2–4 March 2021 (Spring) and 2–4 November 2021 (Fall), online. Two virtual Ignites in one year — Microsoft was effectively shipping operational updates at twice the cadence to catch up with how customers were actually consuming the cloud during the pandemic.
What we took away (across both editions)
- Microsoft Mesh (March). Mixed-reality collaboration platform; Mesh for Teams (November) gave us avatars and immersive spaces as a Teams primitive.
- Industry Clouds (March). Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, Manufacturing, and Nonprofit joined the existing Healthcare/Retail clouds.
- Microsoft Loop (November). Fluid-framework-based collaboration app with portable Loop components that sync across Teams, Outlook, Word. The most interesting collaboration model out of Redmond in years.
- Teams Shared Channels (Connect) — cross-tenant channels. Big for partner/supplier collaboration in EMEA supply chains, including the kind of workflows our Kühne+Nagel work touches.
- Attack Simulation Training GA in Defender for Office 365; Azure Key Vault Managed HSM updates; Azure confidential computing previews — useful for BaFin/GDPR-driven workloads.
- Azure Percept (March) — edge-AI hardware/services bundle for IoT scenarios.
Why it mattered
Loop and Teams Connect changed how we sell "let's modernise the way you work with your suppliers" to manufacturing customers. The old answer was give them limited SharePoint access; the new answer was put them in a shared channel where everyone keeps their own identity. Cleaner sale, cleaner operation.
"The next big whoa moment." — Microsoft's own framing for Mesh at the Spring keynote.
Some of those whoa moments aged better than others (Mesh has had a journey). Loop is still doing real work.