[Gregory Alford]

I really doubt I am going to Summit next year. NAV/BC users got the shaft again! 

1. We had sessions separated between two buildings.
2. We did not get very good support for informational sessions from Microsoft. Certainly no road map was given.
3. The sessions were 15 minutes apart. That is just stupid. You cannot go to the bathroom (there were lines even for the men), check E-mails (yes we still have a job to do), grab a snack and/or a drink and get to the next session. Especially if they are not in the same building! This results in getting to a session late or at the very last minute. Guess what, now the room is full and you are unable to attend the desired session.
4. The rooms just are not big enough. Our community has grown. Why hasn’t Dynamica Communities addressed this? I know they try and watch for what people are setting as their favorites, but that is just not working. The last couple of Summits have been a lesson in frustration.

This time, I am not going to register until there is a published schedule. I know that will cost the company more money, but I am not going to be mistreated again. If Dynamic Communities cannot or will not address these issues, they do not deserve our business.

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Gregory Alford
Director of Technical Resources
Tri Star Metals LLC
Carol Stream IL
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[Garth Woods]

While I was not impacted in the same way (most of my sessions were in the same building), I did not feel that the facilities and preparation were adequate for our group. There were often long lines to get up or down the one escalator and one staircase (also: registration desk on day one, anyone?).

I agree that some of the rooms were too small and I didn’t particularly care for the “throw four sessions into one room and make people wear headphones” idea.

One last nit: can we please have eggs for breakfast? 😉

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Garth Woods
Global Head of IT – KD Pharma Group
Marine Ingredients
Mount Bethel PA
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[Michael Carr]

they had eggs , the three breakfasts I made anyway?

I was able to get a seat at all but one session – (Power BI).

The food was better, I liked eating on the Lawn and or Atrium.

Gaylord could be better but they are still better than most —– altho they are the expensive but a group of DC size  has only so many places to meet.

You could break it up into smaller groups and multiple conferences but I think the odds are the facilities would be worse — not better.

It’s hard to be constructive without knowing what the options are.

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Michael Carr
VP , Finance
Philadelphia Scientific LLC
Montgomeryville PA
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[Kim Dallefeld]

First, Michael I’m jealous as I did not find eggs at every breakfast, one was oatmeal and yogurt…neither of which are my favorite.

Gregory, thanks for your feedback, please make sure you do you evaluations and surveys. I so sorry you feel so strongly that Summit did not meet your expectations. Most everyone that I talked to had ideas on improvements but they also felt that even with all the problems (and you can never make everyone happy all the time), there was much gained from the event.

This user group has grown so very much. As Lewis said…the facility for Summit is booked 3-4 years in advance. With high growth, the risk is that growth is greater than the facility can accommodate.

We do need to figure out how to do better at not having overcrowded rooms. 

Did you miss the General Session that was held late on Thursday? I didn’t like that this was done late in the conference and late in the day but we did see things that are being improved upon.

Constructive criticism is always help so keep it coming and put in those evaluations and surveys!

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Kim Dallefeld
Kim@Dallefeld.com
Dallefeld Consulting, LLC
Member of Dynamics Consulting Group
Ft. Worth, TX
2019 NAVUG Board of Advisors
Past NAVUG Board Chairman
NAVUG Programming Committee
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[Gregory Alford]

I was not aware of the General Session on Thursday. Therefore, I missed it.

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Gregory Alford
Director of Technical Resources
Tri Star Metals LLC
Carol Stream IL
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[Crystal Whelan]

I almost missed it myself, it was not added to the schedule until late the day before.  Having to refresh the app every 15 minutes drained my phone battery so it wasn’t until a co-worker who attended with me called and asked where I was, did I know I was missing it and rushed over.  The room felt very empty, and was generally an hour-long Microsoft talk with some advertisements thrown in.  Very little on the user group, awards, activities, etc.?

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Crystal Whelan
IT Systems Manager
Banneker Supply Chain Solutions, Inc.
North Smithfield RI
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[Laurie Kuehl]

Thank you, Kim and Greg for your posts.  Feedback is a gift!

We knew going into the event that we would be tight on space within brick and mortar available to us – we creatively came up with new ideas for available space to host educational sessions. I hope you took advantage of the BCUG/NAVUG Fast Chats – 30 min educational sessions that took place as round table discussions in the Medics space during the breakout session timeframes.  We also were able to create the PowerZone space where we could have 4 sessions in one room all at the same time and then we built 4 stages with privacy walls within the expo as well. It was a plus for our UG to be in the same hallway area as the PowerZone so that we could be close to them when we had sessions in that space. The session recordings were new this year with our UG having 4 rooms with this capability and many took advantage of these. All the user groups were provided 5-6 rooms during all breakout sessions that were permanently ours then we all divided and conquered – sharing all the remaining rooms.  My colleagues and I (PM’s and GM’s) met numerous times to review the ‘favorite’ sessions to pick/choose the rooms and we made adjustments onsite as well. It is so very helpful when attendees mark ‘favorites’ in the sessions schedule a this helps us greatly with shifting sessions to larger rooms.  We will continue to communicate this importance for future events.  

