is because of the close interactions in a smaller crowd environment.

I met up with some famous people at the event. It’s kind of funny to meet someone in person that you admire from a far. I met Anya Ciecierski in person and got to attend one of her sessions on blogging. She’s ther person behind the www.erpsoftwareblog.com blog. I blog a fair amount but haven’t really considered doing it for marketing purposes. I’m just an old techie that likes to tell stories. A few things mentioned in the session is to use key words in the title and in the content. So if from hear on out my blogs seem filled with convoluted phrases it’s all Anya’s fault. She also mentioned she likes to see blogs go through the marketing team so they can make sure the content is not offensive and to also correct speling mistakes. I don’t think I ned that much help with mines grammer.

Met Nick Hoban who is in charge of the Dynamics community site for MBS. I told him I’d make him famous in my next blog so I guess this is his 2 minutes of fame. He gave me a sneak peak at the new site they are going to release in a week or so and it looks like there are some cool things underway.

Attended a few sessions with Joe Rotella. He’s a great presenter and I’ve enjoyed his sessions in the past. I must say he looks a bit different than his picture. I had the same response when I met Mark Polino. I’d guess both Joe and Mark are about 5′ 5″ tall. Correct me if I’m wrong Mark. ha.

I presented a couple of sessions on hosting. I have a slide deck put together that I’m sending out to all the partners that attended the session. Drop me a line if you’d like me to send it to you as well. Seems to still be a lot of confusion with SPLA in the partner channel in general which I’m sure extends to customers as well. One of my main points was if you don’t offer SPLA or some form of hosting alternative you will lose opportunities. Those comparing NetSuite to Dynamics GP will not choose an on premise solution when they are looking for a cloud solution.

Handed out myGPcloud T-shirts to quite a few people and even had a few of our hosting competitors almost wearing one. Wish I had a camera. It would have been a perfect Coke/Pepsi type picture to put on our Facebook’s site.

Didn’t win any prizes at this event. I usually win at least something so I guess my luck might have run out. I’m accused of being the luckiest guy in our office and everyone has me entering all their names in drawings etc. for them.

I participated in the sunrise scramble which is a 2 mile run at 7 am in the morning. I proud to say I was the leader of the pack for the first 200 yards. Well, maybe I was a close second to Chris Dew from eOne. Let’s just say the remaining distance was significantly harder than the first few yards and I’m still hurting from running two days ago.

For some reason my laptop wouldn’t project on the projector for the first presentation. Thankfully Jenny Davis was around in the morning to save the day. She’s the new owner of the partner channel but its quite evident she is still very much in charge of operations and details. It’s great to work with someone so responsive to the needs of the people attending the event. Good job Jenny and team.