“Over the past few years, we’ve talked extensively about digital transformation, but today, we need to go beyond that, from talking about digital transformation to delivering on the digital imperative for every organisation.”- Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

Much like past two years, Microsoft Inspire 2022, the largest partner-focused Microsoft event kicked-off virtually and like every time, it delighted us with related concepts of future possibilities along with several other big announcements. And, as Microsoft’s CEO stated, the focus for this year will be digital imperatives to ensure the success of the digital transformation.

At Dogma Group, we were as excited for the Inspire this year as we had always been for these marquee partner conferences. Why?

Because it allows us to analyse key sessions of Microsoft Inspire and handpick major highlights and changes with their benefits for you so that you’re better prepared for what the future holds in your digital transformation journey.

Let’s go through our top 8 Interesting Takeaways from Microsoft Inspire 2022.

1. Collaborative Tools to Enhance Hybrid Working

The success of hybrid work largely depends on a collaborative culture with frictionless processes and appropriate technologies. And Microsoft constantly refines its blended work approaches with new updates. During the Microsoft Inspire 2022, Microsoft announced new capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams to organise processes well and enable seamless communication while working from anywhere with an enhanced AI-powered hybrid work experience.

Some of the exciting features and their high-level benefits in Microsoft Teams are:

Real-time workbook collaboration in Teams meetings with Excel Live: With Excel Live anyone in the conference can join in and update a workbook without ever leaving the meeting screen., This turns the Microsoft Teams meeting window into a canvas.

Proactively respond to shared content with Collaborative Annotations: Collaborative annotations enable all conference attendees to write, draw, and respond on top of a shared screen during a meeting using rich toolsets in Microsoft Whiteboard.

Send video messages to your team members: The new Video Clip feature in Teams chat lets you record, send, and watch mini videos at the push of a button. And, the receiver can watch it whenever they want.

Work on a common space with Shared Channel in Teams: Shared Channel enables you to work together with individuals both within and outside of your company in a shared space where everyone can work, talk, meet, share, co-author files, and create apps together.

An interesting and beneficial feature in Microsoft 365 is:

High-performance experience with Citrix HDX Plus for Microsoft 365:

Citrix HDX Plus provides professionals with high-performance experiences while extending the hybrid work experience on cloud-based devices. This new Windows 365 add-on offers excellent performance in low-bandwidth areas, better security and policy controls, and compatibility for a wider variety of endpoint devices and peripherals. You can get a full-featured personalised experience that enables you to stream your personalised apps, content and setting to any device.

Similarly, you can enhance the digital employee experience for every role and function with the Microsoft Viva line ups:

Make right decisions with Viva Goals: Viva Goal is a goal setting and management system that aligns teams with the long-term goals of your company to achieve right outcomes. It enables workers to evaluate their impacts and make the best decisions for specific goals.

Create community and connection with team members via Viva Engage: With Viva Goals, employees can connect with peers and share their ideas, knowledge, and hobbies using the Storyline and Stories features. It is like a social network for your employees, wherein you can stay connected with your peers. Think of it as Facebook or Instagram for your organisation! The Yammer Communities app will be replaced by Microsoft Viva Engage, offering more robust and enhanced features.

Use Viva Sales to increase your selling efficiency: Viva sales automatically captures data from Office 365 and Teams, so that sales professionals do not have to manually enter data.

 

2. Better customer experience with Digital Contact Center Platform

New Business Opportunities and excellent Brand Reputation! There are several rewards to offering the finest client experience. However, providing a consistently positive client experience is a challenging endeavour in and of itself. And having contact centres based on old systems that do not communicate with one another creates further issues.

In connection therewith, Microsoft unveiled Digital Contact Center Platforms to modernise contact centres and transform customer experience. The collaborative contact centre uses AI to support self-service, live customer interactions, collaborative experiences with live and virtual agents, business process automation, fraud detection, and advanced telephony.

The platform is an architecture that combines parts or all of Azure, Teams, Power Platform, Dynamics 365 and Nuance, the newest member of the Microsoft family, which the company acquired in April 2021. Nuance has introduced Conversational AI, security, and automation to the contact centre.

Digital Contact Center Platform offers the ability to communicate between Dynamics and Microsoft Teams. With embedded Teams chat, a Dynamics agent can reach out to people in the organisation using Microsoft Teams to get support with any issue. Besides this, Teams users can also interact directly with Dynamics 365 records.

The capabilities enable both the customers and agent tools to resolve the issue faster with a personalised service, which ensures expedited problem solving and improves customer satisfaction. What’s more? the contact centre can offer targeted incentives and build loyalty as well as create upsell opportunities to boost revenue.

The contact centres are compatible with a wide range of contact centre infrastructures and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Companies can start small or go big on their own terms, and expand capabilities as needed.

Benefits of Digital Contact Center Platform:

Customer self-service and automation: Streamline repeatable processes, freeing up support personnel to handle the more complicated requests.

Intelligently connect customers to virtual and live agents: Provide agents with AI-powered recommendations and connect customers with the best-suited skills, experience, capacity, and availability.

