Microsoft’s CEO revealed the latest innovations to Microsoft Cloud at Microsoft Ignite 2022.  

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, divided the new updates into “five key imperatives”: Microsoft Azure, automation and AI, cloud developer platform, Microsoft 365, and security.  

Microsoft Ignite is an annual Microsoft conference geared towards IT professionals. Nadella provided the opening keynote to this year’s conference, which sought to highlight the ways in which Microsoft Cloud is helping its customers.  

Nadella said: “Organisations in every industry are turning to you and your digital capability to help them do more with less so that they can navigate this change and emerge strong.  

“You are the change agents who make doing more with less possible less time, less cost, less complexity, with more innovation, more agility and more resilience.  

“Doing more with less doesn’t mean working harder or longer. It’s not going to scale. It means applying technology to amplify what you can do and, ultimately, what an organisation can achieve amidst today’s constraints.  

“Over the past few years, they have talked extensively about digital transformation, but today we need to deliver on the digital imperative for every organisation.  

“It all comes down to how we can help you do this with the Microsoft Cloud. No other cloud offers the best of category products and the best of suite solutions. That is what we will focus on at Ignite this week as we walk through the five key imperatives.”  

Microsoft 365, Teams & Viva  

One of the five critical areas for Microsoft Cloud is its communication and collaboration segment, which includes the Microsoft 365 platform, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Viva.  

Microsoft 365: As well as Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, Microsoft 365 has some new apps, including Loop, Clipchamp, Stream, and Designer.  

All of these applications are combined within Microsoft Graph to bring insights, meetings, events, and documents into one interconnected system. Graph helps you to understand how your distributed workforce is working. It also displays your personalised recommendations, favourite productivity tools, and the third-party solutions you choose to add.  

Microsoft Teams: Over the past year, Microsoft Teams has introduced more than 450 capabilities.  

This year at Microsoft Ignite, more features have been announced, including Microsoft Teams Premium, which offers advanced meeting protections, Intelligent Recap for meetings, and more.  

On the Teams app platform, collaborative apps are bringing business workflows, data and insights to the end users. There are now more than 1,600 third-party apps available on the Microsoft Teams App Store, and more than 100,000 companies have deployed their own custom line of business applications in Teams. Power Platform and Teams are making it easy for anyone to build a collaborative application.  

3M has built an app which converts handwritten notes into a collaborative digital space. American Airlines is using “Connect Me”, a hybrid microservice with tools layered over Teams and the Power Platform. It provides the communication and collaboration necessary to keep its various teams and staff connected.  

Turning to Teams Rooms, Teams Meetings will be native on Cisco devices and other peripherals.  

Teams is also opening up to immersive meetings to Quest so users can connect and collaborate in virtual reality.  

Mesh avatars will be available for private preview in Microsoft Teams, allowing users to create their own avatars to represent them in meetings. They won’t even need to turn on their cameras! Nadella reflected that “the digitisation of people, places and processes is happening worldwide”.  

Last but not least, Microsoft Places has been unveiled as a way of helping “turn a space into a place”. It includes tools, reservation capabilities, a travel scheduler, sentiment and space usage insights, and more.  

Click here to view all the Microsoft Teams news from Ignite 2022.  

Microsoft Viva: Viva is designed to provide “insights, connection, purpose and growth” to fuel teams.  

New to Viva Sales is the capability of bringing live CRM data into customer interactions across Teams and Outlook.  

Azure, Automation & AI, Developer Platform, and Security  

Microsoft Azure: The first ‘key imperative’ focussed on Microsoft Azure, with highlights including the general availability of Azure Arc to run on-premise, Azure Premium SDD v2 Disk Storage becoming generally available, and the fully managed storage area network service, Elastic SAN, coming in preview.  

Automation & AI: The big news in automation and AI is the release of Microsoft Designer, which enables businesses of all sizes to access easy-to-use graphic design software. The new software was announced on the first morning of the conference.  

Open AI is making Microsoft’s codex models interactive, making them closer to becoming comparable to a real programmer. The codex prototype revealed at Ignite can explain and debug its own code, as well as learn from mistakes and make corrections on the family.  

Developer Platform: From a cloud developer standpoint, GitHub Co-Pilot is in the innovation spotlight. Microsoft is applying Codex to suggest code and functions in real-time from the editor, transforming natural language prompts into coding suggestions. It can even draw context from the code you have been writing and suggest entire functions.  

Security: Finally, the centrepiece of Microsoft Cloud security right now is Microsoft Edge, which, according to Nadella, is the browser that offers the highest rate of protection against phishing and malware. It is introducing Edge Workspaces, which allows users to create a shared set of tabs to work from.

Work Trends Index

Nadella also summarised three key findings from its latest Work Trends Index and how to act on them: “We need to stop the endless productivity paranoia. People are working more than ever, but leaders still worry employees are not getting the job done. We need to embrace data over dogma and realign organisations around the most important work.  

“We need to embrace that people come to the office for each other, not policy. And as leaders, we need to re-recruit our employees. Recruiting doesn’t end when the job offer is accepted. Leaders must continuously help their employees learn new skills or risk losing them. Employees must be empowered and energised to do meaningful work so that they can thrive.  

“To do so, organisations require a new system to build human social and knowledge capital across the entire organisation. You need to help people feel aligned with the company’s mission, purpose, and business priorities. You need to help them connect with each other, where they are and wherever they are working.  

“You need to help them continuously build new skills in the flow of work, and you need to have all these things working in harmony to have a workforce that thrives. That’s what Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva enable.  

In total, Microsoft is introducing more than 100 updates across the Microsoft Cloud at Ignite this year “in order to help you do more with less”.  

Microsoft Ignite is taking place live from the Seattle Convention Center (Seattle, Washington, USA) on October 12 – 14.

 

 



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