NetMonkeys Insights: Microsoft Inspire Highlights 2021

There were plenty of announcements to look forward to as Microsoft industry leaders revealed new developments to the Microsoft Teams landscape, Microsoft Viva, Dynamics 365, and revealed the much anticipated Windows 365 cloud-based solution.

Microsoft took the time to highlight how successful certain products have been in recent times. One stat we particularly liked was the '1 billion one-to-one Teams calls made in June 2021', quite mind-blowing given the fact a lot of users hadn't heard of Teams pre Covid!

Another huge number for us to process - 38 billion collaboration points within one month in Microsoft 365! That number includes chats, conversations, collaboration on documents, etc. Furthermore, Microsoft estimates the amount of data that we will create in the next three years will be more than the data we created in the past 30 years! That's definitely something to shout about but very hard to comprehend!

Highlights from Microsoft Inspire 2021

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Teams

Microsoft Teams has seen huge progress over the past year, from 75 million users in 2020 to over 145 million users in 2021. Industry leaders announced that there will be more collaborative apps added to the portfolio in partnership with Salesforce, Workday, Service Now, and Atlassian Confluence (the guys behind Trello). This will greatly benefit those who are transitioning into hybrid work and will enhance the relationship between collaboration capabilities with data integrations.

Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams

The relationship between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams just got closer as anyone in your organisation can access, edit and collaborate on Dynamics 365 data from within Teams at no additional cost. To enhance security, organisations can set permissions for specific users within the organisation, with the option to purchase additional advanced features to better interact with the data if required. To enhance collaboration further, Microsoft has added automatic notifications to notify colleagues of changes when they happen, where you can select specific channels and chats to send notifications through.

Windows 365

Arguably the biggest announcement of Inspire this year... The new Windows 365 cloud service gives users a full Windows experience to any of their devices from the Microsoft cloud. This means the current Windows 10 and the recently announced Windows 11 can be used as a cloud service. When using Windows 365, you'll benefit from Cloud PC giving hybrid users a personal, flexible, and secure way to stream and access your applications, tools, data, and settings from any device - Yes even your mac (Linux support to follow)

You can choose the size of the Cloud PC to suit your specific requirements at a cost per user per month. Windows 365 launches on the 2nd of August 2021 and will launch in two options - Business and Enterprise and we caught a glimpse of pricing which suggests it will start from 36$ per month...

Microsoft Viva

We heard the announcement of Microsoft Viva in February 2021 and loved the idea of a Microsoft Teams employee engagement platform that's designed to improve wellbeing and increase productivity. Since we're seeing a shift from remote to hybrid work, it's great to see that Microsoft has added 20 more integrations that complement Viva's focus on communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights. These new integrations will give employees plenty more opportunities to personalise their workspace with tools, insights, and apps to help them work more efficiently and alleviate the pressures of the workday.

Viva will be out for general release in Autumn 2021 (exact dates to follow) and whilst certain features are free, there is a cost of 4$ per module per month for Topics, Insights, and Learning.

Get in touch

For more information about the announcements made at Microsoft Inspire 2021, feel free to get in touch with the NetMonkeys Troop via our contact form.

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