Deliver hyper-personalised omnichannel service across voice and digital engagement channels: Provide richer service engagement with Teams voice and video embedded within Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Personalise and protect customer interactions: Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform uses AI and deep analytics to anticipate customer requests, predict intent, and provide rapid resolution, streamlining service and allowing for an improved satisfaction.

Secured: Customer experiences are protected with integrated biometric identification, authentication, and fraud prevention to build and maintain brand trust.

3. Microsoft Promotes Savings Potential of Integrated Security Solutions

As mentioned in a session of Microsoft Inspire, ‘Help customers streamline their security across clouds and platforms’, there are 921 password attacks every second, almost double from a year ago. In addition to that, there’s been a 650 per cent increase in supply chain attacks year-over-year, and the average total cost of a data breaching has increased to $4.2 million per incident. The rapidly rising online-based service in the world today necessitates robust, integrated, and simpler solutions across all platforms, allowing organisations to do more with less.

In this year’s Inspire, Microsoft launched the two critical products: Permission Management and Verified ID of Microsoft Entra.

Permission Management, a cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) product provides comprehensive visibility and control over permissions for any identity and any resource in Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Verified ID is where you can create, issue and verify identity credentials to enable more secure interactions.

Benefit of Permission Management:

Gain visibility, continuous monitoring, and right sizing of permissions across the three major clouds: Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.

Benefits of Verified ID:

• You can rapidly check someone’s credentials and status to confidently allow least-privilege access and authenticate identification information for trustworthy self-service enrolment.
• A faster self-service procedure to authenticate identities can take the place of support calls and security queries.

Besides this, Microsoft communicated about investing in their existing offerings and collaborating with partners to strengthen and promote Microsoft’s full-service security offerings during Inspire 2022. Announcements related to ongoing investments in Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Sentinel for threat protection, Microsoft Entra for identity and access management, Endpoint Manager for centralised device and endpoint management, Microsoft Purview for compliance and data governance, and Microsoft Priva for privacy management were important highlights of the event. Together, these solutions provide a single integrated solution for safeguarding the environment of over 785,000 businesses.

According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft partners can enjoy more than 60 per cent cost savings by choosing Microsoft’s end-to-end solutions over a multi-vendor strategy, which impacts the cost for end-customers.

4. Government organisations can have complete control of data with Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

Technology needs to comply with local laws and regulations and run on a reliable and secure platform for a successful digital transformation in government sector. However, multiple compliance frameworks can lead to plenty of complications, whether for a nation, industry, or sovereignty. In essence, it is a challenging effort to fulfil all criteria while maintaining public cloud’s full value, agility, and scale.

In light of this, Microsoft announced ‘Cloud for Sovereignty’ for government organisations. It’s a new cloud bundle in the Microsoft Cloud lineup. This solution assists government organisations in building and digitally transforming workloads in Microsoft Cloud while adhering to stringent security and regulatory requirements.

This rollout also encompasses hybrid deployments, document classification, confidential computing, and data residency when necessary. This means ‘Cloud for Sovereignty’ allows government institutions to have complete control over data and ensure transparency in their procedures.

Under the ‘Cloud for Sovereignty’ banner, Microsoft will provide Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure with data residency and control at the centre of this service.

It’s comprehensive service feature that enables clients to receive cloud capacity, apps consultancy, integration and support. Most importantly, as each workload adheres to local laws, it’s a life-saver for the government sector entities.

Benefits of Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty for government clients:

• Government organisations can build, operate and modernise workloads in Microsoft Public Cloud.
• They will have a wide range of capabilities, including agile infrastructure, secure DevOps, open-source platforms, contemporary collaboration, and low code development, which are all based on the public cloud’s expectations of scalability, resilience, cost, and agility without compromising on data privacy and operational transparency.
• They can also benefit from global security signals, analysing over 24 trillion signals daily to identify and help protect against local attacks while adhering to local laws and requirements. This is where innovation meets regulation!

5. Updates on Azure Migration and modernisation to provide more options and efficiency

A large-scale migration requires extensive planning across the organisation. As many organisations don’t have the in-house expertise or capacity to plan and implement their migration, the role of Microsoft partners comes into play. According to Microsoft, 500 partners are enrolled in its Azure Migration and Modernisation Program across applications, data and infrastructure.

The ‘Azure Migration and Modernisation’ focused on three different areas: Innovation with new cloud-native experience, the Modernisation of app and data estates and migration, and the Modernisation of mission-critical workloads infrastructure.

The company also mentioned that they will now offer up to 2.5 times larger incentives for Windows Server and SQL Server migrations as part of a new effort for Microsoft sales organisations to locally allocate them for their areas and give partners more opportunities.

Besides this, Azure Migrate function is also set to create opportunities for Independent Software Vendor (ISV) to integrate their intellectual property, providing a more customised solution for end customers.

Benefits:

• With this programme, ISVs can innovate rapidly, build well-architected applications, publish them to commercial marketplace, and reach more customers.
• These partner-focused approaches are certain to strengthen the partner ecosystem, providing end users with additional options, efficiencies, and benefits.

