Microsoft's CEO revealed the latest innovations to Microsoft Cloud at Microsoft Ignite 2022.
Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, divided the new updates into "five key imperatives": Microsoft Azure, automation and AI, cloud developer platform, Microsoft 365, and security.
Microsoft Ignite is an annual Microsoft conference geared towards IT professionals. Nadella provided the opening keynote to this year's conference, which sought to highlight the ways in which Microsoft Cloud is helping its customers.
Nadella said: "Organisations in every industry are turning to you and your digital capability to help them do more with less so that they can navigate this change and emerge strong.
"You are the change agents who make doing more with less possible less time, less cost, less complexity, with more innovation, more agility and more resilience.
"Doing more with less doesn't mean working harder or longer. It's not going to scale. It means applying technology to amplify what you can do and, ultimately, what an organisation can achieve amidst today's constraints.
"Over the past few years, they have talked extensively about digital transformation, but today we need to deliver on the digital imperative for every organisation.
"It all comes down to how we can help you do this with the Microsoft Cloud. No other cloud offers the best of category products and the best of suite solutions. That is what we will focus on at Ignite this week as we walk through the five key imperatives."
Microsoft 365, Teams & Viva
One of the five critical areas for Microsoft Cloud is its communication and collaboration segment, which includes the Microsoft 365 platform, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Viva.
Microsoft 365: As well as Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, Microsoft 365 has some new apps, including Loop, Clipchamp, Stream, and Designer.
All of these applications are combined within Microsoft Graph to bring insights, meetings, events, and documents into one interconnected system. Graph helps you to understand how your distributed workforce is working. It also displays your personalised recommendations, favourite productivity tools, and the third-party solutions you choose to add.
Microsoft Teams: Over the past year, Microsoft Teams has introduced more than 450 capabilities.
This year at Microsoft Ignite, more features have been announced, including Microsoft Teams Premium, which offers advanced meeting protections, Intelligent Recap for meetings, and more.
On the Teams app platform, collaborative apps are bringing business workflows, data and insights to the end users. There are now more than 1,600 third-party apps available on the Microsoft Teams App Store, and more than 100,000 companies have deployed their own custom line of business applications in Teams. Power Platform and Teams are making it easy for anyone to build a collaborative application.
3M has built an app which converts handwritten notes into a collaborative digital space. American Airlines is using "Connect Me", a hybrid microservice with tools layered over Teams and the Power Platform. It provides the communication and collaboration necessary to keep its various teams and staff connected.
Turning to Teams Rooms, Teams Meetings will be native on Cisco devices and other peripherals.
Teams is also launching immersive meetings on Quest so users can connect and collaborate in virtual reality.
Mesh avatars will be available for private preview in Microsoft Teams, allowing users to create their own avatars to represent them in meetings. They won't even need to turn on their cameras! Nadella reflected that "the digitisation of people, places and processes is happening worldwide".
