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