Microsoft Ignite was fully digital this year and anyone could register. Nice. And fortunately I had some time to attend quite a bit of it, because there were a lot of interesting sessions. Here are my favourites. Not my favourite features or announcements, because there were too many of them, but my favourite themes addressed at Ignite. My top 5, not necessarily in order of importance.
1.Project Cortex with the new Microsoft SharePoint Syntex
At Ignite, Microsoft announced the first product of Project Cortex: SharePoint Syntex. It’s a tool to automatically “understand” content and categorize it, in order to better process, enrich and reuse it.
The example we saw in a demo was on contracts: You train a no-code AI model to identify key data in the contract documents, like the stakeholders and money involved.
SharePoint Syntex: The AI model analyses selected contracts (Screenshot of the demo)
Syntex then extracts that information into metadata, which you can then use to get a better overview of your contracts, slice & dice the collection and automate where needed.
Syntex: Key information extracted from the contracts by the AI model is put into metadata (Screenshot of the demo).
See also Announcing SharePoint Syntex
I can’t wait for the other elements of Project Cortex to become available as well, like knowledge management ..
2.Yammer for knowledge sharing
Talking about knowledge, the preferred about for informal knowledge sharing was and still is Yammer: it is definitely alive and improving.
In Yammer, the capabilities for questions and answers are beefed up. You can tag your post as a question, which makes it more visible and allows everyone to find it by filtering the posts. And then you can pinpoint good answers to these questions: upvote answers and tag the best answer. This helps us to distill knowledge from the informal conversations.
You can upvote answers to questions (Microsoft screenshot)
We will get new topic functionality: the #hashtag 2.0… These topics help to manage knowledge within Yammer more systematically: each topic will have a topic pages with a summary and an overview of all posts on that topic across Yammer. An improved version of what happens now when you click on a hashtag. In a Yammer community, you also see the most popular topics within that community.
And yes these topics will be connected to the Project Cortex knowledge topics: you see the Cortex topic card inside Yammer when you hover over the term. And the other way around: on the Cortex knowledge topic page, you’ll get a feed from the Yammer topic .
On a Yammer topic page, you can also get the topic card from Project Cortex (Combination of Microsoft screenshots).
See also Microsoft’s What’s new for Yammer at Microsoft Ignite 2020.
But knowledge sharing is not the only thing that we can do in Yammer…
3.The new intranet: SharePoint + Yammer + Teams
Employee communication and engagement used to happen in a SharePoint intranet. But the “new intranet experience” takes place in an integrated conglomerate of SharePoint AND Yammer AND Teams. They’re better together!
One of the things my users ask for, is a clear homepage or ‘start page’, with an overview of what’s important and a place to start working. In SharePoint, the starting point is the ‘Home site’. People work in Teams all day can soon also take advantage of that starting point: the Home site will become available as an app in Teams. So you don’t have to leave Teams to get this start page.
The SharePoint Home Site as an app in Teams, including the new global navigation (Microsoft screenshot)
We will also get such a starting point at the level of Teams channels: a ‘start pane’ or info pane that tells especially new team members what this channel is about: the description, active members, pinned posts.
Another big challenge is getting important news to the right people. Quite a few options were announced to help with that. In SharePoint, we will be able to boost news for a specified time or until the news has been viewed enough. And people can receive in their email a digest, generated by AI, of the news articles they have not read yet. You can share the news to a selected Yammer community, to notify more people – there is the integration again.
You can boost a SharePoint news article and share it to a Yammer community (Combination of Microsoft screenshots)
In Yammer, you can also draw attention to important posts, by tagging them as a featured conversion, posting them as a priority announcement and pinning them to the top of the community. Ok, of course the news publisher will have to restrain themselves and not push everything as a top priority featured boosted pinned to the top of everything. But at least we will have the options.
Priority announcements in Yammer send notifications
(Microsoft screenshot)
Some more integrations: the search of Teams and Yammer will be integrated with the SharePoint search, so it will function as one “intranet” or rather: one digital workplace. And the Yammer notifications will also appear in the Teams activity feed, because more and more people will “live” in Team for most of their day.
See also Innovations for workplace communications and employee engagement in Microsoft 365.
4.Improvements in Teams Meetings?
Talking about Teams, Microsoft Teams is also our foremost app for online meetings. There are improvements in the collaborative meetings that help the participants to find what they need more easily. For example a meeting recap appears in your agenda after the meeting: the initial meeting details are hidden and links to available materials appear, such as the recording, transcript, notes, presentation, whatever there is.
Also, Microsoft will bring Teams Meetings (which are now mostly used for small-scale collaborative meetings) together with Teams Live Events (which are used for large-scale virtual broadcasting events): they will beef up Teams Meetings with capabilities that allow for such big events. Later, Live Events will probably be replaced. Not yet, but soon they will take several steps in this direction. For example, Teams Meetings will allow for webinar registration and reporting.
A new option that will be especially useful for big presentation is the custom layout: your video transposed on your presentation.
Display your video feed on top of your presentation in a Team Meeting (Microsoft screenshot)
And we will soon get breakout rooms in Teams Meetings: meetings from the main meeting, for example, for small brainstorm breakout sessions in a big conference. Everything associated to a breakout room is only for the people in that meeting room, but presenters can hop between rooms and announce to all rooms. And when the separate brainstorming breakouts are finished, the presenter closes the rooms to bring everyone back to the main meeting.
Breakout rooms in a Teams meeting, for brainstorming in sub-groups for instance (Microsoft screenshot)
See also What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2020.
5.Focus on the well-being of ourselves and our planet?
Ok, so this last one is not a killer app for me. Quite the opposite in a sense. It was just but nice to see a big focus in Ignite on keeping us alive & well… You can’t treat people like machines; it is not just about efficiency. People also need time for recovery and help to perform their best and stimulate their ingenuity. The graph helps with data, Teams with collaboration tools.
The Insights app in Teams helps to protect our time and close our day with a virtual commute, now that we don’t have a physical commute to transition from our ‘work self’ to our ‘private self’. Microsoft now even has a partnership with a meditation company, which results in a meditation app in Teams.
Give your mind a break with a virtual commute or meditation (Demo screenshot)
See also Microsoft’s Introducing insights in Teams to power wellbeing and productivity.
In addition to that focus on our personal well-being, we saw a lot about Microsoft’s efforts to keep our planet healthy. We had already seen that Microsoft takes Important new steps on our path to be carbon negative by 2030 and Microsoft commits to achieve ‘zero waste’ goals by 2030. Now we also heard that Microsoft will replenish more water than it consumes by 2030. Good stuff!
Speaking of good stuff, you can get an overview of the announcements in the Ignite 2020 Book of News. And the recordings still are available at myignite.microsoft.com.
