Microsoft Ignite: Key announcements during the keynote

The first ever Microsoft Ignite conference for IT professionals kicked off today in Chicago with a 3 hour long keynote. A lot of announcements were made during the keynote, so t might be difficult at times to keep track of all the great new feature, capabilities and products. So here is a list of 3 key announcements that were made during the Microsoft Ignite keynote.

1. Skype for Business broadcasting capabilities

Using this new capability, meeting organizers will be able to broadcast Skype meeting to an audience of up to 10.000 attendants. This feature will be very helpful  in scenarios like global department meetings and so on, when the presenter speaks to several thousands users at the same time. Skype for Business broadcasting capabilities were just announced today, so there weren’t any deeper technical insights on how this capability will work, but I can assume that companies may want to take advantage of this capability also when delivering online trainings and webinars.

Even though this is, in my opinion, the biggest Skype announcement, Gurdeep Singh Pall also announced other interesting stuff like pre-loaded meeting attachments and in-call co-authoring of Office documents. 

And last but not least, the public preview for Skype for Business server was also announced today.

2. Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA)

Microsoft ATA is an on premises, non-intrusive solution that leverages deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to analyze Active Directory related network traffic, as well as information from Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Active Directory.

ATA analyzes this information to create dynamic behavioral profiles for each entity in your organization and builds an Organizational Security Graph (an entity interaction map representing the context and activities of the users, devices and resources).

After building this interaction map, it identifies abnormal behavior of entities, advanced attacks and security risks without the need to create rules, policies, or install desktop and server agents.

This solution is in public preview starting today and you may test it for free.

3. Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS)

Microsoft Operations Management Suite is a new hybrid management service that supports Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMWare, OpenStack and allows IT administrators to centrally manage all IT assets in their organization, including the usage of cloud services from multiple vendors, as well as traditional and virtualized infrastructures.

Most organizations are faced with some really tough questions about how to manage the explosion of apps and data spread across their own infrastructure as well as clouds and cloud services from multiple vendors. No matter where this corporate data is residing, IT still has a responsibility to manage and secure it – OMS simplifies this traditionally difficult function by providing simple IT management for any hybrid cloud.

On top of the simplified management experience is the way OMS can simplify your life. Instead of spending weeks or months trying to integrate multiple tools, OMS is up and running in seconds (literally) and it unifies your management operations with a single solution.

With OMS you also avoid the hassle of a learning curve. With a simple onboarding experience you can add new services, use new services, and see intelligence across all your applications and workloads within minutes.

OMS also allows you to have an easy overview on IT resource consumption so that an organization would be able to proactively scale in or out.

If you feel there were also other major announcements at Microsoft Ignite, please feel free to comment on this blog post and let’s discuss how technology will surely change the way we work.

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Dan Patrascu-Baba

Dan Patrascu-Baba

Developer, consultant, trainer at Codewrinkles
,Net Developer.Focusing on both the .Net world and Microsoft Azure. Experienced speaker and trainer.
Dan Patrascu-Baba
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