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Keep tuned to UC Today – we have all the Microsoft Ignite 2020 coverage…
What Does a Fully Virtual Microsoft Ignite Look Like?
Like most first-party and community events this year, Microsoft chose a 100% virtual channel for Ignite 2020, demonstrating how its events and broadcasting infrastructure play out in the wild. “I definitely miss the in-person nature of it. Trying to commit the time to the event while you’re not in there is tough. I think it was the first time in about 11 years I haven’t been over for some kind of show or event,” Tom said.
But there was upside too. “They did a good job of doing lots of table talks, which worked really well. These were just Teams meetings (nothing special) with a few community speakers and an open, engaged workshop. It gave some of the community vibes back to it,” he added.
And despite being fully virtual, Microsoft lost no opportunity to roll out some really exciting news.
The Meeting Experience is About to Get Dramatically Better
The meeting experience was among the top focus areas for Microsoft at Ignite. “The number #1 news for me is that Microsoft Teams meetings recordings will now be stored on OneDrive and SharePoint,” Tom told us. Instead of being moved to Microsoft Stream (which is like a corporate YouTube), meeting recordings would be treated like any other file on Teams.
“We get all the benefits – SharePoint APIs, the control, the audits, the retention, the sharing – and no real learning curve for the users,” Tom explained. He calls this a clever strategy, given that SharePoint is known for its mature retention and governance policies. In a smaller but equally significant tweak, Microsoft also introduced custom meeting layouts.
Custom layouts allow a cutout of the participant and PowerPoint content to sit on top of each other, improving engagement for virtual presentations. This one is already making the rounds, as UC Today’s Rob Scott mentions seeing the feature in action during a keynote at UC Expo. And to make the post-meeting experience more enriching, Microsoft has launched Meeting Recaps – linkable from Outlook and Teams.
“This brings some of Teams’ long-standing promise of ‘everything in one place”
“I can see it getting more powerful over time. This is version 1, but as they start overlaying Artificial Intelligence (AI), you could get a recap of the actions called out during the meeting or the people who spoke the most. You’d know when XYZ person was mentioned. It’s only going to get better and better,” he commented on future possibilities.
In another interesting move, the Cisco-Microsoft partnership on cloud video interoperability gained fresh momentum. After the upgrade, you’d be able to use Cisco endpoints to join Teams meetings and vice versa – good news for IT leaders managing mixed infrastructure.
Let’s now turn to another important aspect of Teams usage – telephony.
Microsoft Fine-Tunes Telephony on Teams
The Teams calling experience often takes a backseat to meetings and collaboration, but that doesn’t make it any less crucial. “Telephony is not going away! It’s quite a crucial part of the whole stack, isn’t it?” we asked Tom during the podcast.
“Definitely,” he answered.
A new calling app (or telephony UI) is on the cards, bringing together your contacts, voicemail, and device information on one page. Microsoft is also adding on Survivable Branch Appliances (SBA) for Teams, which is like a competitor to Cisco Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST). Tom calls Teams SBA a “box that sits on-site that provides resilient telephony if the internet WAN or Teams service goes down.” This option was already around for Lync and Skype, but it is a welcome addition to Teams’ cloud services.
As Tom said:
“When you’ve got 75 million+ active users, there’s enough of a market to warrant AudioCodes and Ribbon building these boxes with Microsoft”
The next big news isn’t technically about telephony, but more on communication as a whole. At Ignite 2020, Microsoft unveiled the new Azure Communication Service that placed Teams’ intelligent audio-video as a back-end to your own proprietary interface. “If you’ve got a non-native app (SAP, Salesforce, etc.) and you want to bring video or VoIP into it directly, you can do that by leveraging this as your communication service. It is a Twilio-esque scenario,” Tom said.
This is really interesting, given that Twilio headed Business Insider’s recent article on which companies Microsoft should acquire. Now, with the launch of Azure Communication Service, Microsoft has officially thrown its hat into the CPaaS ring.
Interesting Pivots in Brand New Directions
Like always, Ignite saw a few unexpected arrivals and marketing pivots that would determine Microsoft’s future over the next few years. The first in this category is its formal foray into webinars and webinar management. “I didn’t see this one coming!” said Tom.
“Teams is a great meeting platform, but it’s clearly enterprise-focused. There are lots of community events, but if you need registration details or URL sharing, a Go-To-Meeting or something has those features. Now, Microsoft is baking those in,” Tom added. This is a direct play against competitors like Zoom, with a sizable potential market share.
Also, Microsoft announced that its collaboration bar hardware family would be folded into Microsoft Teams Rooms. Effectively, we will now have the Android-based collaboration bars and Windows-based Rooms systems under one umbrella. “This isn’t just a rebrand – they are also bringing feature parity as much as they can. There will always be differences because Windows has Intel CPU, higher horsepower, and more inputs/outputs. But the Android units will get very close,” Tom elaborated.
Several customers continue to prefer Android for its lower overheads, simpler management, and more seamless upgrades. “Even though the pitch is Windows is easy, Android is arguably easier,” Tom suggests. Merging the two device families underscores Microsoft’s commitment to the Android ecosystem.
And the final – probably biggest – pivot is the launch of a fresh hardware category from Microsoft, called Teams Panels. Tom calls them “small, iPad-like devices you see stuck outside of meeting rooms that show green for “available”/red for “not,” show the list of meetings, and let you reserve a room.” These Panels will connect with Exchange to fetch room information and feed into the Teams platform to make the information accessible.
As Microsoft gets closer and closer to achieving its philosophy of “one-stop solution,” Panels tick a necessary box.
Another move which doesn’t technically count as a pivot but is an interesting departure from Microsoft’s usual way of doing things is the Skype for Business Server 2022.
Server 2022 is subscription-only, unlike previous versions that offered an on-premise option. Tom suggested a possible reason behind this:
“It’s for the customers that are on an on-premise path for whatever reason – Microsoft would like to get you off that path and onto the cloud”
But don’t expect too many new features he also added.
On Safety, Security, and Wellbeing in the New Normal
Microsoft is doubling down on Teams security and compliance with the introduction of customer-managed encryption keys for Teams. Again, it is competing against existing players, just as it is doing with Panels, SBA, and webinar enablement. “Cisco made a really big deal out of this a while ago – kind of bringing your own key to collaboration,” Tom said. Before this, customer-managed encryption was available only in Office 365, where you could “extra encrypt” data with a personal key.
It is not about locking your data from Microsoft – “It’s really about regular requirements necessary in certain verticals, where you (the customer) have to own the key. If you exit the service, you need to force destroy your data and prove it’s been cryptographically destroyed with the key.”
The feature – scheduled for general availability in 2021 – extends this to Teams chat and messages.
Side by side with data security, employee wellbeing and safety was a running them across Ignite 2020. Microsoft will give managers insights on these topics via a new Teams dashboard. “Everybody is remote now, so we need to look at mental health and managing our time properly without over-committing,” Tom said. Managers can help employees achieve this by looking up their engagement data, overtime deviations, and workplace support requirements.
In the podcast, we were able to only skim the surface! You can learn about these updates (and more) by going through our extensive coverage of Microsoft Ignite 2020. Do check out the complete podcast for:
- Why SharePoint/OneDrive is a radically smarter alternative to Stream?
- What content can you expect in a typical meeting recap?
- Which industries could gain from offline telephony via Teams SBA?
- What features you could expect on the new Microsoft Teams Rooms for Android?
Thank you for joining us and subscribe to UC Today News on YouTube for the latest updates.
