Microsoft Ignite 2024 Unpacked: Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights
In this episode, host Zeshan Randhawa dives into the game-changing highlights from Microsoft Ignite 2024. Hear firsthand insights from Eric Fugere, National Director of Microsoft Programs at MSP Corp, and Michael Lamontagne, Microsoft MVP and co-founder at Entergrade Solutions, as they share live takeaways and what these innovations mean for business leaders navigating the evolving digital landscape. Don’t miss this exclusive recap!
Transcript
You’re listening to the Cloud Lounge podcast, a show about business technology and all that jazz brought to you by soft landing, a leading it service provider in Canada. Let’s get started. Here’s your host, Zeshan Randhawa. Welcome to the Cloud Lounge podcast. I’m your host, Zeshan. Well, folks, today we have a special episode lined up for you. We’ll be diving into the highlights and key takeaways from the Microsoft Ignite event of 2024. This year’s conference was packed with groundbreaking announcements, innovative solutions and insightful sessions that are set to reshape the cloud landscape.
Now, rather than reading out a list of announcements and updates from Ignite, we have two industry experts who will share their experience of attending the event live. First, I’d like to introduce Eric Fugere, who is the National Director of Microsoft Programs at MSP Corp. Joining Eric, we also have Michael LaMontagne, who is a Microsoft MVP and co-founder at Entergrade Solutions. Well, Michael and Eric, welcome to the Cloud Lounge podcast.
Thank you.
Thanks, Zeshan
Well, I’d like to start at the simplest spot by having you folks introduce yourselves. Michael, maybe we can start with you.
Sure, yeah, I’m Michael Lamontagne. I’m an 11-time Microsoft MVP. So, I’m deeply engaged in the Microsoft community ecosystem. I followed the Microsoft communication journey from Lync to Skype to Skype for Business Online and Teams. My primary focus is really all things Teams, phone devices, and helping customers in their journey, whatever stage they might be at.
Excellent. And Eric?
So, my role here at MSP Corp is National Director for Vendor Management for Microsoft. I’ve been involved in Microsoft sales, support, or management throughout my entire career. I started selling Microsoft NT4 back in 1999, so I’ve definitely seen the evolution and feel that I have been a good companion to it throughout the 25 years that I’ve been selling this product.
Excellent. As I mentioned to the listeners, I know both of you were able to attend in person at Chicago this year. I just want to start by getting your overall impression and experience at the actual Ignite event this year. Eric, maybe we can start with you.
Sure thing. The atmosphere was super stimulating. There was a great energy in the air. Many people were there, and having not been to a convention of this type in a while, a lot of people were expressing happiness to see faces again. That was part of the great reason I went there, to really get to see some of those folks that we collaborate with daily on Teams and actually see more than just a torso. It was really interesting to run into a lot of folks, including the pleasure of meeting Michael for the first time.
Absolutely. And Michael, how was it for you?
Yeah, I have been fortunate to attend all the Ignite conferences except for the two in Seattle. I don’t work for Microsoft, but I get to represent Microsoft. This year, I was in the expert meetup and under the Copilot and Admin Center section. So, I got to be with the product group and engineering, interacting with customers and partners around those key areas. I didn’t get a chance to attend sessions; I spent the whole time in the hub or expo area, really interacting with customers and partners. My impression of this Ignite is that it’s really getting close to where we were before, and I’m really excited to talk about this event and also the Ignite coming in San Francisco next year.
Absolutely. Now, I know this might be like asking who is your favorite child, but are you able to highlight one or two announcements that excited you the most? Maybe Michael, we could start with you.
I’m going to be biased because I was in the Copilot for Admin Center. So, I’m going to start with that one because it floated under the radar. But all the admin centers, Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Teams Admin Center, SharePoint Admin Center, and Exchange Admin Center, as an admin, you are going to get access to using Copilot in these different kinds of experiences as long as your tenant has at least one Copilot license. So, you don’t have to have a Copilot license assigned to you as an admin, but you get the benefit of, if your organization is using Copilot, being able to use Copilot for administrative tasks. The Microsoft 365 Admin Center is planned to go generally available in January. The public preview is running right now in December. The first iteration is really query only, so you can ask questions like “Give me a list of users that have these specific licenses and this may be based on department” and “What is the usage that they are seeing in Copilot?” So, there will be some interesting prompting that admins can do that they may have had to go to PowerShell for before. The other thing I would talk about from an announcement point of view is Copilot actions. This is in Teams, where you can build out automated tasks that can be set up using fill-in-the-blank prompts, similar to a choose-your-own-adventure. You can say, “I want to get a weekly message that summarizes important action items” or “I want to reach out to these individuals on my team on a weekly basis to schedule a one-on-one” or something like that. It was interesting to see that lens from a productivity point of view. And then, of course, interacting with the product group, I’m like, “So when are we going to have Copilot actions and admin centers where it can give me a license utilization report at the end of the week?” and stuff like that. Not on the roadmap, and they were like, “That’s a great idea.” So, we’ll see what comes down the path.
