For business management solutions email us or call 020 3004 4600

The need to knows from Microsoft’s Ignite 2021 event

As many of you already know, Microsoft recently held its annual Ignite event virtually which aimed to showcase Microsoft’s plans for the coming months and into next year. In our latest blog article, we will provide you with you all the need to knows from Ignite 2021. 

Microsoft Teams 

PowerPoint Live in Teams 

This will provide presenters with the ability to share their presentation boards in Microsoft Teams without needing to share their screens. This will help to improve the overall presentation experience for example presenters will be able to look at their notes without these being shared with others.  

Dynamic View 

This will give users the ability to control the organisation of meeting items. Are you wishing for the attendee gallery to be at the top of the meeting window to enable better eye to eye contact with attendees? Sure, this can be achieved straight away! 

View of the large gallery and Fashion set 

This will make it easier for personalisation to be used to transform the overall meetings experience by giving users the ability to add up to 49 video streams in one screen for large meetings as well as the ability to add attendees’ faces in a single virtual space. 

Teams Connect 

This new feature is due to be released within the next calendar year. It will allow all users to be able to share channels with both internal and external users. Different to guest access, the shared channel will only show in a user’s primary Teams tenant along with any other Teams channels which means that numerous organisations are able to share one channel that can be accessed by users from their own Teams accounts. 

Mesh avatars in Teams 

Microsoft has recently revealed its plan to enable Teams users to be able to build their own animated avatars which will enable them to meet with colleagues across 3D virtual environments thanks to a partnership with Mesh. You can read all about this in our latest blog article

Power Platform 

Power Automate Desktop now free! 

This used to be paid subscription of around £12 per user per month but now that has been removed by Microsoft. This is fantastic news in that it almost encourages businesses to look into using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) which will be available on Windows 10 shortly.  Power Automate is such an underutilised tool by businesses as you can perform over 400 actions to help you create flows across different apps to allow you to fully automate tedious and repetitive tasks without the need for any code. Better still, it helps your business to save both time and money in the long run. 

Dynamics 365 

Dynamics 365 integration with Microsoft Teams 

This feature now allows Dynamics 365 to seamless integrate with Microsoft Teams with chat meetings and transcript now supported fully within Dynamics 365. 

Dynamics 365 Sales: Embedded Teams Experience 

You will find that sellers will now be able to track the career movement of contacts through the use of LinkedIn Sales Navigator in addition to being able to connect sales records to Teams without even leaving the sales application. You will also notice that a new side panel has been added which will show you recent and ongoing chats, channels and those in Teams that are related to the customer record in view. 

As well as this, you will find that there is an improved Teams dialer experience just for Dynamics 365 alongside an extensible video or audio Teams meeting experience that completely integrates with the sales application. 

Dynamics 365 Customer Service: Work together to solve cases quicker 

You will find that Teams has a new embedded chat capability, which can be accessed from the Dynamics 365 Customer Service agent desktop which will make it easier for agents to work together to solve cases quicker and with it improve the overall customer experience. This means that you will no longer have to switch between applications so can retain a consistent working pattern. 

Dynamics 365 Marketing: create, push & report on Teams events from within the marketing application 

You will find that this new piece of functionality will make it simpler for users to create, push and report back on events hosted within Microsoft Teams directly in the marketing application. In terms of capabilities, you will now have the ability to export attendee data and view customer segments built in Dynamics 365 Marketing based on audience attendance.  

Next Steps? 

If you are a business that has read the above and are keen to take advantage of these new features by looking to implement Microsoft Teamsimplement Dynamics 365 Sales, implement Dynamics 365 Marketing or implement Dynamics 365 Customer Service then please get in touch with one of our team of Dynamics 365 experts today to discuss your specific business requirements. 

Want to hear more from us? You can do this by making sure that you sign up to our mailing list