BitTitan CEO Geeman Yip and IT Director Nik Thumma delivered a 20-minute presentation to a packed house on Tuesday focused on transitioning from on-prem systems to a fully cloud model. Geeman and Nik walked through BitTitan’s own journey to the cloud over the past five years, covering project management tips and hidden costs as well as the inevitable pitfalls that come with this type of project. That session is viewable on-demand here.

Teams, Teams, and More Teams

Private Channels

Arriving to Teams is a new group called Private Channels, enabling users to collaborate and converse within a Team in a more secure and private manner. Any members of the topline Team, including Guests, can be added to a Private Channel up to 250 members. Private Channels are denoted by a lock icon to the right of the channel name. Note that integrations with Stream, Planner, and Forms are not supported as of this writing, though Microsoft ensures those are on the way. Learn more about Private Channels here.

Integration with Outlook

While the ultimate vision for Teams is to curtail email usage, new integrations with Outlook help users move conversations from Outlook into Teams and select the method of communication that will be most effective. These new integrations enable users to send information from an email into a Teams channel and vice versa. In addition, Microsoft introduced a new Tasks feature that integrates with other applications like To Do, Planner, and Outlook to provide a “single pane of glass” view for action items assigned within Teams. Learn more about these updates via ComputerWorld.

Teams Clears 20M Daily Active Users

Coming on the heels of Ignite is a surprising growth figure for Teams. Redmond shared its daily active user count has risen from 13 million in July to over 20 million today. That’s significant growth in a short period of time, indicating many organizations already in Office 365 are beginning to pay attention to this new workstream collaboration market. It’s an ominous sign for the future of Slack, who’s stock was significantly down on news of these adoption figures.

Machine Learning, AI Arrives to Office 365

Microsoft also introduced new capabilities across applications such as Word, Excel, and Outlook. For Word, these new features suggest more concise phrases or grammar and the context around the change. Excel users will now be able to record actions within the application and save to a script. Another big change for spreadsheet fans ais new functionality that allows users to ask questions about a data set and be presented with formulas to answer those questions without having to create or write them. Updates also arrived for Outlook, including the ability for Cortana to read emails out loud. Learn more about these features with this great roundup from VentureBeat.

Miss us at Ignite but want to chat about an upcoming migration project? Contact us today!