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Not everyone and everything is available online. While I follow the practice of working out loud and try share as much as possible in public channels rather than privately inside MS Teams, that’s still only one side of the coin. What we say and do in these asynchronous communication channels leaves out the messages transmitted over face-to-face, ad-hoc encounters.

These days, I don’t do a lot of conferences. After I stepped away from the Microsoft MVP program one year ago, there’s been no pressure for collecting formal community contribution metrics for anyone else. I don’t need to worry about measurable impact like counting how many people attended a specific session or reporting on reader stats for online stuff. I can instead just focus on doing what feels right for me.

The factors I can think about instead are how and where do I spend energy on. There are two sides to this. One being the physical energy consumption needed for travelling to conferences. I’m aware that the lifestyle we live in the western world is still overshooting the capacity our planet can provide. As an example, here in Finland we consumed our fair share of natural resources for 2025 by April 6th already. If I can avoid flying around the world to make things worse, I must at least consider that option before buying a ticket.

The second part is mental energy. In the past few years, I’ve learned about the limits of my mental battery and how it reacts under different kinds of circumstances. I won’t get a full recharge by merely doing digital things, that’s for sure. At the same time, the risk of depleting all my mental energy reserves is much higher when being surrounded by big crowds and a constant flow of social interaction.

Greetings from Portoroz! ☀️

Yet here we are. 😎 Or were, last week.

I had heard many community members praise the DynamicsMinds conference in Slovenia in its first two years. When I was invited to be a speaker on the third round, it was an easy choice to say: “let’s do this!”

Being a relatively new event, with its audience primarily from the ERP side of Dynamics 365 biz, not that many members of the Power Platform community probably know about it yet. Even answering the question “how would I get there” isn’t as simple as with the more usual tech conference locations.

It’s all part of the experience, though. Because unlike at conferences that are arranged in big cities and convention centers, once you arrive in Portoroz, it’s like being at a festival site. You don’t just visit meeting rooms and expo floors during the day and then go back to the outside world in the evening for a dinner somewhere downtown. It’s a round-the-clock immersive show that the event team has put together for you. Beach parties by the Adriatic Sea are just as critical a part of the agenda as any keynote sessions.

Real talk, no BS

All the free drinks in the world couldn’t make up for the investment of time and attention you need to commit to as a conference attendee. These days there’s hardly a shortage of online tutorials and other content that you could be watching while back home on your computer. What’s the thing that sets the live sessions apart from polished YouTube videos and SEO optimized how-to articles?

I think the secret ingredient is authenticity. Meaning, the fact that live sessions are not polished. The people who go on stage at community events are not there primarily to sell you something and do a “conversion”. Sure, most will be working for someone who potentially sells services and products closely related to the topics discussed. Yet just like the session attendees don’t come there to be sold at, the presenters are there to first and foremost talk about what they do. The things they care deeply about.

Take licensing, for instance. Who in their right mind would want to kickstart a three-day conference with a Monday morning 9 AM session that talks about the scariest demons of Power Platform licensing? Well, I did! And there was a room full of other community members that also made that conscious choice to come and listen to me talk about it.

It was not a one-off incident. On day three of DM25 I attended in total three licensing related sessions. A much bigger room than mine gathered to hear Laze Janev and André Arnaud de Calavon talk about capacity-based licensing for Dynamics 365 F&O. Even if I’m not personally looking to do an ERP implementation anytime soon, it’s always interesting to learn about what the licensing concerns and gotchas are in another family of MS business applications.

The common theme across the sessions that ended up on my event agenda was real life. Not demos about how to use the latest shiny tech from Microsoft, but rather experiences from people who have tried existing tech and attempted to solve actual business problems with it.

How to optimize the capacity usage of your Dataverse environments? How to support citizen developers that build apps alongside formal IT projects? How to test for and identify security risks in LLM based systems? How to choose the right tool for bulk data operations in Power Platform? How to build reports on license usage from Graph API data? How much will Fabric Link impact your Dataverse storage bill? How to build a CRM system that salespeople would want use on a daily basis? How to get your ISV solution visible in the many cryptic portals of Microsoft?

Zero BS about something that a tech vendor built to impress investors and inflate their market cap. No time spent learning about products that will get reimagined and renamed within a year. Instead, the sessions that filled my DynamicsMinds agenda all covered the perspectives that interest customers and partners who are in it for the long game. Not to hype up something for the sake of quick wins, but rather to help everyone involved keep our game going.

Okay, there was some amount of BS on the agenda. Specifically the panel discussion I was invited to, to argue with three other baldies. Steve Mordue, Mark Smith, George Doubinski and I sat down to do a freestyle session that addressed things we couldn’t possibly have reliable information on. Like what’s going to happen with AI a year from now. You can check out Steve’s thoughts on the AI fog of war for a taste of what we talked about.

The brighter side of tech

Readers of my newsletter will be well aware of how I approach the shiny new technology that vendors keep promoting. Now, the sarcasm and hot takes that I do on Copilot and other similar initiatives shouldn’t be taken as a sign that I resist change or progress. It’s more about me caring about the practical impact that technology can have on the customers. More specifically, ensuring that it has an impact beyond the keynote stages and launch demos.

I used to spend a lot of time and energy exploring the roadmaps of Microsoft product teams, learning about new products and features that were coming up. I still do, but I’ve given myself permission to worry less about things that haven’t happened yet. Because at one point, after a decade in the Microsoft MVP program, I realized that most of these tools and scenarios I had spent time reading and learning about were never encountered in my day job. They filled my awareness of this tech landscape, yet they didn’t get used for anything that would have generated value in the physical word.

This is a trap that passionate individuals like me can easily fall into. We are geeks who get excited about demos where new elements like agent feeds or natural language search are injected into the UIs of tools we already use. We can’t wait to see when the buttons that were shown on massive keynote stages finally light up inside our M365 tenant. We get carried away with fictitious processes built in demo environments for fictitious companies delivering magical fake outputs.

We focus so much on the “what” that we forget to ask the question “why”. One reason everything brand new seems so attractive and liberating is that there are no stains and scars on it from real world battles. Like a newborn child, it is innocent and perfect. The stress of meeting the expectations of the surrounding society only comes later.

It is not the fault of tech vendors that the new products they build are like this at birth. When no customers have yet had the chance to make use of the new tools, all we can do is imagine. What isn’t healthy, though, is if we just stay in the dreamland of envisioning a world that could be - without stepping outside and checking on how it actually looks out there. Getting caught inside a reality distortion field is a surefire way to miss the future direction of the market your business exists in.

Big vendor events like Microsoft Build or Ignite are these days too far detached from the everyday needs and concerns of people who put this technology into practical use. Based on their digital session content, it seems like an endless loop of FOMO marketing that screams “if you’re not investing in this you’re getting left behind”. While it may all take place inside a tech amusement park with big budgets, is it really an environment where you are getting your money’s worth? Or is attending them just ending up costing you even more in the end?

With community led events, the whole setting is different. As an example, out of the 1.000+ attendees of DynamicsMinds 2025, every fifth attendee was also a speaker. Think about how that kind of balance reduces the distance between people. It’s a strong mechanism for building trust among people and creating a sense of safety that in turn leads to more open discussion.

If you get a chance to decide how and where to spend your budget, be it monetary or energy, I recommend prioritizing events where equal minds can truly meet.