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Microsoft Ignite

Global experiences, localized content, in-person opportunities, and more—let’s get ready for a new kind of Microsoft Ignite.

Discover what's new

Empowering today’s digitally connected, distributed workforce

Microsoft 365 is the cloud-first platform for all the ways that people work today—wherever, whenever, however. From information workers to frontline workers. No matter how you run your company or your team. And, with Microsoft 365, organizations save more than 60 percent compared to a patchwork of point solutions.²

Microsoft 365 comes alive in the new Microsoft 365 app, home to all your favorite productivity apps—Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook—along with new apps for creation and expression, like Loop, and any third-party apps you choose. It’s a secure, integrated, experience built on the Microsoft Graph that brings together all your documents, files, contacts, meetings, and more—with intelligent, Graph-powered recommendations personalized for you. Simply put, it’s a better way to work. And the Microsoft 365 app will be available to customers across our business, education, and consumer segments.

Learn more about the Microsoft 365 app.

Transforming meeting culture with Teams

Microsoft Teams is the app at the center of Microsoft 365. With more than 270 million monthly active users, Teams has changed how people work more than any other app in the past 20 years. We’ve introduced more than 450 new Teams capabilities in the past year alone to transform meeting culture and keep everyone in the flow of work.

It starts with helping everyone have better hybrid meetings. Last year, we introduced new AI-powered intelligent cameras to Microsoft Teams Rooms, dissolving the walls between an attendee’s physical and digital presence. Today, together with Yealink, we’re bringing you the SmartVision 60, the first 360-degree, center-of-room intelligent camera. The SmartVision 60 produces multiple video streams with AI active speaker tracking—and soon: people recognition. Learn more about SmartVision 60.

As Teams has become pervasive for collaboration, we’re expanding to every type of hardware. Today, we’re announcing that Cisco is now a Teams Rooms Certified Devices partner. For the first time ever, Teams meetings will be available natively across certified Cisco meeting devices, enabling customers to configure Teams as the default meeting experience. Get the details on Cisco and Teams.

We’re not stopping with better meeting experiences. We’re on a journey to help you transform meeting culture, starting with the new Teams Premium meeting offering. Teams Premium includes Intelligent recap, a powerful new AI experience that’s like having a virtual assistant at every meeting—even when you can’t be there. It creates tasks, automatically generates chapters from the meeting, and shares personalized highlights from the recording. Teams Premium also includes Live translation for captions, which delivers AI-powered, real-time translations from 40 spoken languages so meeting participants can read captions in their own language. If an organizer has Teams Premium, all meeting attendees can enjoy live translated captions.

With Teams Premium, we’re also excited to bring you experiences that make meetings more personalized, intelligent, and secure.

• New meeting guides that automatically set up the right meeting options.
• Upleveled safeguards for confidential information with advanced meeting protection, including watermarking and sensitivity labels.
• Friction-free Virtual Appointments for personalized business-to-consumer engagements.
• The ability to host high-quality webinars using advanced functionality to drive deeper engagement and generate new leads.

Learn more about Teams Premium.

Introducing Microsoft Places: Transform your space into a place

Overwhelmingly, people come into the office for each other. That’s why we’re creating a new Connected Workplace category and introducing Microsoft Places to address the unique challenges of hybrid work. People are what give a space meaning and identity. In essence, people make a space, a place. Microsoft Places helps everyone understand who will be in the office when; where people are sitting; what meetings to attend in person; and how to book space on the days your team is already planning to come in. It also helps leaders understand how people use the office, and ultimately optimize their real estate investments. And third-party partners can build and integrate new and existing solutions on top of Microsoft Places.

Learn more about Microsoft Places.

Bringing the metaverse to work

Our data shows that 51 percent of Gen Z envisions working in the metaverse in the next two years.¹ Just yesterday, we announced with Meta that we’re bringing Teams immersive meeting experiences to Quest so you can connect, share, and collaborate in virtual reality as though you’re there together in person.

With Mesh avatars for Teams, you can create custom avatars to represent yourself—so you can take a break from the camera but still have a physical presence in Teams meetings.

Unlocking new collaboration patterns

Across Microsoft 365 and Teams, we’re making work better with collaboration experiences designed for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, creation and expression, and business processes in the flow of work.   

This starts with making meetings more hands-on and interactive. Rolling out in November 2022, Excel Live transforms how people collaborate in meetings, enabling every participant to live-edit the Excel file directly, right from Teams—without ever opening the file. Teams Live Share, now in preview, goes even further by turning any app shared in a Teams Meeting into a real-time, multi-user collaborative experience where participants can interact, annotate, and collaborate directly in the meeting window.

With the latest innovations in Together mode, meeting organizers and presenters can assign seats to meeting participants in the Together mode view and can also pin the Together mode view to the meeting stage so everyone has the same view of the group.

The new hours and location feature—accessible across Teams and Outlook—makes it easier to schedule in-person meetings by allowing people to specify and adjust from hour to hour whether they will be available in the office or working remotely.

The new Teams channels experience makes it easier to focus and collaborate, placing recent posts at the top so people can easily catch up on the latest conversations, contribute to discussions, and pop them out so they can return to them quickly. The new channels feature new post types like announcements and video clips and a customizable channel header.

New features in Teams chat give people more ways to prioritize their most important work, protect boundaries and time, express themselves authentically, and have fun. AI-recommended replies save time, while the ability to “@” mention everyone in a group helps grab the group’s attention quickly. With up to 800 reaction emojis, everyone can express themselves in natural and authentic ways, and Video clips in chat gives everyone the ability to easily record, send, and view a video clip in chat, lending a personal touch to help strengthen connection.  

Learn more about Teams chat and channels.

