2024…. what a year it was! It is almost coming to an end but it is time to reflect since the Holidays are coming close. Personally, 2024 started with the 90-Day Mentoring Challenge from Mark and Meg Smith. What a great start to the year besides the fact that I learned a lot, it was also great to meet and connect with so many people from the community all around the world. During such a program you learn things you can apply immediately and sometimes you need more thoughts or build up the confidence to take action, in my case my own blog: jscheper.com
90-Day Mentoring Challange
As mentioned in the introduction of this post, the year started for me with the 90-day mentoring challenge. The three most important lessons / topics I took away from this are:
- Community; Before I joined the program I would classify myself as a “consumer”, which in essence means I would be the kind of person who would only search for answers but would not try to give anything back. The program let me realize that there is more, everyone is on a journey, some of you are really experienced and some of you have just started. The knowledge you can share will always help others in their journey.
- Personal Brand; Perhaps hand-in-hand with the first item, but one of the actions I took was creating my own blog where I share my findings, thoughts, and cool stuff about the Power Platform and AI.
- AI; This was already there a bit longer, but it did make me realize that the potential of this is enormous. So investing time and effort in this area to increase skills was crucial for me.
URL: 90 Day Mentoring Challenge
Blog site: JScheper.com
After I completed the 90-Day mentoring challenge it was time to transform the lessons learned into more actions. The probably most important lesson resulted in the blog site that you are currently visiting. Was I afraid of this and exposing myself to the outside world…? Hellll yeah 😎 But I feel damn proud that I took the steps, and shared what I know so it can hopefully help others, but also another way of encouraging myself to keep on learning and exploring new areas. I do owe Megan Walker a massive thank you for encouraging me and for all the help during this journey!
When looking at the statistics of the posts of my blog for this year, the following top 5 were most interesting and viewed:
1. Copilot
This was probably one of my first Copilot posts, and funny enough, it was about switching off suggestions AI was making when creating a new record. After this post, I created several other posts about Copilot which is probably the most interesting topic I wrote about in 2024.
URL: How do you turn off suggestions in Dynamics? – JScheper.com
2. Use Work Assignment to automate assignments
This feature allows you to automate the process of leads and opportunities assignments based on different criteria. This can be a great way to assign high-priority leads, high-value opportunities, or perhaps opportunities from important customers to the right colleagues almost instantly.
URL: Use Work Assignment to automate assignments – JScheper.com
3. Awesome refreshed look for Model-Driven apps
Personally speaking, I was surprised that this post would be in the top 5 that had the most interest. Since there is a transformation going on from managing Themes to using XML to set the different colors of your environment. The biggest thing I am still missing is the ability to set the logo, which is still managed via the classic theme.
URL: Awesome refreshed look for Model-Driven apps. – JScheper.com
4. Stay Connected and Informed: Manage Your Notification Preferences
This is probably one of the creations I am most proud of. The Notification Hub was a real need because of all the different triggers and channels that users wanted to be notified. This notification hub would allow them to manage their own preferences for each of the pre-defined triggers.
URL: Stay Connected and Informed with the Notification Hub
5. Use the AI Builder Prediction model to predict how the Netherlands will perform at Euro 2024
AI Builder is something I did not have much experience with. During my blog journey, it got more attention, same as other artificial intelligence topics, which resulted in more posts about this subject. During the Euro 2024, I tried to predict the performance of the Dutch National Soccer team using a custom AI Builder prediction model which was a really fun journey.
URL: AI Builder Prediction Model to predict Dutch team Euro 2024
2025
2025 will of course be another interesting year with even more Artificial Intelligence, which is my expectation. More AI tools will be released, more enhancements in this area, and all of that even faster 😎. Personally I would like to focus more on the following topics for 2025:
- Copilot, Agents, and Copilot Studio….. to summarize this… more AI 👨💻
- In-person speaking at an event/user group
Especially the last item, speaking at an event is something that has my interest, but that is one that I struggle with a bit because what am I supposed to tell everyone? If you do have that experience, then I would love to hear from you how you:
- Got to the very first topic that you presented at an event/user group
- Did you choose your very first event/user group carefully or was it just the first one crossing your path?
Feel free to drop your experience in the comments, I would love to hear them.
For now, I will take a short break and get back to you in the new year with lots of great content. I wish you and your family Happy Holidays and an amazing 2025.
