Microsoft recently held its annual Ignite Conference where they announced over 100 updates to its suite of cloud services and products. Daymark was on the ground at the Convention Center in Seattle to explore the innovations and engage with Microsoft on the latest changes. 100 updates is a lot to digest! Here are our thoughts on 5 important ones worth paying attention to.
1. Microsoft Teams Premium
What is it?
Microsoft Teams Premium is an add-on scheduled for release in December of this year, and will provide exciting new features around security, artificial intelligence, and personalization
Why is it important?
The AI will provide intelligent meeting summaries and will automatically assign tasks based on its review/recap of the meeting. In addition, it will provide personalized insights in meeting recordings that will call out important moments in the meeting, such as when a user’s name was mentioned, a screen was shared and when people have joined or left.
2. Microsoft Places: Turn your spaces into places
What is it?
Microsoft Places is a new Microsoft 365 App coming soon that will help organizations coordinate where work happens, so that your coworkers can see when others will be in the office and plan for in-person meetings with the use of intelligent booking. It also includes insights and guidance on commute times, as well as employee sentiment as it relates to hybrid work policies and space usage with a goal to better evolve the hybrid work balance.
Why is it important?
Several times, I've had the frustrating and disappointing experience of deciding to drive into the office only to find out upon arrival that most of my co-workers are working remotely that day. I think a lot of us are inspired by face-to-face work collaboration, but we lack an easy way to coordinate and track this. I was excited to see focus in this area and I'm looking forward to exploring what this can do for Daymark's growing hybrid work environment.
3. Microsoft Viva Enhancements
What is it?
Microsoft continues to expand on the release of Microsoft Viva, which will now include new features for Viva Insights, Viva Learning and Viva Engage. For example, with Viva Engage anyone inside the company can create rich posts that include links, files, photos, and videos, as a way of sharing updates and perspectives with others in the organization. These posts appear on a user’s Storyline, which others can view in Viva Engage, Outlook and the Viva Connections feed in Microsoft Teams.
Why is it important?
The best way to picture Viva Engage is to look at it as a Facebook or Instagram social media platform for your business. Creating social communities around business projects, events, topics, or even the more social aspects of your company like team dinner plans, softball night, etc. It's aimed at fostering business relationships and knowing what's going on within the communities you follow. This could replace some outdated Teams sites that were created to try to offer this kind of collaboration and replace it with a more authentic and engaging social experience, which now includes storylines and stories, very similar to what you see on other social media platforms.
4. Microsoft Intune Premium Add-ons
What is it?
Microsoft Intune has been a staple in helping organizations achieve their security goals around Endpoint Management. Microsoft has revealed additional premium add-ons to enhance management capabilities. “Remote Help” capabilities (announced back in April for Windows devices) will be available as part of the premium add-on and will eventually incorporate ServiceNow integration as well as support for Android Devices. Endpoint Privilege Management is another feature included that provides the ability to temporarily elevate admin privileges on the system so that the user can perform privileged actions. Also included is VPN tunneling for mobile application management (MAM), which enhances BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) scenarios by providing secure access to on-prem corporate apps without having to enroll the device.
Why is it important?
These are all great features, but the one that really stands out to me is the ability to elevate Admin privileges. Typically, we see customers needing to manage this through 3rd party applications, but coming soon this will be a built-in feature of Intune Premium, enabling administrators to get closer to a Zero Trust model while allowing users to perform functions like adding printers or executing other elevated privileged actions.
5. Microsoft Defender for DevOps
What is it?
The Microsoft Defender product has now expanded into DevOps, providing security for multi-pipeline environments
Why is it important?
We have implemented Microsoft Defender across organizations to handle Endpoints, Servers, and Cloud Apps, however for those organizations that are developing, it's important for Microsoft to continue extending their detection capabilities beyond just the production data locations. Development environments include creative code environments where anything goes, where code is copied, pasted, reused, etc.
Let’s Talk: At Daymark, we continue to be impressed with the way we as a company, as well as many of our clients, leverage Microsoft solutions. We have more than 50 Microsoft Technical Certifications and Specializations that enable us to be on the cutting edge of all that Microsoft has to offer. Please reach out if you’d like to chat about any of these new features or want to discuss optimizing your current or planned environment.
