Last week, Microsoft held their annual partner conference, Microsoft Inspire. The event helps make sense of Microsoft’s priorities for the upcoming year with a mix of feature announcements and vision of how all the product lines work together. Surprisingly, it worked well in a digital format!

My top takeaways and notes:

1. Teams, Teams and more Teams

Microsoft emphasized Teams as a ‘platform for work and learning’. The increase in adoption of Teams is the backdrop to many announcements – adoption went from 44 Million daily active users in March to 75 Million daily active users by the end of April.

The other story is the rapid pace of new feature rolling out and the deeper integration of Microsoft apps within Teams. A few highlights of changes coming to the Teams platform:

• More business processes available in Teams: Additional Power Platform capabilities are moving into Teams including Microsoft Dataflex, which is a built-in simple relational database. There's also a new Power BI app for Teams with a better experience for accessing reports.

• Communities app for Yammer: an app that can be pinned to Teams and offers full functionality fidelity.

• Together Mode: A new experience that uses AI to digitally place participants in a shared background. We can’t wait to try it!

“This makes it feel like you’re sitting in the same room--reducing background distractions and making it easier to pick up the nonverbal cues that we miss. So conversations are much more natural--and more importantly, more inclusive. Our research shows that the brain exerts less effort when participating in a meeting using the Together Mode, compared to the standard grid view.”

— Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

• Teams Rooms: Want to pay Microsoft to improve your meetings? This is a monthly offering that includes device and monitoring options to deliver better calling and meeting experiences.

• Front-line worker improvements: There’s a shift scheduler tool for creating schedules, letting managers know of conflicts and other things. Also added is “Time Clock”, which lets workers clock in and out for their shifts and a push-to-talk “Walkie Talkie” feature.

• 3rd party apps in meetings: 3rd party apps are already part of chats in Teams, and they are coming to the meeting experience too. For example, see your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system data while talking to customer, take a poll during a meeting, add a whiteboard app and more.

• Surfacing your intranet in Teams: The options have been there in the background for a while, but the conference gave me new ideas for how to integrate news and corporate info into Teams. There are a suite of ‘hooks’ and easy user interface extensions to get intranet content into Teams, with SharePoint still being the backing app for content. I plan to write more about this in a future post.

One question I get is: Why is there a focus on making Teams a platform and integrating these apps in? Here’s what Microsoft says:

“The reason why so many apps are in Teams - it's where communication and collaboration happens. It’s where you talk about the work. The more apps you use in Teams, the more benefits you get.”

One of the most powerful aspects of Teams for end-users is how the tools integrate. It doesn’t really matter where stuff is – it brings tasks, documents, conversations, projects, and more together. All it’s missing is an enterprise search…which I’d bet is coming soon. Teams is the place where Microsoft imagines people do most of their work and it’s becoming more impossible to ignore in the cloud era.

2. Every worker is a knowledge worker

The General Availability of new Yammer which features an all new user interface was highlighted at Inspire.

One question we often get is – why use Yammer instead of Teams? The focus of Yammer is connecting people across teams and across department silos. Yammer conversations are open by default (vs. Teams which are more restricted or 1:1). For this reason, Yammer fosters communities of practice, discovery and innovation better.

One point that came through to me is that Yammer is useful for clients with significant front-line staff. It allows access to conversations across the organization and in this way, “Every worker is a knowledge worker.”  

Recent features include: crowd sourcing ideas for innovation, asking questions then marking something as 'Best Answer', and conversations in Yammer that will integrate with Cortex (more to come at Ignite).

3. The Cloud shift is happening faster than ever

Satya Nadella again noted the incredible pace of digital transformation as a result of COVID-19. Another executive said:

 “If it looked good to get out of your data center, pre-COVID, it looks really good to get out of your data center now.”

— Judson Althoff, Microsoft’s executive vice president for worldwide commercial business

The cloud shift has indeed accelerated. Despite organizations reducing spending, cloud investment is needed to improve remote access and save money down the road.

Microsoft announced many updates such as Windows Virtual Desktop for Azure where you can deploy a new desktop in minutes and new hybrid migration, data, security and compliance, and developer offerings.

These updates are important for us to deliver secure and compliant solutions to our customers.

4. Blurring of product lines

Microsoft has hundreds of cloud services, and it’s hard to keep up, let alone make sense of it all.

Most customers refer to some apps by names such as SharePoint, Word or Teams, but beyond that it’s usually just ‘Microsoft.’

Microsoft 365 is the re-branded term for Office 365 and includes the suite of tools for the modern workplace, such as SharePoint, Teams, Yammer and desktop apps like Word and PowerPoint. It hasn’t taken off as a term that customers use (yet) — Office or sometimes “Office 365” is more predominant still.

I think the branding of the main product areas are still somewhat confusing, although it’s not as overwhelming as in the past. Here’s the latest jigsaw puzzle graphic for modern work and customer service products:

I expect that the product lines will start to blur more – e.g. could Dynamics and Power Platform make sense as part of the ‘Microsoft 365’ family one day?

I enjoyed this forward-looking article which Microsoft 365 UX released last week that hints at this. Check out this really calming video where brand colours from apps are faded away, adaptive commands come to the forefront and the focus is on tasks:

Maybe one day we won’t care what app we’re using!

5. Digital first responders

The conference featured lots of sensitivity to the impact of COVID-19.

While we don’t want to takeaway credit from those who we think of true first responders, there is a group of unsung heroes who worked overtime to roll out new solutions quickly over the past few months to keep people doing their critical work. These are IT groups, partners and technology people around the world.

“The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated economic and social effects underpinned much of Microsoft Inspire 2020. Our partners are digital-first responders supporting frontline workers, and they have rapidly rolled out offerings that didn’t exist at the beginning of the year.”

— Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner Organization

So to all of you out there responding to your organization and customers – way to go! It takes everyone to respond to a global crisis and I’m proud to be part of this ‘digital first responder’ team. 😊

Reach out if you want to chat about Microsoft technology or direction. We’re happy to share our insights in a free call or presentation.