Jessica recaps some of the new and exciting updates from Microsoft Inspire as well as some fun facts she learned by attending the virtual Microsoft Inspire conference this year.

Microsoft Inspire is an annual event for Microsoft partners to introduce and announce new innovations surrounding Microsoft products. As a Tier 1 Gold Partner that specializes in Azure and Office 365, Managed Solution attends every year, and more of us got to attend this year with it being online.

Here are the first top 5 takeaways from this year's event:

1. VPNs are designed for 20% company workload. If your company is using a VPN and experiencing downtime or slowness, it's because these legacy VPNs weren't built to support an entire workforce. That's what the cloud is for!

2. If you have compliance reasons or other reasons where you need an on-prem infrastructure, you'll be excited about this update. Now in public preview is Microsoft Azure Stack HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure). This offers secure virtualization of Windows or Linux systems. This is designed specifically for a hybrid environment and is designed for any workload.

3. Microsoft Lists: If you are familiar with SharePoint lists, those are considered now classic lists and you can refer to these as modern lists. It's an integration of Outlook, Teams and SharePoint and acts as a project management tool and keeps track of all your conversations, emails, decisions, tasks, etc. It's great for your hiring process, event planning or any projects you collaborate with others on.

4. Fun fact: using single sign-on saves a person 10 minutes a day which equals about a whole week of time over a year! Think about everything you could do in that extra week. More productivity + better user experience = happiness.

5. With Microsoft Universal Print you can now print from anywhere in the world to your company printers! Whether you're on vacation or traveling, you can still print to your headquarters.

Watch the video that discusses the first 5 in more detail:

6. Azure Active Directory is now offering external identities. Azure AD is where all your group policies and permissions exist. This is where it's determined what you have access to. You can now do this for people outside of your organization!

7. Endpoint Data Loss Protection is now available.  This is specific to Office 365 and protects us when we're on our devices while we're remote.

8. Communication compliance is now available, which scans chats, emails, etc to detect any bullying or harassment. Anything that you determine violates your code of conduct.

9. New Security Integrations are available! No more time-consuming workarounds as Microsoft now integrates with Okta SSO, Symantec, VMware and Carbon Black.

10. Double key encryption for Microsoft 365 which means that Microsoft doesn't even have access to your data that is stored with them. You now control the second key which means you fully control your data.

Watch part 2: