Microsoft Ignite: The Day Three wrap-up from Windows IT Pro

Microsoft Ignite: Three days down and two more to go. Here's what the team from Windows IT was up to in the past 24 hours.

*

We had a sit-down with Julia White, GM of Product Marketing for Microsoft Office,

While Office has continued to receive new features, and will continue to be enhanced in Office 2016, Microsoft will rely on new products, like Microsoft Sway, to reinvigorate its offering and prove that a product that just works can also be exciting to use. Though Sway feels like a heavily consumerized offering, Microsoft also plans to make it an official Office citizen and will deliver it as part of Office 365 for Business which will rely on an organization ID to use like the rest of the business stack.

The rest of the interview lays out the role Skype will play, how Sway will co-exist with PowerPoint and how Click-to-Run installation will be overhauled, eventually replacing MSI.

*

The System Center Configuration Manager, a new, Microsoft Intune-like updating tool, will not be released until the general availability of the first Configuration Manager 2016 release in the fall. Microsoft is not ready to talk about the architecture for the updating capability, but pieces of it can already be seen in the Technical Preview.

*

Tony Redmond took a look at Data Loss Prevention's (DLP) implementation in SharePoint Online, Outlook 2013 and Outlook Web App, as well as DLP document fingerprinting, which allows companies to create their own sensitive data types. He concludes: 

After a number of years of development, DLP has come of age. It is a powerful way to create and manage policies to control the use (or abuse) of sensitive data within email and documents. If you’re an Office 365 customer, DLP is easy to deploy across both Exchange and SharePoint. On-premises customers can use it with Exchange 2013, but the SharePoint side will have to wait a while more.

*

Rod Trent had a conversation with Ranga Rengarajan, Corporate Vice President for Data Platform, Cloud & Enterprise, about Azure as the backend for Microsoft's data services. They also covered SQL Server 2016, which will include integrations for Revolution R, Datazen, and Hadoop, and a new Stretch Database component that provides SQL Server 2016 the ability to host data locally and in the Cloud at the same time.

What's a stretch database? As Rengarajan explains it:

With Stretch Database businesses can store regularly accessed data locally while maintaining massive amounts of old data in Azure. The conduit provides quick access and hosted analytics services as well as seamless Business Intelligence.

*

Richard Hay has collected some of the best of the Ignite Day One sessions, if you'd like to see some of the presentations for yourselves.

*

Finally, I've attended a number of sessions around Office 365, OneDrive and Clutter, and come to one conclusion: Microsoft has declared war on e-mail attachments.