The Microsoft Ignite takes place September, 26-30 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta (GA) and floods us with tons of announcements about several IT-Pro topics. I summarized the most relevant announcements about SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure. Read this post for a summary of Microsoft Ignite 2016 Day 2.

Microsoft Ignite Keynotes
The first keynote was all about the digital transformation, the second keynote focused on next generation innovations and investments.

Feature Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2016
The Feature Pack has been announced and will be available in November 2016 for customers with Software Assurance and includes the following features:

  • Logging of administrative actions performed in Central Administration and with Windows PowerShell
  • Enhancements to MinRole to support small environments
  • A new OneDrive for Business user experience
  • Custom tiles in the SharePoint app launcher
  • Unified auditing across site collections on-premises and in Office 365
  • Unified taxonomy across on-premises and Office 365
  • OneDrive API 2.0

SharePoint innovations further advance intelligence and collaboration in Office 365
The next wave of innovations to achieve the SharePoint vision (simple and powerful file sharing, mobile and intelligent intranet, open and connected platform, commitment to security, privacy and compliance) contains the following highlights:

  • A significant update to the OneDrive browser experience, so that you can find, access, share and collaborate on all your files in Office 365
  • OneDrive sync preview for SharePoint Online document libraries and folders shared with you
  • Team news to keep your team up to date and informed of what matters
  • People cards in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business that intelligently surface content and details from your colleagues’ profiles
  • New integration with Microsoft Flow, PowerApps and Yammer
  • Preview of the SharePoint mobile apps for Windows 10 Mobile and Android
  • Enhancements for developers including new sites and lists APIs in Microsoft Graph
  • New security controls including site classification and conditional access based on location and device
  • Feature Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2016
  • Expanded FastTrack services and tools to support hybrid configurations and migration

Yammer integrates with Office 365 Groups
With this integration, Yammer users can access SharePoint sites and document repositories, a shared OneNote notebook, and lightweight task management with Planner. These new experiences and more will be rolling out in phases over the coming months.
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New People experiences in Office 365
The new People experiences includes the rollout of the following features:

  • A new Delve app for Windows 10 desktop and mobile (available today)
  • People cards that surface profile information and content throughout Office 365 (rolling out now)
  • Updates to the Office 365 profile (rolling out to first release today)

Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet
The mobile and intelligent intranet comes with the following features:

  • Team news for SharePoint Online modern team sites
  • SharePoint mobile apps for Android and Windows 10 Mobile (in preview today)
  • News roll-up tab within the SharePoint mobile app for iOS (announced today)
  • Create a modern team site and an associated Office 365 group from the SharePoint home (announced today)
  • New people experiences within SharePoint Online team sites, document libraries and lists, and OneDrive for Business (rolling out now)

Delve Analytics in Office 365 is now MyAnalytics
MyAnalytics helps you focus on what matters most by providing personalized insights about how you spend your time at work. MyAnalytics will allow you to stay up-to-date with important contacts, share key metrics with a coach and help you prioritize the time you spend with different groups.

Intelligent Office 365 Security & Compliance
As part of the Office news the following new security and compliance capabilities in Office 365:

  • Improvements to Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection
  • Threat Intelligence
  • Advanced Data Governance
  • Updates to Advanced Security Management

Azure DNS General availability
The Azure DNS is a global service and available for use in all public Azure regions. Azure DNS has the scale and redundancy built-in to ensure high availability for your domains—and is backed by our 99.99% uptime SLA.

Public Preview of Azure Monitoring
With Azure Monitor, you can consume metrics and logs within the portal and via APIs to gain more visibility into the state and performance of your resources. You can also configure alert rules to get notified or to take automated actions on issues impacting your resources.

Azure Networking services and features
Several new Azure networking services and features will provide greater performance, higher availability, better security and more operational insights:

  • IPv6 support
  • Azure DNS
  • Accelerated Networking
  • Web Application Firewall (WAF)
  • New Virtual Network capabilities like peering, active-active VPN gateways and a new ultra-performance gateway for ExpressRoute

New compute offerings
New Virtual Machine and compute offerings to address the unique application needs:

  • H-series: The fastest CPUs in public cloud as well as RDMA with InfiniBand.
  • L-Series: Storage-optimized VMs specially designed for applications requiring low latency, high throughput, large local disk storage such as NoSQL databases and data warehousing.
  • N-series: With both a visualization SKU and a compute-focused SKU, these VM sizes offer unparalleled performance for desktop graphical modeling/rendering and deep learning computational models.

 

Picture credits: Microsoft / Office Blogs