Ignite2017: Conference Day 1

Today was the first day of the conference. I was out of the hotel at 7.30 to catch the conference shuttle bus, breakfast had been laid on and consisted of some eggs and bacon. I was done with breakfast at about 8.10 so started to head to the keynote but was told it was full up already even though it wasn't scheduled to start till 9 so I went back to the hall I had just had breakfast in and watched it on a live stream on a screen that would put most cinemas to shame. I was left feeling underwhelmed by the keynote. So they started off by saying they wanted to focus on using technology to empower people, nothing really new there and they had taken the information on any device, anywhere to now include multi sense and they see it very important that that you can interact with that data in a number of different ways to suit the device and the environment, predominately speech and Ink. To achieve the better speech recognition and better searching and understanding required better AI and lots of compute power in the cloud. Microsoft were in the race to develop a Quantum computer and they wheeled on 3 scientists to explain how their computer which seemed to based on things that hadn't really been proven to exist and needed to run at temperatures colder than space was going to do that. Don't get me wrong, when someone does develop a Quantum computer that is viable in the number of calculations it can perform it will be a game changer but the focus they gave it during the keynote today seemed out of place.

Microsoft also briefly showed bing for business which looked like a normal bing search engine but it was also hooked into company data so as well as doing an internet search it brought back results from Sharepoint, one drive, email etc.

The other main takeway was that Microsoft was integrating the Skype technology into Microsoft Teams and discontinuing the Skype for Business app. Obviously on the back of that they were heavily pushing Teams adoption.

As a wow factor they had a car on stage and showed a demo of how Ford were using mixed reality or as we know it augmented reality to cut design costs down by being able to create virtual meeting spaces and adjust parts of the car and see how that affects things like performance, aero dynamics, cost, drivers view etc all in real time without having to pass clay models around the office. But there was nothing new there that hadnt been seen before

After the key note I attended, Office 365 creating a modern workspace. Again they focused on using AI to delver better ways to search for information and sense, new ways to interact with that content. It wasn't long before they got onto Teams again. As Microsoft see communication as being core to collaboration and Teams being their collaboration tool it made sense to them to bring their communication tool and their collaboration tool together hence why Skype is being bumped off. Teams will also allow non organizational members to join so you can pull in people from other organizations into your team site.

There were a couple of minor mentions

There will be more of the @someone in office so in an email you can write @someone and it will copy them in or in a word document you can @someone in the comments and it will notify them on thier device that they need to review a document

There will be smarter use of ink in documents, as you draw shapes it will recognize the shape and convert your rough scribbles to actual shapes with shape features, triangles get angles, circles will get made into a proper cicle with radius you can adjust and if you draw a rectangle you can add rows and columns and as you write into a table it auto resizes

Sharepoint will have an offline access so you can sync documents before you leave the office and work on them offline

Autopilot - a solution that provisions devices once a user logs on. Think of how your mobile phone works when you first get it and you sign into google. It will be a similar experience on a device that has been registered to the organization Once the users has logged on intune brings down polices and applications to the device wherever they are

Secure email, very brief demo that suggested that Microsoft had partnered with some vendors so that when a user using office 365 sends an email to an external company, and they press the protect button it will send an encrypted email. The user at the other end user will need to sign into their service such as gmail. and once they have re-authenticated they will be able to read the email. You can also specify controls so that the end users can copy, paste or forward.

Windows defender can now do complete security analysis and threat protection and will trace the attack back to the source Microsoft purchased hexadite to achieve this. https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/24/microsoft-hexadite-100m-cloudyn/

After that session I attended the Expo and tried to get round as many vendors as I could. Some were non starters due to the level of access we dont have to our hypervisors or system center but there were some potentially useful ones. Things like companies that deliver office 365 training and adoption over the web, threat security that not only looks at trends on end devices but also looks at what people are doing in office 365, Skype room solutions, securing and managing azure better etc. I don't think there was anything that screamed you must have this, probably the most game changing was the adoption of skype and using that throughout the organization to collaborate better and having the devices to enable you to do that and throwing away the old style desk phones.

The final session I attended was focused purely on teams

The buzz words here were

Before, during and after

Ensuring that all of the information that you need before a meeting is available, everything is at hand during the meeting and then afterwards everything is captured for refence

When a new person is added to the team they will see all of the historic content such as meetings, documents and emails.

Microsoft will continue to build enterprise voice functionality within teams so you can see call list history, transfer calls, organize multi user meetings etc

Outlook will have a new teams meeting button much like new skype meeting. There will also be local call numbers as well so people can join on a normal phone.

When you schedule a meeting in teams you have the option to make it public. This publishes it to the team site and anyone that feels they have something to offer can join in

In a meeting you will see all the participants and any shared content. Hovering over the users pulls out contact information so you can see who those people are, job role, organization chart information etc This functionality is also available on mobile devices.

Once the meeting has finished if the option to record it was selected it will be stored in the cloud for those that missed it. It will be transcribed to allow for easy searching and can be dynamically translated into different languages.

One customer talked about the following use cases

Team collaboration - replacing email within teams

Ad hoc projects - using teams for project planning

Incident response -transcribe the incident in teams so that people can see how it was dealt with after the event.

Microsoft will offer the following upgrade options from Skype for Business