Microsoft Ignite seems to be attracting a lot of attention from enterprise folks focused on Azure, Office, and now Skype for business.
Typical sessions (among 273 others) that caught my attention were the ones related to legal compliance in general. I had not yet seen so many interesting sessions on the topic all put together in one place. That’s the kind of topic that really differentiates a conference for the general public from something really targeted at enterprise customers. For instance:
From the horse's mouth: learn how the legal personnel from within Rogers Communication and Microsoft IT started using hold and eDiscovery instead of third party products, and hear best practices learned in real-world scenarios.
Going through a process of legal discovery is a nightmare situation for those who have ever lived it, and it would be interesting to see what technologies can do to make it easier. Microsoft is calling that “eDiscovery for Microsoft Office 365” and “in-Place eDiscovery”.
There are also about 53 sessions on the “Enterprise Developers” category, mostly dealing with Office 365, Skype, and Azure. However for me the crown jewels on this category are:
This session demos using Desired State Configuration (DSC) with Release Management for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 to tackle real-world deployment challenges. We start by presenting an overview of the key concepts, architecture, and configuration of the various components. We discuss the out-of-the box deployment actions available to compose automations for common deployment scenarios and how to use extensibility to cover the not-so-common scenarios. In more detail, we discuss adding custom DSC resources, how to trigger release as part of a build and how to leverage logs to diagnose failed releases. These are presented through specific scenarios encountered in the field.
and
With Release Management for Microsoft Visual Studio you can achieve true continuous delivery on any platform. This session demos how to use Release Management for continuous delivery in cross-platform environments including Windows and Linux. We cover how to leverage Desired State Configuration (DSC) and ASP.NET core to create a release pipeline for both Windows and Linux.
I am also curious to see what will be of the Hackathon session:
The cloud-targeted app is failing in production. Competitive time to market advantage is at risk, the business is at an inflection point. "It worked fine in testing!" says the Development Team. "We had no visibility to production infrastructure needs until a week ago!" says the Operations Team. Does any of this sound familiar? Learn firsthand how to embrace a DevOps mindset, evolve your traditional ALM approach regarding people, process and tools, and help your business accelerate its journey to a cloud-first approach! Join us for the DevOps Hackathon @ Ignite where you will team up with fellow attendees from developer and operations roles to apply DevOps practices to a real world challenge. Small teams will be formed at the start of the [session].
I am not sure yet if I will be able to attend, but this if I am then this would be an interesting session to be.
In conclusion
Even if you might not be able to attend, just browsing over the session catalog for Ignite is already a learning experience of what is coming on the Microsoft pipeline.