Announcements Ignite - a new Microsoft conference dedicated to IT Pro, business and productivity tools

“The mission of Microsoft is to enable every person, every company on this planet to do and achieve more” Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, in a plenary report at the Microsoft Ignite conference , bringing together 23,000 people.

In this review, we will briefly look at the main news announced at Ignite - there are many of those, we will write more about it in more detail as soon as the information appears, here it is almost news in one line. Most news about Windows Server and System Center.

Inside:

• Office updates
• Windows Server and System Center updates
• Azure Updates
• And many other interesting news.

Windows Update For Business

Windows Update for Business will allow administrators to control which devices should receive updates first (due to the Distribution Ring function, conceptually similar to how Windows 10 is distributed, that is, the waves in which updates should be distributed), at what time they should they will do it (or not), and all of this will be maximally integrated into the existing tools and technologies - System Center and Enterprise Mobility Suite.
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Windows Update for Business will be free for Windows Pro / Enterprise.

Office

Skype for Business :

• the ability to broadcast meetings on 10,000 people;
• the ability to download attachments to the meeting before its start and automatic launch;
• opportunity to jointly edit one document during the meeting.
• Skype for Business Server - own server with clients for Skype for Business on Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and the web.

Office 2016 Public Preview :

• Available for Office 365 subscribers   and as a separate installer.
• Continuing integration with cloud services — for example, you can add files directly from OneDrive and configure access rights without leaving Outlook.
• Collaborative editing with cloud sync
• Clever features Tell Me, Clutter and Insights . The first one is search, for Word, PowerPoint and Excel, it guesses the command according to what the user is beginning to type. The second is for Exchange and Outlook, it uses machine learning to analyze the user's behavior with the mail and transfers the letters with low priority to the new Clutter folder. The third, using Bing, finds context-relevant information while reading.

• A lot of new functions for analyzing data in Excel - one-click predictions, integrating Power Query with various sources (Hadoop, websites and much more), improvements to Power Pivot and PivotChart, publishing working documents to Power BI, as well as new types of graphs and diagrams.
• Data Loss Protection (DLP) for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For administrators, they can create and manage document access policies in one place.
• Multifactor authentication for Outlook.
• Information Rights Management (IRM) for Visio is online and offline.
• Network load optimization with BITS.
• Office 365 Groups - for grouping users.
• Enterprise analytics in Delve to track various trends in user behavior in Office 365. The function collects data from Office 365 applications and shows, for example, how email and Skype or Yammer communicate between teams and users, and shows the work-life balance indicator based on analysis their communications outside working hours :)
• SharePoint Server 2016. A lot of updates - more integration with the cloud, front-end and security-related.
• Exchange Server 2016. The functions entered in office 365 come to the desktop along with Outlook (for example, search functions, user interaction, etc.)

SQL Server 2016

SQL Server 2016 is coming soon (end of summer). Many updates - Always Encrypted (data protection along the way and already in place), Stretch Database (data placement in Azure), improvements and additions for in-memory and analytics with R.

Advanced threat analytics

ATA is a technology from Aorato. ATA allows you to analyze logs with authentication operations and detect Advanced Persistent Threats. The problem is that the environment and the actions that accompany the attack may look completely legitimate and correct, and here the ATA can help, which can already be used in the preview. In its work, ATA uses a combination of various algorithms that analyze packets, logs, and data from AD, and superimposes this data on heuristic machine learning algorithms.

Windows Server and System Center

Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview. In 2016 there will be a lot of new features:

• Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers (the difference between them lies in the fact that WSC gives greater speed, Hyper-V Containers does more isolation),
• Azure Service Fabric
• Large updates of the virtualization stack — replication, fault tolerance, etc. For example, hot adding or removing memory and NIC.
• Nano Server - OS, specially designed for cloud applications and containers. Made with requests for speed, flexibility and reduced resource consumption. Is a deep-recycled version of Windows Server. If, for example, you place an application on it that will work using CoreCLR, resource consumption should be minimal — the Nano Server, following the concept of microservices and the component approach, contains only the components you need (unlike Windows Server, which is traditionally good for heavy enterprise scenarios ).
• Network stack updates :
  
