Microsoft Inspire is Microsoft’s largest partner event, providing partner insight into the Microsoft roadmap for the year ahead.
Inspire is a 2-day conference that takes place annually in July for Microsoft’s partner community. It is a brilliant chance for the Microsoft partner ecosystem to come together to: learn best practices, experience the latest product innovations and learn new skills and techniques to share back with customers.
Taking place digitally for another year, I attended the conference from the comfort of my home office. Here are my top three take aways from the 2-day event:
1. Bend the productivity curve
It is now essential to achieve more with less. The modernisation and automation of Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft platform offers the opportunity to achieve even greater productivity gains.
CEO and Chairman of Microsoft, Satya Nadella said in his keynote session, “When we make every day experiences collaborative, we can bend the productivity curve for an entire organization.”
A key example of this within the Microsoft stack is the new Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform – an open, extensible, and collaborative contact centre solution, powered by Teams, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Azure and Nuance. The Digital Contact Center Platform enables organisations to deliver seamless customer journeys.
2. Hybrid work is now just work
The need to adapt to new working models is not optional. Greater collaboration and integration of people and processes, all the while making sure employees feel included, are fundamental to core strategy. This is what Microsoft is calling ‘the digital imperative.’
Excel Live is a great example of how Microsoft is supporting this collaboration between employees, no matter where they are based.
Excel Live enables people to work simultaneously on workbooks, directly within the Teams meeting window. Collaborative annotations give people the ability to draw, type or react to shared meeting content via a whiteboard, all in real time.
Another example is Microsoft Viva – an employee experience platform that uses a variety of tools to increase productivity and collaboration.
The new Viva Engage app helps organisations build connections and a sense of community. It provides employees with personal expression tools such as the ability to create and share video posts through the new stories feature.
3. Sustainability in everything we do
We can all do our bit to protect the planet by having a sustainability-first mindset. Organisations have the ability to do more. From recycling chips from data centre upgrades into educational computers, to deploying programmes which drive green initiatives, sustainability is at the core of every element of the Microsoft strategy.
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability provides the ability to record, report and reduce your environmental impact with Microsoft Sustainability Manager. It has been designed to unify data intelligence, build a sustainable IT infrastructure, reduce the environmental impact of operations and create sustainable value chains. It is something I encourage all organisations to look into.
To conclude, Microsoft Inspire 2022 once again showed Microsoft continues to be at the forefront of digital advancements across the technology industry. Telefónica Tech is excited to put these announcements into practice for our customers.
If you would like to know more about Microsoft Inspire or how Telefónica Tech can help your business with its digital transformation get in touch to arrange a conversation.