[1] A week after Facebook articulated its future in the metaverse,
Microsoft offered its vision for augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) meetings in Microsoft Mesh for Teams at its November Ignite developer event. The service, the company says, combines the AR/VR capabilities of Microsoft Mesh — which allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative experiences through AR and VR — with the productivity tools of Teams.
Mesh builds on existing Teams features such as Together mode and Presenter view that make remote and hybrid meetings more immersive, according to Microsoft corporate VP Jeff Teper. Presenter view offers different views to, for example, show slides and notes while the audience only sees slides, while Together mode uses AI to place everyone on a call in a shared room-like environment, similar to a coffee shop.
Mesh for Teams — which Microsoft says anyone will be able to access from smartphones, PCs, and AR/VR headsets when it launches in preview in the first half of 2022 — and is ostensibly designed to make meetings more "personal" and "engaging." Users join a standard Teams meeting as a customized avatar of themselves, and organizations can build spaces —
"metaverses" — within Teams. Mesh for Teams users can then take their avatars (or, alternatively, video, static picture, or bubble with initials) into these spaces to mingle. >>
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[2] At its Ignite 2021 conference today,
Microsoft announced Loop, a new app that combines a "flexible canvas" with components that sync across Microsoft 365 services to help teams communicate and work remotely together. Built on Microsoft's Fluid Framework, Loop is "the next big breakthrough in Microsoft 365," according to Microsoft 365 corporate VP Jared Spataro.
"We're completely reimagining Office to go beyond the traditional confines of a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, spilling over to entirely new mediums.
Just as Teams transformed collaboration and productivity," Spataro said in a blog post.
Loop components are "units of productivity" that allow users to complete work and collaborate in the flow of work, either on a Loop page or in a chat, email, document, or online meeting. Components can be as simple as lists, tables, and notes — or as sophisticated as a customer sales opportunity from Dynamics 365, according to Microsoft — and they always stay in sync across all Microsoft 365 apps. >>
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[3] Today, Microsoft announced significant advances to its Power Automate platform to help scale
robotic process automation (RPA) infrastructure. Key advances include new capabilities for understanding business processes, collaborative bot development, and scaling RPA software bots with virtual desktops. Microsoft is a relative latecomer to the RPA playing field, but is growing this capability quickly — thanks to its existing strengths in office productivity apps, Windows integration, and Azure cloud infrastructure.
The field of
RPA started as a way to program sophisticated macros for automating repeating tasks like copying and pasting data between two business apps. Gartner has suggested the future of this field, known as hyperautomation, includes finding ways to identify automation opportunities and program automations, then scale the deployment of the automation more efficiently. Microsoft's newest updates tick the boxes of significant progress on all three of these aspects.
Better integration between RPA and Azure desktops promises to simplify the processes of setting up and scaling the appropriate machine configurations for RPA deployments. >>
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