  • Combining NICs with tenant traffic and RDMA and reducing, for example, the number of NICs from 4 to 2.
  • PacketDirect 40G for performance optimization (PD is an extension of NDIS).
• Storage stack updates . Mainly upgrades from SDN with an emphasis on cost reduction, increased control and fault tolerance:
  
  • VM Storage Path Fault Tolerance - VMs stop correctly in case of an error with the Storage Path.
  • Storage Spaces Direct - Storage Spaces aggregation from multiple servers.
  • Storage QoS - more control and predictable performance.
  • Storage Replica - synchronous replication.
• Security Updates:
  
  • New Host Guardian Service is a mechanism for ensuring isolation and trust between the cloud and guest OS (details of this mechanism have not yet been published).
  • Just Enough Administration - restriction of permitted actions for users.
• Management tool updates:
  
  • PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC)
  • PowerShell Package Manager - package and deployment manager for PS packages.
  • Windows Management Framework 5.0 April Preview and DSC Resource Kit
  • IIS, RDS, and AD — condition-based access control in AD FS — for example, to require a device to satisfy policies for accessing resources, support for OpenID Connect and OAuth, full support for OpenGL with RDS, and server support for HTTP / 2.
  • System Center 2016 - improvements in Linux support (DSC, native support for SSH, LAMP monitoring), management and deployment of SDN, new monitoring features for Azure, Office 365, SQL Server, Exchange, and much more.
  • Operations Management Suite is a new resource management solution that can be hosted locally and virtually (Azure, AWS, Windows Server, VMWare, OpenStack), providing logging, security and automation control, and one administration window.
  • System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager Service Pack 1 and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Service Pack 2 with Windows 10 support.
  • Intune - Windows 10 support

In addition, Brad Anderson, Corporate VP Windows Server and System Center, together with the team held 11 demonstrations:
The New Outlook App: A Modern Standard for Secure E-mail
Enhanced Data Protection with Windows 10
Windows 10 Device Guard
Azure RemoteApp
Document Tracking & Secure Collaboration with Azure RMS
SaaS Management with Cloud App Discovery
Detecting Anomalous Sign-Ins with EMS
Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics
Deploying Azure in Your Datacenter
The Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS)
Power BI in SCCM

Azure

Exchange 2013 support in Azure

Azure stack
Azure Stack is a local solution containing:

• integration with System Center (for infrastructure management tasks),
• software-defined infrastructure (SDN, SDS, etc.),
• Azure Service Fabric (product for building scalable distributed projects),
• New portal Azure
• Azure Resource Manager (product for managing resources hosted in resource groups).
• Azure IaaS (Storage, Network, Compute API)
• Azure PaaS (Service Bus, Web Sites)

This solution allows building an infrastructure platform with PaaS capabilities in a local data center.

Azure Rights Management Services ( RMS ) : Document Tracking - tracking those who opened or used documents and revocation of rights, if necessary.
Azure AD Cloud App Discovery and Azure AD Privileged Identity Management - monitor and manage applications in your organization .

Disk Encryption for VMs with Linux or Windows using Key Vault, which contains encryption keys.

Client-Side Encryption for Azure Storage + Xamarin Storage Client Library

Virtual Machine Scale Set - a logical combination of virtual machines to perform operations on all with a single API call (for example, for patching or HPC).

Network :

• Azure DNS in public preview . Azure Domain Name System (DNS) is a long-awaited service that allows you to place DNS records in an Azure subscription.
• User Defined Routing - define your own routes within the Virtual Network to control traffic flows. If necessary, redefine the standard routing policies and implement NAT, firewall, or BYOG (Bring your own gateway).
• Support for new vendors and their products. Cisco, Barracuda, Check Point, Fortinet, Websense, Palo Alto Networks, F5 and Alert Logic.
• Multiple virtual IPs for the Cloud Service — for example, you need to host several websites.
• Reserved IPs can be moved between services — so you can redirect traffic in less than a minute from one deployment to another.

Total - Ignite is not over yet, but there are already many interesting announcements, and many of them are long-awaited. Stay tuned!