Microsoft Ignite 2018 is massive with plenty of announcements

Microsoft is presenting its huge Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida this week. Microsoft has so much to announce this year that it provided the press with a 27-page booklet containing all of it.

First up is its partnership with Adobe and SAP to take on Salesforce. The Open Data Initiative as programmed by the trio aims to create a single model for representing customer data. This helps businesses to easily port data between systems. It wouldn’t be surprising if the trio decides to develop new tools to extract value from this data, and nonetheless, businesses may also choose the Microsoft Azure platform to analyze the data.

Next up was an offer exclusive to Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) users. Businesses will now be able to use the Microsoft Authenticator app (iOS & Android) to log into their business applications with just a single tap. This way one can do away with the passwords/ second-factor authentication – ideally without compromising security.

Businesses can now rent a multiuser virtualized Windows 10 desktop on the cloud, directly from Microsoft. Also, the Microsoft Office Productivity suite is getting an AI-upgrade. PowerPoint will now start suggesting layouts and Excel will automatically pull rich data from third-party sources.

Microsoft also unveiled its next version of Surface Hub – Surface Hub 2. Set to launch in Q2 2019, the lighter and thinner massive whiteboard displays will receive a software upgrade in 2020. An upgraded Microsoft Teams and the new Azure Digital Twins were the other noteworthy announcements made, thus far.