Rick McCutcheon’s Post

Transcript

Hello everybody, My name's Rick McCutcheon. I'm a Microsoft Business Applications MVP, and today on partner Talks we have another Canadian Microsoft MVP, Malcolm McCauley. Malcolm, tell the people a little bit about who you are and what you do. I should have brought my Canadian flag and everybody thought it would be great to wait. So yes, hello Rick. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm excited to be here. My name is Malcolm McCauley. I'm a practice lead at C5 Insight, and so I take care of and support our teams for the Dynamics. 365 CE and CRM, we don't do any of the year free stuff. And then also our Microsoft 365 practice. And so I've been a long time supporter of community events. Much, much thanks to you and you roping me in, I mean, supporting me through the process many years ago. So yeah, excited to be here and we're here today because we had a big event earlier this week. This will record, this will be published next week. But we had this big event, we had the Canadian National meet up and it's the first time. That we got together in a live event since pre COVID so. What do you think about the event, Malcolm? How did we do? Yeah, there's nothing like coming together, right? It's, it's being in person. We do a lot of virtual stuff on our user group stuff. And it was really nice to get back together and do the in person event, which just is a totally different feeling and vibe and all of that. So I thought it went really well. We had like 150 people, give or take, I think a little bit more than that at one point. And and for a free event, people held on for a good chunk of the day at I didn't notice things starting to drop until close to 4:00, which is. That's impressive to me. So I think everybody just took a lot from the event, got a lot of good ideas and and just that you you come together and feel re energized in terms of why we do what we do and what what are we doing this for and what are some ideas? Why am I struggling like all the all the good things. So I thought it was a huge success and look forward to do that one. And you know, we've been really keeping the user community alive on the CRM CE side of Canada doing our national calls. Once a month. We've been doing it for the last couple of years, but we've never gotten together and we've worked quite sure what was going to happen. So we, we, you know, we work with the Doug organization, Dynamics user groups and we're on their meet up platform. So we said, or they said to us, let's do a live event and we did it. And I was expecting no, we might get 50-60 people, but we joined up with the power platform group, we joined up with the BC group and we had over 250 people actually sign up, which was. A very, very impressive, even though our capacity at this hotel was a lot less. So I think, you know, people really wanna get back together and with the energy we had this week, you could see absolutely they want to get back together. Yeah. It's just like I said, it's a whole different vibe. I think it brings the level of interaction. I mean, everyone knows virtuals virtual, it's not the same. And and so when you can sit down or share a coffee or water or whatever with with somebody else and share ideas and hear other people. Asking questions in the room and and just there's just something different about being a person so I think super successful and would love to see us amp up our efforts. I mean I'm not going into Toronto for the record, the biggest learning I took is I'm never driving into Toronto again. I always I don't know why I do it to myself I eat it so so checking the train next time but would be happy to go back. So what I found really interesting too was you know we're getting together we're all hearing a lot of AI stories right so us being in the channel we talk about Aiwa time, but. And the customers come in, they have a different perception, they have a lot of questions that are very basic. And I think that was very helpful, you know, not only having the presenters, the Q&A's meeting in the hallways after, because not everybody wants to ask a question in the session to say, hey, what about this, what about that? And you know, I think bringing, bringing together the business central, bringing together the power apps, bringing together CE CRM really created a great energy. Yeah, I agree. I like that those tracks, I'd love to see it even expanded more. You know, back in the day we used to have multiple others as well, so that would be a lot of fun. But having multiple tracks each of the rooms, from what I could tell, I peeked in a couple times into the other rooms during sessions. It was pretty even distribution, which was exciting to see. And then I think you nailed it with the AI mean we're immersed in it day in and day out and we're trying to be at the bleeding edge of of some of this stuff. And I think because we're surrounded with it every day, we lose sight of what the boots on the ground are actually doing it. Be right saying it there was a couple of times when when somebody would pull the audience and say, who's actually used this a feature of the copilot feature of this and there was very few hands go up and and that was shocking to me because in our world we're like, yeah, everybody's using it, but but they're not they're just getting started and they're not using it because they're they're trying to figure out where to start and what to do to get started. And that's good perspective for for people to have just to understand how to how do we best support each other through that process. So, you know, work we run still run our monthly. Virtual groups, and I'll put the URL on the post today for people who want to join our virtual group. So actually out of Canada, we run one virtual group for CE CRM. We have another one that's more to do with enterprise and the business side that Nancy Calder's running. So I'll put those links in as well. And we're seeing the same thing happen on the BC side right now. They're forming a group and there was people from the F&O side this week at our conference. We're talking to them. About getting ethanol together again or finance and supply chain. So I think, you know, this time next year or whatever we do our next live event, it's going to be much, much bigger and a lot more energy. Yeah, I would think so. I hope so. I made some introductions to people who were on the FBO side looking for, you know, who else is thinking about community. So there's the desire, the appetite is there. It's just, it's just giving people a a common centralized place to do this. And I think Doug and the team at Doug has has done a great job giving us. Opportunity and I know we're just entering into our you know planning for a 2025 but we'll we will continue on with our virtual events on the months we don't meet live so we're just trying to figure out what that schedule looks like so please you know for listeners out there today follow us join our meet up group that's the best way to do it and you'll see all the notifications going out yeah yeah that would be great we'd love to have people out there even if it doesn't matter where you are just join us and come and share ideas if you're interested in presenting and you've got. Years and you you've got content things you'd like to hear things you'd like to present yourself we're always open to ideas please please reach out join us and you know we're we're a couple of Canadians and this is an international audience so you know if you're in Canada you want to get involved with community please reach out to Malcolm or myself but if you want to start building a community wherever you are in the world right there's Doug communities that you can find out more about neither start a community or join an existing community so. We'll put those links again in the show notes. I love it here. All right, Malcolm, thanks for joining us today on Partner Talks. And I'm sure we're going to be back to you talking more about community and especially what we've got in store for candidate in 2025. Looking forward to it. Thanks for having me. Thanks and bye for now.