Dynamics 365 F&O/AX Dynamics 365 CE / CRM Dynamics GP Business Central / NAV UG Dynamics SL Power Platform Fabric UG MS Copilot UG

[Jeff Woodard]

I’m curious what others are doing for their company memberships? 

Ours is currently up for renewal, and we’re still not sure about the direction of the multiple organizations. The renewal notice comes from Dynamics Communities (DCI), with links to the Decision Acceleration Community (DAC). The DCI web sites are referencing both DAC and MSFT. The membership benefits page on DCI indicates that the membership fee provides access to local users group meetings (now handled via Microsoft), and discounts on academy courses (no longer offered by DCI, and I don’t think yet offered by DAC).  Several of us at my company are fans of the discussion groups, but I think a lot of that content does not require membership. I have attended a few of the webinars put on by the various groups, but still don’t see a consistent direction.

I registered, and [hopefully] will be attending Summit in Houston, pandemic willing, but really not sure at this point who gets the membership dues and what benefits it will be for our organization in the coming year(s). Spending the company’s money is more important than ever now. I’d like to help keep the community going, but also have to balance the company ROI.

Adding some interesting reads:
Dynamic Communities Debuts Decision Acceleration Community and Announces Future Event Plans at Community Summit North America (prnewswire.com)

Goodbye Dynamics User Groups – Hello Dynamic Acceleration Cloud (crestwood.com)

Microsoft reveals new plan to support local user groups for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform | MSDynamicsWorld.com

#membership #discuss????

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Jeff Woodard
Chief Technical Officer
Transportation Financial Services, Inc.
West Palm Beach FL
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[Nancy Edwards]

This is a good question Jeff, and one I can’t answer other than to let you know that we are having the same dilemma.  Almost all of the value we received with our GPUG membership seems to have disappeared completely or, we simply can’t find it. 

We were regular users of the GPUG discussion boards-asking, answering, and learning from other people’s questions, that resource was invaluable to us and we not once ever questioned if the membership price was worth it.  Now I recognize very few people (the “community” feel is gone) and there are minimal questions/answers happening. 

Then there were the free webinars, which those alone would again be enough to make us not even question paying for the membership.  We have seen lots of “sales commercials” offered, but no actual usable (to us) content. 

And of course SUMMIT was the best training ground we have ever encountered.  Covid killed it last year, but this year we didn’t even consider it-partly because of covid and partly because everything else has changed so much we didn’t want to risk spending the money to go to a sales convention instead of a users-helping-users learning experience.  We are waiting for feedback to see how it goes before we even consider it for next year.

Admittedly, I have spent not enough time searching all the new sites to find these things we valued so much, so they might still be out there.  I did try again using the links you provided, my general response was “Eh, I don’t have time for this”.  I guess I’m just spoiled in that what used to come to me in my daily emails (discussion boards) and weekly emails (educational material) was easily navigated; I could find stuff pertinent to us, and I could put 15 minutes a day into it and learn something I could use-often with the bonus of helping someone else along the way.  The weekly emails listed out the upcoming one hour webinars,which allowed us to dive down into a pertinent topic a couple of times a month.  If I was looking for a specific topic I could go to one website and search for it.  That time commitment was manageable and provided a good ROI.   What we get now is bare bones discussion emails, or time sucking websites which I have to dig through a lot of material to find something worthwhile.  I’m sure larger companies with more need for all these extras are loving the content, but our smaller company just isn’t feeling represented here.  Again, you get out of it what you put in to it, I recognize that much of my complaints are on me, but at this current level this is not worth the price of an annual membership. 

I miss the community of GPUG.

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Nancy Edwards
Director of Operations
H&W Computer Systems, Inc
Boise ID
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[Cathy Huggett]

Nancy,  I totally agree with you.  GPUG did so much for us!

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Cathy Huggett
Accounting Manager
Persolvent/Simek’s
St. Paul Park, MN
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[Debbie Cummings]

Nancy I couldn’t have expressed my frustrations any better.

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Debbie Cummings
Accounting Systems Manager/Analyst
Excell Marketing LC
Des Moines, IA, USA
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