Microsoft Ignite 2021: what you need to know

Last week, Microsoft presented its conference: Microsoft Ignite. This is a big conference held around the world that brings together IT professionals and developers. This year, many topics were discussed: Metaverse, Cloud, Data, Artificial Intelligence... A look back at the innovations of Microsoft Ignite!

Microsoft Mesh makes a buzz at Microsoft Ignite 2021

Since the announcement of Facebook's name change to Meta, digital leaders have been talking about one word: the Metaverse. Far from being just a buzzword, the Metaverse is a real opportunity for digital companies. The Metaverse is made up of two words: Meta and Universe. It is defined as a fictional virtual world in which people can evolve collectively.

At the Microsoft Ignite conference, the giant announced its positioning on this market with a new product: Microsft Mesh. The basic idea: the physical and digital worlds come together. Combining computing and the real world allows people to connect through an immersive experience directly in Teams. This means that the video conferences of tomorrow's world will no longer be just about the camera. We will be able to be virtually present in the meeting room or elsewhere! This system combines augmented reality and holograms to collaborate, provide remote assistance for equipment repairs or create digital meeting spaces. In addition, it is not the Sims, but your avatars that can be in a meeting room, or collaborate on boards and in creative rooms.

An interesting use of Microsoft Mesh is digital onboarding. As more and more onboarding is done remotely, this platform helps to improve the onboarding experience for newcomers. It creates deeper connections and spreads a strong company culture.

📌 To go further, discover the 6 key steps to creating a strong company culture

And have you ever dreamt of teleportation? The session goes so far as to present this possibility via holograms, which arouses a lot of curiosity in the audience!

Power Platform innovations

In addition to the announcement of Mesh, Ignite 2021 was an opportunity for Microsoft to present all the new features of Power Platform. Power Platform is Microsoft's low-code, no-code application development solution that allows you to automate tasks and easily create applications. Here are the innovations that impressed us the most:

• Improved collaboration for application developers. They will now be able to send comments and mention people in the Power Platform on Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate in the same way as they can on Planner.

• Highlighting areas of inefficiency in workflows. The functionality pushed by Process Advisor is a great help to improve daily work processes and gain performance;

• Automation of organizational processes. With Microsoft Power Automate Desktop, you can eliminate repetitive tasks in a matter of minutes.

• The new  "Pay as you Go" " license. It gives the possibility to pay only for the applications used and only once they have been used. As a reminder, before, there were two possible plans: one plan per year, and one per user. The Pay as you Go option is interesting for large companies that want to pay only when the user uses the application during the month. This option is available in "Settings", by choosing the "Pay as You go" option. You can then view the payment details via your Azure portal;

• The release of Power Fx. It is now available as open source low code software. It makes a difference, as the code used is the same for Power Apps Canvas, Model Driven App, and Dataverse Formula Column ;

• Accessibility of the Power Platform in Linux environments ;
• The ability to upload access data and data capture to mobile. This allows users to easily feed data back to Microsoft Dataverse and create suitable applications on mobile.

Microsoft Loop, the newcomer

A new tool was presented at Microsoft Ignite: Microsoft Loop. A project that Microsoft has been working on since 2019.

Initially called Fluid Framework and Fluid Components, Loop has been added to the list of Microsoft's collaborative tools, but it is different because it allows real-time collaboration and interaction between numerous collaborators. It competes directly with the pure player in collaboration, Notion.

These components are in the form of texts, tables, tasks, etc. but it is possible to go much further by integrating Office documents. Loop thus allows everything to be grouped together on a page located in a workspace. This shared space contains all the tools and information necessary for the smooth running of a project. You can also track your team's progress towards a given goal. Finally, data synchronization will allow you to collaborate in the same space remotely and asynchronously.

A cybersecurity offer for VSEs/SMEs

Microsoft is diversifying its cybersecurity offering by proposing a service adapted to companies with fewer than 300 employees. With its " Defender for Business" offer, Microsoft intends to provide a solution for companies that do not necessarily have high-level IT skills. This offer will be accessible through Microsoft 365 Business Premium or for 3$ per user per month. The features will be :

• Threat and vulnerability management;
• Reduction of the attack surface;
• New generation protection;
• Detections and alerts;
• Automated investigations;
• API and security data integration.

👾 To go further, find out how to secure workstations

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