5 Big Announcements from Microsoft Inspire 2022
Microsoft’s largest partner event of the year, Inspire, is the annual conference that brings the partner community together and creates new opportunities for growth and collaboration. At this digital event you can celebrate achievements in the community, find out Microsoft’s biggest priorities for the year ahead, and gain the chance to develop and expand your business. In addition to going over these opportunities, this year’s conference will focus on partner programs and the Microsoft Cloud. Here are a few of the big announcements from Microsoft Inspire 2022 that we’re excited about.
Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty
Along with Microsoft’s other industry clouds, there is now a Cloud for Sovereignty—a worldwide government and public sector cloud that covers security, compliance, and policy requirements specific to various countries’ governments. The foundation for this starts in Azure regional data centers in 60+ regions. Data residency and management are central to this cloud, which offers Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure along with its Confidential Computing Service. Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is starting as a private preview in select locations, and more details about it will be announced over time.
New Teams Collaboration Features
There are a number of new features in Microsoft Teams, and we always like those. A few of the cool new capabilities announced at Inspire 2022 include:
- Collaborative Annotation (now generally available): All meeting participants can type, draw, or react to content being screen-shared with a new toolset powered by Microsoft Whiteboard, allowing presentations to become much more interactive.
- Live share (in public preview): Powered by the Fluid Framework, this is a way for developers to make any app collaborative within Teams, synchronizing state, media, and control actions with just front-end development.
- Chat with self (generally available now): Need to develop budding thoughts before sharing them with others? Send yourself notes and files to quickly access later!
Also check out this page with more Teams updates.
Viva Goals & Engage
The employee experience platform Microsoft Viva provides resources for employee productivity and well-being. It features modules that facilitate a great workplace environment: connection, learning, insights and information. Some new ones introduced now are Viva Goals, which helps employees set targets, and Viva Engage, which “brings consumer-like social networking to the workplace.” Viva is powered by AI to extract information, categorize relevant information, and provide helpful recommendations for employee wellness. These will all be generally available on August 1.
Microsoft Digital Contact Center
This is a new open platform to give contact centers modern digital tools for engaging with customers. Powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Power Platform, and a new AI tool called Nuance, it’s a comprehensive solution designed to save time and increase customer satisfaction. It provides everything needed for voice, video, and omnichannel engagement, even supporting social messaging platforms. Microsoft Digital Contact Center also enables self-service experiences, collaborative agent experiences, business process automation, advanced telephony, and fraud prevention capabilities.
Azure Orbital
Azure Orbital is a fully managed Ground Station As-a-Service (GSaaS!) that enables customers with satellites or spacecrafts to communicate, downlink, and process data from their units. This is done on a pay-as-you-go basis, without the need to build satellite ground stations independently. Orbital allows for easy and integrated data processing at scale with operations directly from Azure, so customers can use familiar Azure services to manage out-of-this-world data.
More Big Announcements from Microsoft Inspire 2022
There are many other big announcements from Microsoft Inspire 2022—see the official Inspire 2022 website to browse other content and videos from the conference.
From last year: