Since the birth of Power 365 Solutions we have been chomping at the bit to attend our first in-person Microsoft Conference. Online Conferences and Video Talks just don’t cut it as you lose the interaction and emotion when talking over a video camera. The dreaded ‘C’ word has been around for what seems like an eternity we have almost forgotten what a handshake is between humans.

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SCS provided us with that opportunity, and we jumped at it with both hands by attending the Hackathon on the Friday and the Summit the day after, you may have noticed quite a few of our banners and lectern boards in various rooms during talks – we couldn’t help but sponsor a major event like this and give back to a great community.

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The Day 1 Hackathon Event ‘Automate Everything’ was a chance for Power 365 Solutions (+ Crimson) to put their heads together and come up with an innovative business solution using Flic Smart Buttons to process automation for real-world use cases. After much deliberation we decided to utilise our button for alerting an emergency contact that we were in danger and required assistance. We developed a Power AppsPortal for the User to register their details and those of their emergency contact, this then linked them to the button on the Dataverse Model Driven App which also displayed all clicks around the world via Power Bi utilising longitude and latitude push notifications.

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Time was of the essence and Microsoft decided to push through a solution update midway through the afternoon which slowed the team down for some time. Eventually we pulled together a 5-minute presentation alongside a demo of the different applications working together to pinpoint a user’s click, and a notification to the emergency contact alerting them of this. We finished the day feeling confident we had done enough and had a ready to market solution in the bag, or maybe this was just the few drinks and dinner we had that evening.

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Day 2 started with the main keynote, once that was addressed it was over to the Hampshire Suite to support our very own Tom Moore on his talk “The Power Platform: Work smarter, not harder”. Various talks and discussions were held during the day from numerous companies, speakers and MVP’s. The Expo Hall was home to Microsoft partners, ISV’s and agencies from up and down the country with each stall providing a great insight to what their business can offer and how they go about it.

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The community that has been created through the use of Microsoft Technologies is quite inspiring. For me, Microsoft are constantly listening to the feedback from their users and enabling them to engage better from anywhere around the world due to the pandemic. Empowering personnel from your average day user, consultants, to developers and beyond, to really target each companies’ specific requirements to produce a fulfilling end product.

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SCS was an eye-opening event for all and one that will stick with us at Power 365 Solutions for a long time due to it being our first. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves across the two days, learning, networking, and talking to like minded people with similar issues, scenarios and solutions and we are already counting down the days to SCS 2022.