>> Okay.
If you like to take your seats,
we're ready to go with Microsoft.
If you were here yesterday and saw the
best of Enterprise Connect Awards,
you saw that Microsoft teams
received that award for the advances
that Microsoft has made
to this product that they announced a year ago.
And I think you're going to get to see some
of what was involved in that,
here at our next keynote.
And we're very pleased to welcome Microsoft,
of course they're one of the companies that
is correlative to this industry and to what
just about everyone here does in
your communications and collaboration,
and knowledge management.
So, without further ado,
I want to bring out Bob Davis,
Corporate Vice President for
Office 365 Engineering at Microsoft.
>> All right.
Thank you very much, Eric.
Hey. Well, hello everybody.
Thanks so much for joining us live and online.
It's great to be here in sunny Orlando.
I want to thank Eric and
his fabulous team for putting on a great conference.
I also want to thank all of our customers and
partners that are in the audience today.
Hey, I was one of a handful of founders of
Office 365 and I've
seen it grow from the very first user,
from the very first customer to over 120 million users.
It's been a phenomenal journey
and one that would not have been
possible without all of
the contributions from our customers and partners,
who we've gotten to work very closely with.
I'm thrilled to be here
today and that you join me for this discussion.
I'd like to start today by bringing up
a word that we've all been hearing a lot about lately.
Intelligent. It seems like every day we're seeing
more and more things and
our lives becoming more intelligent.
Thermostats, that figure out how
to save on our electric bill.
Watches, that study our sleep patterns
and make helpful recommendations.
And yes, even cars that drive themselves.
And we've seen what happens when things get smart.
We save time, we know more,
we accomplish more, simply put life gets simpler.
I love that on my Surface I don't have to
remember my password, it remembers me.
Windows Hello sees my face and it unlocks without a fuss.
Cortana, gives me an overview
of my day while I'm on my way to work,
and Office 365, my analytics
gives me interesting stats about how I work.
Like how much time I spend in email,
how much time I spend in meetings.
And like most of you,
I spend a lot of time in both.
Everything around us is
becoming more and more intelligent.
I'm here this day to say that it's time to make
the way we communicate and collaborate more intelligent.
It's time for intelligent communications.
Intelligent communications is
a broad and long-term vision
for our industry and
Microsoft together with our ecosystem
of partners is so excited to lead the way.
Our vision for intelligent communication,
builds on the amazing work
our entire industry has done and
continues to do around unified communications.
But with intelligent communications,
we now forge a new path.
A new vision for what we should
expect from our communications tools.
So, what is intelligent communications?
What is it really?
Intelligent communications is more
connected. Think about it.
Today meetings are a set of disconnected experiences,
and typically knowledge falls between the cracks,
from one meeting to the next.
Things like action items and meeting notes,
intelligent communications treats our interactions
more like a life cycle,
so that they can be easily recalled and shared.
It minimizes context switching
and gives us a more connected,
consistent experience across the multiple tools
that we use to communicate and collaborate.
Intelligent communications is also more insightful,
powered by AI and machine learning,
we get the insights we need in real time.
Like that colleague who has
just the right skill set to help
us or everything you needed to
know about a project that you just joined.
Communications isn't just for talking,
it's for getting stuff done.
So, we expect next gen tools to give us the insights,
that help us take action.
And finally, intelligent communications is proactive.
It anticipates our needs and gives
us helpful tips to better
manage the growing deluge of
information and requests that we get each day.
Our tools will prompt us to share
a file or schedule a meeting,
or even flag content that we should follow-up on.
During a meeting, our tools
will break down language barriers.
It will eliminate distractions and
even write up the meeting notes.
At Microsoft, we've taken
our very best technology including Microsoft 365,
Azure, Cortana, and Microsoft
AI to bring intelligent communications to life.
And we've tapped into something that
is unique to our company,
the power of the Microsoft Graph.
For something to be intelligent,
it needs a brain and that's
exactly what the Microsoft Graph is,
a powerful brain that connects to
billions of data signals coming from every email,
every file, every message sent within Office 365.
And on your behalf,
we're able to offer up real time proactive insights,
like predicting who you're most likely to
collaborate with on a project,
or predicting which person you
mean when you say, "Call James".
