A Summary of Microsoft Roadmap Updates from Microsoft’s Ignite 2019!
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Microsoft has been busy! At Microsoft’s 2019 Ignite conference, attendees learned about numerous updates to what the company has been doing, along with new/improved tools and technologies. The main focus is at the conference was Azure, including improving Azure Infrastructure, revamping Azure Apps, accelerating Azure Data & AI, and integrating Azure IoT. Improvements also included Microsoft Power Automate & Power Virtual Agents allowing for automated flows and AI-driven solutions.

Microsoft 365 also has numerous updates and additional abilities. Most are focused on the ability to gain applicable knowledge easily, improve core productivity, and provide more developer tools. Security has also been a top priority.

PowerApps is a low code/no code suite of apps, services, connectors and data platforms that provides a rapid application development environment to build custom apps for your business needs.

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Using PowerApps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your business data stored either in the underlying data platform (Common Data Service) or in various online and on-premises data sources (SharePoint, Excel, Office 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and so on).

Apps built using PowerApps provide rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform your manual business processes to digital, automated processes. In addition, apps built using PowerApps have a responsive design and can run seamlessly in a browser or on mobile devices (phone or tablet). PowerApps "democratizes" the custom business app building experience by enabling users to build feature-rich, custom business apps without writing code.

PowerApps also provides an extensible platform that lets pro developers programmatically interact with data and metadata, apply business logic, create custom connectors, and integrate with external data.

Microsoft has made massive changes to its end-user automation tools including branding, pricing and the complexity of its licensing.
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On the branding side, Microsoft Flow is now called Power Automate. Power Automate is a cloud-based software tool that allows employees to create and automate workflows across multiple applications and services without the need for developer help. View the video below to learn more about Power Automate.

Tired of upgrading NAS and file servers and migrating data every 3-5 years? With Nasuni you don’t have to.

File storage is not always simple and file servers are painful; organizations often have to overcome fundamental obstacles in object storage like latency, file retrieval, and organizational issues to make object storage usable for storing business files.

Nasuni® Cloud File Services™ is a software as a service (SaaS) platform that allows IT teams to gain a more scalable, affordable, manageable, and highly available file infrastructure that meets cloud-first objectives and eliminates tedious data migrations and forklift upgrades. Nasuni enables organizations to store, protect, and collaborate on files by offering a unique solution which combines a master “gold copy” record of files stored in Azure in combination with both physical and virtual filers which live at the customer’s remote sites. This together allows for cloud protection and unlimited storage to be combined with the LAN speed type access of a traditional file server. The best of both worlds.

Power BI can now be shared with anyone in your network within seconds!

Native data reporting within SharePoint is a powerful tool to have, but embedding this reporting into Power BI is even more powerful.

The option for sharing Power BI data has been somewhat limited until now. Microsoft recently launched an update allowing users to embed interactive Power BI reports into SharePoint pages. This new feature allows convenient access to sharing data-rich graphs as well as other presentations. The embedded reports are also more secure because not all users have permission to access the report; the permissions to review the report are set within the Power BI service. This means they can be shared for internal or external review as needed.