Microsoft WPC: My Video Diary

It’s really important for me and my colleagues within TSG to keep totally up to date with relevant things that are happening in the technology industry.  We can then decipher and pass this knowledge onto our customers.

And there’s not many places where you can get this information on such a scale than the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

It was a brilliant experience out in Washington DC, I learned loads (so much so that I’ve had to escape to the Cotswolds in order to take it all in, and articulate it back properly to the rest of my TSG colleagues).  I’ve also come back more encouraged than ever that we are in a great position to be able to serve our customers’ IT needs and wants.

I made a video diary whilst I was out there – you can watch these below. I tried to get across how what I learnt from each session is relevant and applicable to you, our readers. So I hope you find them useful, and also don’t miss Steve’s blogs all about the vision keynotes.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

To summarise, here are my key takeaways from WPC 2014:

‘Mobile-first, cloud-first’ – the new Microsoft mantra….we get it, there’s possibly no need to repeat it 50 million times. Literally every presentation starts with this affirmation of the new direction. In reality, great emphasis was placed on how this transition will come about. Whether pushing O365, or practical advice on how to help businesses make the transition to the cloud. We’ll be talking a lot more about this in due course.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 – the official name was launched at WPC and we got to see a preview of the new version, due in the Autumn. It looks great, very much like Office 365, introduces live tiles and fantastic document reports, allowing you to brand your invoices etc through Word (again showing synergy between products). Importantly, they are building NAV 2015 to have an easy upgrade path, the aim is to be able to upgrade in a weekend, reducing downtime for customers. Also, it will have a mobile client so you can use NAV directly on iPad/Android/Windows phone

CRM people addressed concerns about strategic relationships with Salesforce.com. There was a great emphasis that we can be confident no one will have a deeper/better integration of products than Microsoft ones.

The case for care – I went to a session on how technology can help businesses deliver better customer experiences, how the customer needs an omni-channel experience these days. That’s given me inspiration for forthcoming webinar.

Great demo of Cortana, Windows Phone 8.1’s digital assistant. In the demo, it was asked to check stock in Sage, which it did perfectly.

Low cost tablets are arriving with Windows 8 on them; this will really open up the mobile-first, cloud-first life to businesses.

Microsoft are bringing some old features back to the next release of Windows. They say this is in response to feedback, but it feels like a step backwards to me.

Satya Nadella was awesome. The only presenter not to use a teleprompter. Very articulate, intelligent man.

Skype Translate was the best thing seen all week. This will really bring the world a bit closer together.

So, lots to talk about over the coming months as we get our testing hands on the new products mentioned. We’ll be sure to give you a full rundown of the true features and benefits for your business, so please stay tuned to the blog for all the latest updates.