User Group Summit – Orlando 2019

It’s been a few weeks now since we returned from (mostly) sunny Orlando after a filled week of 2 events by Dynamic Communities – eXtreme 365 and User Group Summit.

Whilst eXtreme was smaller than I anticipated it was invaluable in learning what’s to come in the world of Microsoft, around the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 which is an area we specialise in for our data quality tools. Speaking with the key personnel within Microsoft, it’s fantastic to know that the Data8 tools are here to stay as there are no current plans to improve the current Microsoft offering in the “master data management” space by rooms of Dedupe and Merge improvements – which gives us the utmost confidence that Duplicare is here to stay and become the go to tool for managing that data quickly and easily.

We travel a long way from the UK to the US for these shows and seeing as the days' events usually end around 6 pm, we need to fill our time, don’t we? It seems only apt that we spend some time in the evenings exploring what a quiet place like Orlando has to offer – and one thing is for certain, you can’t knock our style of hats.

As eXtreme came to a close and the focus shifted to the massive User Group Summit event, the Gaylord Palms resort become a hive of activity with lots of recognisable faces, some current customers and hopefully some future customers too. From a super busy expo hall to the bustling rooms for each talk, the event was the busiest non-Microsoft Microsoft event I’ve ever attended and we learned some fantastic stuff from the breakout sessions. Highlights from me were some of the talks by Joel Lindstrom of CRM Audio fame and Matt Wittemann of D365 Calendar (and much more) fame as well as lots of others talks – it’s simply too many for me to name but the quality of the sessions this year had really been upped compared to previous years.

We even had the privilege of having an upgraded stand since Arizona last year and this year were representing two companies since our recent acquisition of Team Knowledge and our marketing team did a great job of making the stand look awesome! We had hundreds of people walking by and dozens upon dozens stopped by to come and talk to us about data quality, about TK Dialogs and really cemented why we do what we do – data quality is an issue for everyone in some way and if we can guide people to make it better, then let’s do it.

A personal highlight of mine was our Data8 Partner Showcase. I’ve done a number of these over the years and I really enjoy the public speaking and the storytelling part of getting up in front of a room and this year was the fullest room we have ever had – to the point where we had to turn 25+ people from outside the room as we literally couldn’t fit anyone else in the room. Fear not, we will give this presentation again as an upcoming webinar but for those that attended and those that tried to attend – we thank you.

We have since had a number of requests from people who didn't get to see the talk - well we are going to be doing a webinar on the 27th November! You can sign up here to see what you missed!

From Matt, Mark and Antony – thank you to anyone who took the time to listen to us speak whether it be in our showcase or coming to the stand or even at the bar after the event. We travel a long way to these events and the people we meet are truly wonderful people who make me look forward to attending the trip every year.

See you next year in Nashville!

PS What would a post about a User Group Summit in Orlando be without a photo of Hogwarts in Universal Studios?