Microsoft Inspire 2019 stayed true to its motto ‘Together, we achieve more!’. The recently concluded event celebrated innovation and partnership. This year, the event was bigger and better with 450+ sessions. In this article, we share some of the key updates and highlights from Microsoft Inspire 2019.
Azure Lighthouse is Available for All
Azure Lighthouse enables service providers to deliver managed services across customers at scale with higher automation, governance and efficiency. Lighthouse is powered by Azure Delegated Resource Management that helps partners manage customer engagement and life-cycle operations easily. With the Azure Resource Manager Template, you can automate workflows such as customer onboarding reducing the need for manual operational tasks.
For customers, Azure Lighthouse offers a single control plane through which they can manage partners with precise and granular access. Lighthouse offers get greater visibility into the operations of a partner building transparency and auditability.
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Azure Cloud Adoption Framework and Azure Migration Program
Moving your business to the cloud requires both cultural readiness and systems readiness. The cloud adoption framework for Azure provides proven guidance that will help organizations develop and implement strategies to migrate to the cloud successfully. The framework comes with best practices guides, documentation and other resources that will help organizations to meet its cloud objectives.
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The Azure Migration Program will help customers to get in touch with Microsoft experts and cloud migration partners to start their cloud journey. Customers will get step-by-step guidance from partners, access to foundational and role-specific courses to develop in-house skills and capabilities, access to free tools like Azure Migrate, Azure Cost Management and exclusive offers to reduce cloud migration costs.
Learn more about Azure Cloud Migration Program
Microsoft Teams Reaches 13 Million Daily Active Users
Last year was a breakout year for Microsoft Teams. Just 2 years after its launch, Teams now boasts 13 million Daily Active Users (DAU) and 19 million Weekly Active Users (WAU). A hub for teamwork, Teams is now empowering a global workforce. Microsoft Teams is now available in 52 languages and 181 markets.
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New Features:
- Announcements: enables channel members to bring attention to important updates.
- Cross-channel posting: post messages in multiple channels simultaneously across the same or different teams.
- Channel moderation: empowers team owners to designate moderators for channels to manage communication.
- Priority notifications: alerts recipients of time-sensitive messages by alerting them every 2 minutes until a response is received.
- Read receipts: indicates when a message has been read in chat displays.
- Time clock: allows workers to clock-in and clock-out of their shifts and breaks using their Teams mobile app. The feature also allows managers to create and share shift schedules with his team.
- Targeted communication: @mentioning the role name in a post will help people to reach everyone in that role.
Dynamics 365 Industry Accelerators
Industry solution accelerators are base components that enable Independent Software Vendors (ISV) to build and deploy industry vertical solutions easily. Accelerators ensure ISV’s adhere to industry standards supported by Microsoft.
At Inspire 2019, Microsoft expanded Dynamics 365 industry accelerators to include automotive and financial services. Update to Dynamics 365 non-profit accelerator was also announced. The portfolio of industry accelerators supported by Microsoft now includes:
- Healthcare
- Education, including higher education and K-12
- Non-profit
- Media
- Automotive
- Banking
The customer journey in the automotive industry involves several touchpoints which inevitably results in data silos. With the rise of ride-sharing apps and shared mobility, customer experience in the automotive industry is a necessity more than a need. The automotive accelerator will help ISV partners to develop and develop customer experience management solutions easily.
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Expectations from customer services continue to increase in the banking sector. To provide the best possible experience, banking and financial institutions require solutions that will help them get an end-to-end view of a customer’s profile. With the financial service accelerator, ISVs can build solutions that cater to these needs easily.
HoloLens 2
Julia White’s keynote on HoloLens 2 was a standout session for us.. and it was in Japanese! Watch the video below to find out why.
To relive the action and watch the sessions on-demand, visit: https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/inspire