Microsoft Jumps on Metaverse Bandwagon

The all-virtual 2021 Microsoft Ignite event started Tuesday and will run through Thursday, Nov. 4. If you're an IT pro with a Microsoft workload, there's a lot of stuff to digest this time around. The big news is that Microsoft is jumping on the metaverse bandwagon.

Microsoft Corporate VP Jared Spataro summed this up as computing embedded into the real world. “That’s Mesh, the metaverse platform,” he said during his Ignite keynote session. “We’re taking that experience and building Mesh right into Teams…and extending productivity beyond what was previously possible.”

There were plenty of demos to showcase what Spataro was describing. Still, the one-liner is that the Microsoft Cloud, which includes any service offered by Azure and Microsoft 365, is now going to focus heavily on redefining what collaboration means if you're a hybrid worker or full-time remote employee. And it's going to do it with a pretty cool combination of artificial intelligence (AI), a souped-up Microsoft Teams experience, and Windows 11, along with some optional virtual desktop capabilities in Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and Windows 365 Cloud PC.

Teams and Microsoft Mesh

One of the slickest metaverse demonstrations was Microsoft Mesh for Teams. It initially looked a little goofy since it just showed a typical Teams video-conferencing session, except several attendees were avatars instead of living camera images. The avatars were still camera-powered, however, and mimicked the attendee's lip and arm movements. That might be useful if you've still got bedhead for an early meeting, but it didn't look very revolutionary aside from that.

Microsoft Mesh basic view
(Image: Microsoft)

The real pizzaz came when the demo shifted to an immersive virtual workspace. In this environment, you can map out an entire 3D office as demonstrated by an early adopter, Accenture, which showed a large onboarding environment it built using Mesh. It calls this The Nth Floor. Using either the Oculus or HoloLens VR headsets, any of Accenture's workers and new hires can meet on the Nth Floor as avatars, move around, and interact with one another. They can also access their data from there. It's the data part that turns out to be one of the most impressive metaverse announcements.

Microsoft Mesh virtual office
(Image: Microsoft)

On the front-end, any data shown in your immersive virtual environment will be live. So you'll be able to have all-avatar meetings in your virtual space, and the data on your virtual whiteboard can access whatever documents you'd like to edit collaboratively. You can save whatever doodles you do on the whiteboard as live data, which you can later share via the Office document engine or as a record in your new Teams space.

Custom Smarts With Azure OpenAI

Even more slick, according to Ignite's spokespeople, Microsoft's AI engine is now capable of higher degrees of accuracy for live speech transcription and translation. That means you'll be able to create a virtual office space where employees from different nationalities can meet and communicate because the AI engine will translate what one says to the other in real-time and show the translation inside the environment or, presumably, via audio.

This AI engine will be accessible by developers using the Azure OpenAI. With this service, your developers will be able to customize Microsoft's AI to help with specific workloads, like vertical models or queries made in Power BI, for example.

Inside the metaverse, Microsoft's AI will intelligently predict the data you're going to need as you need it, serve it up, and then take care of importing it into whatever format you're in at the time. It's calling this a “digital fabric,” which means it's going to tie your data to a secure combination of collaboration and communication tools.

So let's say you're writing an email about quarterly sales figures. Outlook will realize what you're writing about, present you with a list of potentially relevant files, and once you choose one, drop the content into your email and reformat it for that experience automatically. It'll do the same on your virtual reality whiteboard, your Excel spreadsheet, or whatever other Microsoft 365 tool you might be using. And you'll be able to do it across different organizations, too, including not just other teams in your company, but outside organizations, like partners or essential customers, too (more on that below).

Loop, Teams, and Viva

Microsoft Loop workspace
(Image: Microsoft)

The beating heart of all this innovation will be a Teams experience powered by new and optional technologies. At first blush, it all feels like a more modern implementation of Microsoft SharePoint absorbed into the Teams UI. But there are a host of additional features thrown in, notably cross-device access as well as the multi-organizational collaboration mentioned above. And that description isn't far off.

