PowerShots – What a Ride …

For the people that are connected to me on Facebook .. they probably have noticed I have been traveling quite a lot lately, together with Vjeko and Gary. In fact, since December 2014, we have been doing – what we call – “PowerShots” in lots of countries in Europe.

It was all quite a rush – the way it started, and the way we did it. Or in other words – like the highly committed PTS of Spain (Andrés Fernández Sánchez) would say: “What a ride“.

It actually all started with him and Ingmar (responsible for all PTS’s in Western Europe and as highly committed as Andrés :-)): after Directions in Poland (Poznan), he heard from Ingmar – that we would really appreciate that Microsoft wouldn’t ONLY pay attention to the Marketing side of the entire “moving to the cloud”-story. In fact, there should also be a PRODUCT side to this as well: how to move our product to the cloud? What do you need to know? How do you need to develop? He wanted to get his partners in Spain to be engaged to do this .. and – as committed as he is – he wanted us to come over as quickly as possible. That was December 2014.

I think we can say that he and Ingmar were satisfied, because Ingmar insisted we would do this in the other countries in Europe as well. He even insisted that it was always Vjeko, Gary and me .. because for some reason or another, we have some kind of “dynamics” going on when we present .. I wonder what he means with that ;-).

It was a stretch – we have day jobs as well – but it was all worth it. We came in touch with a total of 270 people, across partners in about whole Europe (In Prague, there were even partners of 9 different countries!). So interesting to see the different countries, the habits, how they think and behave, what levels they are on, what doubts they have .. we learned so much, while it was us that needed to teach ;-).

The content?

The focus was: The Transition of your Product to the Cloud. So more in detail, having (non-hands-on – because we wanted to cover awareness in as many topics as possible) sessions on:

• PowerShell (Intro, Serveradmin and Merging code)
  
• Testability (test codeunits and the importance of it)
  
• Azure (what to take into account when you would put your product on Azure)
  
• Office 365 (what does the “in” and “on” story really cover)
  
• Repeatable Code (C/AL done in a structured way)
  
• JavaScript AddIns (with cool demo’s :-))
  
• Managing your Dev Team (Scrum)
  
• Power BI (which is a difficult topic, because it has been changing quite a lot! ;-))
  

And we did these in 11 PowerShots, spread over 11 countries:

Or – since there was a PowerBI session as well – I quickly put it on a Power Map :-):

What a ride it was .. but it’s time that it ended, because I have a family, and now my family needs some attention as well, before “conference season” starts again in October.