Overview
Microsoft's Ignite conference kicked off Wednesday morning. It took place in Seattle, but was broadcast live globally, so most of the "attendees" watched it virtually.
As usual, the conference began with a keynote address from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Satya acknowledged that we are now going through a period of historic economic, societal, and technological change. To address this, he asserted that we must "do more with less!" - a phrase he repeated throughout the keynote and which he described as "applying technology to amplify what you can do and... what an organization can achieve".
He focused on five key "imperatives":
- Be data-driven and optimize with Azure
- Deliver efficiency with Automation and AI
- Innovate with a cloud developer platform
- Re-energize your workforce with Microsoft 365
- Protect everything, everyone, everywhere
Be data-driven and optimize with Azure
The cloud allows you to scale your applications and data horizontally and vertically.
Azure Arc allows you to extend applications from Azure to on-premise, edge, and multi-cloud environments.
Deliver efficiency with Automation and AI
Azure provides AI models available for Microsoft AI and OpenAI services
Microsoft Designer is a new tool designed to generate images based on a description.
Innovate with a cloud developer platform
Satya announced improvements to GitHub Co-Pilot:
- Co-Pilot can generate code based on a description of what that code should do
- It can explain existing code in plain English
- It can translate code from one language to another
Enhanced Power Apps features include:
- Generate flows based on plain text description
- AI Builder - a tool that integrates AI capabilities into Power Apps by selecting from a set of templates
Re-energize your workforce with Microsoft 365
He announced a number of new features for Microsoft Teams and tools that integrate with Teams, including the following:
- Teams Premium, which features advanced meeting protection to protect privacy of meetings
- Teams Intelligent which provides a recap of a Teams meeting
- New apps (e.g., SAP adaptive cards)
- Mesh Avatars: animated graphics that represent an attendee without them turning on camera
- Microsoft Syntex, which provides automatic summarization, classification, and translation of documents
- Microsoft Places provides tools to match available people and locations, making it easier to schedule meetings at the right time and place in a hybrid work environment.
- Microsoft Viva brings actionable insights and connections into Teams to drive productive hybrid work. Viva Sales integrates CRM, teams, and Outlook for an integrated view of customer data.
Edge - Microsoft's web browser - also includes some new features, the most interesting of which was Edge Workspace, which allows multiple users to share the same set of tabs
Windows 11 will have enhanced phishing protection built in;
and Windows 365 is a SAAS offering for a Windows desktop that can be accessed from your Start menu or taskbar.
Protect everything, everyone, everywhere
This section was about security and focused on the following products:
- Entra for identity protection
- Purview for data governance
- Priva to protect privacy
- Intune to protect and manage endpoints
A significant new feature for Microsoft Defender provides security recommendations for multi-cloud deployments.
Conclusion
Satya promised over 100 updates would be announced at Ignite. Some of the features he highlighted are available now, some are in preview, and some will be available in a few months. It was not always clear to me the status of each feature or product when he described it.
The most compelling features for me were the enhancements to GitHub Co-Pilot; but each of you should find something to increase your productivity among this week's announcements.