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Myself and two others from my company drove to Charlotte, NC yesterday to attend what was billed as an in-depth look into making the most of Microsoft Dynamics.

We use Dynamics as our main software for our service business. It does everything from dispatch our technicians to bill our customers to make bank deposits and write our payroll checks. It’s not a cheap piece of software and is robust and versatile, although it doesn’t 100% fit our business needs, after reviewing some 30 pieces of software, it came the closest, so that was what we decided to go with.

We estimate that we don’t use 1/4th of it’s capabilities and were excited to have this closer look at features we weren’t using and get some ideas on how to better utilize the not-insignificant investment we have in this software.

Well, I suppose the overview of the “seminar” should have given us a hint.

The first two hours of it (which it didn’t even start until 11:30 AM) were devoted to “feel the love” marketing.

Every single person in attendance was already a customer or a “partner”, so this “feel the love” portion was 90% a waste of our time. The after lunch session — supposed to be 2 hours, but ended up being more like an hour and a half was what we came for, but unfortunately, was rushed through and glossed over with respect to the “in depth” possibilities of it.

The last half hour was devoted to pitching the purchase of more modules or better yet, changing your purchasing model from module based to a more robust and all-inclusive “core products” of which over half were modules we will never use and 2/3rds of the other half were modules we already own, leaving about 4 modules we would like to have in the perfect world. Still other items were on an ala carte menu of additions that could be purchased no matter which purchasing model you were using.  Of course all of this came with a price tag (that was never revealed in the meeting seminar, but which I later discovered would cost us $22,000 to upgrade to the core products module from our present module based one).

I’m not saying that we didn’t learn anything because we did, but it was more like receiving light hors dourve when you were expecting (and had the appetite for) a 3 course meal.

Oh well, it was free, they fed us a decent lunch and had Starbucks coffee on tap when we got there, so I guess it wasn’t a total loss.

Oh! I almost forgot — we each got a thermal coffee cup in a lovely blue (like the Windows Vista shimmery blues) and a set of 4 leggo-like blocks that the kiddies can play with.

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