What we learned at Microsoft Ignite 2022

Here’s our rundown of the big announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2022 with Bridget Denby, Trustmarque’s Microsoft Alliance Manager.

Kicking off with a key-note address from CEO, Satya Nadella, who announced via video that Microsoft joining forces for the good of Teams with another of Trustmarque’s key strategic partners. Nadella detailed that in 2023, Microsoft will be bringing Teams Rooms to Cisco meeting room devices, as they work to connect people across the hybrid workplace.

Nadella also discussed how Microsoft Cloud will be driving forward innovation across these key areas:

• Deliver efficiency with automation and AI
• Be data-driven and optimise with Azure
• Innovate with a cloud developer platform
• Re-energising your workforce
• Protect everything, everyone, everywhere

Speaker highlights

Digital cities

The two-day event was filled with guest speakers offering an enlightening take on their world, including the Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham and his desire to equip the citizens of Manchester with adequate tech. Burnham has previously spoken openly about his desire to create a high-tech innovation hub in the city and clearly wants to upskill and attract local talent to make this a reality.

Diversity in technology

We also heard from Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE on diversity in technology, and the production of software tuned into the whole of society. A key takeaway here was that developers must have true representation from the word go in order to produce inclusive software, otherwise they face producing solutions that alienate huge chunks of society.

AI for the better

Later on, we also delved into the power of AI and how call centres are driving efficiencies through automated/AI technology screening. For instance, when there’s an accident at the side of the road, the caller’s conversation is recorded through AI software, transcribed and routed to the correct handler. There are also instances of this information eventually populating an insurance claim form.”

Software and solution announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2022

Re-energise your workforce in the office, at home and everywhere in-between.

One of the key announcements at the Manchester event was around Teams Premium , penned to make meetings more personalised, intelligent, and secure.

• New meeting guides that automatically set up the right meeting options.
• Upleveled safeguards for confidential information with advanced meeting protection.
• The ability to host high-quality webinars using advanced functionality to drive deeper engagement and generate customer conversations.

Mesh avatars for Teams – create custom avatars to represent yourself—so you can take a break from the camera but still have a physical presence in Teams meetings.

November 2022, Excel Live transforms how people collaborate in meetings, enabling every participant to live-edit the Excel file directly, right from Teams—without ever opening the file.

Microsoft Places

Addressing the challenges of hybrid work, Microsoft Places helps everyone understand who will be in the office when; where people are sitting; what meetings to attend in person; and how to book space on the days your team is already planning to come in. It also helps leaders understand how people use the office.

Delivering data-driven experiences that give you more time and value

Microsoft will continue to enhance the way Microsoft Azure integrates across infrastructure and data services, maintaining business efficiencies and resilience. This will happen through the Microsoft Intelligent Data platform, integrating database, analytics, and data governance products for a seamless experience.

In summary, the new announcements below will empower customers to do more with less, add layers of intelligence to applications, unlock predictive insights, and govern data anywhere.

• Developers can build on their terms with the new innovation in cloud-native distributed data and open-source access.
• General availability of the SAP Change Capture Data Connector in Azure Data Factory. Azure Data Factory’s new Microsoft Graph Data Connector for Microsoft 365 datasets transports your office data into Azure, so you can unlock collaboration and productivity insights.
• Continuing to remove friction from end-user experiences, allowing sharing of Power BI datasets across tenants through Power BI B2B data sharing.
• Microsoft Purview will combine unified data governance with risk and compliance solutions.

Leverage low-code to do more with less – Power Platform

Updates to Power Platform to include:

General Availability of Managed Environments: Managed Environments offer a set of enhanced out-of-the-box governance capabilities that simplify, automate, and streamline IT administration of Microsoft Power Platform at scale.

ALM pipeline automation: Built-in application lifecycle management in Microsoft Power Platform to improve security and governance for solutions with less effort.

Co-authoring in Power Apps: Makers can work together in real-time with co-authoring in the modern app designer to accelerate development with collaboration.

Power Pages: for creating modern, secure, responsive business websites

Interactive Power BI charts shared directly from OneDrive and SharePoint: Users can now share and interact with reports directly from OneDrive or SharePoint.

Cross-tenant dataset sharing: Cross-tenant dataset sharing enables users to share datasets with external organisations in an easy, quick, and secure manner.

The Power Automate co-pilot converts natural language to cloud flows: Users can describe what they want to automate in a sentence, and AI will build your flow in seconds.

Transform your business with Microsoft Azure, anywhere

It was clear during the event announcements, Microsoft wants you to be able to stay agile and flexible when extending Azure to your on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments. To facilitate this, the following updates are on the horizon:

• Azure Arc, offers a bridge that extends the Azure platform so customers can build cloud-native applications and services with the flexibility to run them across their existing datacentres, edge, and multi-cloud environments.
• New Azure Arc capabilities to save money and enable further innovation:
• Expansion of Azure hybrid benefit to include Azure Kubernetes service on Azure Stack HCI or Windows Server in own datacentre or edge environments at no additional cost.

So what does this mean? It is hoped that these new developments will focus on finding ways to help save and get maximum value out of cloud investments.

The following will make this even easier:

Azure Migration and Modernization program (AMMP) now helps plan and deploy cloud security services as you migrate, including support for Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel.

A new Azure savings plan for compute allows savings up to 65 percent on select compute services compared to pay-as-you-go prices

Relive Microsoft Ignite with Trustmarque

In this article, we have outlined all the innovation and demo content that we have built using Microsoft innovation and capability. As a long-standing partner of Microsoft, we have a wealth of expertise and experience across the breadth of their products and solutions, including advising, implementing and deploying native Microsoft solutions that meet the needs of our customers. Tune in on-demand to see how we are working in partnership Microsoft to do more with less with the Microsoft Cloud.