Microsoft says these new capabilities are primarily based on two new platforms: Microsoft Loop and Microsoft Viva. Loop seems to represent all the features the company promised as part of its Fluid Framework in 2019, including documents that automatically enable multi-person collaboration, an intelligent and app-agnostic document model, and a host of intelligent agents now powered by Azure OpenAI. But instead of leaving this under the Fluid banner, Microsoft placed it beneath Loop as Loop Components, Loop Pages, and Loop Workspaces. It also made those capabilities accessible across the Microsoft 365 app portfolio, especially the Teams UI.

The more advanced features of the Metaverse vision won't be available until at least Q1 of 2022, but you can still get a lot of the new data fabric right now in Microsoft Viva, which was released just in time for Ignite. You won't see Viva on the front end, but for a promotional price of $9 per user per month (available until August 2022), your IT staff will be able to configure it inside a new administration experience that's been added to Microsoft 365.

Viva will let you build an early metaverse data fabric right now using four components—Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Topics, and Viva Learning. And since Microsoft recently acquired Ally.io, Viva will also expand to employee performance management using the OKR model later this year.

Viva enables a long list of other features when using Microsoft 365, like new manager insights into hybrid employee well-being and meeting efficiency using Viva Insights but surfaced through an app for Microsoft Teams. You'll also get a new organization and sharing model with Viva Topics, and you'll be able to access that via Bing, Outlook, and Yammer integrations. Viva Learning is a complete Learning Management System (LMS) that shows up across several Microsoft front-end touchpoints, including Teams, Office, and even LinkedIn's Glint.

There's a lot to get your head around here, and an excellent place to start is today's Viva sessions at Ignite as well as the Microsoft 365 blog.

Microsoft Promises Security Without Boundaries

Microsoft intends to use Azure Active Directory to maintain identity management and document-level protections on the metaverse's back-end, including role-based access, DRM, and encryption. But it also says this protection will be “without boundaries.” So as long as both organizations use Azure AD, their IT departments will be able to link up their domains. You'll essentially be able to pull customer or partner organizations into your secure AD environment quickly but without sacrificing security control over the stuff you need to be protected.

On the front end, users will know it as Microsoft Teams Connect. Once live, Teams Connect will let users share their Teams channels with outside organizations and collaborate with them just as they would with internal colleagues, but with full security protections in place.

This means you'll get SharePoint-esque team sites for document storage, collaboration, and task management. But you can also combine that with Teams' meeting and communication capabilities. So information from a Teams site automatically shows up in your Team's virtual meeting, and you'll be able to access both the meeting and the data from a variety of devices, including mobile ones. Naturally, you'll get the best experience using a Microsoft Surface device, but the company says it'll support a wide variety of other platforms, too.

Adding the Virtual Desktop

And while you don't need either Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) or Windows 365 Cloud PC to use the metaverse, you'll be able to access all these capabilities using either of these desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) platforms. This represents the first layer of Microsoft's hybrid work strategy since both those technologies are already available. The entirety of the metaverse won't arrive until well into 2022 and likely later since something this complex and far-reaching will undoubtedly hit some last-minute snags. However, both AVD and Cloud PC represent attractive options for solving hybrid work headaches right now, even without the coming Metaverse.

In a QA session with PCMag.com, Wangui McKelvey, Microsoft GM of Apps & Endpoints, summed up the differences between virtual desktop products. “Windows 365 Cloud PC is another more simplified option for companies that want to take advantage of virtual desktop technology,” she said. “AVD is for Azure and virtualization-savvy IT professionals who need deep customization features. Windows 365 just lowers the entry barrier. It's simpler to deploy, use, and it's even got easier pricing since it's part of Microsoft 365.”

So Windows 365 offers easy and near-instant deployment of desktop images that are entirely controlled by your IT department. And it'll serve those up using anything from an iPhone to a desktop workstation. Patch management and security are rolled into the package and you'll even be able to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 on existing desktop instances simply by checking a box. And since it's an option inside Microsoft 365, you'll be able to buy Cloud PC with an Office 365 bundle as well as Intune device management and more advanced back-end offerings, like Dynamics 365 or Microsoft SharePoint Online.

For deeper information on all these announcements, you'll want to attend the rest of this week's Ignite event (it's free). No matter which day you attend, you'll want to focus on sessions detailing Microsoft's hybrid work and hyperconnected business strategies as well as its cybersecurity challenges talks. Specific sessions on Loop and Viva are also available.