Day 2 of MS IGNITE 2017 in Orlando.

Day one was all about orientation both personally and within the strategy of Microsoft.

Yesterday we saw some keynotes around AI, machine learning, augmented reality and the importance of social graphs.

More related to my specialism is collaboration in the Office so I attended a keynote around the Microsoft Teams product.  During the keynote,  some announcements were made and use cases shown.  An interesting interview on its rollout at Accenture and another large organisation.  The demo of Microsoft teams showed a compelling product enabling collaboration in the workplace for staff including external folk.  A controversial statement around its design rationale was that it was aimed at millennial who work in a different way – I would have stayed away from such a statement.

One of the challenges of a conference of this size is that it is difficult to coordinate going from session to session as there might be a long walk.  I have decided not to necessarily stick to sessions around my specialisms, but to broaden.  I am about to go into a deeper dive session around teams “Collaborate in a chat based workplace using Microsoft teams”.

Later yesterday in an evening session, Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin) discussed the various classification of collaboration products and we saw that Microsoft Teams is a different use case from “classic” SharePoint (your bread and butter teamsites etc.) and Modern SharePoint.  It’s more like a workplace Facebook messenger, an evolution of Skype for business.  I took a picture of a compelling slide, but do to the sheer busyness of the event, some of is content is hidden.

Microsoft collaboration products classified by Benjamin Niaulin of ShareGate.  Here we see five classes: Conversations, where Teams sits, Meetings, Site & File, where SharePoint sits, Task Management and Others such as OneNote and Power BI.  A useful diagram in my opinion.

I’ll post more after some sessions today.