Microsoft Convergence 2007 - Day 1

Today was my first official day at Convergence even though I arrived yesterday (too late to do anything since I didn’t get into San Diego until after 6pm PST). I attended the keynote presentation by Doug Burgum and Satya Nadella who told us about all the things to come over the next few days as well as the big topic of the conference… Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 (that’s Great Plains for those of you not up on the new naming convention)! While I was excited to see the new look and feel of GP 10.0, I have to say that overall I’m unimpressed with the lack of new functionally that will really make it worth upgrading. I’m sure we still will upgrade at my company given the new BI (business intelligence) stuff they threw in 10.0 but I honestly see no other real benefit from it. After the keynote I was supposed to attend my first learning session of the day but alas work called and I had to skip it to work on a GP issue back at home. Luckily I finished up the work in time to head back to the convention center in time for lunch which was, as usual at these events, nothing more than filling and wholly unpalatable if it weren’t free. After lunch I attended two more learning sessions (one on SQL Server 2005 and BI, the other on the new GP 10.0 user interface) before I headed back to my hotel to drop off my stuff for the evening. It was time to party!

I headed down to meet some people I know from Cincinnati who are also attending Convergence here and had dinner at a great little restaurant called Lou and Mickey’s down in the Gaslamp district. The food was pretty good overall (I had the jumbo crabcakes and garlic mashed potatoes) but nowhere near good enough to justify the bill for our dinner that night which came damn near $500 for seven people! After dinner we headed out to a vendor party at Jimmy Love’s where we spent the rest of the night drinking free beers and talking about business way too much. LOL The bar was small and crammed with people upstairs so we headed downstairs where things were more laid back (horrible red velvet couches, pool tables, a small bar area covered in some sort of faux black leather material, etc.) and ended up staying here the rest of the night. By 12:30am (3:30am Cincinnati time) we were all pretty tired and drunk so we called it night and headed back to our respective hotels. The real question was this: who was actually going to make the 8:30am keynote the next morning? Stay tuned to find out!