Posted by I was fortunate to be able to attend Microsoft Ignite 2015 (formally TechEd) up on the Gold Coast in mid November. Ignite is for those looking for what's next or insights on key technology trends from Microsoft and the greater IT industry. It's a full-on week of learning with around 180 break-out sessions, learning labs, the Hack Theatre spread over 4 days covering technology such as Azure (cloud), developer tools (DevOps), servers and databases.
After attending TechEd previously in 2013, the key take-away for me was the focus on cloud computing - Microsoft Azure has grown to become the biggest cloud offering (covering around 21 different regions across the world with the Australian region running in Melbourne and Sydney since 2014) with a huge number of services available. In 2013 a small number of sessions focused on Azure, but in 2015 the vast majority contained content relating to Azure such as the various data storage offerings, user authentication and remote applications. Each of these particular areas may be a focus for us moving forward - who wants a hosted easyFBT usable from not only your PC, but your Mac, iPad or Android tablet? With Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) in the workplace all this is now possible and something we may investigate (let us know!!) in the future.
At the lock-note closing presentation it was re-enforced that the cloud is the future for productivity. Previously a massive 24 blade server with 192GB of Ram (per-blade) was brought in to manage the event (each session and presentation is recorded and uploaded to Microsoft's Channel 9 developer network) - this year the whole event was hosted in the cloud on Azure!
Other sessions i enjoyed included coverage of the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) - the new cross-platform Windows 10 environment (covering Desktop, Phone, XBox, HoloLens and Internet of Things (IoT)), a great session in relation to HoloLens (how would you like one day to work in a office without your PC but still be productive!). I also attended a number of sessions covering Visual Studio Team Services and DevOps so we can continue streamlining our development and testing cycle for rapid release (be that internal or external builds).
Overall for a techy like myself it's a terrific week to get away (who could argue a better place than sunny Broadbeach for a week!), listen to some great (and very entertaining) speakers, learn about some new and exciting technology and think about how some of this can be used to improve and enhance easyFBT in the future.
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