Collaboration

Microsoft Ignite 2017 Will Lay Out a Vision for the Future of Collaboration

Expect big news on Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams at the software giant’s conference in Orlando as the company spells out what’s coming for some of its biggest enterprise IT products.

Ann Longmore-Etheridge

Ann is the managing editor of BizTech magazine. Prior to working on BizTech, she spent more than two decades as a journalist at Security Management magazine writing about issues such as cybersecurity, physical security, terrorism, hacking, and new technology.

Microsoft Ignite will take place in Orlando, Fla., Sept. 25-Sept. 29. Microsoft will likely make major announcements at the conference concerning products such as Office 365, SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Azure, the Surface product line and its SQL Server on Linux, SQL Server 2017.

One mystery that may be solved is whether an on-premises version of Skype for Business is nigh. Earlier this month, there may have been a slipup when users of Office 365 saw a message reading “Skype for Business is now Microsoft Teams.” No one yet knows if this was an error or a true insight. We may know next week.

There are other unknowns to potentially be answered, including whether Microsoft's partnership with Adobe that was made public at last year’s conference will bear new fruit. There may also be revelations about the professional social network LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired last year. The company is keeping everything on the QT for now.

A major highlight of the conference agenda is a Sept. 25 keynote by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The CEO is expected to speak on important emerging trends that businesses don’t need to wait to embrace. A hint? The future, he said at a conference last year in Munich, Germany, “is going to be about people working with machines. So that means you have got to be able to understand machines and how they work. There is no walk of life that is not going to require computational understanding.”

Other featured speakers include Paula Januszkiewicz, CEO of CQURE Inc., who is a powerful advocate for women in technology. Also addressing attendees is system administration and deployment expert Jeremy Chapman, who serves as Microsoft’s director of IT pro community and events, as well as Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Data Group (database, big data and machine learning products). Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for Microsoft Office, SharePoint and OneDrive, and Joy Chik, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Identity Division, are two more of the highlighted presenters.

Microsoft says the conference will include more than 700 sessions, industry leader insights, deep dives and live demos, totaling more than 1,000 hours of learning.

Keep this page bookmarked for articles from the event. Follow us on Twitter at @BizTechMagazine or the official conference Twitter account @MS_Ignite, and join the conversation using hashtag #MSIgnite.

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