We are here at Microsoft Ignite this week in Orlando, Florida along with almost 25,000 attendees to hear the latest from Microsoft on the productivity, cloud, machine learning, and AI fronts.
Here is a snapshot of some of the big news announcements which began the week during the main keynote led by Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella.
What Was Announced
- Microsoft 365's Intelligent Search: Credit the the Microsoft Graph for this. New features include:
- Private Preview of Bing for business, which integrates intelligent search and Microsoft Graph signals with public web search to deliver a unified view of personalized, contextual search results to find and surface important information from inside and outside your organization.
- Integration of LinkedIn data with Office 365 profile cards brings information about professional contacts and colleagues right to their profile card in Office 365.
- Significant improvements to Office 365 search help you more quickly find the content and expertise you need across SharePoint and OneDrive.
- The ability to search for people and content inside your organization directly from your Windows taskbar.
Why It's Important
We're beginning to see the power this LinkedIn buy offers Microsoft. People will be able to quickly run intel on would-be job candidates -- all while corresponding with current colleagues within Outlook, for example -- and we're seeing the shift to thinking of data as something that accumulates to a specific user id and moves with them, wherever they're working. Microsoft's showing that it considers personal information to be as potent and fungible as any other data to be analyzed and monetized.
