The first day of Microsoft Ignite brought a staggering amount of announcements, most of which I have yet to read about in detail.  With the number of product groups represented at the conference, I am sure there are still some that I haven’t heard about.  In all of the sessions I attended today, I saw Microsoft’s mission throughout.  It is clear that they are really focused on ensuring users have the tools they need to be productive.

Microsoft Mission: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Keynote

I had V.I.P. seating for the keynote so was able to catch the action up close.  While it is always awesome to see Satya’s enthusiasm, the star of the keynote was Li-Chen Miller.  Li-Chen announced Bing for Business, and showed a demo of how the service can be used to surface details about colleagues, cloud stored documents, as well as information from internal sites and tools.

Her connection to the crowd was great, and I found her hilarious.  I can see B4B making an immediate impact in the modern workplace.

The keynote also showed how Ford is using mixed reality to make data driven decisions in their manufacturing plants.  Mixed reality is amazing, and will make make a huge impact on decision making and cost savings as it is more widely implemented.

Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business

As expected, it was officially announced that Teams will become the “core communications client” and will eventually replace Skype for Business.  As part of the announcement, we saw some really cool functionality of Teams meetings including a demo of facial recognition.  With facial recognition, you can watch a recorded Teams meeting and jump right to the spot where a specific person is speaking.  Much more efficient than trying to skim through a meeting for particular content.

Other Quick Hitters

• Yet another flavor of Advanced Threat Protection, Azure ATP, joins Windows Defender and Office 365 ATP to add to the cloud security portfolio.
• Brad Anderson demoed in-session control of SaaS applications in a browser.  In-session control helps secure data on unmanaged devices allowing secure collaboration with people outside the company.
• The Inside Exchange Online session, one that I was anticipating, announced Bing Powered Exchange Online Search.  Using the power of Bing, search results will be twice as fast and more relevant to what you are looking for.

More Announcements

Here are some other announcements that I made a note of today.  I haven’t had time to go into detail on them yet.

1. Compliance Manager Preview
2. Configuration Manager and InTune Co-Management (which is capable partly because of the ability to join a device to both Active Directory and Azure Active Directory)
3. Azure File Sync Public Preview
4. Azure Migrate
5. Intelligent Search powered by the Microsoft Graph
6. Bing for Business
7. Exchange 2019