Duly (key)noted

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It's hard to describe the sense of scale at Ignite.  When the chairs alone in the auditorium took two full days to set up and an overflow area is still required, you know you're not in Kansas anymore1.

Satya Nadella won the toss and elected to open the batting, touching on a number of topics including the transformative nature of technology, empowering users from all walks of life and all abilities, deriving business insights from advanced analytics and personalising computer interactions.  It also featured a short chat with Real Madrid CEO Jose Angel Sanchez to cover the data-driven nature of sports, not just with on-field performance but also fan engagement and content delivery.

Next up was Joe Belfiore demo-ing the latest build of Windows 10, covering features like Cortana integration, the new Edge browser and document security.  The best feature on display was undoubtedly connecting a Windows Phone to a monitor and using it as a computer, with the phone becoming an on-screen keyboard and a trackpad for the mouse.

Gurdeep Singh Pall and Julia White went through some of the new features of Office 365 & Office 2016 like Sway, Delve and Graph, and finished with a demo of the Surface Hub.  The Surface Hub is a giant touchscreen roughly the size of a TV, ideal for acting out those secret weatherman fantasies you've been harbouring2.

Rounding out the keynotes was Brad Anderson, who showed us some new features in Document Rights Management, the newly announced Windows Update for Business and some of the cool new features of Server 2016, SQL 2016 and System Centre 2016.  The part that really got my attention was Advanced Threat Analytics, with conditional multi-factor authentication depending on the device and location amongst other criteria.

If you are keen to see all that I am talking about, then you can see the full keynote here.

It's a big show, comfortably the biggest trade show I've ever seen.  And there's so much more to come.

Cheers,

g-lock

1: to be honest, I'd struggle to locate Kansas with a map and a Marine Expeditionary Core, but the point stands
2: I can't be the only one, surely