With asynchronous collaboration on the rise, people need solutions to help them communicate and collaborate across space and time. Last year we introduced Loop, which breaks down barriers between apps to enable fluid collaboration as people think, plan, and create together. Today, we’re excited to announce that the Loop app—featuring workspaces, pages, and components that sync across Microsoft 365, is in preview. We’re also excited to bring Loop components to Word for the web, Whiteboard, and Outlook for Windows, to meet users in the context of their work, across Microsoft 365 apps. Learn more about Loop.

With Microsoft Editor, you will soon be able to surface Loop components using Context IQ, our set of intelligent capabilities working in the background of Microsoft apps and services. Loop also now offers Dynamic 365 integration within Teams—you can now insert a Loop component into a Dynamics 365 record while in Teams chat. We’re also introducing Edge Workspaces in the Edge browser, so everyone working together on a project can view the same websites and files in one place as a shared set of browser tabs.

New creation and expression experiences in Microsoft 365 include Microsoft Designer, a new app powered by AI technology, including DALL-E 2, that helps you quickly create stunning social media posts, invitations, and graphics just by entering a text prompt or other content. Microsoft Create features thousands of creative templates to spark inspiration and up-level skills. Today, we also welcome video editor Microsoft Clipchamp to Microsoft 365 to empower anyone, regardless of skill or experience level, to tell stories with video. These creation and expression experiences will roll out first in the Microsoft 365 consumer experience. Learn more about Designer, Create, and Clipchamp.

We’re also helping organizations drive productivity with new experiences that bring business processes into the flow of work. Adaptive Cards is a new low-code way to design and deliver micro-apps directly inside Teams. With Cards, developers can bring interactable content from multiple applications and platforms into a single interface in Teams chat.

Content AI is a new category of technology solutions that uses advancements in cloud and AI to transform how content is created, processed, and discovered—empowering people and automating workflows at scale. Today, we’re introducing Microsoft Syntex, which integrates Content AI into the flow of work with services like content processing, content summarization, e-signature, and more, that help you enhance, manage, and connect your content. Learn more about Microsoft Syntex.

Empowering everyone to thrive with Microsoft Viva

While places still play a key role in helping people thrive at work, work is no longer just a place—it’s an experience. And you need an employee experience that people can access anywhere, anytime. Microsoft Viva is the first digital employee experience platform that brings connection, purpose, insight, and growth into the flow of work to empower people and teams to be their best.

Just a few weeks ago we introduced a new set of apps and services in Viva to help align everyone in the organization around the most impactful work to drive business outcomes. Enhancements and integrations to goal-setting and objectives and key results (OKR) management solution Viva Goals bring the experience right into the flow of work. Viva Pulse lets managers and team leaders take the pulse of their teams for quick and confidential input, when they need it, to understand their teams’ needs on an ongoing basis and take action when it matters. And the new centralized communications management and publishing tool Viva Amplify helps employee communication teams and leaders communicate more effectively with their employees by automating publishing all from one place to reach people wherever they work—whether that’s Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, or Viva—and providing metrics to help understand and track message impact and improve over time.

Windows 11 and Windows 365: a new cloud computing paradigm built for the distributed workforce era

With Windows 11, we redesigned the operating system, from the client to the cloud, for hybrid work. Windows 365 is a new cloud computing paradigm built for the distributed workforce era.

With the new Windows 365 app, you can access your cloud PC directly from the Windows 11 taskbar or start menu and then stream the full Windows experience—all your apps, settings, and content—to any device. We also announced the availability of Windows 365 Government for Government Community Cloud and Government Community Cloud High customers in the United States. And, coming soon, organizations will be able to provision Windows 365 Cloud PCs for shift and part-time employees who only need a Cloud PC during their workday for a limited time. Learn more about Windows 365 news.

We’re also announcing updates to services expressly for IT professionals. Windows Update for Business reports will leverage Azure Workbooks to make deployment reports more modular and customizable to better fit your needs, and Organizational Messages makes it easy to communicate with people directly in the Windows UX, helping onboard employees or providing reminders of important training. We’re also adding branch office printer management and diagnostic reporting to Universal Print, as well as support for evaluating apps after an in-place upgrade with Test Base for Microsoft 365. We continue to add functionality to Windows Autopatch to help you move from Windows 10 to 11, and to support AVD patching to secure all your Windows instances—both in the client and the cloud.

Watch Panos Panay’s session for all the latest about Windows and join us on October 24 to 27, 2022, at our Microsoft Technical Takeoff event for an even deeper dive into Windows and Microsoft Intune.

Simplifying IT management

With Microsoft 365, we want to help you simplify IT management and reduce costs.

Today, we’re bringing new capabilities to the cloud-enabled Microsoft Intune suite, including endpoint privilege management, designed to dynamically elevate permissions, and Microsoft Tunnel for mobile app management, which provides secure access to company resources. And as I mentioned earlier, consolidating today with Microsoft 365 can save you more than 60 percent compared to a patchwork of point solutions, while helping your employees stay secure in the flow of work.²

Learn more about Microsoft 365, Teams, Viva, and Windows

At Microsoft, we believe that energized, empowered employees are the key to durable competitive advantage for every organization. We’ll continue to innovate across Microsoft 365, Teams, and Viva to help everyone thrive—because technology, combined with the right culture and leadership, can create a better world of work for everyone.

¹Hybrid Work Is Just Work. Are We Doing it Wrong? Work Trend Index Pulse Report, WorkLab, Microsoft. September 22, 2022.

²Modernize your business while managing costs, Microsoft 365.

Based on publicly available list prices of point solutions for identity and access, content and productivity, chat and collaboration, and meetings, vs. comparable Microsoft 365 solutions.

The post Microsoft 365 at Ignite—Re-energize your workforce in the office, at home, and everywhere in between appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.