Key Takeaways from Microsoft Ignite 2019

Microsoft Ignite is the annual gathering of technology leaders and practitioners. It's four days of visionary discussions and hands-on learning about the latest tools and insights that are driving tomorrow's innovations.

The OnePlace Solutions team was once again thrilled to participate.  The event was made extra special for the team as OnePlaceMail won the Microsoft 365 app award - Peoples Choice and 2nd place for Best Integration! What an honor!!! Read all about the OnePlaceMail App and our award win here. Find out about all the winning apps on the Microsoft blog.

With nearly 2000 sessions here are our teams' key takeaways from the event:

Cameron Dwyer, Chief Technology Officer

New innovations in Microsoft Search

Microsoft revealed more of the modern unified search experience across Microsoft 365 including:

• People search with attributes
• Acronym search - results are mined using AI as well as being editorially generated
• Floorplan search
• Use the search bar in Microsoft Edge to find workplace information
• Semantic search
• Microsoft Graph API for Microsoft Search
• Content connectors
• Modern Search customization in SharePoint

Read more here: https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/microsoft-search/

Project Cortex

Project Cortex in Microsoft 365 empowers people and teams with knowledge, learning, and expertise, in the flow of their everyday work.  It uses AI to automatically classify all your content into topics to form a knowledge network. Project Cortex improves individual productivity and organizational intelligence, helping identify experts on specific topics, and surfacing knowledge through interactive experiences across Microsoft 365, such as in the Office apps, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams. It will be an interesting technology to see keep an eye on as it comes into public preview.

Learn more here: https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/project-cortex-microsoft-365/

Fluid Framework

Fluid Framework, a technology for building a new class of shared, interactive experiences on the web for Microsoft 365, will be available to developers through a private preview and to end-users through an example experience in public preview, coming soon. End users will be able to try real-world scenarios to experience instantaneous collaboration that transcends traditional document boundaries and app-specific workflows across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Developers will be able to start leveraging the flexibility of the rich component model and adapt these end-user scenarios in new verticals for the organization.

Sign up for the developer preview here. 
Or stay tuned for the general public preview here: https://fluidpreview.office.net/

Colin Wood, Product Manager

Private Channels in Microsoft Teams

Private Channels in Microsoft Teams has now been launched. This offers the following benefits:

• Allows a channel to be secured to a subset of team members so confidential discussions and collaboration can take place
• No longer a need to create an entirely new team to allow a restricted set of people to collaborate in private meaningless 'Teams Sprawl' and less confusion for users
• Private channels in combination with the ability to pin favorite Teams channels really helps the user experience in Microsoft teams for users allowing them to get to their active locations easier

The only major negative with private channels is the underlying technical architecture used to host private channels. Each private channel spawns a new site collection. For example, if a Team has 10 private channels that one team would create 11 site collections in SharePoint online giving tenant administrators more challenges.

Read more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/private-channels

Common Files Experience in OneDrive/Teams

Microsoft's vision is for Teams to be the hub of all teamwork and collaboration. They have now launched the rich files experience from SharePoint into Microsoft Teams and OneDrive. This offers the following benefits:

• No context switching when needing to perform functions on files in M365, users can perform all actions in Teams or OneDrive with no need to go out to the browser
• Support for viewing and editing metadata
• Check-in /Check out files
• Preview of files

Read more here: https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/rich-new-file-and-sharing-experiences-throughout-microsoft-365-now-in-microsoft-teams/

Microsoft Information Protection enhancements

Sensitivity labels in M365 allow you to label content manually or automatically and associate a policy to a label so that it can be secured and protected, or records management policies can be applied to content. Lots of new enhancements were announced at Microsoft Ignite with lots of sessions in this space. Key enhancements include:

• The ability to manually apply labels natively across the all Office products on all platforms
• Automatic labeling of content in a different area of M365 if it matches the criteria or conditions for applying the label
• The ability to recommend a label is applied to content in an area of M365 if it matches specific criteria of a policy associated with a label.

Read more here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Security-Privacy-and-Compliance/Microsoft-Information-Protection-Ignite-2019-recap/ba-p/998174#O365apps

This event is always a great way to engage with the Microsoft community and we can't wait to be back next year! To get your tickets for the 2020 event pre-register on the Ignite website.