Microsoft Inspire 2022

Microsoft Inspire is a global event where Microsoft Partners from around the world gather in-person or online to learn about Microsoft’s roadmap for the year ahead. This event is pivotal because we’re able to learn about Microsoft’s developments to strategically plan how to deliver more value to our clients by amplify productivity, efficiency, and collaboration so they can so you can differentiate and build resilience through by applying strategic technology.

During this year’s event, a few key topics arose that we’re very pleased to share such as, enriched collaboration capabilities with Microsoft Teams and Office 365, new Cloud for Sovereignty solutions, and improved application development tools to automate and streamline business processes.

Enhanced Collaboration with Microsoft Teams & Office 365

73% of employees would like the flexibility they’ve experienced during the pandemic to continue and 67% say they want more in-person time with colleagues. The world of Hybrid Work is here to stay and as employees seek more work-life-balance, Microsoft has introduced features that boost employee experience that promotes flexibility and personal wellbeing.

Microsoft Teams Rooms

In the year ahead, Microsoft plans to continually evaluate and bridge the hybrid work gap between in-person and remote teams. To learn more about Microsoft Teams Rooms, consider reading our blog post, Unifying Remote & In-office Staff with Microsoft Teams Rooms to learn how we’re enhancing the employee experience.

Collaborative Annotation & Video Clip within Microsoft Teams

Microsoft released new features within Microsoft Teams called Collaborative Annotation and Video Clips. In Teams meetings, you can engage with any content presented through screen share allowing participants to type, draw and react to shared content in meetings using Microsoft Whiteboard. Additionally, Microsoft released Video Clips where Teams users can record and send brief video messages to recipients.

Excel Live

Within a Teams Meeting, users will have the ability to collaborate within Excel files, in real time! This allows meeting participants to remain in one window for the duration of the meeting. Imagine the power of collaboration.

Viva Engage

Building upon the current Viva platform, Microsoft introduced Viva Engage which helps employees build community, engage with leadership, cultivate knowledge, and build networks. Similar to an internal social platform, it also allows users to “view storylines so you can create and share what you’re passionate about, discover and follow colleagues and leaders, and find answers to questions,” says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Viva Goals

Planned for a 2022 release, Viva Goals allows organizations to align their teams by sharing company-wide key goals, metrics, and the collective progress toward fulfilling the goals. This fosters organizational unification coupled with a platform that encourages employees to view their progress towards a collective goal.

Microsoft Digital Contact Center

Built utilizing Nuance technology and Dynamics 365, Microsoft introduced the Digital Contact Center, a single unified platform that reduces costs and provides visibility into customer service trends. With this technology, customer service agents can utilize voice-recognition to authenticate accounts, view topic pages related to customer questions, directly reach out to subject matter experts to minimize escalations. This cohesive platform will streamline and enhance customer experiences across the globe.

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

Geared toward public sector entities and contractors, Microsoft’s released a new product called Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty. This solution enables you to meet government data, security and privacy requirements by proving policies, controls and technologies that help to streamline the internal processes. Built on public cloud technologies, users will have improved resiliency, agility, scalability while reducing over-arching costs of doing business.

Enhanced Application Development (DevOps) Capabilities

There is an increasing demand for developers in certain industries and Microsoft seeks to stay ahead of the curve by fortifying GitHub, Microsoft PowerApps and other platforms for no-code, low-code and pro-code developers. What does this mean? Microsoft is making it easier for us at FSi Strategies and organizational internal developers to build and deliver customized applications faster and efficiently. As an example, “FedEx… is using the service to run all their Java apps at massive scale, predicting the estimated time of arrival of millions of shipments,” declared Microsoft CEO. By building end-to-end business solutions Microsoft platforms reduce complexity as well as the cost to go-to-market.

As a certified Microsoft Partner, we recognize the importance of staying on-top of emerging trends so that we can continually innovate and deliver unwavering value to our clients. If you have any questions about Microsoft’s recent product developments, we encourage you to connect with us.