📣 Microsoft Ignite 2022: My top 6 announcements and features to track

From October 12th to 14th, Microsoft Ignite (Microsoft's annual conference for professionals, services and enterprise products) was held in Seattle and around the world.

More than 907 sessions and 1212 speakers from around the world to speak around the following topics: Azure, AI, Business Applications, Industry Cloud, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Security and Windows.

And this year again, there were a lot of announcements. Impossible to mention them all in this article but I have selected 6 announcements that particularly interested me and for which I will follow their development.

# 1 Microsoft Places: Turn your spaces into places

Who are the people in the office?

How to tell my colleagues that I will be at the office that day?

How to know where my colleagues are?

How to better reserve spaces?

The new connected workplace platform wants to answer all these questions.

Microsoft Places' hybrid scheduling will draw on data from Outlook and Teams and allow you to visualize the upcoming week and know when your colleagues and close associates plan to be in the office. You will be able to view which days are the most crowded in the office, making it easier to meet face to face.

Several administration functions are provided, as well as room maps to see where your closest colleagues are sitting and choose your office accordingly.

Microsoft Places will be available in 2023 and if you want to know more, you can refer to the official announcement.

#2 : “working hours and location” in Outlook and Teams

For this meeting, who will be on site and Who will be remote ?

In the same spirit as Microsoft Places, here is a new feature to facilitate hybrid work habits. We all know it today. Scheduling a meeting when it comes to determining who can attend in person, who will be remote or if you need a conference room.

Working hours and location is a new little module that allows a user to set their working hours in Outlook by week, specifying when they will be remote or in the office. They can also set different working hours per day, or multiple working slots in a day.

Colleagues can then see each other's work locations by using the scheduling wizard in Outlook, in the people map in Teams, or by opening a person's contact card.

If you want to know more, you can refer to the official announcement.

#3 : rebranding Office app to Microsoft 365 app

Big change coming: office.com, the Office mobile app and the Office for Windows app will become the Microsoft 365 app, with a new icon, look and additional features.

We will find the interface that we already know with the "create" and "my content" modules, to which will be added :

- Feed : Relevant content based on who you work with and what you work on is surfaced through an easy-to-digest interface to simplify your workflow. Available today for commercial users on the web, Windows, and mobile.

- Tagging : A new way to group and organize your content with custom tags across all types of content. Available today for commercial users on the web and Windows

The changes will begin rolling out for Office.com in November 2022. Then, the changes will begin rolling out for the Office app on Windows and the Office mobile app in January 2023. If you want to know more, you can refer to the official announcement.

# 4 : Refresh interface of OneDrive

Change also to the OneDrive sharing interface. This one is enriched with new features particularly interesting:

- Visual file type filters to search better by document type

- The "People" filter to access all the files you have collaborated on by person card. The view shows by default the last people you collaborated with but it is possible to search for other people using a search bar.

- The "Meetings" filter to find files shared in a meeting you attended. This view includes all the meetings you've been invited to, as well as all the files shared in attachments, discussions and even meeting recordings, making it easier to find information.

If you want to know more, you can refer to the official announcement.

#5 : Microsoft Teams channels reimagined

Change also in the Teams channel interface. This one is enriched with new features particularly interesting:

- The compose box and recent messages now appear at the top of the page. This makes it much easier to create a new message without having to look at the bottom of the window.

- Message composition now groups message types, such as announcements, Q&A, video clip and more to come ...

- Each post in a channel can be pinned more easily and users can also pop out the post, keep an eye on the discussion, while continuing to work on other topics.

- Each channel will have a customizable header if you want to add a particular visual identity to a channel

This interface will be available in private preview by the end of the year and if you want to know more, you can refer to the official announcement.

#6 : New features coming for Microsoft Loop

The development of Microsoft Loop continues and there have been many announcements. Here are the ones I find most interesting:

- Loop as an application with workspaces, pages and components (that sync with Microsoft 365 applications) to work on collaborative projects such as event planning, product development, brainstorming, etc...

- Loop components in more places (Word for the web + Whiteboard). Loop is now available in Word for the web, Whiteboard and Outlook for Windows. And the best part is that if you want to transfer the conversation to another application, you can copy and paste the component into Teams chat, Outlook or Whiteboard. All content remains synchronized and updated in real time, no matter where your teammates access the component.

- New Loop component types (Polls + Q&A). 2 new modules are introduced. Polls which allows you to create and launch quizzes and word clouds. Q&A for collects answers to questions in real-time across your team and tracks who responds to each question in line, providing clarity on who responds to what.

If you want to know more, you can refer to the official announcement.