IT Innovators: Rounding up the News from Microsoft Ignite

Close on the heels of Build 2015, Microsoft kicked off another event this week; the first-ever Ignite conference in Chicago. Once again Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, got the ball rolling by delivering a keynote trumpeting the idea that IT professionals—both individuals and organizations—need to come together with new solutions to achieve transformation. For its part, Microsoft was anything but short on new capabilities for its existing products and new solutions, all designed to help IT professionals fuel innovation and transformation within their organizations. In case you missed it, you can go here for a rundown on all the keynote announcements and access links to information regarding the 11 different technologies that were demoed on stage.

In all, Microsoft’s keynote announcements were split between those that are available today and those that you’ll have to wait a while to get your hands on. For a list of products available today (including public preview releases), such as Skype for Business Server, System Center Configuration Manager and Windows Update for Business go here. Two of the solutions not on that list, which are now available as public preview releases include:

A list of Microsoft products coming soon, such as Microsoft Azure Stack and SQL Server 2016, is available here. One solution not on that list is organizational analytics in Office Delve. The solution provides an interactive dashboard that individuals and teams can use to identify trends across employee engagement, team connections, and even view work-life balance. Additionally, there’s an Azure AD Cloud App Discovery solution that will allow users to identify cloud apps being used in a customer’s IT environment, revealing shadow IT. The Intune Conditional Access and Mobile Application Management for the Outlook app will also be coming soon—sometime this quarter. It will allow customers to restrict access to the Outlook app based on device enrollment and compliance policies. Users will also be able to restrict actions (e.g., cut, copy, paste, and save as) between the Intune-managed Outlook app and personal apps. 

There will undoubtedly be more news out of Ignite in the coming days ahead so be sure and check back here for the latest updates. And remember, the conference is still going on through May 8. You can stream the days’ events live or access recorded versions of the sessions after they take place.

This blog about storage and networking is sponsored by Microsoft.

Cheryl J. Ajluni is a freelance writer and editor based in California. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of Wireless Systems Design and served as the EDA/Advanced Technology editor for Electronic Design for over 10 years. She is also a published book author and patented engineer. Her work regularly appears in print and online publications. Contact her at [email protected] with your comments or story ideas.