The Microsoft Graph has already made
many of our productivity, security,
and developer products more insightful and
we're uniquely positioned to do
the same with communications.
So, how are we bringing
intelligent communications to you and your customers?
The answer is Microsoft Teams,
which we are so excited,
was named Best in Show here at Enterprise Connect.
A year ago, today we introduced Microsoft Teams
which is our foundation for
intelligent communications. What is Teams?
Think of it as a digital version of
an open work environment
where everyone can work together,
share information, and be in the know,
regardless of where they are
located or where they sit on an org chart.
It's where teams of two or 2,000 can chat,
call, meet, co-create, and share.
Where teams need to get people
together and get things done.
And best of all,
Microsoft Teams has intelligence built-in
tapping into the Microsoft Graph
to give you those connected,
insightful, and proactive experiences we've talked about.
But hey, enough talking for me. Let's see it in action.
>> Thank you, Bob. Hi, my name is Mark Pottier.
I'm an Engineer on Microsoft Teams.
We don't just build the product,
but we use it every single day and I'd
love to show you some of the features that I really like,
and I think you're going to like too.
When I get up in the morning, the first thing
I do is reach for my phone.
I like to check in and see what's happened at work.
And so I start off by launching
"Teams" and I quickly look through "My Activity",
this is where all my messages have
proactively been organized for me to go look at,
based on importance, based
on whether I've been referenced.
I can also look at "Chat" to catch
up on recent conversations.
I can also go look at "My Teams" to check
on all of our group collaboration that's happening.
I can look at "Meetings" to get
a glimpse of what's ahead for me in the day.
And finally, I can look at "Calls"
so I can check up and see whether I've
missed any calls from my desk phone
at work and even check up on voicemail.
So this gets me going, gets me oriented,
and I'm really all caught up in a couple of minutes.
When I get into work, I
switch over to my desktop application.
And as you can see, it's organized in
the same way as my cell phone is, right?
So I have my activity
all the way down to my files and calls.
The core of Microsoft Teams is really about
teams and so here I'm a member of five different teams.
A team can be a handful of
people that are collaborating together on
a project and scale
all the way up to thousands of people.
It could be a division or a very, very large group.
Within a team, are
individual channels and this is where
people come together to collaborate.
So under Engineering, you'll find
hired hardcore engineering stuff
like Wiring Diagrams, and Code Snippets.
And maybe under Marketing,
you might find things like
PowerPoint presentations and other fluffy things.
But that's kind of where it shows up, right?
So, we really believe that
everybody should be able to work the way
that they need to work and so there is a lot of
extensibility built right into teams.
If you have third-party applications
that you use on a daily basis,
you shouldn't have to sacrifice those.
So an example of that is
we've added a bunch of applications up here.
We have "PowerBI", we have
"Trello" and other applications that you can add in.
So "Trello", for example,
it's full integration, it's interactive,
I can go ahead and move tasks one column to a next,
get things more, get things done and track by activity.
These are just a few of
the examples of applications that we have.
We have way, way more in
our store and we're
just making this richer and richer every day.
And you can find all the applications that you
need right here to make your teams productive.
So how do people actually collaborate in teams?
Well, they post
different topics that they want comments on.
So for example, Adele here
posted a new post on a new customer engagement deck.
So I can expand it, read the full post,
and I can see that she's even
posted the document right here.
Well, because we're integrated into Office
365 and we're just part of the suite,
I can go ahead and "Click" on that document and see it
right in line within Microsoft Teams.
I don't even have to jump out to another application.
This keeps me focused in on task.
If I want, I can even go ahead and edit
the document and add in my review and comments.
So that's pretty good.
We can also see that people are
responding to this particular deck.
So Megan for example,
went ahead and replied to us and actually
flagged my name as well and Francois replied in French.
Well, I don't speak French so that's a little bit
of a problem, but in teams,
we believe that everybody should be able to
communicate regardless of where you are in the world,
and regardless of what language you speak.
So, we've built in "Instant Translation",
where I can come in and just
translate this directly to English.
Isn't that awesome? I love it.
In fact, Yuna also went ahead and replied in Japanese.
We can go ahead and translate that too.
