Microsoft Ignite

Last week, Microsoft organized its first Ignite conference in Chicago, Illinois with 23,000 attendees, Microsoft Ignite. The objective of Ignite was to replace the other professional conferences that Microsoft hosts such as TechEd, with one single event. Unlike Build 2015, which primarily catered to developers, Ignite aimed to help IT professionals deliver innovative technology.

Microsoft made several significant announcements in over 200 sessions.  We have complied for you, the top seven that will have the most impact in the technology industry.

SharePoint 2016

Microsoft promised to offer better support for embedded video, an intuitive admin portal, and improved people experience with Delve, Microsoft’s newest technology.

Storing files across devices with OneDrive, as a replacement of your organization’s file server is now available. You can also expect to witness improved reporting and auditing of changes to files.

New features like governance controls and personalized discovery experiences, strengthen enterprise search. You can also expect an improved user experience with more advanced collaboration and personalized insights.

One significant improvement was Zero Downtime Patching. This means updates that are critical to the operating system’s health will be pushed and delivered in one go, without affecting the end user.

Another improvement is the new Server Role Selection when configuring a new SharePoint Some other features revealed are:

• SharePoint 2016 will support Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 R2
• Hardware requirements for SharePoint 2015 will be same as SharePoint 2013
• Support of non-default SMTP ports and SARTTTLS to encrypt connections
• Standalone instructions will no longer be supported with SharePoint 2016
• ODF support
• Upgrade directly from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016

We expect there will be more updates or announcements about SharePoint 2016 between Q1 and Q2 of 2016.

Skype for Business

In April 2015, Microsoft launched Skype for Business, and at Ignite, they talked about modern meetings, an improved meeting feature that will help you collaborate easily with participants sitting in multiple locations. It was also announced that later in 2015, it would enable users to broadcast Skype for business meetings to up to 10,000 participants at a time.

Two new features were announced that are pre-loaded meeting attachments, which will speed up meeting start times, as it will show the meeting content automatically at the beginning of the call.

Another was in-call co-authoring. It will help initiate co-authoring sessions easily so that multiple participants can work or collaborate on a single document right from within the meeting itself while everyone sees the changes happening live.