DynamicsMinds is here to stay!

From May 26-28, the third edition of DynamicsMinds took place in Portorož, Slovenia. The conference center is located in a cozy village next to the Adriatic Sea. For the third year in a row, I was privileged to visit the event and share my knowledge in a few presentations.

Background

The idea of DynamicsMinds started with a kind of joke by some people working at Docentric. As there wasn’t a larger community event for Dynamics and the Power Platform anymore, the Docentric team worked out a plan successfully to bring together like-minded people with a specific theme. The theme is about Wizards, Witches, and Magic, which you will understand when walking around in the venue during the event or visiting the evening parties. It is a community event where speakers share real-life experiences. Even the speakers from Microsoft shared facts instead of selling their product or pushing AI and Agents too much.

For the 2025 edition, I participated in the programming committee, where we were tasked to help out on the session agenda and help promote the event. Under the leadership of Mira Razman, our speaker fairy, about 20 people were involved, reaching out to potential speakers, reviewing sessions, and making hard choices about which sessions to pick for the agenda per track. For the Finance and Operations track, we had about 160 sessions submitted and had space for about 45 of them. In case your session was not selected, it was not about declining it; the quality of the submitted sessions was overall high this year. We were also happy to host some new speakers during this event.

Sunday arrival

I had my travel on the Sunday before the DynamicsMinds conference started. Depending on the exact arrival in Portorož, I intended to have a walk to the first Geocache in Slovenia. That one is about an hour’s walk from the event venue. When I arrived, there wasn’t that much time left before the speaker’s welcome, so I had to skip this idea. During the visit to the Olive Garden, we got to learn about the process how to produce the finest olive oil, and we had a tour in classic passenger vans.

The tour guided us through the beautiful landscape of Slovenia. It was the first moment when we could meet and have some nice chats. We learned a lot about olives and how to produce oil. The tasting of the oil was a culinary experience that I really enjoyed.

After this experience, I had a walk to Piran with Johan Persson and his wife. After finding a Geocache, they went back for the dinner event party, and I desperately wanted to find another cache that I couldn’t find last year. That cache also brought me to a Catholic cathedral of St. George, from where you also have some panoramic views.

When I returned to the hotel, I first had to check the status of my environment for a demo during one of my presentations. I found out that after I refreshed some environments, some community customizations weren’t up to date, and deployments failed. At the end, I decided to use two environments for two distinct demos, but had to configure some prerequisites and set up for a seamless demo.

I was late to the dinner party, but there was still food left, and I was fortunate to meet a lot of old friends. but I also met several people I had only met on LinkedIn and the Dynamics Community forum. It is so nice to meet people in person and have some talks face to face instead of some messaging via social media.

My DynamicsMinds experience

For this event, I had to deliver two presentations and show up as a panel member for an Ask the Experts on Dynamics 365 F&O Functional. Apart from my presentations, I had a list of sessions in mind, I wanted to join. Some sessions related to Dynamics 365 F&O, but I also wanted to learn more about other technologies, such as the Power Platform and Git/GitHub. I will not list all sessions I visited in detail, but I got some learnings out of them, and was very pleased with the high quality of speakers and the sessions. I think all attendees were having similar thoughts as the overall feedback statistics showed an average session rating of 4,44 on a scale of 1 to 5 and an average speaker rating of 4,56.

To be able to improve the next edition of the event, all of your ratings and feedback are valuable. Unfortunately, it happens that some people rate sessions and speakers with low scores. This could be fair feedback, but in that case, please provide comments so the DynamicsMinds organizers and program committee can learn from your feedback.

The Magic for Managing Security Role Assignments Automatically

I had my first presentation on Monday at 13:15. In this presentation, I showed options available out of the box on how to make the life of a security administrator easier by using automation for security role assignments in Dynamics 365 F&O. In addition, I highlighted options for using or extending the existing for dynamic role assignments. I discussed the good and bad about the standard options. At the end of the presentation, I demoed a community contribution for an enhanced Entra ID group integration available for free on GitHub. This takes away all downsides of using the standard Entra ID group integration, as with the enhanced version, it will use the automatic role assignment rules to physically add role assignments to the users as part of group memberships. The D365FO Admin toolkit was initiated by Alex Meyer, where I added the features for the Entra ID group enhancements.

During this session, I was eager to learn more myself as well. I asked the audience if they were using automation using Entra ID group integration or the automatic role assignments. Only a few people raised their hands. When asking how many were using manual assignment of security roles, the majority, I guess about 90%, raised their hand. So definitely, I think the audience could benefit from my presentation.

Although my session was highly rated (session 4,69 & speaker 4,74), I reviewed the possible comments and thank all of those who provided additional details. Apart from words as “great session”, I noticed some feedback on the slides where the font was small. This is something I acknowledge for some slides, particularly if you were sitting in the back of the room, but I will review it for next time. Either improve it, or explain what the slide is about. Anyway, you can download the slides from the conference page, regardless of whether you attended the session or DynamicsMinds at all, using this link: Presentation deck

At the end of the session, there were some great questions. One of them was a question about linking a person when importing a user using the enhanced Entra ID group features. This is added as a feature for a future release of the toolkit. Thanks for providing this feedback.

