In today’s blog, you’ll meet with one of our amazing volunteers. You might have seen him speaking at an event or online, advocating for healthy ALM in all Power Platform projects. Say hi to Parvez Ghumra!
About Parvez
Parvez lives in Leicester, UK, and works as an independent Power Platform & Dynamics 365 CE Technical Architect. His community contributions include:
- Co-organizing the Birmingham, UK regional User Group.
- Blogging (though not as frequently as he would like and it’s currently also down for maintenance 😊), XRM Solutions UK – Blog.
- Open source project contributions, see Parvez on GitHub.
- Speaking engagements, visit Parvez Sessionize profile.
- Various appearances on YouTube, see this playlist.
He also mentions that he enjoys collaborating with folks in the community on LinkedIn, WhatsApp groups, in the community forums, on GitHub and on Discord!
At Nordic Summit 2025 in Gothenburg, Parvez will hold a pre-day workshop together with Sean Astrakhan:
The ALM workshop you’ve been waiting for: Azure DevOps made easy!
and deliver the session:
Power Platform Solution Framework 101: A recipe for silky smooth deployments
As fun facts Parvez reveals that in his junior days, he wasn’t aware that it was possible to interact with the Dynamics 365 Web API from the client side to manipulate data. He believed it was a server-side only capability using the SDK. There were also platform and client-stipulated limitations which influenced the design. So he designed a solution which persisted some data in a text field based on user selection in an HTML Web Resource embedded in the form, then server-side plugins were implemented to process the data from the text field!
“Reflecting back on this now, I would probably re-engineer this solution using a combination of PCF controls, Custom APIs, Azure Service Bus and Azure Functions. The evolution of the platform has really made it possible to design enterprise grade solutions”.
Favourite part of the platform
What is Parvez’s absolute favourite part of the platform? Turns out, it’s something that has been around for a long while and has been in discussions over the years. Team managed or unmanaged… you might know what that is…
“Without a doubt, it has to be the Solution Framework within Dataverse. It’s been around for a very long time (coming from the days of Dynamics CRM 2011), though it has matured significantly since then. It enables the whole ALM story and brings so many days (and nights) of joy managing deployments! 😊”
Nordic Summit 2024
Parvez mentions what brought him to Nordic Summit 2024, it was the people, both in the organizing team as well as beyond.
“Over the years and my engagement in the community, I have got to know many of the organizers very well. It’s fantastic to see their genuine passion and energy to serve the community and bring people together for collective learning.“
Best session
“Elevate Your Deployment Game with Dataverse Packages” by Rebekka Aalbers. Package Deployer is a topic that is so rarely spoken/written about and even the official documentation on it is not that good. Areas like this are where sessions like this can be very helpful”.
About volunteering
We asked Parvez about his experience being a volunteer at Nordic Summit.
“Volunteering at Nordic Summit has been an amazing experience. To be able to collaborate in a strong, passionate team that is so well organized and managed is refreshing to see. Despite the challenges of running a large event, it was a very light-hearted mood, everyone was really friendly and easy to get along with. Communication was good and there was flexibility for people to take breaks out of the volunteering activity to go and enjoy some sessions and networking opportunities.”
It was not the first time Parvez volunteered at Nordic Summit, he attended as a volunteer also in 2023. Parvez compares the two experiences and sees similarities.
“The first Nordic Summit I attended and volunteered at was in Copenhagen in 2023. This was an opportunity for me to meet Ameed Sheikh, who was a long-time connection of mine in the community. I spent some good time with Ameed and his hospitality was amazing.
“In 2024, I had a similar experience in Oslo. I have been grateful to have had the opportunity to meet and get to know community friends like Ahmad Najjar who went out of their way to make sure I had a really good time in Oslo! Ahmad Najjar is one of the greatest community friends I have ever met. I have had the pleasure of getting to know him a lot better through the community. Oslo is home for him. He and his family really looked after me during my time in Oslo. We spent some good time in some of the most beautiful (and coldest) parts of Oslo – up in the mountainous areas.”
Thank you Parvez for being a returning volunteer, a guest on this blog and we’re excited to see you as a speaker this year! 🤩
The Nordic Summit Team