I am in Copenhagen attending the EMEA Convergence conference and I would like to give you a quick look at what’s happening here. We made an interesting announcement during the event and the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM release Titan seems to be the most popular product at the conference.
The EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Asia) Convergence is a conference for all our customers, partners and Microsoft employees. More than 3300 people from 27 countries are attending this conference right now for 3 days. There are tons of sessions giving a good idea of how to use software to streamline business processes or to improve customer relations. But more important, this event is a great place to grow the personal network, exchange experience with industry experts or just to meet experts from Microsoft.
I have already had some really interesting discussions with customers from Germany and beside the main event we visited the icebar in Copenhagen. It is a nice bar, where everything is made of frozen water. Even the glasses for the fruit juice are made of pure ice.
Back to business: I just watched the conference keynote and I think it inspires me a lot. Jeff Raikes – President of Microsoft Business Division – talked about business trends and what makes companies successful. Specifically he said that people are the most important asset for companies and people make the difference to become a winning or losing company. By providing the right software and tools, a company can empower their people to work more efficiently, minimize costs, and create a competitive edge for the company.
During his speech he invited Brad Wilson on stage to give a presentation about the upcoming Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 release. Brad is the general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM at Microsoft Corporation and he gave us a great demo about some of the most interesting new capabilities. To be more precise, he introduced the Multi-Tenancy, Multi-Currency, Multi-Language functions by showing us a typical sales process. Beside the larger improvements like the amazing Report Wizard and the Workflow Management Tools, a really interesting function came to my attention; the auto complete feature. This is a really smart solution to improve the user experience. The result is much better than my auto suggestion field solution which I created for version 3.0.
Beside the demo, he announces the new partnership with international hosting firms to support our Microsoft Dynamics strategy for software plus services. This will help us to deliver the new on-demand capabilities of the Titan release to our customers in very flexible way by giving customers the choice to choose the right deployment model for their business.
So the first part of the conference was really exciting, and there are still three days left. This was a good start to this conference!