Once again, the folks at Dynamics Communities have proven just how well they can “conference”. The GP Partner reimagine 2014 event in Fargo is one of the most informative, interesting, and in depth things I have ever been a part of – and then eOne made it fun!

For those who didn’t follow my twitter updates (why didn’t you?) here is a quick run down of my day:

With over 600 partners in the room, the keynote was pretty impressive. Members of the Microsoft team were able to wow us with an overview of the 120+ features coming in GP 2015. Chief among those for me was the workflow functionality. Although somewhat available in GP2013R2, the 2015 feature set was pretty cool. Watch for more posts coming on the individual features – or check out Pam Misialek’s blog!

From the keynote I went to a session about deploying the companion apps – including Business Analyzer and Time Management so far. I found out that Business Analyzer can now support Excel spreadsheets and KPI’s (even in Office 365) as well as Management Reporter reports along with the SSRS reports it always supported. If you’re a customer of mine, expect a call pretty soon.

After that was a session on Workflow. Simply put, Jared Hall was able to wow me. The workflow capabilities were really impressive. Even if you’re not a customer of mine, expect a call any day now.

Next was a rather tasty lunch, followed by a Partner Showcase presented by Wennsoft. This showed many of the new features in their latest release of the Signature Series. There are some pretty cool things going on over there.

This was followed by a technical presentation on the Identity Management features in the Dynamics GP web client. If you like making your users’ lives a little easier and you are running (or want to run) the web client, we need to talk!

Next was a session on the Service Based Architecture coming in GP 2015. Basically, the concept of a service based architecture is that various functions of the software are made available as http calls so that other systems (sorry…apps) can take advantage of them. In the demo we watched, an inventory batch got posted from a web based app. I think we all cried a little from joy…or maybe it was just me. In a completely nerdy way, this one is a game changer for Dynamics GP integration and as one partner worded it: I want to publicly thank Microsoft.

From here we went to a reception at the Microsoft office in Fargo. The food was impressive, the drink was plentiful, and I got to go to the Microsoft employee store where I wasn’t the only nerd having a hard time deciding what to buy.

From there I made my way to Mustang Sally’s where eOne Solutions put on a rather spectacular evening. The band, Pop Rocks, were pretty cool and I got to see Mariano Gomez rock out to a cover of Twisted Sisters’ “We’re not gonna take it.” If he hasn’t put them up yet, ask if you can see the pictures.

All in all, it was a very full day. I am off now to day 2 where I hear I will find out more about GP 2015. I’m probably more excited by that than I should be.