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Microsoft is hosting its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida this week. And while Ignite is not the last name of the Microsoft Build Conference in recent years, it's a big event with more than 30,000 attendees and lots of news. Indeed, there was so much news this year that Microsoft provided the press with a 27-page booklet with all that.
We've written some of them today, but here are the most important announcements, including the one that was not in the Microsoft brochure, but was featured on the stage.
What has been announced: Microsoft is partnering with Adobe and SAP to create a single model of customer data representation that companies can transfer from one system to the other.
Why it's important: Moving customer data between different enterprise systems is difficult, especially because there is no standardized way to represent this information. Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP say they want to make it easier to move data between systems. But it's also a boost from Salesforce, the leader in the CRM space. It's also a chance for these three companies to put in place new tools that can extract value from this data – and Microsoft obviously hopes these companies will choose their Azure platform to analyze the data.
What has been announced: Companies using Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) will now be able to use the Microsoft Authenticator application on iOS and Android instead of a password to connect to their business applications.
Why it's important: Passwords are annoying and they are not very secure. Many companies are starting to push their employees to use a second factor to authenticate. With this, Microsoft now replaces the password / second factor combination with a single tap on your phone – ideally without compromising security.
What has been announced: Microsoft now allows businesses to rent a virtual Windows 10 desktop in Azure.
Why it's important: Until now, Windows 10 virtual desktops were the domain of third-party service providers. Microsoft itself will now offer these desktops. The company says it's the first time you can get a multi-user virtualized Windows 10 desktop in the cloud. As employees become more mobile and do not always work from the same computer or laptop, this virtualized solution will allow businesses to offer them a complete Windows 10 workstation in the cloud, with all known Office applications. provide and manage a physical machine.
What has been announced: Microsoft adds a number of new AI tools to its Office productivity suite. These include Ideas, which aims to eliminate some of the problems associated with the use of these tools. Ideas can suggest a layout for your PowerPoint presentation or help you find interesting data in your spreadsheets, for example. Excel also has two new tools for extracting rich data from third-party sources. Microsoft is also building a new unified search tool to search data on a company's network.
Why it's important: Microsoft Office remains the most used suite of productivity applications. This makes it the perfect surface for showcasing Microsoft's AI chops, and anything that can improve employee productivity will definitely add value to the business. If that means sitting across fewer poorly designed PowerPoint slides, then all this AI will have been worth it.
What has been announced: The next version of Surface Hub, Microsoft's big screen, will be launched in the second quarter of 2019. The Surface Hub 2 is both lighter and thinner than the original version. Then, in 2020, an updated version, the Surface Hub 2X, will be launched and will offer features such as tiling and rotation.
Why it's important: We are talking here about a 50-inch touch screen. You probably will not buy one, but you will want one. It is a disappointment to learn that Surface Hub 2 will not launch next year and that some of the advanced features that most users expect will not happen before the refresh in 2020.
What has been announced: Microsoft Teams, its competitor Slack, can now scramble the background during a video meeting and automatically create transcripts of your meetings.
Why it's important: The teams have become a competent Slack competitor, very popular with companies that are already betting on productivity tools from Microsoft. Microsoft now offers its teams many of its machine learning tools to offer features that most of its competitors can not match.
What has been announced: Azure Digital Twins enables organizations to model their actual IoT deployments in the cloud.
Why it's important: IoT introduces a massive new market for cloud services like Azure. Many companies were already building their own version of Digital Twins over Azure, but these in-house solutions were not always appropriate. Now, Microsoft is offering this feature ready for use and, for many companies, it could only act as the most efficient feature that will allow them to standardize their IoT workloads on Azure. And because they use Azure Digital Twins, they also want to use the rest of Azure's many IoT tools.
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