6. Winning the data estate with the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform

The customer’s data estate is crucial since it will be the location of all future workloads, including analytics, artificial intelligence, and other workloads. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the world’s data will climb to 175 zettabytes.

It’s difficult to envisage all these workloads related to AI analytics accommodated within one Cloud while a customer’s data estate resides in another. They indeed work together.

Microsoft utilised Inspire 2022 to highlight the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, an industry-leading cloud data platform that seamlessly combines databases, analytics, and governance. With a suite of products, a comprehensive Azure Data and AI portfolio, organisations can spend more time producing value by investing in this seamless data platform rather than integrating and managing their data estate.

Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform sets up these four key customer scenarios that bring this larger opportunity to life:

• Migrating and modernising the data estate
• Innovating with AI and Cloud-scale databases in every app
• Powering business decisions with Cloud-scale analytics
• Enabling unified data governance

 

 

Benefits of Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform:

• Fully managed, flexible databases help you build cloud-native applications or update existing applications.
• You can analyse large volumes of data in near real-time.
• Save time and total cost of ownership as you don’t need to integrate and manage the data estate on your own.

7. Empower Fusion teams with Power Platforms

Microsoft Inspire 2022 also underlined the significance of the Fusion Teams on its incredible impact in any industry and highlighted further investment to enhance the platform’s strength.

“It’s not just one app or one workflow or one automation. It’s all about accelerating digital capability-building across every function in the organisation. As a result, the number of organisations building Center of Excellence around Power Platform has grown exponentially over the past few years,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during the event.

Many businesses are adopting fusion development, which combines business experts , developers and IT professionals, to create better application faster. Microsoft Cloud allows fusion teams to work together to quickly develop low-code solutions like applications, flows, and bots. These solutions have been shown to deliver up to twice the reach of apps built by single individuals, enabling every industry to deliver solutions at a much faster pace. 

All the components of Fusion Teams essentially help clients transform the motion of idea into code, and code into Cloud, under the speed of light.

“By 2025, 70% of new applications deployed for the enterprise will use low-code or no-code tools, up from less than 25% in 2020. With Power Platform, we have the leading business process automation and productivity suite for domain experts in every industry, with 20 million monthly active users,” said the Microsoft CEO at Inspire 2022.

Benefit of Fusion Teams:

A business user with business knowledge looking for ways to improve a business process along with code-first developer, and IT Professional can use low-code capabilities and combine them with code-first components to meet business needs and create Fusion applications.

8. Reimagine Sustainability with ‘Microsoft Sustainability Manager’

Customers prefer purchasing sustainable products from sustainable businesses. Investors are asking companies to disclose their sustainability metrics. So, it’s clear that Sustainability today is not just desirable but necessary and doable!

In this regard, Microsoft Inspire 2022 announced the launch of ‘Microsoft Sustainability Manager’, a new Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Solution. This solution records, reports and presents you with data on your emissions, so you as an organisation can take steps to reduce it.

Rightly said proverb ‘If you want to solve a problem, measure it!’ Thanks to Emissions Impact Dashboards connected to Microsoft Sustainability Manager, you can now measure your overall carbon footprint and emissions. What’s more? Utilising Microsoft cloud services you can see a better picture of the underlying reasons for emissions fluctuations and take the next best step to meet your sustainability goals.

This extensible solution is built atop the Cloud for Sustainability to achieve Microsoft’s raft of sustainability goals and help other organisations create momentum toward net zero, no matter where your organisation is in the sustainability journey.

Benefits of Microsoft Sustainability Manager:

Microsoft Sustainable Manager provides an automated and comprehensive view of an organization’s operations and value chain emissions. It gives organisations continuous visibility into their emission activities, reports their impact and progress in near real time, and provides the intelligence needed to refine and scale sustainability initiatives and transform their business end to end.

Other Noteworthy data highlights announced at Microsoft Inspire 2022:

• A pledge to reuse more than 90% of cloud computing hardware by 2025, be it in schools or recycled memory cards for electronic toys.
• Azure will open 10 new data centre regions in ten markets, spanning four continents from 2022 to 2023.
• Microsoft Inspire 2022 announced Azure Orbital, which will provide real-time satellite fleet operations, global communications for remote connectivity, and Earth observations for precision farming.
• By 2025, 10 per cent of all data would be produced by generative AI models.
• Microsoft Inspire announced Azure Space Partner Community Program. It is a comprehensive offering to the space industry that helps shape the future of space technologies.
• 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms by 2025.

 

What’s Next?

As we help you continue to successfully harness the power of cutting-edge technology, we are excited about the possibilities that lie ahead. Our goal as Dogma Group, is to earn our clients’ trust. We are eager to provide you with the most recent information about Microsoft solutions since we have our fingers on the pulse and don’t want you to miss out on anything.

If you have any questions about the new developments from Microsoft Inspire 2022, contact us for a no-obligation consultation at info@dogmagroup.co.uk or on 01296 328689.