Microsoft today previewed the top line items that it will be sharing with its business partners at the annual Inspire convention, to be held next week in Las Vegas, Nevada. Microsoft works with 72,000 cloud partners, and works with partners in 234 countries, employing more than 17 million people.
The company announced improvements to Azure, many focused on making data movement to the cloud easier for companies, a free version of Microsoft Teams, its collaboration software that targets entrenched products like Slack and new live event and collaboration tools for Microsoft 365 which make remote work more immersive. A free signup option for Microsoft Teams is now available.
Less exciting for the recalcitrant worker is the new Nudge feature, which offers low-keyed urgings to work team participants to meet agreed on targets. With Windows Server and SQL Server 2008 approaching End of Support, the company has introduced a new offer to migrate existing services to Azure at no additional charge and will offer a tool to assist with data migrations, Azure DB Managed Instance in early Q4 of this year.
Deeper, more specific reporting of this news will be featured in next week’s BitDepth column.
