At this year’s Microsoft Ignite—a showcase of the best of what’s next for Microsoft and its partners—Microsoft unveiled over 100 products and updates that are designed to help customers, partners and developers get the full value of Microsoft’s technologies.
“The past few years have been a period of dramatic change, with disruptions to society, the global economy, technology, and the work environment. In today’s uncertain economic environment, companies are looking to change the way they work to get better results with more flexibility, and are turning to their technology providers to help them succeed,” said Peter Maquera, Microsoft Philippines Chief Executive Officer. “At every layer of the tech stack—whether it’s infrastructure, data, hybrid work, developer tools or security—the Microsoft Cloud is the most complete and trusted cloud in the industry, offering solutions to help organizations be more secure, and to help their workers complete their tasks more easily and effectively.”
Infrastructure that works for every customer
The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform was introduced earlier this year to unify Microsoft’s database, analytics and data governance offerings so customers don’t have to.
The enterprise-grade, highly scalable, serverless distributed database Azure Cosmos DB already helps mission-critical applications, increasing geographic availability, scalability and distribution. Now, Microsoft is adding distributed database support for PostgreSQL, a popular open-source database engine. This means PostgreSQL developers can take advantage of the speed, scale and performance of Azure Cosmos DB, and open-source developers can access both structured and unstructured data in one familiar database service.
Additionally, the newly-announced Visual Studio images for Microsoft Dev Box—a service in preview that provides developers with cloud-based, ready-to-code workstations—helps developers save time and focus on coding what matters.
Harnessing the power of AI
Microsoft has also announced that Azure OpenAI Service will offer invite-only access to DALL∙E 2, a model that allows users to generate custom images using text or images. The addition of the DALL∙E 2 model expands the breadth-of-use cases Azure OpenAI Service customers can employ with the security, compliance, and responsible AI guardrails that Azure provides.
DALL∙E 2 powers another newly introduced product: Microsoft Designer. a personal design generator powered by AI. By just typing in a few words, Designer immediately generates templates and creates custom-made images. The program eliminates the need to spend extra time creating a new design or searching through thousands of pre-made templates. In just a few words and clicks, users are able to bring their ideas to life.
The introduction of Microsoft Syntex integrates offerings from across the Microsoft Cloud, from Microsoft 365 and Azure to Power Platform and Microsoft Purview. With people at its center, Syntex automatically reads, tags and indexes high volumes of content and connects it where it’s needed in context—in search, in applications and as reusable knowledge.
Helping organizations thrive in the new world of work
Moving into the new work environment, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Places, a new workplace app that optimizes the use of physical space. According to the recent Work Trend Index, more than 80% of employees go into the office for each other. Places provides insights into when colleagues are coming into the office or what meetings are best suited for in person.
Microsoft also introduced a new Teams Premium add-on: intelligent recap—a virtual assistant that uses AI to assign tasks from meetings, automatically generate chapters from the meeting and share personalized insights from the recording, enabling users to discover information that matters most to them.
As Microsoft continues to invest in distinct experiences that make the workday easier, it introduced Microsoft Edge Workspaces—a shared set of browser tabs where groups can view the same websites and latest working files in one place. As the team works together, tabs are updated in real time so everyone stays on the same page.
With more sellers on the road and in digital meetings, Microsoft is making conversation intelligence free for Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and the newly released Viva Sales. Conversation intelligence gives sellers the power of insights while helping them be more productive by using analytics and data science to help sellers cut down time spent on administrative work and spend more time with their customers.
Protecting everything, everyone, everywhere
As businesses adapt and transform through the adoption of cloud, mobile and edge platforms, security becomes an increasingly critical priority for every organization. Microsoft offers a natively integrated security solution that closes gaps quickly and safely. Moreover, Microsoft is the only cloud provider that extends its solutions to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The new Defender for DevOps was announced, which helps organizations secure applications as they are being built, giving developers the assurance that they can get ahead of security vulnerabilities and deliver a more secure solution.
Another new offering is the Power Platform Managed Environments, which enables organizations to introduce low code broadly to spur innovation with the knowledge that IT admins maintain governance and security capabilities over low-code implementations, allowing teams to create at scale without security concerns.
Microsoft is helping organizations build the identity system of the future, a connective network that enables people, organizations, apps and even smart devices to make real-time access decisions. With Microsoft Entra, organizations are offered identity and access management solutions designed to securely work across multiple cloud platforms. Microsoft Entra Identity Governance helps organizations ensure the right people have the right access to the right resources at the right time.
