On the road with 365 Saturday

Wagner Silveira, Tharanga Chandrasekara and Steve Gichure have been busy presenting at the recent 365 Saturday events, where you can learn more about Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. Here's an update from Wagner to give us an insight into what they've been up to. Watch this space for another update once they've finished the series.

Written by Wagner Silveira, Principal Integration Architect and Microsoft MVP

August saw me with a full agenda of events presenting at the Dynamics 365 Saturday community events here and in Australia. 365 Saturday is a global initiative of the Dynamics 365 community. For those uninitiated, like me, that means the old Dynamics CRM - the various flavours of it like Customer Engagement, Field Services, Sales and Marketing; Dynamics NAV - now called Dynamics 365 Business Central - and Dynamics AX - that has been rebranded Dynamics 365 Financials and Operations.

These applications have been around for a long time and have a vibrant community around the world. With the move to the cloud, they've been changing rapidly and are complemented with a series of new tools that makes them shine even more - the Power Platform (comprised of Power BI, Power Apps and Microsoft Flow).

What is 365 Saturday?

With so much to learn, 365 Saturday is always a fun event to attend! It has something for everyone - from application customisation, best practices, latest news and extensions with Power Platform. There’s always something new happening.

How did we get involved with it?

One piece of the puzzle that I didn't see explored much before was how enterprise integration fits into all of that. Usually, those applications also integrate with external services – that’s how I got to know them. During the work I was doing with the Dynamics 365 team at Theta (who have fantastic consultants on both D365 CRM and Business Central), I saw that some of the work we did would be worth sharing with the community. The best way to tell that story would be to have both a D365 consultant and an integration consultant to show both sides of that story - that thought started a great partnership between Tharanga Chandrasekara, who is also a Microsoft MVP specialist in Business Solutions, and myself. Since last year we have been sharing the stage in various 365 Saturday events.

The roadshow so far

Last year we went to Melbourne, Auckland and Christchurch - as I was not able to join the Wellington event. This year, we are reprising Melbourne, Auckland and Christchurch but also managed to add Wellington to the schedule. Every single Saturday of August is booked for 365 Saturday events!

Usually, we base our sessions on good practices and innovative ideas on how to extend D365 CRM and Business Central using the Azure Integration Services toolset. From introductory sessions to advanced scenarios, we've been exploring possibilities based on use cases that we’ve implemented for our clients.

Our new speaker – Steve Gichure

It seems like the "give back to the community" bug has also bitten one of our colleagues - this year Steve Gichure joined us on the New Zealand leg, co-presenting with Tharanga. Their session discusses how to leverage Internet of Things (IoT) with Business Solutions and how to quickly prototype solutions using available tools and the power of integration. A great addition to the "setlist" - and Steve, who just did his first public session last Saturday, is a natural. I’m looking forward to new sessions from them.

So if you are in Auckland this Saturday (24/08/19) or in Christchurch next Saturday (31/08/19) and are interested in our sessions and many other interesting sessions involving the D365 family of products or the Power Platform, you just need to register.

What's on the agenda for Auckland

14:55 - 15:50 Unlocking new integration potential for Dynamics 365 BC with Azure Event Grid and Azure Integration

14:00 - 14:55 Integrating Microsoft Dynamics 365 with IoT

We hope to see you there.