Leaving the controlled bedlam that is Microsoft Ignite behind, I travel to Las Vegas next week for the more intimate and less stressful IT/DEV Connections event, where I’ll be chairing the Enterprise Collaboration track. If you want to catch up with what happened at Ignite, I published five articles on Petri.com:

Office 365 News from Ignite – Day 1: The keynotes, Exchange 2016 CU3 and the Outlook REST API, the Outlook apps have completed their move to the Microsoft Cloud – but not for everyone, and no change in the reported number for Office 365 monthly active users.

Yammer and Office 365 Groups Connect: The Yammer community will have been relieved to have heard Monday’s announcement that the long-awaited and much-promised connection between Office 365 Groups and Yammer is coming (Figure 1). According to Microsoft, the new capabilities will be delivered in a series of phased updates. However, only new Yammer groups will be able to take advantage of the linkup with Office 365 Groups.

Office 365 at Ignite – Exchange, SharePoint, and more: There’s lots to hear and learn about relating to Office 365 at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta this week. All of the product groups are putting their best face forward to impress and amaze customers with what has happened or what will happen inside the service. Here’s some of what I have been hearing.

Office 365 Groups News from Ignite: Office 365 Groups occupy a special place in Microsoft’s collaboration strategy. The link-up between Yammer and Groups was the headline news for some people, but a lot of other facts were revealed at the Ignite conference, mostly around operational improvements to help tenants manage groups better. Here’s some of what I encountered.

Wrapping up Ignite – more Office 365 Snippets:  Some of the things I found out or explored during the week include a solid DLP roadmap for Office 365, how BMC Remedy creates incident tickets from DLP audit events, that Veeam now offers a backup for Exchange Online, how QUADROtech’s ADAM plans to drag public folders into the 21^st century, the delights of recording a special version of the Office 365 Exposed podcast, why Office 365 will use classification policies in the future, and my continuing frustration with the old OneDrive for Business sync client. Maybe the new client will fix all known ailments.

I also participated in three sessions:

The Grand Exchange debate – why you would or would not want to move mailboxes to the cloud. This was a fun exercise with Greg Taylor and Steve Conn of Microsoft designed to surface the reasons why people want to stay on-premises and debate whether the reasons hold true. We didn’t want to come up with a definitive answer because no such answer exists. Instead, we wanted to provoke a discussion and I think that we succeeded in that respect.

The Ultimate Field Guide to Office 365 Groups. Microsoft gave a lot of information at Ignite about future developments for Office 365 Groups. This session provided a counterweight in that it focused on how groups are used in the field.

Meet twin sons of different mothers (MVPs and Exchange engineers). I chaired this panel session where most of the questions were about on-premises and hybrid configurations. Karim Battish and Jeff Mealiffe of Microsoft were busy answering, but Andrew Higginbotham and Jeff Guillet had some views to share too.

All-in-all, it was a busy time at Ignite. The value of the conference is not all in the breakout sessions, interesting as they are. I actually get a lot more from meeting people and companies to take the pulse of what’s happening in the technology spaces that I care about. After all, you can always watch the Ignite sessions online.

In any case, it’s time to get my head down and finish the sessions I have to deliver at IT/DEV Connections and at the UK UC Day a week or so afterwards…

Follow Tony on Twitter @12Knocksinna.

Want to know more about how to manage Office 365? Find what you need to know in “Office 365 for IT Pros,” the most comprehensive eBook covering all aspects of Office 365. Available in PDF and EPUB formats (suitable for iBooks) or for Amazon Kindle.