Ask the Experts: Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Functional

On the second day, I participated in a session for answering random functional questions. Being part of a panel is always hard. You don’t know what exact question will be asked, as there are a lot of features in the product. In addition, it is hard to moderate in case of many hand raises and questions. For that purpose, we tried to have a mix of knowledge from the panel members. In this session, we had (from left to right) Lone Gru, Natalia Salas, me, Rachel Profitt, and Fredrik Saetre,

During the 45 minutes, there were several questions where the majority could only be answered by the Microsoft team members. After the session, there were some attendees reaching out to me with other specific questions. Some of them were related to the upcoming Dynamics 365 F&O license enforcement, and a question related to my session I had the day before. For one of the questions, I needed to review some options in Entra ID and promised to get back on this after the event.

Capacity-based Licensing for Dynamics 365 F&O

On Wednesday, the last day, I had a joint session with Laze Janev where we talked about capacity-based licensing. Initially, the session was planned at 12.15 but got rescheduled to 10.00 last minute due to a conflicting schedule for my departure to the airport. My apologies to all who got impacted by this change to have either missed this session or another one. There were too many great sessions at the same time. Also, I missed a session I had marked to visit myself at that time.

Besides named user-based licensing, the Dynamics 365 cloud services come with a database entitlement. Based on tenant, user, and device licenses, the license comes with specific gigabytes available for the databases and file storage. So far, Microsoft has not enforced the database usage. When LCS is migrated to PPAC, the database storage will be enforced, coming with some administrative restrictions in case of an overrun. The session was intended to make you aware of the possible impact, as, from our experience, we see a lot of clients having consumed way more than what is available as part of their subscription. Of course, it is possible to buy additional gigabytes of storage, but to prevent clients from paying too much, there are ways of cleaning up data, moving data to long-term retention storage (archiving), and reviewing customizations or other settings. The presentation is available using the following link: Presentation deck

We got some great feedback after the session, and this was also visible in the rating (session: 4,69 and speaker: 4,68). Despite this, I think we can take some learnings from the comments. When preparing the session, we knew we had to cover a lot, which we also mentioned at the beginning of the session. We had prepared some demos for the Archival workspace and PPAC capacity usage reports, but we weren’t sure if we had time for this. For that purpose, we moved the slide for demos to the end of the presentation.

One striking comment was about too much chit-chatting and jokes instead of the demo. In one way, I can feel with this person, but we mentioned in advance that we weren’t sure about the time for a demo. We wanted to have some jokes and interaction in the session, as it was the last day, and thought to make it interactive and accessible by switching or adding some additional comments or questions to each other. I think this is all about expectations. I like demos too. I did a similar session before, where I had 60 minutes instead of 45 minutes at this event. Then the time was already an issue. We left out particular slides to avoid repeating messages and focus on the 45 minutes. As for learning, I think we need to manage expectations in the future by either not talking about a demo at all or seeing what parts might be candidates to shorten.

Evening parties

The conference ticket includes lunch and dinner, but for the evening, it is not just about eating and going to bed. The community event continues with a party. Bringing all attendees to the hotel garden gives the option to meet and speak with even more people. There was also a small moment in time when I could meet with my other Next365 colleagues.

At Tuesday evening, there was also a celebration with community awards. Congratulations to all winners, and hopefully this will be a boost to continue your contributions to the community.

I met so many amazing people. Sometimes it is just quickly shaking hands and getting remarks like “I know you from the community” or “Thanks for your posts, as they saved me a ton of time”. In other cases, I had longer chats and learned more about their interests and journey to come to DynamicsMinds. Where I didn’t have the opportunity to go to both DynamicsCon in the US and DynamicsMinds, some others did. Some of them even did it on their own personal expenses. I can only show a lot of respect in such a scenario.

I’m not aware of any other community event where the organization of the event is taking it to the next level. The location, the energy, the atmosphere, the vibes, the day program, the keynotes, and the evening parties make this such a unique event.

DynamicsMinds is here to stay!

This year, over 1000 participants showed up at DynamicsMinds. Among them, there were just over 200 speakers. Microsoft employees, MVPs, sponsors, but most importantly, also other volunteers wanting to share their experiences.

During the keynotes, a momentum was built to bring a message at the end of the session about DynamicsMinds returning next year, as you can see in the featured image of this blog post. The theme of the keynotes was a modern warehouse run by agents (modern dance during the session), where humans were able to monitor and control. This was built in by having us all voting if particular actions were allowed or should be stopped. After fine-tuning the warehouse AI model, all agents were operating simultaneously with different tasks to reach the end goal. Luckily, DynamicsMinds will return next year.

DynamicsMinds organizers, the Docentric team, all sponsors, and all attendees, thank you so much for the experience this year. After three years of amazing events that energized me, I would like to see DynamicsMinds become a tradition.

Hopefully, see you next year!

I do hope you liked this post and will add value for you in your daily work as a professional. If you have related questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to use the Comment feature below.


That’s all for now. Till next time!