Microsoft Ignite 2021

Microsoft announces new tools to modernize supply chain and manufacturing

The pandemic has wreaked havoc on the world’s supply chains for a number of reasons — from a lack of raw material to labor shortages — but whatever the reason, the problems are persi

Microsoft launches Google Wave

Microsoft is bringing back Google Wave, the doomed real-time messaging and collaboration platform Google launched in 2009 and prematurely shuttered in 2010. Maybe we should’ve seen this coming.

Microsoft launches Azure Container Apps, a new serverless container service

At its Ignite conference, Microsoft today announced the preview launch of Azure Container Apps, a new fully managed serverless container service that complements the company’s existing container

Microsoft Teams gets 3D animated avatars, because metaverse

Microsoft wants a piece of the metaverse, too, so at its Ignite conference today, the company announced 3D avatars for those Teams meetings where you don’t want to be on camera. Those animated p

Microsoft brings JavaScript to Excel

At its Ignite conference, Microsoft today announced an update to Excel that brings a new JavaScript API to the venerable spreadsheet app. With this new API, developers will be able to create custom da

Microsoft’s new Azure OpenAI Service brings GPT-3 to (a few) more developers

Microsoft today announced the launch of the Azure OpenAI Service, which, as the name implies, makes OpenAI’s machine learning models available on the Azure platform. Specifically, that means GPT

Microsoft Azure wants to make working with data on its platform easier

At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced a number of new features for its Azure data platform. These range from a first preview of the 2022 edition of its venerable SQL Server line to updat

Microsoft Azure expands its hybrid and multi-cloud reach

Microsoft Azure, just like its competitors, launched a number of tools in recent years that allow enterprises to use a single platform to manage their virtual machines and containers across clouds and

Azure gets a Chaos Studio

Resorting to chaos may not sound like a sound engineering method, but chaos engineering is quickly becoming a standard way to test complex systems before real-world outages put those systems to a test

Microsoft’s Power Automate Desktop is now free for all Windows 10 users

Microsoft today announced that it is making Power Automate Desktop, its enterprise-level tool for creating automated desktop-centric workflows, available to all Windows 10 users for free. Power Automa

Microsoft brings tighter integration to Dynamics 365 and Teams

As the pandemic drags on and we learn about the requirements of working from home with distributed teams, users could be craving more integration across their tools to help reduce the clicks required

Microsoft launches Azure Percept, its new hardware and software platform to bring AI to the edge

Microsoft today announced Azure Percept, its new hardware and software platform for bringing more of its Azure AI services to the edge. Percept combines Microsoft’s Azure cloud tools for managin

Microsoft’s Azure Arc multi-cloud platform now supports machine learning workloads

With Azure Arc, Microsoft offers a service that allows its customers to run Azure in any Kubernetes environment, no matter where that container cluster is hosted. From Day One, Arc supported a wide ra

Microsoft Azure expands its NoSQL portfolio with Managed Instances for Apache Cassandra

At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced the launch of Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, its latest NoSQL database offering and a competitor to Cassandra-centric companies like D

Microsoft launches Power Fx, a new open source low-code language

Microsoft today announced Power Fx, a new low-code language that takes its cues from Excel formulas. Power Fx will become the standard for writing logic customization across Microsoft’s own low-

Microsoft updates Teams with new presentation features

It’s (virtual) Microsoft Ignite this week, Microsoft’s annual IT-centric conference and its largest, with more than 26,000 people attending the last in-person event in 2019. Given its focu