Really cool. So she wants
an expert to review this before we send it out.
I do not really know that much about drones,
and I need to find
an expert in the organization to help review this.
So usually, I'd have to
go and talk to a colleague and find
somebody that might take me a
day to find the right contact.
Well, with Microsoft Teams and
the Microsoft Graph one of the things
we can do is we can just ask teams.
So I can say, "who knows about drones?"
So what this is doing is this is looking
through all the channels that I'm a member of,
and looking at the Microsoft Graph
and find the experts in
my organization based on
the content that they've produced.
And this brings it right back so I can get
quick access to who
the experts are in that particular topic.
Saves me a ton of time,
no more asking in my organization
who is the expert in so-and-so and what topic.
Isn't that awesome? I just love that.
All right. So we have Delenda,
that's going to be our expert.
Let's go back in and schedule that meeting.
So, a few things about meetings and teams.
First of all, we're the full deal.
We have, you can do one on one meetings,
you can do group meetings,
you can scale all the way up to
broadcast soon in the next quarter.
So we really have you covered there.
On a devices side, we work on Mac,
we work on PC, Android,
iOS and even the Web Client.
So, everything has a full meetings experience.
You're not sacrificing something
by being on a different platform.
Other things that we've added recently
is we've added anonymous join.
So, if you happen to have contacts
that you need to pull
in and they don't use Microsoft Teams,
but they have an e-mail address, you can pull them in.
They'll receive an invite, they can click on it,
they'll use the Web Client, and
they'll be brought into our lobby.
From there you can meet them into the meeting.
So that's great. It's huge scope.
And finally, we're also investing really
heavily in companion device experiences.
So what do I mean by that?
Well, if I'm in the PowerPoint presentation
I'm already presenting from my laptop,
I can also join using
my phone and this gives me a couple of new features.
The first thing I can do is I can actually
control the presentation from my phone.
I use as remote control and
so I can walk around and present with people
and actually advance the slides and back them
up and see the content.
The other thing I can do is I can access
my camera and I can share content around me.
So if I'm meeting with people that are
off-site and I've written something up on the whiteboard,
I can just hold it up and show it to them and
will come right through into the meeting.
It's a great way of building more engagement.
So, we want to schedule this meeting.
Let's go ahead and go do that.
I can come into this channel and
we want to talk about this particular deck.
So I'm going to go ahead and schedule
it right in the channel.
So here we go. We can say talk about drone.
And I'm going to go ahead and schedule it right
now and we'll add Delanda.
So what this has done is scheduled
the meeting inside the channel and
now everybody who's part of
this channel can see that there is a meeting coming up.
Delanda who I added in will get an invite
on her calendar so she'll know to join as well.
And as what happens
here is because it's a public meeting,
as people see the meeting come online,
they'll be able to join it right away
and be able to hop in.
So let's go ahead and jump into this particular channel.
Okay, here we go.
So Delenda joined,
we'll go ahead and hop into the meeting.
Great. So this is our pre-joining experience.
So as you can see I can check myself out, fix my hair,
make sure I'm composed, go ahead
and decide whether I want to
use video or audio and check my devices.
And then I can just join. Hi guys?
>> Hey Mark, How's it going?
>> Good. Hey Delenda,
there's some distraction in the background with
that big poster board with
confidential information written all over it.
Can you do something about that?
>> Yeah, let me get rid of it.
>> Awesome. So this is it, is that cool?
Plenty will flip through that a few times.
Yeah, so this is a great feature.
This is one of the things we're
doing to try to make you have,
let you have more successful meetings.
If you happen to be meeting at home and
let's say you're doing an interview on the BBC,
you have a little kid runs in behind you,
this would be a great feature to have, wouldn't it?
Like you just blur them out, they don't have to see them.
We have to work on kid mute next.
So that's a great little feature that we have.
I think it's going to really be more compelling.
Another thing that we can do is we can share content
right into the presentation.
So before I'd have to go out and share
my desktop and maybe access
PowerPoint and juggle between apps.
Well, now we have all the content right here.
In fact, we proactively identify
which files are most relevant
to this meeting and surface them,
and I can just share the content
right into the meeting and control
the PowerPoint presentation from
the meeting itself as well.
