Microsoft 365 and Ignite 2021

Ignite 2021 is here, and earlier than usual! There’s always a lot of news at Ignite, and I wanted to highlight some of the big items that caught my eye around Microsoft Teams, the new Microsoft Viva, and Security.

Reimagining the employee experience with Microsoft Viva 

Last month, we introduced Microsoft Viva, our new employee experience platform powered by Microsoft 365 that brings tools for employee engagement directly into the flow of work. It's been amazing to be part of the journey with the cross-Microsoft team collaborating on this project. At Ignite, more details were announced about Viva’s four modules – Connections, Topics, Insights, and Learning – and how they integrate into the day-to-day work of employees: 

• The desktop experience for Viva Connections is now generally available to customers. Viva Connections brings many different apps that employees use every day, like SharePoint, Yammer, and Microsoft Stream together into a centralized (and customizable) Teams app.
• Viva Topics is now available, and we are working to extend it beyond Teams to other Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, Office, and SharePoint. In fact, here’s a screenshot of an internal Topic card for the term Microsoft Viva snipped from Microsoft Edge, where a topic highlight was automatically layered on to text reference to Microsoft Viva in a SharePoint page. You can see it automatically generates a description, links to relevant people and company resources on the project, and allows you to click through to view even more details on a dedicated Topic page. 

• Now in public preview, Viva Insights includes the virtual commute experience, which will begin rolling out next month to help employees transition between the workday and time away from work. Also coming soon is the new Home tab, which will incorporate wellbeing and organizational tools directly in Teams (rolling out next month), and Headspace, the meditation app, availability within Insights (coming later this year). Learn more in the Viva Insights blog.
• Viva Learning will be in public preview starting next month and is expected to be generally available later this year. With Learning, employees can search for, view, and consume courses from online platforms like LinkedIn Learning and third-party platforms right from within Teams. Our team started using Learning, and we are really enjoying having easy access to training right within existing chats and channels. 

A better Teams experience, from anywhere  

Many of the experiences in Microsoft Viva are supported by Microsoft Teams, and there was no shortage of exciting Teams announcements at Ignite:

• You can now host larger virtual events in Teams with up to 1,000 participants and access to tools like custom registration and post-event reporting. You can also broadcast a view-only meeting for even larger events with up to 10,000 people, and to accommodate the especially high volume of remote work during the pandemic, Teams will even temporarily support up to 20,000 people in view-only mode through the end of this year.
• Presenter mode lets presenters choose between three new views: Standout, Reporter, and Side-by-side to adjust how the video feed and content appear to the audience. The preview of this feature looks awesome, and I’m excited to try it in my team’s upcoming all-hands meetings – it will definitely help up the production value!
• Dynamic view, generally available this month, arranges the elements of your meeting for the best viewing experience and gives you the ability to place the meeting participant gallery at the top of the window. In my early testing, this has been a game-changer for virtual meetings, enabling me to look more naturally at people in eyeline with the camera, rather than constantly looking down toward the bottom of the screen.
• New gallery views in Teams Rooms, like Together Mode and Large Gallery, make it easier to see everyone in the meeting, including people in the room together and those joining remotely, plus the meeting content all at once. 
• New Intelligent Speakers will help meeting participants understand who is talking by identifying the voices of up to ten people in a Teams Room. It also introduces an option to generate a meeting transcript, something super handy for references post-meeting.  

A step forward in the Zero Trust journey  

While we’ve continued to see updates for platforms like Microsoft Viva and Teams, there’s been an equal focus on building security and privacy protections into our platforms following our Zero Trust principles. At Ignite, a few key security updates were announced: 

• Teams will now support end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for 1:1 Teams calls, available to commercial customers in preview in H1 CY2021. Customers have control over how E2EE is used and who uses it within the organization. 
• Co-authoring of documents is now protected with Microsoft Information Protection, allowing multiple people to work on a document simultaneously while keeping documents secure. It’s awesome to see these elements come together, and the pairing will provide strong built-in protection for documents and emails across Microsoft 365 apps.
• Microsoft 365 Defender now includes Threat Analytics, which gives you access to reports from Microsoft security researchers, directly within Microsoft 365 Defender, to help you understand, plan for, and mitigate security threats.
• Passwordless Authentication with Azure Active Directory allows you to utilize biometrics, Windows Hello for Business, or the Authenticator app to sign into apps and services. Passwordless authentication for cloud and hybrid environments is now generally available.

Final thoughts 

There was a lot of exciting news at Ignite. You can view the full set of Ignite announcements here and keynotes here. A huge thanks to our customers for all the feedback that helps us shape these services, and of course to our teams internally for building them.

Thanks,

Kirk