Now that April 1st is behind us and this would no longer fall for an April fool, I can officially anounce the good news.. I’m now part of the big ‘small’ family of the very ‘select’ Dynamic GP MVP group.
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It’s great because of all the GREAT people that make this group a real family… and it’s probably the smallest MVP group dedicated to a Microsoft product : there are only 15 active Dynamics GP MVP’s around the world with 2 new ones added on April 1st, 2015, with myself and Mahmoud AlSaadi. And it looks like I’m the only Canadian one as far as I could inquire from the official Microsoft MVP site, which means either that Kanuks are not big Dynamics GP fans or that it is just too cold and people spend more time shovelling snow around half of the year then caring about Great Plains :-)…
Hold on ! Great Plains.. isn’t that a place somewhere in the middle of North America, where all the crop farms are ? we have some provinces like Saskatchewan and Manitoba that are actually sharing that qualification: always windy, hot in the summer and darn cold in the winter. There is no spring or fall season… just winter and summer. Reminds me when I was in Fargo in 2011 in March and it was no different from Montreal at this time of the year.
That said, I would never have imagined that when I started to work in 2003 with Dynamics Great Plains (aka GP) that one day I would end up being one the few subject matter experts for that product… quite a long way since those first days where I was hired to do some process rework for a manufacturing company to optimize the production forecast with big Excel workbooks. In those days I was relying on the newsgroup forums (only a few ones dedicated to GP) that were barely monitored by Microsoft, but mostly by dedicated users like Mariano Gomez and David Musgrave, to only name a few.
It was after a few years later that I really understood the power of the ‘community’ when Microsoft took back control of the newsgroups and put them into a controlled environment to be able to better ‘moderate’ the discussions and keep the spammers away from the subjects. Since those days I was grateful already for the numerous tips and hints that I had received from other users, that I seamlessly started to give back what I had received during a few years.
During the life I spent in IT (which covers almost 30 years back in the early 80’s), I always made a point to keep up with the latest technology and try to be ahead of everyone else, mostly by educating myself or getting ad-hoc training for the products I was working with. I never really had a mentor as such, since most of the people I was working with always came to me to ask questions… The wheel turned and one day it happened that I was myself asking for questions about a product I had no idea how to work with. As my motto has always been “if you know how to do it, you’ll save yourself lots of trouble in the future”, so rather then relying on a partner to fix problems, I just looked around on the net.. that was when started the long Journey about my apprenticeship with Dynamics GP :-).
I’m happy with the road I decided to go at that time since it opened me already much better opportunities in my professional work back in 2009 and many others that came along when joining the GPUG community. Today I’m at a point I only dreamed about several years when looking at all those MVP VIP’s (Valuable Informed People) that where providing advice and technical content to others in need. I’m now too one of the very few Dynamics GP SME (Subject Matter Experts) around the world and hope it’s only the beginning of another lengthy joyful journey.
Thank you all for your support and recognition. Looking forward to more exciting online & in-person discussions.
Until next post..
@GP_Beat
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