Microsoft Ignite 2017 Summary and Announcements

Ignite 2017 Key takeaways

This was the first year I have not attended Microsoft Ignite, due to unforeseen circumstances. But this didn’t stop me from covering Ignite 2017. So here we go…

Ignite 2017 this year has about 25k attendees. During the same time as Ignite, they are also running Microsoft Envision. This is more focused to business leaders across industries.  Its main focus is to have Business Leaders understand and manage their organizations in the Digital Age.

Ignite 2017 Attendee Breakout

  • 47 % ITI/IT Pros
  • 34% Developers
  • 19% ITDM.

Top Industries Attended

  • 34% IT and Software (flat YoY)
  • 20% Education
  • 9% Healthcare
  • 9% Manufacturing
  • 9% Professional & Business Services

Ignite Keynotes Summary and Links

ignite2017

Modern Workplace

Key Takeaways – Modern Workplace

Expanding Microsoft 365

  • Microsoft 365 Firstline offering and Microsoft 365 Education
  • New Windows 10 S devices from HP, Lenovo, Acer and Fujitsu starting at $275 USD

Intelligent personalized search power by Microsoft Graph

  • Bing for business
  • LinkedIn data integrated with Office 365 profile card
  • Office 365 search & discovery improvements
  • Windows 10 taskbar search

Intelligent Communications vision

  • Bring voice and video + new cognitive and data services into Micro Teams

Advances in Intelligent Security

  • Integrated Adminced threat Protection using Intelligent Security Graph
  • Better data protection and access control across Microsoft 365
  • New Compliance Manager, a single GDPR dashboard

Modernizing Business Process with Cloud and AI

Key Takeaways – Business Applications

New Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI Solutions

  • First solutions for customer care includes a virtual agent for customers, an intelligent assistant for support staff and conversational AI management tools, power by Microsoft AI
  • HP, Macy’s, and Microsoft already using this technology to improve customer satisfaction and handle more requests, more quickly

Modular apps for Dynamics 365

  • New modular apps are lightweight SaS services designed to transform one business process at a time
  • Work with Dynamics 3 business apps or can be used independently
  • Extend existing systems of record, integrate with Office 365 and augment with LinkedIn insights.
  • First to allow talent leaders and hiring managers to address a company’s most important asset, people
  • Attract: focused on recruiting | Onboard: helps you make new employees successful – Available later this year.

Deeper integration for PowerApps and Microsoft Flow + Office 365 and Dynamics 365

  • Rapidly build apps, automate tasks, simplify workflows and solve unique business problems.
  • Allow any business user familiar with InfoPath forms, Access databases or SharePoint list. This allows customers to build apps that help them achieve more, on a single no-code/low code platform.

Apps and Infra/Data and AI

  • Every customer is an AI customer

The Enterprise Cloud

Key Takeaways – Hybrid

Delivering true hybrid consistency

  • Azure Stack shipping through OEM partners including Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo
  • Database Migration Service (DMS)

Empowering customer to optimize costs

  • Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL server
  • Azure Cost Management by CFloudyn – free to all Azure subscriptions

Key Takeaways – Intelligence

Any data, any place

  • SQL Server on Linux Windows and Docker availability with SQL Server 2017 GA’

One convenient workbench for data scientists and AI developers

  • Azure Machine Learning Updates

Build intelligent apps at global scale

  • Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions integration

Performance and Scale for mission-critical analytic apps

  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse preview release of new “optimized for compute” performance tier

Cloud for Good – Key takeaways

To empower nonprofits, Microsoft Philanthropies will:

  • Microsoft has announced they met their 2016 commitment to donate $1 billion in cloud computing resources to nonprofits
  • Continue the cloud donations program, and triple the number of nonprofits Microsoft serves over the next three years
  • Launch a new Tech for Social Impact group, and the first offers, announced this week include:
    • Microsoft 365 for Nonprofits
    • Nonprofit Surface discounts for the first time ever

To get more detailed information about these announcements, please see links below or check out the Ignite2017 Site.

Official Microsoft Blog
Office Blogs
EMS Blog
Dynamics Blog
Azure Blog
Hybrid Cloud Blog
Data Platform Blogs


Until next time, Rob.

Microsoft Exchange Best Practices on Nutanix

To continue on my last blog post on Exchange...

As I mentioned previously, I support SE’s from all over the world. And again today, I got asked what are the best practices for running Exchange on Nutanix. Funny enough, this question comes in quite often.  Well, I am going to help resolve that. There’s a lot of great info out there, especially from my friend Josh Odgers, which has been leading the charge on this for a long time.  Some of his posts can be controversial, but the truth is always there.  He’s getting a point across.

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Microsoft Exchange Documentor 1.0 – Planning Tool

Microsoft Exchange Documentor 1.0 - Planning Tool
Have you had a need to document your Exchange environment?  Do you need a tool to help you plan your upgrade of Exchange?  Is your documentation current for compliance purposes?

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Exchange Server Role Requirements Calculator Explained – Part 1

Email1
The Exchange Server Role Requirement Calculator is your one stop calculation tool for Exchange 20132016 design. The tool covers design calculations for both the Mailbox and Client Access server role. Exchange 2013 reduced the number of roles from previous versions of Exchange by making the design and implementation as simple as possible and Exchange 2016 furthers that into a single role.  The Server Role Requirement Calculator helps us to size virtually and it provides in-depth sizing of every component of the hardware like CPU, Memory, Network, Storage, Backup, servers, datacenter etc.

