Ignite 2019 - Day 2
ProductivityIdentity ManagementOffice AppsMicrosoft 365Power Platform
Azure Active DirectoryMicrosoft To DoPower AutomateIgnite
After a full-on first day, day 2 was set to be even more full on with every slot double or treble booked!
Azure Active Directory: New features and roadmap
As such a key component of every project based on Office or Microsoft 365, Azure Active Directory is a must know product. Having done many community sessions on the subject of managing guest users, and having been massively excited by developments in identity management over the last 3-4 years, this was a must attend session.
It didn’t disappoint!
First up, the scale of AAD is impressive:
- 250M active users!
- 30B daily authentications
- 300,000+ CPU Cores
A lot of consideration has been put into the provisioning process for users and upcoming integrations with SAP and Oracle and an existing integration with Workday will be big wins for many organisations. This is supplemented with new end points to support SCIM will help other organisations build custom provisioning solutions.
Once users are provisioned, new tools will be available to allow managers to more easily manage Front Line Workers (FLW) so that IT does not need to be involved.
There are many other features that are bringing further control to the end user and enabling easier management of permissions and identity:
What you can see in the above image are the different elements of the portals that will allow users to see their own details, gain access to apps and entitlements and review their own sign-ins.
Conditional access continues to be the go to tool to control access from users, devices and locations:
How to manage governance and automation in Teams for Education
There were some new features that are coming to Teams for EDU:
- The ability to group policies together into packages that can be deployed to groups
- Deploy policies to up to 20,000 users at a time
- Teams will be able to be set to “Pending” which will allow teachers to configure them before the students are able to access the content
Energize mission critical enterprise business processes with Microsoft Flow: Patterns, tips and tricks
As always, Serge Luca delivered a great set of scenarios and demos in his session on “Power Automate”!
Serge started off with describing the Power Architecture with a nice slide to show how everything fits together:
He followed up with a fantastic summary of some of the constraints of Power Automate:
After that it was into the detail of his controller pattern for managing complex Flows:
Some of the key take-aways for me are the structure of the Flows with regards to using blocks within blocks to build a try-catch pattern and the general level of planning that goes into producing a robust Flow.
What do I do next? Managing asks and tasks with Microsoft 365
This session was the most disappointing so far as there was not really anything new and pretty much every question asked didn’t get a very good answer.
Top CASB use cases to boost your cloud security strategy
MCAS is a great tool that provides valuable and versatile ways to investigate activity and to pro-actively respond when concerning activity is identified. Having been recently placed nearest the top-right corner of Gartner’s CASB quadrant, this was always going to be an interesting session.
All security sessions are starting with the normal scary stats:
- Average number of apps in an organisation: 1.5K
- Average number of risky apps per tenant: 729
- Average amount of data going to risky apps: 78GB
- Median dwell time of attackers: 80 days
All of these stats contribute to the need for a tool that will track usage of apps and allow an organisation to manage access to the apps and importantly, prevent access and transfer of content to apps.
Get more done with Microsoft Planner
This session was a great overview of the strategy that Microsoft are taking with regards to task management across all applications.
This is still a work in progress but it summarised the compatibility of the tasks across different tools and also demonstrated some really great progress towards creating tasks from with applications such as Word and the rest of the Office suite.