With Dynamics 365 for Operations, “shiny new things” come fast and furiously. It’s up to implementation partners to make sure they’re stand-up ready for customers, says Eamon O’Toole, Senior Manager of CRM Solutions with BDO Canada,

O’Toole is a 15-years CRM-industry veteran, who is enthused by some of the apps around Dynamics 365. When he began his CRM career, there were much broader release windows in which features were static for years at a time. Now, new features evolve in the middle of an implementation.

Some of the topics Eamon discusses with MSDynamicsWorld editor Jason Gumpert:

• Why larger companies are no longer cloud laggards – nor are the risk-averse healthcare and public sectors.
• Field service options: Between the FieldOne acquisition and Dynamics 365’s scheduling engine, which suits break/fix situations like HVAC, and which suits other industries?
• Internet-of-Things (IoT) readiness: When this is a job for CRM, and when it is not.
• Workforce management and allocation: Has Microsoft finally embraced Human Capital Management in a stand-up application?
• The changing partner opportunity: With shorter and less-complex engagements, partners add value in governance and vetting as much as in implementation.
• Why partners can expect 2017 to be a year of continual excitement, and 2018 one of stabilization.

Today we chat with Bob McAdam, program manager for GPUG and organizer of this year’s GPUG Amplify event. Amplify is in its second year and it is one of the few user-facing events of the spring. With Convergence now long gone, we discuss topics including:

• The Dynamics GP user experience,
• The full GP event lineup for 2017,
• The new competitive landscape for GP partners, many of whom now sell a competing solution,
• How Microsoft is adapting its stance on business solutions amid so much other change at the company.

Nothing signals an interesting week more than a police presence. Join us for a recap of compelling Microsoft Dynamics stories. Among the topics we cover this time:

• What the Dynamics GP team needs to do instead if it is doing away with user manuals.
• Lightning-focused sales effectiveness with CRM backed up by Azure IoT and Azure Machine Learning for like-never-before customer profiles.
• Putting an off-the-rails Dynamics NAV + CRM implementation back on track with a more do-able scope.
• How two UK police forces use Dynamics CRM and network visualization in incident response – how dangerous, where, who’s involved and how many officers to send.
• How digital transformation safeguards you against clever, disruptive upstarts (think AirB2B and Uber), an interview with Microsoft’s Customer Success EMEA Director Dilip Popat about Summit EMEA 2017.
• Product and best-practices stories, including why to start planning your Dynamics AX to Dynamics 365 migration now; “Social selling” for Microsoft Social Engagement 2017; a passel of new apps mark Outlook Mobile’s two-year anniversary.

Chuck Ingram knows CRM like few do. He has worked with it before it was even called CRM in the late ‘90s, and worked at Microsoft for eight years in CRM, and is now the Dynamics practice director for Tribridge.

He observes "It certainly feels like perpetual on-premises will be an exception rather than the rule,” now that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 on-premises will move ahead to become "Dynamics 365 (On-Premises)".

Ingram walks us through Tribridge’s experience and observations of the Dynamics CRM to Dynamics 365, be it on-prem, in the public cloud or somewhere in between.

Among his observations:

• How the transition will help CRM users weather the digital disruption.
• Why digital disruption means that “streamlining operations” is no longer a strategy – not when competing with the Amazons of the world.
• When the “Netflix approach” to CRM makes sense; get up and running, and explore the features later. (If you’re a subscriber, you have time.)
• How large customers with big IT departments are used to subscriptions and like it that way..
• How eight in 10 customers are perfectly comfortable with the cloud; but security or certification requirements still mandate (or at least encourage) on-prem CRM.