Microsoft Ignite 2016 – Keynote

Microsoft Ignite 2016 - Atlanta, Georgia  - Philips Arena, 09:00 AM PDC

Welcome to my almost live coverage of the Ignite 2016 in Atlanta, Georgia. Two years ago I attended the very last SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas and crafted 30 blog posts - and got good feedback afterwards. So well, this year I aim at 20 posts - lets see how it goes. Please excuse typos, I do fast releases!

The arena is packed - so is the atmosphere!

I landed in Atlanta yesterday, started with a party at our Nintex friends - I am a little tired.

My Expectations

I wanna see new and innovative solutions about productivity.

I want to play with the HoloLens

I wanna see further investments in Azure and everything cloud related.

SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint, Search and Delve!

Connecting with friends, peers, partners and people around my areas of interests.

Having fun!

Here we go!

Julia White on stage - last Ignite was 18 months ago and a lot has changed since then.

Julia mentioned a lot of things that have changed like SQL Server on Linux, Microsoft’s investments in security, Open Source, Surface Book, Office on iPad  - well, basically everything.

I tried to post live, but the wifi was super slow (I expected that).

Scott Guthrie and Cloud

Scott Guthrie is next on stage.

Scott show how digital transformation changes the workplace - next up he teases two showcases and the first one is BMW’s use of Azure do connect to it’s customers.

Next up is Facebook for Office workloads, Rolls Royce with Cortana Intelligence for predictive maintenance. Adobe is using Azure, too - well Cloud Cloud Cloud!

Customer showcase: Adobe loves Azure

Next up is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen.

Adobe <3 Azure

Shantanu explains how they use Azure to connect to clients, transfer the workload to the cloud to drive innovation. He mentioned very high numbers of transactions that could not be realized without a scalable cloud solution. The wording they are using is “intelligent cloud”.

IT Transformation

Scott Guthrie is back with more showcases how to transform IT workloads. Motivation here is create time to innovate and create instead of maintaining servers. 34 data centers across the world, twice as much as AWS. Cloud is about trust, Microsoft Azure has more certifications than any other cloud provider with unique options in China and Germany.

Hybrid all the things, too.

Azure Monitor

Donovan Brown shows a new monitoring solution running on Azure that continuously provide metrics (CPU, RAM, Storage, etc.) of servers no matter where they run. That looks like a broader Application Insights - cool stuff.

Log Search with performant queries. Use case that is shown “locate SQL servers that might have resource problems”. Integration of Microsoft Operation Management Server (OMS). Updates: A nice dashboard where you can see what windows or linux updates needs to be installed.

Security dashboard is next - I like the direction of that, one place to monitor our workloads.

Customer showcase: Tyco

Digital Transformation changed a lot for Tyco, 50% of their engineers are now software engineers.

Work like a start-up

One of the things Tyco is working on is IoT - but it creates a lot of data. 50.000.000.000 events per year. They are using SQL Server 2016 on Azure to analyze the data efficiently in the cloud, with only a little refactoring.

Windows Server 2016  / System Center 2016

Azure inspired, containers, virtualization density - the cloud had great impact on the newest windows server release. Both Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 are now generally available.

The announcement was a little brief.

App modernization + DevOps

Visual Studio family grown to 3 members - classic Visual Studio, multi platform Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Team Services. Latest acquisition was Xamarin which is fully integrated into Visual Studio, with it its possible to create native apps on all mobile platforms. Xamarin test cloud: Pinterest uses it for testing their mobile apps on 2000 real devices. Slack too.

Donovan Brown is back on stage. Now he demos Team Services with

idea, code, source code management, build, test, release and deploy - the whole story in one tool.

Awesome stuff not only for Devs. Demo on a Mac with Visual Studio Code, Git - same workflow, just a different platform. Any platform, any language - friction free - is the goal here.

Personal Computing

Windows 10: 150% faster releases than with windows 7. 400 Millions monthly active users.

Office  365: 70 Millions monthly active subscribers

EMS: 1 Billion logins per month

Windows 10 Ink Workspace

Yusuf Mehdi on stage. With just one click on your pen he opened the new experience to quickly craft stick notes with cortana intelligence in the background. He demoed it with $MSFT and the ink turned blue and added context infos. Here the stock price of Microsoft.

Yusuf shows how to add math formulas in OneNote - and solve for X. Not only kids will love that feature.

Delve Analytics

Who reads your mails? How is your bosses response time. Manage your time because time is precious. How much time do you spend in meetings? Delve Analytics tracks that in the background, Yusuf calls its “Fitbit for your workplace”.

Surface Hub

The average meeting needs 11 minutes to start.

Stormboard application: Planning application with embedded documents and sketches runs perfectly on Surface Hub - right in a video call. Make meetings more productive.

Security

Video: Average detection for security breaches is 200 days.

1 billion devices updated. 200 billion emails analyzed for spam and threads. Largest virus scanner in the world. The numbers are awesome.

Announcement: Microsoft Defender Application Guard (MDAG)

This MDAG is a hardware based solution to run the Microsoft Edge browser in a sandbox. Demo shows minikatz to dump passwords on a windows 7 maschine with just one command line. With windows 10 the passwords are transparently protected.

Demo: A website that disables all security settings on your computer - without a single notification to the user. Second run was with MDAG - no change on the local computer.

Short demo about O365 Security & Compliance Center & Microsoft Advanced Thread Analytics.

Digital Transformation #2

Scott Guthrie is back on stage, this time with Accenture CIO. They got more than 100.000 users on Windows 10, SharePoint and Skype on O365.

We cannot give the users yesterdays services!

Summary

Cloud Cloud Cloud, flexibility, security and productivity at Ignite 2016 - but nothing surprisingly big and fancy here. Let’s see what insights the following vision keynotes gives us.  Stay tuned!