Excellent, excellent. Hopefully, Copilot and Admin Center can help with the ever-changing locations of certain settings in there as well. Eric, how about yourself?
Piggybacking on the Copilot enhancements, that was definitely a big focus point. Obviously, we’re Copilot jumpstart partners, so I love to get all the information as early as possible. Talking about agents, that was really interesting—the out-of-the-box agents that they’re trying to make specialized roles with. I thought that was really cool in Copilot. We also have an amazing practice around Fabric, so it’s always exciting to see the product evolve. This year’s announcement of bringing a SQL-like database into Fabric for streamlining data management and analytics was fascinating. Instead of it pinging external sources, it brings those sources directly within the Fabric environment. That’s going to be a key development in my opinion. I think that was really fascinating as well. I don’t know if Michael agrees or not, but everybody was talking about the Windows 365 Link for some reason. I thought it was okay. It seemed like a cool product, but I’m not sure if that was the highlight, in my opinion. It’s a thin client, right? Maybe I’m oversimplifying it.
It was funny that the booth was right across from where I was in the admin centers. So, I got a chance to interact with the team over there and see what they were doing. My first comment was, “Why isn’t there a laptop form factor? Wouldn’t organizations want to ship out a really simple screen, keyboard, and access to Windows 365 without having to ship a monitor?” So, we’ll see if any feedback was taken.
I figured there were some uses for it, in a retail environment or for shared lines that need applications. But yeah, frontline kiosks, and I don’t want to use a term that’s too unpopular, but I think it had applications. I completely agree with you, Michael. I think having a Chromebook form factor might have been an interesting way to pitch this thing.
Absolutely. Now, talking about announcements, I’d love to know more about the long-term side of things. What kind of trends or innovations discussed at Ignite do you think will have the biggest impact on organizations in the coming years? Michael, maybe we can start with you on that.
Yeah, I mean, it was interesting at Ignite, right? Previous Ignites, every product and every product group would have their spotlight and announce all the fun things they are building, all the features that are coming out, and get to demo that. This Ignite was really about every product explaining how they are in the AI journey. Products and innovations showed how they use AI in their lens or scope. So, it was very different. If you are thinking about trends in innovation, it’s really anything AI. When you walked around the expo, you saw Microsoft and the partners finding different ways to leverage this technology in pretty much any scenario, doing some pretty impressive things.
Piggybacking on that, I think even the hardware vendors that were there had Copilot onboard. They were pitching that they were building devices structured to support AI. I agree, AI was everywhere from that aspect.
One that I thought was pretty interesting is AI Foundry, Azure AI Foundry, which is helping enterprise AI development with new tools and integrations to make the citizen developer more powerful, giving more abilities to Azure. Aside from AI, I think that was also one that struck me as something with long-term impact in changing the way we all work.
Absolutely. Now, I know Copilot and AI were at the forefront of the discussion, but were there any other technologies or solutions you think businesses should be paying close attention to, or is it Copilot and AI that takes the focus as well? Eric, I do think there was always, at least in a lot of the sessions I attended from a learning perspective, a good focus on security innovations. The new features and how they are trying to make security Copilot, personal data encryption, and compliance important in managing your AI environment for the data you are about to input into that feedback. There was an air of security in a lot of the things I attended. I think that was one of the consistent themes throughout all the presentations I sat through.
Excellent. Michael, anything businesses should be paying close attention to from Ignite?
Yeah, I would recommend any business looking to deploy Copilot to look at the on-demand sessions from Ignite, especially around adoption. There are a lot of different approaches and conversations around really driving or maximizing value and driving usage. I was glad Eric talked about security because I was like, if he talks about adoption, I’m not sure what else I’ll say, but I think that’s the big one everyone is trying to figure out. How do we justify ROI and get people using the technology? Watching these recorded sessions is a big win. It is a resource not every business may tap into without knowing about it.
