Microsoft Ignite 2016 - Summary of key announcements for Office 365, SharePoint and Azure from Day 1

In the flood of announcements from Ignite 2016 today, I noted down my favorites about Office 365, Azure and SharePoint. Enjoy.

SharePoint Server Announcements

I only found one interesting SharePoint Server announcement today, and that was the announcement about Feature Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2016.

The Feature Pack contains among other things:

• Logging of admin tasks in Central Admin
• Logging of admin tasks using PowerShell
• Enhancements to MinRole to support small environments
• A new OneDrive for Business User Experience
• Custom tiles in the SharePoint App launcher
• Unified auditing across site collections on-prem and in O365
• Unified taxonomy across on-prem and O365
• OneDrive API 2.0

Those were a few of the tidbits, as quoted from the post I linked to. Go check it out - it's worth investigating this if you're on-premises with your SharePoint and either plan to upgrade to 2016 or if you're potentially already there.

My favorites: Logging of Admin Tasks! Surely we need to know what those admins are doing.

Office 365 Announcements

Working with SharePoint since early 2006, progressing to the first edition of BPOS which then became an early version of SharePoint online - or what is now a fully featured SharePoint experience in Office 365, has been an interesting journey for sure.

Though, the journey doesn't end here - it only gets better. Today Microsoft made some announcements at the Ignite conference regarding Office 365 and related services. Here's my collection of announcements for you to indulge.

Delve Analytics is now MyAnalytics

Delve in Office 365 has been around now for a while, and personally I find it pretty valuable. I suppose it doesn't come as a surprise that they announced the evolution of this product from Delve Analytics to MyAnalytics.

Yammer integrates with Office 365 groups

Another announcement that might not come as a surprise is that Yammer is to integrate with Office 365 Groups.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Yammer is integrating with Office 365 Groups, bringing together the power of open collaboration with the productivity tools millions rely on every day. With this integration, Yammer users can easily turn ideas into action with access to SharePoint sites and document repositories, a shared OneNote notebook, and lightweight task management with Planner. These new experiences and more will be rolling out in phases over the coming months.

Yammer has a lot to live up to. It hasn't yet, in my opinion. Let's see if this brings it closer to the goal - but I'm still not convinced.

Office 365 Security & Compliance Center - News and improvements

An announcement around security today was made, covering Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, Advanced Data Governance, Threat Intelligence and Advanced Security Management updates.

New People Experiences throughout Office 365

If you're into SharePoint and Office 365 and people experiences, there's a good post about the updates around those parts available as of today.

• New Delve app for Windows 10
• People cards that surface profile info and content
• Updates to the Office 365 profile

Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet, new apps etc.

Some updates around the "Mobile and Intelligent Intranet powered by SharePoint" were announced today.

• Team news for SharePoint Online modern team sites (announced today).
• SharePoint mobile apps for Android and Windows 10 Mobile (in preview today).
• News roll-up tab within the SharePoint mobile app for iOS (announced today).
• Create a modern team site and an associated Office 365 group from the SharePoint home (announced today).
• New people experiences within SharePoint Online team sites, document libraries and lists, and OneDrive for Business (rolling out now).

SharePoint innovations further advance intelligence and collaboration in Office 365

Jeff Teper published this post today, extending the messaging about the cloud-first, mobile-first vision.

There's too much info in there to make an easy summary of it - go check it out.

Announcing Microsoft StaffHub public preview

Now this was a pretty nice move by Microsoft. The StaffHub offers an app for deskless workers to manage their work schedules et al. Something I know many folks in other industries have been looking for, or have problems with today. I'm excited about this, and can't wait to introduce it to the folks around me that I know have challenges with this!

Azure Announcements

I work in Azure every day. Hence my big interest in what's happening in the Microsoft Cloud. There's some interesting announcements that came out of Ignite today, and what I've listed here are extracts and noteworthy information that I think would be beneficial for others with their heads in the clouds too.

Azure DNS General availability

Last year Microsoft announced the public preview of something called Azure DNS. Today at Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta, Microsoft announced Azure DNS General Availability - available for production use!

Azure DNS enables you to host your DNS domains and manage your DNS records in Azure.

Announcing Public Preview of Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor went into Public Preview today (public beta), and looks pretty promising. Use Azure Monitor to overview and manage monitoring tasks from a single UI in the portal, rather than from every resource.

It's already live, and here you can see a quick preview from my own Azure:

Dashboard from the announcements:

Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server now Generally Available

The Azure Service Fabric was released last year in the cloud to help devs build and manage cloud-scale apps. Today, Microsoft announced an on-prem edition of the Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server.

Added capabilities to Azure Security Center

Microsoft Security Center has been out there since July this year, but with the announcements today by Microsoft about the Azure Security Center they're showing their commitment in improving security across their product and service stack all the time.

• Integrated Vulnerability Assessment (preview)
• Expanded Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities (preview)
• Azure Storage Security Assessment (preview)
• New Threat Detections
• Enhanced Security Incidents
• Threat Intelligence Reports (preview)

Announcing Azure Command Line Interface (Azure CLI) 2.0 Preview

On a daily basis I utilize the command-line tools available on routine. Creating new projects, maintaining code or managing cloud infrastructure. That's why I'm personally very excited about the Azure CLI 2.0 preview announced today.