So it saves me a lot of time and switching between apps.
Finally, we also have call recording.
So this is coming next quarter and it
will capture the entire event of the meeting.
You'll see people join, you'll see
the content that's being presented,
you'll even hear all the video or
all the audio track of everyone who's speaking.
And to give you an idea of what that looks like,
that will be captured,
packaged up, and then put back into
the channel so other people can refer back to it later.
So bye guys, I'm going to
show how meeting recording works.
So we have another meeting that we've recorded,
it takes a while to transcribe.
So we'll go ahead and open that up.
And here I have the whole meeting as it
unfolded and as it was recorded
>> Good morning guys.
>> Good morning.
>> Thanks everyone for joining this morning's call.
>> What's great about this is that I can
experience the entire meeting as it
occurred and because this is
up in the Cloud we're using our cognitive services,
everything is already transcribed
and I can even turn on the closed captioning.
So, if I'm meeting someplace where
I need to be more quiet
or I don't want people to
overhear I can go ahead and see that.
In addition to that, I can also do search.
So, for example, I can search
on probably the most important thing,
which is my name, to find out where I
was talked about during this
meeting that I didn't attend.
I think you'll probably all use this feature.
So, I can go ahead and click on that.
Exactly. So, I go ahead click on
that and jumped to right at
that moment in the video, which is great, right?
So I can see exactly what happened.
So, the last thing I want to show you,
which kind of gives you a full feeling of
the extent of our product is the calls tab.
So, calling is critical, right?
And a lot of products have void calling.
We have void app PSTN all built in.
So, what's great about this is
that I can not only call everybody in
my organization but anybody on
the planet with a phone number.
And we're also are building out
a complete Cloud PBX capabilities.
So, I have "Contact",
I have "History" is
here so I can see incoming outgoing calls.
My "Voicemail", complete with
transcription is also included.
And, of course, I have E911 and
all the other regular things that you would expect.
But that's basic calling and we all
know the enterprises need a lot more.
So, we're investing deeply in sort
of these enterprise workflows that are required.
So, things like organizational auto attendant,
call cues, delegation, consultative of transfer.
In fact, right now, I'm set up to be
a delegate for Ilya and so,
look at that someone is calling for Ilya.
Who knew? We'll go ahead and answer that.
>> Hi, Irena.
>> Ilya, I would like to learn about devices.
>> Okay. Well, let me see if Ilya is available.
So, we've implemented consultative of transfer as well.
So, I can go ahead and select Ilya,
reach out to him. He's over there.
>> Hey, Mark.
>> Hey, Ilya. How are you doing?
>> I'm good.
>> That's great. Can you take a call from Irena.
>> I can. And actually,
I was just about to talk about
devices that you just go ahead and listen in.
>> Perfect. All right. Thank you.
>> Well, good morning everyone.
You just saw Mark show you exactly how Microsoft Teams is
now a complete hub for
collaboration and intelligent communications.
It's my privilege to now show
you how we are bringing that same Teams
intelligent communications experience to
every device you need in your work day.
So, let's start with my personal space right here.
I'm sure many of you would agree that
the most well-known personal communications device
at work is still the IP desk phone.
And so this week we announce,
together with our partners,
that we will be bringing the full native Teams
experience to a new generation of IP phones.
From our friends at Audio Codes and Yealink.
Now this Yealink T58A
is actually the phone I have on my desk.
And I love the crisp big screen because I
can fully navigate the whole Teams' UX.
And actually, I also love having my meeting schedule
always visible so that
I can join meetings with just one touch.
But we're not only bringing
that full Teams experience to these devices,
we are also enabling
natural language interaction powered by Cortana.
So, if I were to hit the speakerphone button,
for example, you don't just get the old dial tone.
You get this Cortana experience
that shows you all the same skills
that Mark just showed on the PC.
So, I'd be able to do calling.
I can find out information about someone like Delanda.
All the same skills and insight.
Now, with Cortana and Teams,
our goal is to make everyday tasks much easier.
I'm sure you all had that experience of
hitting 52 keys or so it takes to do a three-way call.
While with Cortana, all we have to do is ask.
Call Delanda Coleman and James Caye.
