Microsoft Business Applications Summit – 2018 Keynote (Live Blog)

I have front row seats at the keynote that will begin shortly.  As features and announcements are made, I will update here.

The room is massive and filling fast.  I’m sitting with some true legends in right by the stage and there is an electric buzz in the air.

And we are underway.

Power BI quick notes from James Phillps

  • 2,200 queries a second
  • 8PB data every Month
  • 8 million queries an hour
  • 570,000 users in the community

James talking about the digital feedback loop and about how the “Power Platform” suite of business apps (Power BI, Flow and Power Apps) that come together to help companies with their digital transformation.  He thinks we are on the doorstep on a fundamental step change in the way data is captured, stored and used.

Today there has been an announcement of the roadmap *URL to come shortly” for the October 2018 release of Dynamics,

We are now seeing some demonstrations on some new features in Dynamics about tightening the feedback loop between the initial customer contact, right through the sales journey.  Dynamics also leveraging LinkedIn and information to help progress leads through the sales process.  MS Teams seems to be playing a key role in the Dynamics

Dynamics 365 AI for Sales has been announced.  This uses a series of key data sources such as call sentiment to detect if customers are happy or not.  This is used to determine if leads are strong opportunity or not.

Next subject is Empowered employees.

Leveraging LinkedIn to combine with Dynamics 365 Talent to help secure the right staff.  50+  new features coming in October.

  • MSFT receive 6 to 7 million visits to careers website
  • 175,000 Applications per month
  • 10,000 interviews per month
  • 2k to 3k hires per month

MS use Dynamics Talent to help manage these numbers

We are being shown a quickfire walkthrough of the recruitment process from the creation of the job posting, through to using AI to help sift applications down to a shortlist.  The main feature seems to be the fact that everything seems to be centrally managed.

All the talk so far has been about Dynamics. They are now demonstrating a mixed reality scenario with a hololens and workflows.

The current demo on stage is walking through an example of a field tech onsite using hololens in some pretty creative ways to deal with an unscheduled situation.

James Phillips on stage is responding to tweets, using an interesting analogy on mixed reality for pasteurisation example.

Time for Power Platform.

Power Apps

Common data service is getting a big plug.  190+ new capabilities coming in October.  They have an “Appman” on stage who is talking about how he has used PowerApps to do some pretty cool things for his AutoGlass company.

Seeing a nice demo of how easy it is to build Power Apps now.  We have always had this with web-app development, but the CDSA seems to be a key to make this super accessible.

Automate with Flow, take action with Power Apps. Citizen devs.

Announcing the PowerAppsUG and FlowUG.

What a whirlwind keynote. Some interesting demos and references to all the features coming up in the various Apps locked away in a document.

A little disappointed at the lack of Power BI Demos and no Amir, but I understand he is presenting in some breakout sesssions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Philip Seamark
Phil is Microsoft Data Platform MVP and an experienced database and business intelligence (BI) professional with a deep knowledge of the Microsoft B.I. stack along with extensive knowledge of data warehouse (DW) methodologies and enterprise data modelling. He has 25+ years experience in this field and an active member of Power BI community.

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