RStarting the day with an amazing show as usual, nothing best to start the day and officially launch the conference.

Over 70 MVPs, MCMs and experts ready to rock the next couple of days.

In this edition, an ‘Ask the expert’ area has been set up with the some of the product teams (SharePoint, MS Teams, One Drive, Azure), so any question related to a specific product can be discussed with the actual product team. What a better source of information

More than 2000 delegates attending this even from over 70 Countries.

ESPC is now competing with Ignite in term of attendees and interests it is catching.

Who’s best to start the talks about Microsoft 365 ? Of course the father of SharePoint, One Drive, and Office 365, Corporate Vice President, Jeff Teper.

Looking at the sessions, I can just say that there something for everyone.

In term of usage stats of SharePoint and OneDrive.

Usage of SharePoint online has grown 10 times in the last 4 years to exceed 100 millions active users per month. OneDrive usage grown 50 times.

MICROSOFT 365

Knowledge

When talking to customers, the main problem is the get the right skills, the employees need to be empowered.

AI technologies, a  great introduction of Project Cortex has been given, which just left me amazed.

In fact, the AI Builder and automatic document tagging and intelligent data extraction for diagrams, files, hand written notes …etc., just ?

Intranet and engagement

OOB user experience provided by SharePoint has been until recently, quite limited.

However, with the help of different contributors and players in the MS world, Out of the box SharePoint intranet experience and customization has been taken to a different level.

Dan Holme, gave a great demo of the new Microsoft 365 UI.

Microsoft Search, has been enhanced, and can now search not only the Microsoft content, but also bring results from other sysems (e.g. Service Now).

The Videos audio content search is a great new feature of Microsoft Search, which can easily list videos where the keyword or keyphrase is spoken, that’s great use of AI in my opinion.

Multi langages and translation for the search results is also a new feature of the Microsoft Search, in

Thanks of the stock images, a good freebie by Microsoft.

Scheduling the go live of pages is another new feature of SharePoint Intranet’s user experience and egagement

3d Space can also be added to have 3D Pages with live content, I am personally a big fun of this, especially knowing that some of my clients are still running IE 11, but if can be certainly helpful for some of you.

Yammer

New Yammer interface, is simpler, cleaner and empowered by AI.

Also, Yammer groups have been renamed to Yammer Communities

Content and team Collaboration

New features and capanbilities have been added to Power Point,

Word can now inform you what has changed in a document since the last time you opened it (who modified what and when). You can also create a task, assign it and send it to a user. This feature was possible couple of years ago, but the news are around what users get when assigning a task to review a document to them.

In fact, they receive an actionable task in their outlook with a preview of the content where you mentionned them, so they can comment without leaving their Outlook app, very handy especially when using a Phone.

Forms is also using AI to predict what actions and possible answers you might want to ask.

Business Processes

A new focus mode ion the page has been added, in which you get a full view of your content.

List formatting has been made easier, no need to know JSON anymore, thanks Microsoft.

The exemple given using flow which creates an entry in an Excel file from a From was amazing, this was powered by Office Scripting, something I should look at asap.

Microsoft Graph API

The Data layer, and the base of all the M365 product.

SharePoint Framework. Announced during the last ignite, SPFX can be used to build features in other products and is no longer limited to SharePoint Only.

Fluid Framework, coauthoring and collaboration, an amazing framework for large organizations.

Security and Compliance

Sesitivity level, can be created at the organisation level, which associated governance rules attached to each level.

The levels

Autoclassification of documents can be used which uses AI to detect the confidentiality level odf a document and might prompt you to apply the right level.

Information barrier,

Can be used to make sure that no collaboration is possible by mistake between different teams, this can be very helpful in a highly regulated environment such as Banks.