Summit 2015: Day 1 Takeaways

Summit is already in full swing! Make sure you keep up with all the action by following #CRMUGSummit, #INreno15 and of course #CRMUGDC. So many exciting things are going on!

The day started out with a keynote from George Kourounis who is a professional adventure, storm chaser and all other crazy endeavors. He talked about how fear is important because we need to harness it to do great things.

Today we also had a keynote with Bill Paterson from Microsoft. He talked about Microsoft's focus for the rest of the year and the changes they are working on. The newest item is task based experiences. They demoed a situation where a user wanted to record details from an appointment. Instead of the usual process, you could run a mini-app which would quickly and easily walk you through filling in the appointment details and give you an opportunity to update the regarding record without needing to navigate to any other records.

Here are some other pictures of the items shared:

  

I attended several other sessions which were of course filled with great content. Be sure to download all the slides if you can or look for encore presentations in the next few months. Here are the top things I learned:

• When upgrading, do not introduce new features. Save this for a separate project later. You can still change current features to take new out of the box functionality.
• Keep in mind the longer you wait to upgrade, the more complex your upgrade will become (more versions to go through).
• If upgrading from 2011 to 2016 you must go through 2013 and 2015.
• When working on new features/customizations, don't do it if you aren't willing to stick the landing. And make sure your executive leadership is too. Anytime you make a change be ready to make good documentation and training materials.
• For user adoption, take time to find the influencers in your environment and make them your fans. They can be your advocate to the users to drive adoption.

Those are just a few quick takeaways. So much more to come over the next few days! Have a good night everyone!