Cortana heard me, is doing exactly what I want.
It's just that easy.
Thank you. Now, we also know that in your businesses,
you now have many mobile first workers.
Using that awesome mobile Teams
experience that Mark just showed you.
So, for those workers we're also very proud to announce
a new category of devices that we
call mobile phone stations.
And here, I have a preview of
the first device in this category from Plantronics.
So, if I put my mobile device here,
it not only charges
wirelessly but it will also automatically
transfer my team's call or meeting to
the built-in super high quality speakerphone
or the great Plantronics headset for privacy.
These devices all have
dial pad and hard buttons
that new users are familiar with
including a Teams button that
makes it super easy to get into the Teams experience.
We are incredibly excited about how these devices will
help your mobile first users get into Teams very quickly.
So, let's talk about shared devices, room systems.
We know that many of you still have lots of VTC's,
maybe legacy devices in your businesses,
that may not be fully depreciated.
So, we are partnering with our friends at BlueJeans,
Pexip and Polycom and they will
be delivering new cloud video interrupt solutions,
later this year, that enable all
of your legacy VTC's to join Teams' meetings.
But we also know that your users are going to ask for,
and love a full native Teams experience on room systems.
So, I'm going to go ahead, grab my laptop,
and walk over to our meeting room area
here where we can talk about native devices.
A year ago, we launched
Skype room systems to really fantastic industry feedback.
People love how these devices enable great audio,
great video, and
super easy one-touch join for scheduled meetings.
This week, we announced that
every Skype room system will also be getting
a native Teams experience in just a few months.
But we're not stopping there.
We know that many meetings today are ad hoc.
They don't include a scheduled room so we're delivering
a new proximity detection feature that makes it super
easy to pull in any available room system
right into a Teams meeting.
So, I'm going to go ahead and
join a meeting here in Teams.
And this is the pre-join screen Mark showed you.
But now, because it knows
that I'm close to a Skype room system,
it's giving me the option to join
and add the room all in one touch.
So, when I do that, it's going
to go ahead, invite the room.
I'll say I really want to join.
And not only that the room join,
but my laptop joined in content-only mode. That's right.
No more annoying audio howling
with multiple devices join in the same room.
So, I'm actually going to go ahead and
disconnect on my laptop
because there's another innovation
from our partners that I want to demonstrate for you.
So, Delanda is in a room
where she is using the same setup I have here.
So, she's got the new HP Skype room system
with the Logictech MeetUp.
Many of you have told us you love
the Logitech MeetUp, love its capabilities.
And this week, our partners at
Logitech are announcing a new innovation for the MeetUp.
Shipping in a few months.
They will enable intelligent video.
The MeetUp will be able to scan and detect people
within its field of view
and automatically frame the picture on them.
So, there you saw, do that all automatically.
No more having to stare
tiny little people at the back of a conference room.
Not only that, but because it
detected how many people are in the room.
The MeetUp will shortly also be able to feed that count
back to Teams and Teams will provide that data to you.
So that, as an IT leader,
you have the information you need to
really measure your meeting room utilization very well.
So, there's just one more thing
I want to show you on this room system.
As I said, we're not just enabling Teams meetings.
We're also bringing the power
of natural language interaction.
So, if I want to do something
like add someone to the meeting,
all I have to do is hit my "Assistant" button,
add Mark Podiaer.
And Cortana does it for me,
understands what I wanted, calls Mark backstage.
And Mark can just join with one button on
his device. It's just that easy.
I'm going to go ahead and disconnect so I
can tell you about all of our Skype room systems.
We are bringing Teams to every room system.
And this week, our room system family is expanding.
Hopefully, all of you are familiar with
our original room systems.
First, from Logitech and then join
shortly later by Polycom com and Crestron.
Well, this week, we have two new friends in this family.
Here, I have the new Lenovo,
a beautifully-integrated system with
console and audio built in.
And, of course, the HP, a very flexible system that comes
both with and without this great integrated audio module.
Of course, last but certainly not least,
we've got our very own Surface hub.
And in just a few months,
we will be putting out an update that enables Surface hub
to also natively join Teams meetings.
With this lineup of devices,
we know we will have
a great device for every kind of space,
every kind of room system, every possible configuration.