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A Tale of Two DAGs – Deploying Exchange 2013 DAG Environment on Nutanix

As always, I try to blog on questions I get from the field and recently, I helped some colleagues and customers build a DAG on Nutanix 2 times last week ;).  The process is pretty straightforward, but there are some best practices that everyone should follow to ensure a healthy DAG environment.

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Exchange Backup Craziness – Log File Cleanup

Exchange Backup Craziness

“Often, you hear about something weird and un-supported, and feel like you have to share it”.

I often get calls and questions regarding backups and Exchange Server, and most backup technologies are not always working as required or as you would expect, but that’s off-topic.

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Deploying ADFS on Nutanix – Installing and Configuring – Part 2

Deploying and configuring Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) 2012 R2 for Office 365 can be broken down into 4 blog posts:

  1. Install and Configuring ADFS (this post)
  2. Configuring Name Resolution and additional nodes
  3. Install ADFS Proxy (Coming Soon)
  4. Leverage ADFS with Office 365 (Coming Soon)
  5. New automated methods of setting up ADFS with Office 365 (Coming Soon)

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Exchange Server 2016 RTM Released: Forged in the cloud. Built for Web-Scale

Exchange Server 2016 is here and available to download!!!

What sets this version of Exchange apart from the past, is that it was forged in the cloud. This release brings the Exchange bits that already power millions of Office 365 mailboxes to your on-premises environment. And deploying Exchange 2016 on Nutanix, you can truly create the ultimate email web-scale environment.

Email remains the backbone of business communication and the one that workers consider the most essential tool for getting things done. Because of this, it’s vital to have a modern messaging infrastructure that meets today’s business expectations of scale. With the volume of email and other communications continuing to grow, people need tools that help them focus on what’s most important in their inboxes, schedules and interactions with others at work. And as the quantity of email data grows, so do the demands on IT to manage, preserve and protect it. This is why Web-Scale so important in an Exchange 2016 environment.

Web-Scale Fundamentals  
Exchange Server 2016
To help you meet these challenges with Exchange Server, Microsoft has deepened the integration between Exchange and other Office products, so your organization can be more productive and collaborate more effectively. They’ve made it easier to manage your email with new ways to focus on what’s important, work more efficiently, and accomplish more with your devices. Microsoft has also simplified the Exchange architecture and introduced additional recovery features.

Exchange 2016 builds on and improves features introduced in Exchange 2013, including Data Loss Prevention, Managed Availability, automatic recovery from storage failures, and the web-based Exchange admin center.

  • Better collaboration: Exchange 2016 includes a new approach to attachments that simplifies document sharing and eliminates version control headaches. In Outlook 2016 or Outlook on the web, you can now attach a document as a link to SharePoint 2016 (currently in preview) or OneDrive for Business instead of a traditional attachment, providing the benefits of coauthoring and version control.
    Exchange Server 2016
  • Improved Outlook web experience: Continuing our effort to provide you with a first class web experience across devices, Microsoft has made significant updates to Outlook on the web. New features include: Sweep, Pin, Undo, inline reply, a new single-line inbox view, improved HTML rendering, new themes, emojis, and more.
    Exchange Server 2016
  • Search: A lightning-fast search architecture delivers more accurate and complete results. Outlook 2016 is optimized to use the power of the Exchange 2016 back-end to help you find things faster, across old mail and new. Search also gets more intelligent with Search suggestions, People suggestions, search refiners, and the ability to search for events in your Calendar.
    Exchange Server 2016
  • Greater extensibility:  An expanded Add-In model for Outlook desktop and Outlook on the web allows developers to build features right into the Outlook experience. Add-ins can now integrate with UI components in new ways: as highlighted text in the body of a message or meeting, in the right-hand task pane when composing or reading a message or meeting, and as a button or a dropdown option in the Outlook ribbon.
    Exchange Server 2016
  • eDiscovery: Exchange 2016 has a revamped eDiscovery pipeline that is significantly faster and more scalable. Reliability is improved due to a new search architecture that is asynchronous and distributes the work across multiple servers with better fault tolerance. You also have the ability to search, hold and export content from public folders.
  • Simplified architecture: One Role…!  Exchange 2016’s architecture reflects the way we deploy Exchange in Office 365 and is an evolution and refinement of Exchange 2013. A combined mailbox and client access server role makes it easier to plan and scale your on-premises and hybrid deployments. Coexistence with Exchange 2013 is simplified, and namespace planning is easier.
  • High availability: Automated repair improvements such as database divergence detection make Exchange easier than ever to run in a highly available way. Stability and performance enhancements from Office 365, many of which were so useful that Microsoft shipped them in Exchange 2013 Cumulative Updates, are also baked into the product.

That’s just quick list of highlights; I encourage you to get a full view of what’s new by reviewing the Exchange 2016 documentation on TechNet.
Or, if you are in the mood for something more bite-sized, check out these short demo videos in which a few members of the Exchange team show off their favorite features:

Exchange 2016 will follow the same servicing rhythm as Exchange 2013, with Cumulative Updates (CUs) released approximately every three months that contain bug fixes, product refinements, and selected new investments from Office 365. The first CU is expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2016.

Until next time, Rob….