Recap | Asian Partner Summit 2014 | Bali – Marije Brummel Blog

Doing six events in 10 weeks, this is probably the most special one from a venue perspective.

Last year I’ve heard from a number of people quite good feedback of that year’s Asian Partner Conference. So I decided to check it out myself. As an excuse I figured I might as well promote my new book. I calculated that I have to sell at least 250-300 copies to break even. 😉

Since I am not a Partner, the way I managed to squeeze myself in was via the MergeTool sponsoring. Their sponsor package included an extra ticket and I offered helping them out.

Having been in Redmond for a week, traveling 15 timezones in 48 hours and spending 27 hours in planes, I was not really feeling well ariving. Fortunately that got better after a good nights sleep.

Which was good since I offered Microsoft since I was there, I might as wel help them out too doing a presentation. So I did.

What is this about

The conference is actually a combination of two events, a business part with more general marketing sessions and a technical and functional track with sessions for consultants and developers as well as hands on labs.

The latter proved to be quite a challenge.

Reading the emails from the sponsoring I already read the recommendation to not relay on the internet for your presentations but to use screenshots or installed software only. And that was a good recommendation.

Even though the internet in the rooms (and the hotel had more than 1000 rooms) was very good, the internet at the venue just crashed as soon as more people connected.

And with the handson labs based on Azure, this was a problem. Because of that, the schedule got changed.

RapidStart Upgrade

I presented about a part of NAV2015 that I love most and am very familiar with. RapidStart Upgrade. I’ve been doing upgrades for more than 10 years and as many other technical people I must have done 1000nds of code merges.

The entire Wednesday afternoon the floor was mine, and since there was no internet, I talked about RapidStart for 2,5 hours. This you can easily do since there is so much cool stuff to talk about. It drasically changes the way we will be doing upgrades in the new platform.

During the talk, the hotel brought in 4G routers and the attendees did some handson after the presentation, but it was still slow.

Design Patterns

The next day, thursday it was so slow, and we had no internet that I decided to try and go home earlier.

Fortunately I did not do that since I first got asked to talk about design patterns for an hour, and then the internet started working so we could do handson. I decided to stay and help with the RapidStart handson.

The Community

In Asia is quite nice. People are friendly and asked many questions during the handson. People from Australia and New Zealand where a bit louder than the Asian people.

MergeTool

I must say I am really impressed by the work Per and Susanne have done in the last years. They have a widely used product with a huge fanbase and a lot of interest from partners. Per and Susanne, thanks for inviting me.