Ignite 2023 – A look ahead for Microsoft 365 admins

Microsoft Ignite 2023 is a huge opportunity to join the global community of IT admins who want to know more about how to transform their organizations with Microsoft 365 and with Microsoft Copilot. Sessions this year cover topics ranging from Copilot and AI, to the latest enhancements that drive collaboration and productivity, and not forgetting improvements to simplify management of Microsoft 365.   

You can still register for Ignite’s digital experience, which gets you access to livestream keynotes, breakouts and discussion sessions, Microsoft Cloud Skills challenges, and attendee networking. Some sessions will be recorded and made available after the event for you to get caught up. There’s a lot that’s going to be covered over Ignite. To help, here’s a list of some sessions we wanted to highlight, available to you whether you are attending in-person or online! 

Join these sessions or watch the livestream 

Unlock Productivity with Microsoft Copilot 

Keynote speakers: Jared Spataro and Rajesh Jha 

Join Rajesh and Jared Spataro for a look into how Microsoft has been investing in and developing Microsoft Copilot to help our customers unlock productivity and transform business processes for everyone across functions and industries. 

Getting your enterprise ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot 

Presenters: Aashish Ramdas, Jeremy Chapman, Ramesh Balasubramanian 

As an IT admin, you’re at the front lines of AI for your organization. Ensuring your environment is ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot is critical to providing the best possible user experience for people working across all functions—and to getting the most ROI out of Microsoft 365.  

Join this session to learn how you can prepare your organization for Microsoft 365 Copilot including core concepts, deployment prerequisites, information access optimization, and extensibility options. We'll also cover tips for driving internal adoption and success. Additionally, we'll provide an overview on the importance of trust in the Microsoft Cloud, with a focus on data privacy and residency, and the comprehensive enterprise compliance and security controls in place to protect data and AI models. 

Extend Microsoft 365 Copilot with your line of business apps and data 

Presenters: Rabia Williams, Sukhmani Lamba, Rob Howard 

Copilot can make it super easy to work with any app or data source in your organization. In this session we'll review customization and extensibility approaches, and demonstrate how you can build, test, debug, and deploy both a plugin and a Graph connector. We’ll also discuss extensibility administration, management, and security. You'll leave the session with practical insights, updates on new VS tooling, publishing, validation, and of course, best practices from our own Microsoft engineers. 

Watch these on-demand sessions available from day one 

Maximizing value from your Microsoft 365 and Copilot investments 

Presenter: Shilpi Sinha 

Creating the best possible user experience is critical to ensuring that people will embrace AI capabilities as part of their daily work to help make them more productive.  

Join this on-demand session on using Microsoft 365 product experiences to drive digital transformation, adoption, and user satisfaction. We will cover new Viva Insights scenarios for IT leaders, actionable insights in the Usage, Adoption, and Experience insights dashboards, and a new centralized experience for Organizational Messages in the M365 admin center. 

Governance and Security Practices for Microsoft 365 

Presenters: John Gruszczyk, Karuana Gatimu 

Frictionless, managed governance for Microsoft 365 Groups is essential to providing a seamless collaboration and communications experience that employees across your organization will love. With the advanced security capabilities available with Microsoft 365, you can help ensure that your data is safe and well managed. In this session, we’ll share the options for guided self-service provisioning, classification, reporting, auditing and lifecycle management that will impact Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Loop, and Planner. 

What’s new for Microsoft 365 admins 

Presenter: Justin Lam, Gabe Ho 

Want to hear all about the latest capabilities for Microsoft 365 admins?  

Within this session we’ll cover topics ranging from new AI-powered experiences for admins, the cloud.microsoft unified domain, managing multi-tenant and cross-tenant environments, to network provider data and actionability. 

Prepare for, implement, and secure Microsoft 365 Copilot 

Presenters: Matt Wade (MVP, Jumpto365, Inc.), Nuno Árias Silva (MVP, Inetum) 

In this live session, we’ll share the key tasks you need to complete to prepare for implementing Microsoft 365 Copilot, such as preparing data for searches, and assigning Copilot licenses. Then, you’ll learn how Microsoft 365 Copilot adheres to existing privacy and compliance obligations, how it ensures data residency and compliance boundary, and how it uses access controls and isolation to protect sensitive business data. 

Roundtable sessions  

Join us for our roundtable sessions where our product experts will provide more technical deep dives and discussions on how you can use the Microsoft 365 admin center to ensure you’re getting the most out of your Microsoft 365 investment. To participate in any of these sessions, first register for the digital experience to Ignite. There are a limited number of spots for each session so interested individuals have to complete the nomination process.  

Help us define the Microsoft 365 adoption journey 

Ashna Patel, Clive Malungah, Elva Fernandez Sanchez, Jane Bove, Margi Desai, and Nadin Merali will join you to discuss why Microsoft 365 user adoption is key to achieving high ROI. They also want to know how feedback and survey data helps you in building and evaluating digital tool adoption across your organization. What critical data points do you use, and what else could Microsoft provide to make an impact as we explore ways to help support your adoption strategy? 

Managing the pace of change – Microsoft 365 adoption 

Karuana Gatimu and Tiffany Lee will talk with you about tools, best practices, and challenges in driving adoption of Microsoft 365 services including and beyond Microsoft 365 Copilot. 

Organizational Messages in Microsoft 365 admin center 

With Organizational Messages, enterprises can connect with their users through contextual messages across multiple Microsoft channels. Brian Burks will join you for this discussion focusing on an in-development Organizational Messages experience within the Microsoft 365 admin center. We’ll take feedback from participants after a brief demonstration of primary capabilities of this experience, including fully customized message creation on multiple channels, management functions, and a multi-person approval flow. 

Shaping the future of admin experiences in Copilot 

As we evolve Copilot to help customers with IT administration, Gabe Ho, Luke Bender, Sarah Rahman, and Veronika Hanson want to hear your thoughts and ideas for creating a seamless and joyful IT management experience across a range of Microsoft admin portals and products that will simplify your job. 

Using external data sources with Microsoft 365 Copilot 

Brian Jackett, Jen Cockrell, Raju S, and Renima Malhotra will join you to discuss how you can use Microsoft Graph Connectors to index, ground, and govern your organization's Line of Business data with the Microsoft 365 Copilot. 

Your say in the future of Microsoft 365 admin center home page 

Ian Kirschner, Joe Day, Shivankit Bisht, and Vanessa Marques Figueiredo Molloy will give you an opportunity to preview the proposed redesigndiscuss the future of the Microsoft 365 admin center home page. They’ll moderate a constructive discussion on the design's efficacy and its alignment with user needs, and explore potential improvements. 

Catch up on the recording after Ignite 

How Microsoft 365 Copilot works 

Presenters: Ben Summers, David Conger, Kevin Sherman, Mary David Pasch 

Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant at work. It includes enterprise-grade security, privacy, compliance, and responsible AI to ensure all data processing happens inside your Microsoft 365 tenant—using technology Microsoft 365 customers have relied on for years. 

In this session you get a chance to go behind the scenes to understand the architecture and dataflows behind Microsoft 365 Copilot. Learn about retrieval augmented generation techniques, semantic indexing, and options to securely connect to external data. We'll also cover the transformative potential of Microsoft 365 Chat, the new hero experience for Microsoft 365 Copilot that goes far beyond simple questions and answers, and examples of specific use cases for how it can save you time. 

Stay Updated 

We’re hosting a text-based Ask-me-anything event tomorrow at 9am PT in the Microsoft 365 Copilot Community and hope to see you there! As always, you can follow all the latest updates on development and roll out of features through the Microsoft 365 Roadmap website.