Last week I attended Microsoft's Convergence 2008 conference at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL.  Convergence is focused on Microsoft's Business Solutions division which includes applications in the Dynamics family -- CRM, GP, AX, NAV and SL -- but also touches on related technologies such as SharePoint (WSS and MOSS) and SQL Server.  It was my first time going to this conference, but being at Tech-Ed last year, I figured it would be similar.

My main goal in going to the conference was to learn more about Dynamics GP, Business Portal and the usage of SharePoint in relationship to those products.  I also wanted to talk to a few vendors at the Expo about products I'd like to bring into our business.

At work we are in the process of re-architecting and developing our core systems on the Microsoft stack.  We're using Dynamics CRM 3.0 as an application platform to build on top of, integrating with Dynamics GP for accounting activities and SharePoint (MOSS) where it makes sense, and incorporating BizTalk Server 2006 and Scribe as the message bus to get everything talking together.

Overall, I have to say I'm a bit underwhelmed by the conference.  I expected to get some really meaty chunks of knowledge, but was consistently bombarded with shallow demonstrations and unabashed marketing.

Tuesday was the first day, and in my opinion the worst day.  The sessions consisted of "Interactive Discussion Groups," which I didn't have a problem with, but the attendance of these sessions was horribly mismanaged.  While I was able to get into my first session with relative ease, I barely made it into my second session when I arrived 30 minutes early!  I didn't make it into a single session the rest of the day because they were all full well before the starting time.

For me, the highlights of the show was Steve Ballmer's keynote address on Wednesday, Microsoft Research's keynote on Friday and a couple sessions that sparked some ideas.  Ballmer's keynote wasn't anything special, but neither was anything else that happened all week.  I twittered the keynotes as they unfolded if you're interested in seeing what I thought about them.

My takeaways from the show were...

• Microsoft is insecure about their place in the enterprise.  Ballmer and every other keynote speaker kept repeating their commitment to the Dynamics products.
• SharePoint is Microsoft's killer business application.  They want everything on SharePoint!
• I can take advantage of SharePoint's Business Data Catalog to solve some architecture problems with CRM.
• CRM 3.0 does not support SQL Mirroring.
• I sometimes over-think business problems.  Since this conference was geared more towards business people than techies, I was able to see how people with limited technical abilities and tools are able to solve problems.  Sometimes knowing too much gets in my way.
• Business Intelligence is a huge buzzword right now.