Reflecting on Microsoft Ignite 2020: Five big strategic takeaways for Business Applications
I’m running a good week behind on this, but do want to share the big business applications theme to emerge from the 2020 edition of Microsoft Ignite about ten days ago: This is the year that low-code cloud transformation goes mainstream. With that I’ll also share my top five reflections on Ignite from a cloud strategy perspective. Joe Griffin has got a great top five at a more detailed feature-by-feature level on his CRM Chap blog, and I also recommend you give a listen to Lisa Crosbie’s and Megan Walker’s “Microsoft Ignite Session Recommendations“ on The Up Podcast (which, incidentally, needs to be part of your regular listening).
So here we go, with a special shout to Laura Graham-Brown at whose urging I decided to put this post together, albeit a few days late…
In the coming weeks we’ll be updating the adoption framework’s Environmental Architecture Model to include Teams environments as shown in the diagram above.
Project Oakdale is (still) a really big deal
In July I wrote that the integration of Power Platform and Teams—for the moment dubbed “Project Oakdale”—would be one of the “most profound Microsoft product evolutions of 2020”. Well, it is. And though the product name “Dataflex” was short-lived, the technology itself is everything we had hoped for as it entered public preview late last month. This post on the Power Apps blog is the best place to start with the nuts and bolts of this. Strategically speaking, though, organizations now need to be thinking of Teams and Power Platform as technologies to be adopted, managed, and governed in parallel with one another. Importantly, application lifecycle from Productivity to Important to Critical solutions has now been tied together. Whereas productivity apps were once largely built as Power Apps on SharePoint whilst important and critical apps were (or at least should have been) built as Power Apps on CDS, the transition of productivity-grade apps away from SharePoint and over to Power Apps on Teams ties the whole picture together. My bet is that Microsoft will invest significantly in capability around promoting apps and environments from Project Oakdale to CDS so that there is a clear upgrade path as solutions mature from productivity into the more important and critical tiers. Refer to the Power Platform Adoption Framework for more on this “Productivity > Important > Critical” concept. This point is, to me, the most exciting part about Project Oakdale.
Microsoft Teams is the center of the known universe
Whilst we’re on the topic: TEAMS! The official Teams blog has a great summary of all the new features that dropped at Ignite, but WOW. Just as Power Platform has become Microsoft’s forward-looking answer to what will in the next couple of years be the majority application development, so too has Teams become the forward-looking answer to the moment-to-moment user experience that was previously strewn all about the stack. We’ve seen Teams log more than 200 million meeting participants in a single day, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes amongst more than 75 million daily active users. Bet on more and more of the all-up Microsoft user experience converging here. From a user experience perspective, everyone in the business of developing business applications needs to be asking themselves—at every turn of design—how does this play with Teams?
Nice to see the Power Platform icons get some re-branding love as they get better aligned with the design aesthetic we’re seeing across Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem.
“Three Clouds”, One Ecosystem
Power Platform. Azure. Microsoft 365. Anyone not thinking of the services resident in Microsoft’s “Three Clouds” as an integrated ecosystem needs to find a new line of work. This trend is visually represented by Power Platform’s new icons that bring the branding of Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Virtual agents closer to the design language we see across the stack. I’ve spent the first half of this post talking about how Teams is now the center of the known (or at least the Microsoft) universe. But for further strong evidence that Microsoft is increasingly pushing us to view its three clouds as a single ecosystem, look no further than the quiet repositioning of the Common Data Service (CDS) as Microsoft’s go-to data platform as a service. This is—I believe—the true meaning behind the aborted rebranding of CDS earlier in the summer: To position the service as more than a data store, rather as the go-to service for the security, logic, modeling, reporting, integration, and—yes—storage of application data for much of the Microsoft ecosystem. Expect to see more CDS in places you’d not have previously expected. Project Oakdale is just the beginning.
Power Platform adoption, management, and governance has gone mainstream
This seems obvious to those of us who have been obsessed with this topic for a couple of years, but it was striking that Ryan Cunningham chose to use his Ignite segment to focus nearly exclusively on the topic, rather than on the latest advancements in the platform’s application development capability. For the uninitiated, “management and governance” is about establishing and maintaining guard rails for the platform so developers can build beautiful and useful things with confidence that what they build will be managed, secured, and otherwise looked after in a compliant way following best practices. It is essential for large enterprise-grade organizations (and smaller ones, too) embracing Power Platform. So note that the CoE Starter Kit now supports both UI Flows in Power Automate and Teams environments via Project Oakdale. I predict that we see the CoE Starter Kit taking on mainstream prominence—something that folks really specialize in the same way that others in the past have specialized in implementing the first-party Dynamics applications—and that in time we see some of the kit’s core features cleaving off to join the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) “proper”. For more on Power Platform adoption, management, and governance I will just direct you to the Power Platform Adoption Framework… to which we have a lot of new content coming, and itself now has an official “AKA” at https://aka.ms/PPAF.
RPA for all!
Joe covered this one in his aforementioned post, but I think it’s worth considering again what this means for Microsoft’s overall business applications + low-code strategy. You can learn more about the release of Power Automate Desktop in Stephen Siciliano’s “Jumpstart your business with Power Automate’s new desktop RPA solution” post over on the Power Automate blog, but the key theme here is that Microsoft is keen to bring RPA—very recently the sole domain of software engineers—to citizen developer productivity similarly to what it has done for app development. For Microsoft customers this will provide greater flexibility as to what can be automated so that employees can focus on deep work that resists automation, and of Microsoft partners this will require a move “up market” to provide value around more complex automations that can’t be achieved through citizen development.
What do you think? What were your big takeaways from this year’s edition of Microsoft Ignite? I’d love to hear.