Absolutely. That’s very true. Microsoft is proving it with the amount of programs they are throwing at adoption for Copilot; they really want this to stick. I know a lot of times, going to a conference like Ignite, some announcements are like, “It’s coming next quarter” or “TBD,” but I’d love to get insight from you folks on some practical insights or actionable takeaways that you gained or that you plan to implement in your day-to-day work. Eric, maybe we can start with you.
Sure thing. I do a lot of thought leadership, and while I don’t want to say I’m a thought leader, I have a lot of dialogue with clients and exploring the Copilot environment. I think that being able to properly demo a lot of the things we have implemented in our tenant, some of the enhancements are going to be fun to demo for people, just to show them the power of what Copilot can achieve. Maybe dabble in more of Power Automate to bring even more value to the end users, especially those clients that have investment in the E5 suite, making sure they are really leveraging all the great benefits they have within it. So, a lot of those exciting announcements are the ones I’m going to try to emphasize and show that the product is in full evolution all the time.
Absolutely. Spoken like a true thought leader, Eric. Michael, how about yourself? Any practical takeaways?
Yeah, I think it’s taking that higher view of what’s going on. I get to play with a lot of features under development and provide feedback to the product group throughout the year. When you look at something like the Ignite Book of News, a PDF document with many pages of announcements, features, and changes to the roadmap, if you take it from the customer lens, not living in the technology all the time, I see better ways to help customers manage that fire hose. Not everyone may be exposed to the sheer volume of features, so there’s a lot to consume in a short period. Now that the event is over and things are winding down, what are you most excited to follow up on and put into action? Michael, takeaways from Ignite?
Yes, there is a large pipeline of new scenarios based on conversations with customers, really having the gears turning on how it can help unblock new or existing customers. That’s my biggest next step, going through my list of notes, getting the wheels turning, and putting stuff on paper in those conversations.
Absolutely. How about you, Eric?
Yes, deepened learning. A lot of Copilot Studio stuff I thought was maybe outside my technical acumen, I find now to be more interesting. So, I want to do more development there because they are making Copilot Studio so simple that a layman can use it, but someone with some savviness can get around using that. That is something I want to double-click on short term. That fabric announcement, understanding what that database looks like, and if we can shift databases into fabric. I want to get more clarity and comfort in discussing it. A lot of learning to do.
Just in closing here, and again, this may be tough to answer, but for organizations or people that weren’t able to attend, what is the one thing they should absolutely know from Ignite 2024, and I cannot accept Copilot or AI as an answer.
Go ahead, I’ll go with innovation. We’re in an incredible time right now and paying attention to these items and the way they’re evolving in leaps and bounds, being adopted at such an incredible pace. The excitement of innovation should drive interest in what was presented at Ignite.
Absolutely. The pace of change is taking another leap for sure. How about you, Michael?
I’m going to cheat with this question. I’m going to double down on a previous statement. The session schedule for Ignite is still up, and you can access 450 on-demand sessions. Organizations should take the opportunity to look at these sessions. It won’t replace being at Ignite; not all sessions are recorded, and there are theater sessions and partner sessions that aren’t recorded. But there is still an amazing amount of content. Organizations can then focus on the key areas they want to see where the evolution and roadmap are going in their products.
Excellent. Michael and Eric, I really appreciate, and I know the listeners do as well, you folks taking the time to share your thoughts, ideas, and experience at Ignite. Thank you for joining us on the Cloud Lounge podcast.
Thank you for having us.
Yeah, thanks so much.
Thank you for tuning into this special episode of the Cloud Lounge. We are grateful to our guests for sharing their valuable perspectives and experiences. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to the Cloud Lounge on your favorite podcast platform, so you never miss an update. Until next time, this has been the Cloud Lounge podcast. Take care.
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Softlanding is a long-established IT services provider of transformation, professional services and managed IT services that helps organizations boost innovation and drive business value. We are a multi-award-winning Microsoft Gold Partner with 13 Gold Competencies and we use our experience and expertise to be a trusted advisor to our clients. Headquartered in Vancouver, BC, we have staff and offices in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary to serve clients across Canada.
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