Microsoft Ignite 2021 took place last week as a virtual event. And we missed it. Yep, we are so used to Microsoft Ignite being an in-person event that we just missed the virtual version of this year. However, we were able to watch some on-demand presentations and read some recaps to provide you with our biggest takeaways from the event… We really hope 2022 can be in person!

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft is bolstering up the collaboration service with lots of new features. The first of those are improvements for Live Events in Teams, where Teams can now be used to create interactive webinars for up to 1,000 attendees. Teams Live Events will also support webinars with up to 20,000 attendees later this month. You can have a look below for the other new features coming to Teams, as announced at Ignite 2021.

• PowerPoint Live is now generally available in Teams. The feature combines slides, notes, and meeting chat in a single view to help make presentations easier for speakers and presenters.

• Dynamic View for Teams meetings is coming next month. The feature makes meetings more engaging and adjusts elements of meetings, such as the ability to display different modes such as charts, chats, etc next to video feeds.

• Teams is getting improved security thanks to invite-only meeting controls.

• It is becoming possible to share channels outside of an organization, through a feature known as Microsoft Teams connect.

• Microsoft Lists is getting custom list templates in Teams, as well as rich-test editor, the ability to add comments or @mentions and create rules, and other new features.

• Microsoft Dynamics is getting a seamless integration with Teams.

• New polling experiences in Teams meetings on Mobile

Microsoft Mesh

As the entire Ignite 2021 event was virtual because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft used this as an opportunity to showcase its newest hologram-based mixed-reality communication platform called Microsoft Mesh. In fact, the whole event was hosted on Microsoft Mesh — several people “teleported” to Microsoft Ignite 2021 using the platform to usher in this new collaborative computing. According to Microsoft, mixed reality has the potential to change the face of current businesses, and it allows people to reference themselves across both space and time in a consistent way.

Mesh allows Microsoft to achieve a complex use-case that the company likes to call “holoportation.” Mesh is capable of allowing people to join a shared environment for conversations or meetings from a different physical location. It uses 3D holograms and shares these holographic experiences on many kinds of devices using the company’s very own Azure cloud platform. Microsoft also made sure to focus on the point that Mesh is not just confined to business meetings or other professional use-cases. The same technology can be used to train students in various streams to attain practical exposure. For instance, medical students can leverage this technology to witness live surgeries.

Microsoft Azure

Azure

Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure already powers almost all of the company’s major services and applications. Microsoft unveiled a bunch of interesting announcements and features of Azure AI and Azure Data platforms that enable developers, data engineers, and all other IT pros to leverage the platform.

Azure AI - Microsoft announced an all-new semantic search capability in Azure Cognitive Search, an AI-powered cloud search service. This new feature is available for mobile and web app development in preview. This new feature enables developers to use the platform to deliver results based on user intent instead of a simple keyword-based searching approach. Microsoft also announced that its Azure Cognitive Service Form Recognizer is going to start support for prebuilt identification documents and invoice extraction along with support for 64 additional languages.

Azure Data - Microsoft announced several updates to its analytics platform and tools that enable data developers to extract more insights from all forms of data. The company listed the availability and general updates relating to Azure Synapse Pathway, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Purview, and Azure Cosmos DB at Ignite 2021.