Microsoft Inspire is an annual partner conference. Inspire was a virtual event this year, and occurred on 19th – 20th July. The event was comprised of multiple keynote speakers including the CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella, Corporate Vice President Nick Parker, Global Partner Solutions, and the Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff.
Microsoft Inspire is held to celebrate the work of Microsoft partners. This event brings the partner community together to celebrate achievements, and to create new opportunities for collaboration and growth. Microsoft currently have 400,00 partners across the world, including Valto as Microsoft Gold Partners.
In this blog we will outline some of the key announcements from this years’ event.
Collaboration Tools
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams has a number of new features that aid in collaborations including ‘Collaborative Annotation’. This new feature allows all meeting participants to annotate any screen-shared content in numerous ways, such as typing, drawing, and reactions.
Chat with self is also a new feature of Teams. This allows you to send yourself messages, notes, and files through the chat feature in Teams. This is useful for quick access to files or information, or building out any messages before sharing them with the wider team.
Additionally, Live Share has been released as a public preview. It is powered by the Fluid Framework, and allows developers to collaborate easily on any app within Teams. Live Share supports sophisticated synchronization of state, media, and control actions, using only front-end development.
Excel
Excel Live enables people to collaborate on workbooks during a Microsoft Teams meeting. This means instead of just screen-sharing a workbook, you are able to co-watch, co-edit, and co-create with your colleagues.
Viva Engage
Microsoft Viva is a new platform, which features different modules such as connection, learning, insights, information, and Viva Goals, which all aim to facilitate a good workplace. This platform is powered by AI and will set helpful personalized recommendations for employee productivity and well-being.
Digital Contact Centre
This is a new platform powered by Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, and Nuance which is a new AI tool. It is designed to make customer experience modern, and efficient. It can be used to build better contact center experiences such as chat bot features, collaborative agent experiences, advanced telephony, fraud prevention, and much more.
Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty
Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is described as a worldwide government and public sector cloud. It covers everything from security, compliance, to policy requirements that are specific to various countries different government policies. This will also include global security signals that will identify local attacks and provide protection against them. This is currently starting as a preview in select locations, and more information will be released on this product over time.
Azure Space Partner Community
This will consist of an ecosystem of Microsoft’s space partners with exclusive access to technical support. This community will allow partners to deliver innovative offers to joint customers, and will shape the future of space tech and services. There are many benefits of joining the space partner community including co-innovation, go-to-market and technical support, industry selling, and solution scaling.