Quick Summary: Microsoft Convergence 2012, Day 4

It's the final day of the event.

• "Your past is not your future", the respectful General Colin L. Powell (Ret.) delivered an inspiring speech in the event's closing keynote. I particularly liked this one: "Where you came from doesn't matter, only where you end up". For more quotes from his classic speech, please check @mochatravelar's tweets at https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/from%3A%40mochatravelar%20colin%20powell (Thanks Mocha)
• CRM MVP Julie Yack was on stage giving the General a big hug. Kudos to Julie. 
• If you are interested in numbers, here are some statistics that some folk has collected from the event about Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, one thing which might particularly interest you is the number of servers that power Microsoft Dynamics CRM online (1000 is not a lot in my opinion). 
• The Convergence had the largest attendance ever! Over 10,225 attendees and 270 exhibitors.
• If you are interested in more numbers, Microsoft announced that Dynamics CRM adoption no's with 33,000 customers & 2.25m users (http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2012/mar12/03-19Convergence2012PR.mspx)
• Another leak of CRM in metro UI from yesterday,  http://pinterest.com/pin/176414510373460408/, by Jukka Niiranen (thanks Jukka).
• If you have missed the opening key note, you can download the opening keynote here! (Thanks JAM Dynamics)
• If you have been confused by the number used for CRM rollups (RU6, RU7) and service releases (R6, R7, R8), you are definitely not alone. People have raised the same concerns to Craig Dewar and the PMG team. 
• There is another leaked news about R9, check it out yourself. I have no source to confirm that for you. 

Richard Knudson has a nice blog post which summarized the the following four important things from the event. 

• Big data
• Cloud
• Social
• CRM Anywhere

Richard mentioned that he will host a webinar on Wednesday April 4 to share some more details about the event.

Before we conclude the post, here are three more notes from myself. 

• Metro and Windows 8 will have some big impacts on the future changes of Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform from user experience perspective. 
• We might have a robust database engine that is big data ready, but CRM is not really there yet, which is a challenge ahead of us, in my humble opinion. 
• Another thing that you should watch out is, we all know that we are going to have the cross-browser support in R8. What this brings to us is, we need to write JavaScript code that works for different browsers.  This is not an issue if we only use SDK API, however there are always cases that we need to do a little magic which is not achievable using the SDK API. This is where your talent comes into play.  

This concludes my notes of the event. It was definitely a fascinating event even I was not at the scene. I look forward to being there myself next year.