Yesterday's keynote at Microsoft Ignite was hosted by CEO Satya Nadella, but featured demos and presentations by many others from Microsoft and its partners.
Highlights of the 112-minute keynote were
- Running Azure services on-premises
- Azure Synapse: a tool for tracking and reporting on telemetry data
- Microsoft Edge browser updates
- Advances in Quantum Computing
- Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents - 2 new tools for "Citizen Developers"
- Major update to the Edge browser
- Project Cortex, a service that makes it easy to find related information from within an application
- Bing integration with searching internal searching
Personally, I plan to explore Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and Visual Studio Online first.
You can view a recording of the keynote here.
Below are my notes while watching the keynote:
Azure Stack Edge
Hardware with built-in Azure services
GPUs
Rugged series
Portable
For harsh environments
Azure Stack Hub
Azure Stack VI
VMs in Azure
Azure Arc
Extend azure services to my datacenter
Access to Azure security
Policies
Geo-replication
Between:
on-premise data
Azure datacenter
AWS
Azure Synapse
Telemetry
App metrics
Analytics
Fast query of telemetry data
Integration with PowerBI
Autonomous System
Simulation environments
Self-driving vehicles
Azure Quantum
Open platform
3 partners
Toolkit
Quantum algorithms can be run on classic hardware
Cyber Security
Last year cyber crime cost $1 trillion
Microsoft endpoint manager
Deploy policy to all data and locations
Tools
Visual Studio online
In-browser IDE
Existing tools
Intellicode
LiveShare
GitHub
Power Platform
"Citizen Developers"
Power Automate
Connectors for business applications
API connectors
Record UI steps
Power Virtual Agents
Language understanding
Uses Bot Framework
Customer Insights
Data platform
Pre-built connectors
Aggregated data stored in Azure
Can run analytics with Synapse (see above)
Productivity Cloud
Built with M365
Human attention
Microsoft Teams
Project Cortex
Converts data inside your organization into knowledge
e.g.,
look up acronym meaning in email
Find experts inside organization on a given topic
Ask contract: when is first payment due?
Voice Enhancement feature
Remove background noise to hear voice more easily
Whiteboards
Detect whiteboard
Make people transparent as they walk in front of white board
Fluid
Connections between applications across devices
Microsoft Edge browser update
Chromium browser
Faster
Runs on multiple operating system
Drag and drop pages, images, and metadata on right of browser
Share
Export to Excel
Bing
Search internal sites, along with the web
Internal information shown at top of search page (semantic understanding of question and information)
Power BI results output integrated
Minecraft Earth
VR
Multiplayer