We also know that your users are going to love
that native Teams experience with Cortana that
you can only get on our certified devices.
I invite you to check these out today. Thank you.
>> Good morning.
It is truly great to be here with
you all on Team's first birthday.
If I think back to last year,
Teams was really just a newborn.
And what you can see today is
the great progress that we have made.
Today, Teams is available in 181 markets,
39 languages, with 60 percent
of our users coming from outside of the United States.
But what is most remarkable are our customers.
Earlier this week, we announced that we have 200,000
organizations around the world using Microsoft Teams.
This is up from
125,000 organizations just six months ago.
We are so excited and we have
learned so much from our partners and
our customers over this past year and want us
to extend the true thank you to them on Team's birthday.
I would also like to let you hear it from
them in their own words. Let's show this video.
>> At the pace of business today and
the evolution of business in a digital world,
there's a strong desire to move faster.
>> Atkins employees have
traditionally communicated through e-mail,
through third party conferencing tools.
>> Our people at Mott MacDonald use
Skype for Business Online every single day.
You've got the full power of
the Mott MacDonald community right at your fingertips.
>> Microsoft Cloud voice services make
it extremely easy for employees to collaborate.
>> Since all of our employees
are using Skype for Business,
we're introducing Teams across the organization as well.
>> It puts the communications
right alongside the content,
and that's what you really need for collaboration.
>> Without having to travel,
we can come together much quicker, make decisions.
And an important factor is how we're able to
communicate with and collaborate with
our clients and our partners.
>> The reaction from people has been incredibly positive.
They can share screens,
they can share files, they can
work collaboratively on documents.
>> We're driving that editing on-the-fly within
the Team's environment so that
the entire team can see that editing.
>> The ability to use it across
multiple devices and multiple modalities
is important to us.
>> The data is secure.
People can only see what they're invited to see.
>> My number one use feature is the animated GIF.
We're trying to drive a cultural change in
terms of how people collaborate and work together.
>> Each of the channels is customizable and extensible.
It's the ability easy to
configure your channel as you need it.
>> We've started to use the cloud recording feature
in Microsoft Teams meetings.
Once recording is finished,
it appears in the channel, so
you can easily refer back to stuff.
>> This experience to our employees is very important
because it supports our vision of agile working.
>> With intelligent communications,
we're really excited to see employees
flawlessly communicate with
their colleagues and their customers.
A communication tool has to scale across the globe.
Microsoft is right in the middle of that.
>> The way that Teams
operates is the way
of our world today and where it's going,
versus the way that maybe
the corporate world operated before.
>> And today, we're
unveiling our new teleport or
technology by having Jeff Monaco,
the CTO of GE, be here with us in person.
You saw Jeff on screen.
Jeff, you guys have been going through a journey at GE,
where you have been rolling out
Skype for Business and
now you're starting to roll out Teams.
>> Okay.
>> Can you share how that's gone?
>> Sure. So we really looked at this as
the next steps for us in our journey towards
intelligent communications across
three different planes, really.
The first one is to roll out
the Skype for Business client
to our employees globally.
With 300,000 employees across the globe,
operating in 170 different countries,
it's quite a challenge.
The next was really to empower
all those employees with Teams in parallel.
And then the last was really around the PSTN voice,
the dial tone capability
that Skype comes to the market with.
So, really, we spent really Q4 of 2017,
aggressively rolling out to
220,000 employees on Skype for Business.
So, obviously very fast pivot
for us and we're really sort of coming out of that,
we're really looking at five and a
half million meeting minutes
per day on this platform.
So, obviously, I have my team
looking at every single network monitor.
Everyday, we're making sure that we're successful.
For Microsoft Teams though,
we really sort of started
an early adopter pilot with about
5,000 people using the platform in just two months.
Great feedback, we're sharing that feedback,
and Microsoft seeing great turnaround time
on this fantastic platform.
The last pieces later on this year,
we'll start to leverage that Skype Client and further on
Teams to deliver
a new dial tone package for our employees.
>> Now, really exciting and amazing numbers.
Can you share a little bit about your devices strategy?
>> Sure. So, at GE,
we have about 2,000 rooms that
have voice and video in them,
and it's really sort of a mixed bugs.
