Microsoft Ignite Recap
Microsoft Ignite was truly a unique experience this year. For the first time, everything was virtual and free. This made the event open to everyone. And you can still watch everything on-demand. So, you don't have an excuse not to watch any of the great sessions.
Key observations from Jennifer Buchholz
Our founder, Jennifer Buchholz, moderated a few sessions at the event, including one of the biggest Microsoft Teams Essentials for IT, which had 615 attendees. Here are some of her observations from Microsoft Ignite:
One of the biggest questions I received during my sessions was… What happened to Office 365? Office 365 was officially rebranded to Microsoft 365 back in April of this year. We even wrote a blog post about it. With everything going on in 2020, this announcement must have flown under the radar.
With the event being virtual this year, I was concerned about connecting with people virtually truly. After this event, I can say I could communicate with lots of Microsoft experts and grow my network. I connected with numerous fellow Microsoft certified trainers who have attended previous Microsoft Ignite events and met some new people who might not have participated in the event if it was a typical year. I'm excited about really growing my network and passing this new knowledge on to everyone.
The growth of Microsoft Teams was a big topic during the entire event. One stat that blew me away was in Feb 2020, they had 10 million Teams users, and they currently have 75 million Teams users - that's extreme growth in just six months and shows how Teams is growing during these challenging times.
One observation I had for future events was to allow more time for questions and answers. As a moderator, I had numerous people tell me they wish there were a central place they could go and have questions answered. Maybe next year, we can have more virtual "booths" where people can interact more with the experts.
Key announcements from Microsoft Ignite
Microsoft 365 and specifically Microsoft Teams were a big talking point for the event. Here are some of the more significant announcements from Microsoft Ignite:
Global navigation with the SharePoint app bar - Global navigation has long been tops on many wish lists for modern SharePoint intranets. My favorite announcement at Ignite 2020 involved the new SharePoint app bar (aka, global navigation). The SharePoint app bar is configured in the Homesite. It allows you to navigate your home site and bring it to a narrow left rail that persists everywhere in SharePoint.
Home site app for Teams - This app brings your home site and the best of your intranet to Teams! Sites built on modern SharePoint will render inside Teams itself. And the app makes it easy to share and discuss content from intranet sites in Teams channels and chat.
Microsoft Teams meeting recordings will now be stored in OneDrive and SharePoint - Microsoft Teams meeting recordings will now be stored and shared with OneDrive and SharePoint, rather than stored directly in Microsoft Stream. Because the files are in OneDrive/SharePoint, we benefit from the much more mature permissions and sharing, retention policies, information governance, "go local" and multi-geo tenant support, customer key support API-level access to meeting recordings.
Microsoft Teams Meeting recaps - An auto-generated meeting summary with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, shared files, and more will be shared in the meeting Chat tab and viewable in the Details tab for each meeting. A link to the recap will also be available in the meeting event in your Outlook calendar.
Webinar registration and reporting for Teams - Microsoft is looking to close some of the gaps towards being a webinar platform with event registration, automated emails, and a detailed reporting dashboard to help understand attendee engagement. With these features and having up to 1,000 interactive participants and meeting overflow, Microsoft Teams might provide an exciting webinar platform for many.
Custom layouts - Coming later this year, custom layouts allow for a more dynamic content viewing experience and enable presenters to customize how content shows up for participants during a meeting. For example, when a presenter shows a PowerPoint slide, participants will see the presenter's video feed transposed onto the foreground of the slide they're offering.
Breakout rooms for Teams - Coming in October, breakout rooms will allow meeting organizers to split up meeting participants into smaller groups to facilitate brainstorming sessions or workgroup discussions. Presenters can choose to hop between breakout rooms, make announcements to all breakout rooms, and/or close the breakout rooms that bring everybody back into the main meeting.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of exciting announcements from Microsoft Ignite. We highly recommend going back and taking a look at some of the sessions available on-demand. Look for future blog posts recapping more information from the show.