Microsoft Announces New Offerings at Inspire 2020: Empowering Partners to Make More Possible

Microsoft today concluded its ‘Inspire Conference’, a two-day digital event that brought together its partner community from across the world. The company announced new innovations, as well as enhancements to existing offerings during the conference with the aim to empower its partner ecosystem, to better serve customers, and manage their business amid changing work environments.

“Our partner ecosystem is essential to deliver transformative solutions for our customers,” said Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner at Microsoft. “Each year, we hear countless success stories from customers across industries around the world who depend on our partners’ innovation, dedication, and service. But in the past year — and in the past few months especially — we have seen firsthand exactly what our partner community offers in a dramatically changing world: unlimited potential. The potential to adapt, to connect, to innovate, and to achieve more.”

Some of the key announcements made during the event include, enhancements to Azure Lighthouse by bringing Multi-Factor Authentication and Privileged Identity Management support; Azure Stack HCI, the latest in Microsoft’s hybrid portfolio and now in public preview, that brings hybrid capabilities to customers’ datacenters while enabling them to leverage existing skills and investment; and new bundled services for Lenovo Managed Services that are designed to help small- and medium-sized businesses support Microsoft software productivity, security, and collaboration.

Microsoft also added new capabilities to its Teams platform in the company’s efforts to empower Firstline Workers connect and engage with information, apps and co-workers while enabling organizational agility. The new Communities feature provides access to Yammer announcements, updates, discussions and events directly from Teams; Walkie Talkie, now in public preview, enables secure push-to-talk communication; and new features streamline shift scheduling and task publishing for Firstline Managers. Additionally, to deliver a more secure workplace, the new Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention in Microsoft 365 will help customers identify and protect information on endpoints.

At Inspire, Microsoft reiterated its commitment towards environmental sustainability by announcing a new coalition with eight leading corporations. The cross-sector initiative known as Transform to Net Zero, aims to deliver guidance and business plans to private sector and enable a transformation to net zero emissions, but also deliver meaningful emissions reductions and economic success. The company also launched a private preview of the Microsoft Sustainability Calculator that provides cloud customers with transparency into their total carbon emissions.

More details on the announcements made at Inspire can be found in the Microsoft Inspire Book of News.