Brad Sams

This year has been a rough one for the event industry with nearly all in-person events being canceled. Microsoft has already canceled its in-person MVP summit, Build, and partner summit called Inspire and it’s not surprising to hear that the company is also altering its Ignite conference as well.

If you were to point to one software-as-a-service product inside of Microsoft that has been a pillar of the company’s growth, Office 365 would be it.

As expected, Microsoft is rolling out later this year a Teams update that will enable functionality for families (and friends) to create a Teams hub for communication, document sharing, calendaring, and password management.

Seemingly overnight, a sizeable portion of the global workforce moved to being a remote operation. While everyone is looking for new options about how to try and keep operations running as smooth as possible, cloud vendors are seeing a significant spike in usage.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft made a significant announcement regarding several of its popular certifications. The company announced that Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA), Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD), Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) certifications would be retired on June 30, 2020.

The rise of COVID-19 has put a significant amount of pressure on IT departments around the globe. With the onset of needing to support robust remote work experiences, every type of remote collaboration application has seen strong growth during the past month.

It’s a bit hard to believe but Microsoft’s Teams application is turning 3 this week. To say that the application has been a success for the company is under-selling its performance as the communication tool has been the fastest growing productivity app in the company’s history.

To those who have been working 24×7 to keep the networks alive, who imaged 100s of laptops, issued security tokens, and have been looking at health metrics for your environment as they inch closer to failing-over, thank you.

Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system has passed a significant milestone, the OS is running on more than 1 billion PCs around the globe. This is a considerable benchmark for the company and shows that customers are migrating from Windows 7 to 10 but you can expect this number to continue to climb higher.

Microsoft has announced that its developer conference, Build, is moving to a virtual-only event with the on-site portion of the conference being cancelled.

There is one feature that I have been waiting to be brought to Teams that has been on the roadmap since July – the ability to chat with Skype contacts inside of Teams. Starting this month, Microsoft will being rolling out that functionality to all customers.

In the world of software development, dogfooding is the act of using your own software. For Microsoft, this is done as a sign of trust that if they can use it for the multi-billion-dollar operation, every other company should be able to as well.