Define Tomorrow Event Highlights

With over 200 people in attendance and more than 10 of our partners supporting us, last week we held our biggest Define Tomorrow event. This event was focused on the latest updates from Microsoft including Windows Server 2016, Office 365, Enterprise Mobility Suite and Azure.  

We were fortunate to have a fantastic line-up of speakers for our event, including Ed Baker and Mark Deakin from Microsoft, and Mark Mulvany from Dell.

Ed outlined his favourite features of Microsoft's upcoming Windows Server 2016 release, including the lightweight "Nano" installation option which can run certain workloads with an astonishingly small RAM footprint. Container technology (made popular by the open source Docker project) is coming to Windows Server and Hyper-V too and fits neatly with Microsoft's "cloud first" approach.

Mark Mulany, Microsoft Dell Cloud Hybrid Lead at Dell UK then delivered our next keynote presentation. Mark spoke about the exciting developments around Microsoft Storage Spaces, allowing Dell to provide solutions that can include both synchronous and asynchronous replication of storage without the need for dedicated SAN solutions. In Windows Server 2016, the Storage Spaces Direct feature enhances this further by allowing commodity direct attached storage to be used and, again, Dell will be offering complete ready-configured solutions. Dell's solutions are ready-configured in small, medium and large sizes depending on your needs, from a handful of VMs to hundreds. If you need to run thousands of VMs, Dell can scale that high too. Both Ed and Mark Muvany talked in some detail about Microsoft Azure Stack, which brings the technologies from the Azure hosted platform to your datacentre. This is ideal for those companies that can't, for whatever reason, host their systems in Microsoft's cloud.

Mark Deakin, Platform Evangelist at Microsoft spoke about how Office 365 can bring smaller businesses technology they couldn't dream of just a few years ago and how these technologies can bring larger businesses new tools, enabling mobile working more easily than ever. Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) adds further to Office 365 by allowing you to secure your company's information across a range of devices. With EMS's information protection capabilities, you can protect documents and restrict what can be done with their contents regardless of where the files end up. Finally, Mark explained how Azure can allow you to run new and existing workloads on Microsoft's hosted platform. The number of services being added to Azure is incredible.

We then ended the day with 4 round tables on: Windows Server 2016, SharePoint, Microsoft Cloud and Education. These round tables gave our attendees the opportunity to ask the experts questions about the technology and have in depth discussions into the topics.  

For all the presentation slides from the day please visit www.definetomorrow.co.uk/Microsoft.  

We also introduced our new service Migrate365. Here at ComputerWorld we have both the technical knowledge and training ability to understand your business needs and create the most efficient way to migrate your business to the cloud. Please visit www.migrate365.co.uk to find out more.

If you missed our event, join us on our catch up webinar

The video below is a montage of the day's events.