So we really are introducing
this Skype Run System platform and Surface Hubs.
And first of all,
amazing things I'm seeing downstairs from the partners.
I'm truly excited to see what comes next.
But as we introduce those Skype Run Systems,
and employees are really feeling
comfortable using that technology,
we also live in this world of Interoperability.
So we're using again
the partners downstairs to make sure that Interop
works flawlessly for our employees so that
either joining these meetings
or even scheduling these meetings is flawless.
>> Great. And you told me
a really interesting story about Skype Meeting Broadcast.
I thought the audience may be interested.
And can you share that?
>> Sure. So, GE has been in the news,
and some of you are aware.
And really through that journey,
the leadership team has really come
together and tried to figure out
ways of engaging with our employees to share strategies,
give people guidance on what to do next,
and operate within the priorities of the company.
So it's really seen a huge ramp up in Broadcast.
So we've been leveraging
the Skype Meeting Broadcast platform.
After we launched the Skype for Business platform,
and really just in two months,
we see about six to seven hundred meetings
taking place with tens of thousands
of users and our employees are really enjoying the fact
that leadership is talking
directly to them quite frequently.
>> That's fantastic.
We're all very excited about the future of
Skype and Teams at GE.
And with that, we'll turn it back to Bob.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you.
>> Hey, thank you Laurie and Jeff.
So we've seen how
Microsoft Teams has launched
our vision for intelligent communications.
And we've heard from customers
who've already started this journey.
Now let's talk about what we're going to
do to help you, our customers,
and partners bring this to life in
your organizations and those that you serve.
For several years, I was responsible
for Microsoft's IT Infrastructure,
where our job was to figure out how technology
could increase value to our company, to Microsoft.
One thing I've learned about
taking on new technology is that
change is personal and can affect morale and culture.
Therefore, change management is as
important as any feature.
So, with that in mind,
there are three things that I
consistently hear from IT Departments,
that I get the opportunity to speak to.
First, Microsoft, what do you do in
about security privacy and compliance?
Second, what are you doing to help us
deploy and manage Microsoft Teams?
And finally, what is Microsoft doing
to enable infrastructure like hybrid environments?
First, because we've built Teams on top of Office 365,
we're able to offer the security, privacy,
and compliance that enterprise expect,
just like we do for Skype for Business.
We're also moving forward to
support new privacy standards like
GDPR and offering compliance features like Legal Hold,
eDiscovery, Compliance Content Search,
Auditing, and Retention policies.
Second, we're investing heavily
in the tools that you need for management,
including call quality and analytics.
We're also redesigning our admin experience in Office
365 to provide a more modern experience for all of you.
This means giving you, as communication experts,
the ability to manage hybrid environments
in order to leverage
your existing telephony infrastructure.
On Monday, we announced direct
routing for Microsoft Teams coming next quarter.
This enables you to connect to your SIP
trunks up to Teams.
This will allow Microsoft to bring
enterprise voice on a global scale to our customers.
And third, for those of you who have been
part of this communication journey with Microsoft,
we continue to support Skype for
Business on-premises in your infrastructure.
We're planning to release the next version of
the Skype for Business Server later this year,
which will also enable simple pathways to our cloud.
When our communications become intelligent,
we're more informed, we get a lot more done,
and life gets easier.
And I want to tell you that we at
Microsoft are more committed,
more impassioned, and more excited than
ever to support you on this mission.
Microsoft Teams is the only product
on the market that brings everything together,
unified communications and collaboration tools that
you can use across a variety of
devices like we've seen today.
And only Teams has
the built-in intelligence across all of
these experiences with the enterprise grade security
and compliance we all need for business.
As you've heard today, many enterprises have
already begun this journey
towards intelligent communications.
We'd love the opportunity to show you how
Microsoft Teams can change the way
people work and make life easier for all kinds of Teams.
Thanks for joining us today.
Come by our booth and check out
all of our new Teams-enabled devices.
I loved them all. I particularly love
things like conference room phones.
We've got the Polycom Trio here and
new entrants from Crestron and Yealink,
all running the native Teams experience.
So, together, let's build the future
of intelligent communications.
