Microsoft

Microsoft’s Teams has quickly found itself at the center of the work-from-home conversation that has kicked up during the past month. The company reported that they added 12 million new users in a week last month and coming next month, they will roll out a highly requested feature.

Microsoft is not planning to have an in-person event until after July of FY2021 concludes and is re-thinking its entire conference strategy.

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.

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.

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.