Top 5 Announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2021

Last week Microsoft hosted their annual Ignite conference. Each year I attend these events to see what Microsoft's vision for the future is, along with the latest Microsoft Cloud and Azure updates are. This year there were some great announcements around Hybrid Work, AI and Security.

These are the top 5 announcements that stood out to me:

1. Azure OpenAI Service

This is a new Azure Cognitive Service that allows customers to use OpenAI's GPT-3 models for things like content summarisation and code generation. I was really impressed with how this is used as part of GithHub Copilot to provide automatic code generation for pro developers.

2. Microsoft Loop

This is a new M365 app that will integrate apps like Teams, Outlook, OneNote and other M365 offerings into one app for cross collaboration between team members.

3. Azure VM Scale Set Flexible Options

Finally! The ability to change VM size within the scale set without having to redeploy! This will be great for anyone wants to look at performing cost or performance optimisation to their VM scale sets.

4. Defender for business

This is a new endpoint protection solution from Microsoft which protects Windows, Mac, Android and iOS. This will be great for small businesses who may not have a dedicated IT to manage security across their fleet of end user devices.

5. Context IQ

You may have seen some of this when typing emails already! Context IQ will be an AI service built into all M365 products to help predict, seek and suggest information people need, right in the flow of their work. One of the cool things showed off was automatically finding a free slot in everyone's calendar and then scheduling a teams meeting, just from the context of the email!

There were many more exciting announcements that I can't detail here, but as always you can check out the Microsoft Ingite Book of News which summarises each announcement very succinctly. I look forward to seeing how I can use these new features in my day to day - especially the Azure OpenAI service. I've already signed up for the GitHub Copilot preview and first impressions are pretty awesome!