My thoughts about Microsoft Ignite 2020

A week has past since Microsoft Ignite and I though I should share my thoughts. Being at Ignite in person is one thing, five days filled with sessions, walking miles, talking to old peers, and creating new bonds. Microsoft Ignite 2020 was a little bit different and the first ever virtual Ignite.

Watching Satya in our caps we got last year at Ignite 😆

In this post I wanted to share some of the news I found most exciting from Ignite 🥳. As always there’s a lot of news, if you want to read them all I recommend the Microsoft Ignite 2020 book of news.

1. News for Microsoft Teams

Well since I mostly blog about Microsoft Teams I’ll start there. As you might noticed this has been a busy year for Microsoft Teams with a lot of new features, but they still managed to announce lots of exciting things 🙌🏻.

Insights app for well-being

I think the Insights well-being app is one of the news I found most exciting during Ignite. Do you ever pay attention to the email you get about how you work (“hey Amanda you’ve worked after work hours a lot this week – stop it”)? MyAnalytics gives you insights and analytics on how you work. Now the new app Insights will move into Microsoft Teams, it combines MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics and will give you personalized insights and suggested actions to enable change and create well-being. Another interesting thing is that managers will get insight about the employees – making it easy to see how you can support your employees in getting a healthy work-life balance.

Link to more info. Will start to roll out October 2020.

Power Virtual Agents moves into Microsoft Teams

Me and Carina talked about this last week in The best from both worlds - Office Apps & Services and BizApps combined but during Ignite we got more info about Power Virtual Agents in Microsoft Teams. There’s a new app in Microsoft Teams for building bots, building bots for Microsoft Teams will be included in the licence (!!!!!!) and it’s about 120% easier to deploy the bot into Microsoft Teams.

This is super exciting for streamlining 😎😎.

Link to more info. Preview available now.

Pinning posts

This is a small thing, but I’ve been wanting this since forever – pinning posts in a team channel. This will make is so smooth when new people join a team to pin for example guidelines or rules in the top of the channel always available for everyone.

Will start to roll out October 2020.

Register to an event and see attendee engagement

Have you also planned an event, for example a webinar or larger meeting and having a struggle with combining Microsoft Teams and event registration? Then you are probably as excited about this news as I am! Soon it will be possible to have event registrations and automated emails to make those events smoother. There’ll also be a dashboard to better understand the attendee engagement 😊.

Link to more info. These new features are expected to begin to roll out by end of year.

Home site app for Microsoft Teams

With the new home site app, it will finally be easy to add your SharePoint intranet to Microsoft Teams. A lot of us users are living our lives in Microsoft Teams but that doesn’t mean we love SharePoint any less 😉. The home app will give your users a way into your organizations intranet and it will keep the multi-level navigation!

In the video you'll see more about this (it's about 40 minutes).

Link to more info. Will start to roll out 2021.

2. News for SharePoint

Boost news that are extra important

Sometimes the news we publish doesn’t get the attention it needs, and it quickly becomes lost when new news articles are published. Well hello possibility to boost news! Soon it will be possible to boost news dependent on different criteria’s such as until it has been read, a specific date, number of impressions. Once the criteria is met the post will return to its actual place in the feed.

Link to more info. Can’t find information on when this will be available – I hope soon 😊.

New global navigation

Often when you are browsing SharePoint it’s just not one site but a bunch of different sites, my normal way of navigating is by going to SharePoint home. But soon we will have a global navigation experience that connects all of those different sites. The new SharePoint app bar will be global and show relevant sites for you, and nice thing is that it will be shown in Microsoft Teams as well 🙌🏻. I imagine this will replace SharePoint home for many users, it most likely will for me.

Link to more info. Can’t find information on when this will be available – I hope soon 😊.

3. Add shortcut in OneDrive

The last thing I want to share is about OneDrive, I would say I use SharePoint for 98% of my files but there are still a few private files for me, and this is an exciting new thing. Add to OneDrive will make it possible for you to add a shortcut from OneDrive, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams in your OneDrive. This means you can have one place that displays everything relevant for you.

Link to more info. Rolling out now.

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Now all we can do it wait!

All images/videos are borrowed (except on my face and Power Virtual Agents 😇) from Microsoft.