I agree with you on the break timeframe, we will look to extend this next year as 15 min is a tight turnaround time to do what we need to do between sessions and get to the next room.  Note – next year we will be in one area so we will all get a few less steps in each day.  

Thank you for your suggestion for Microsoft regarding the roadmap, I’ll provide this to Mike and Errol and note it for 2020 that a roadmap is a requested topic.  I’m also providing the additional questions from the Q&A to Microsoft and will be posting the answers in the community once completed.  

Please provide me any additional feedback you have. 

Kind regards,

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Laurie Kuehl
BCUG/NAVUG Program Manager
Dynamic Communities
Fargo ND
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[Steve Simon]

Greg,
It wasn’t perfect, BUT I was happy to be there and learn. I took the BC Reporting class with Claus Lundstrom. Really smart guy. Taught me a workaround to speed up RDLC reports, by removing header and footer, but simulating them using groups: grandparent; parent; child.
I learned about some great tools like Continia Expense Management and Payables Automation via an OCR service. Met some NAV developers, who I will use for dev down the road. Got familiar with Sana Commerce, which will be a perfect replacement for Magento, now that all their sites are needing to be redone (Adobe). Finally, heard Mark Hamblin of Insight Works show mobile warehousing. 3 days later a large customer calls and says he has to move his warehouse. We will take him from GP to BC and use Insight works as an add-on.
So perhaps the environment could have been improved, but the beef was there.

Sincerely,
Steve Simon
PDG Consultants

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Steve Simon
Pres.
PDG Consultants, Inc.
Clearwater
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[Devora Locke]

Last year in Phoenix it also wasn’t perfect in the same way. Either no lessons were learned or the challenges are not so easy to overcome.  It’s a huge show and an impressive undertaking, but like many other folks I kept getting shut out of the sessions I really wanted because they were either full or competed with another session I really needed to attend. It was frustrating enough that I decided not to attend this year. One can only hope that this has meaning to event hosts, as I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Summit also can be categorized more as a marketing conference for BC than a support conference for NAV, which is to be expected given that these are Microsoft products. Still, if you’re not ready to do that upgrade, much of the info you’ll learn may be forgotten by the time you are.

 

Just my thoughts, as I follow this thread.

 

-d.

——Original Message——

Greg,
It wasn’t perfect, BUT I was happy to be there and learn. I took the BC Reporting class with Claus Lundstrom. Really smart guy. Taught me a workaround to speed up RDLC reports, by removing header and footer, but simulating them using groups: grandparent; parent; child.
I learned about some great tools like Continia Expense Management and Payables Automation via an OCR service. Met some NAV developers, who I will use for dev down the road. Got familiar with Sana Commerce, which will be a perfect replacement for Magento, now that all their sites are needing to be redone (Adobe). Finally, heard Mark Hamblin of Insight Works show mobile warehousing. 3 days later a large customer calls and says he has to move his warehouse. We will take him from GP to BC and use Insight works as an add-on.
So perhaps the environment could have been improved, but the beef was there.

Sincerely,
Steve Simon
PDG Consultants

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Steve Simon
Pres.
PDG Consultants, Inc.
Clearwater
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[Lewis Rosenberg]

No doubt the Advisory Board and Programming Committee will be discussing the issue of sessions getting filled. Lessons are being learned, but facilities are booked several years in advance, so there is a challenge there.  Last year we made sure to repeat popular sessions at Summit.  This year, we opted not to.  I don’t remember if the reason was to be able to offer more different content or if there was another reason.

I don’t really agree with the statement that Summit is a “marketing conference for BC…”  The last two releases of the product (three, if you count the October 2018 Cloud release) have been Business Central so obviously there is a lot of attention given to Business Central.  The User Group Programming Committee and Advisory Board certainly realize that people will be continuing on older releases of NAV (esp. NAV2018) for some time to come.  Every session I attended at Summit had content that pertained to NAV.  In fact, I just viewed Kerry (Rosvold) Peter’s 50 Tips session and it was entirely presented using the NAV client.  The Get Started session covering Relationship Management was relevant to NAV and I did a session on permissions where I did demonstrations using NAV2018 and NAV2013R2, but also showed BC screenshots to identify the similarities.  So there are three examples of content that was suitable for users of NAV.

While the future is Business Central, we have not and do not plan to abandon supporting users who are using pre-Business Central versions of NAV.  Of course, our challenge has been and will continue to be striking the correct balance.  All user group members can help with that challenge by continuing to provide feedback and by suggesting session ideas when the “Call for Proposals” opens.  The “Call for Proposals” is when we ask for session ideas for the Summit and Focus conferences.

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Lewis Rosenberg
IT Manager
Mars Fishcare
Chalfont PA
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BCUG/NAVUG All-Star
BCUG/NAVUG Board of Advisors, Chairperson
BCUG/NAVUG Programming Committee

Twitter: @RosenbergL
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosenbergl
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NAVUG/D365BC-User Group Focus
May 18-19, 2019
Denver, Colorado
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