Latest News in the category AI
A news aggregator from various RSS feeds, like technology, gaming, development and general news sites.
Google AI Releases WAXAL: A Multilingual African Speech Dataset for Training Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech Models
Speech technology still has a data distribution problem. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems have improved rapidly for high-resource languages, but many African languages remain poorly represented in open corpora. A team of researchers from Google and other collaborators introduce WAXAL, an open multilingual speech dataset for African languages covering 24 languages, with […] The post
2 hours ago
Resiliency Patterns for Azure Front Door: Field Lessons
Abstract Azure Front Door (AFD) sits at the edge of Microsoft’s global cloud, delivering secure, performant, and highly available applications to users worldwide. As adoption has grown—especially for mission‑critical workloads—the need for resilient application architectures that can tolerate rare but impactful platform incidents has become essential. This article summarizes key lessons from Azure Front Door incidents in October 2025, outlines how Microsoft is hardening the pl...
3 hours ago
Porting C++ from IBM Power to x86: Solving Silent Endianness Corruption with C++and Github Copilot
Migrating C++ applications from IBM Power Systems to Azure x86 involves a subtle but critical architectural difference that is the byte order. When legacy code compiled for Big-Endian hardware is recompiled for Little-Endian x86 without modification, multi-byte integers silently corrupt. There are no compile errors, no runtime exceptions, just wrong values in production. This guide walks through the endianness challenge, demonstrates a practical refactoring workflow using GitHub Copilot, and ...
3 hours ago
Announcing the IQ Series: Foundry IQ
AI agents are rapidly becoming a new way to build applications. But for agents to be truly useful, they need access to the knowledge and context that helps them reason about the world they operate in. That’s where Foundry IQ comes in. Today we’re announcing the IQ Series: Foundry IQ, a new set of developer-focused episodes exploring how to build knowledge-centric AI systems using Foundry IQ. The series focuses on the core ideas behind how modern AI systems work with knowl...
4 hours ago
Foundry IQ: Give Your AI Agents a Knowledge Upgrade
If you’re learning to build AI agents, you’ve probably hit a familiar wall: your agent can generate text, but it doesn’t actually know anything about your data. It can’t look up your documents, search across your files, or pull facts from multiple sources to answer a real question. That’s the gap Foundry IQ fills. It gives your AI agents structured access to knowledge, so they can retrieve, reason over, and synthesize information from real data sources instead of relying ...
4 hours ago
How to Build High-Performance GPU-Accelerated Simulations and Differentiable Physics Workflows Using NVIDIA Warp Kernels
In this tutorial, we explore how to use NVIDIA Warp to build high-performance GPU and CPU simulations directly from Python. We begin by setting up a Colab-compatible environment and initializing Warp so that our kernels can run on either CUDA GPUs or CPUs, depending on availability. We then implement several custom Warp kernels that demonstrate […] The post
6 hours ago
Mistral AI Releases Mistral Small 4: A 119B-Parameter MoE Model that Unifies Instruct, Reasoning, and Multimodal Workloads
Mistral AI has released Mistral Small 4, a new model in the Mistral Small family designed to consolidate several previously separate capabilities into a single deployment target. Mistral team describes Small 4 as its first model to combine the roles associated with Mistral Small for instruction following, Magistral for reasoning, Pixtral for multimodal understanding, and […] The post
16/03/2026
Building Production-Ready, Secure, Observable, AI Agents with Real-Time Voice with Microsoft Foundry
The world is moving from assistants that answer to agents that act. Systems can now plan, reason, and collaborate across data, tools, and people. The shift creates enormous opportunity and raises the bar for what “production-ready” truly means: agents that operate on your network, respect your security policies, feel natural and intuitive for your end-users, and give you full visibility into what they're doing in production. AI decision-makers cite security, privacy, ...
16/03/2026
NVIDIA’s Open Models on Microsoft Foundry:
As enterprises and governments move from AI experimentation to production, they face several structural challenges: fragmented AI stacks across environments, operational complexity in customizing models, and strict requirements around data sovereignty, privacy, and security that limit the use of proprietary models. These challenges often lead to long development cycles, duplicated engineering effort, and stalled AI adoption.
16/03/2026
Generally Available: Evaluations, Monitoring, and Tracing in Microsoft Foundry
If you've shipped an AI agent to production, you've likely run into the same uncomfortable realization: the hard part isn't getting the agent to work - it's keeping it working. Models get updated, prompts get tweaked, retrieval pipelines drift, and user traffic surfaces edge cases that never appeared in your eval suite. Quality isn't something you establish once. It's something you have to continuously measure. Today, we're making that continuous mea...
16/03/2026
Public preview: Voice-native agents in Microsoft Foundry
We’re excited to introduce the native support of Voice Live with the new Foundry Agent Service, making it dramatically easier to build real-time, speech-to-speech AI agents on Azure. This integration brings together agent orchestration and real-time voice interaction into a unified developer experience — helping you to easily build production-ready voice-native agents that delivers natural conversational AI experiences. Shift toward real-time A...
16/03/2026
Evaluating AI Agents: A Practical Guide with Microsoft Foundry
AI agents don't just generate text. They take actions, call tools, and make decisions across multiple steps. That makes them both powerful and harder to validate. A prompt change that improves one workflow can quietly break another. A model upgrade that boosts fluency could degrade tool selection. Without evaluations, those regressions typically surface only when users encounter them in production. Building agents in Microsoft Foundry, we've seen this firsthand: early demos look...
16/03/2026
Building Microsoft’s Sovereign AI on Azure Local with NVIDIA RTX PRO and Next Gen NVIDIA Rubin
Across governments, regulated industries, and critical infrastructure, organizations are moving quickly to adopt advanced AI but with a clear requirement: AI systems should be built and operated within Sovereign boundaries. The question is no longer whether to use advanced models, but where those models should run, who controls them, and how they can evolve over time without compromising sovereignty, resilience, or trust. Many of these customers are building Sovereign Private C...
16/03/2026
AI‑Powered Troubleshooting for Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management now available
A really interesting post is now live on the Microsoft Purview Blog, describing a open‑source release of the DLM Diagnostics Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server – an AI‑powered diagnostic server that allows AI assistants to safely investigate Microsoft Purview DLM issues using read‑only PowerShell diagnostics. Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) policies are critical for meeting compliance and governance requirements across Microsoft 365 workloads. However, when some...
16/03/2026
🚀 AI Toolkit for VS Code — March 2026 Update
March brings another milestone for AI Toolkit! Version 0.32.0 is packed with new capabilities designed to help you ship production ready AI agents. This release brings a unified tree view experience, Agent Builder enhancements, and streamlined GitHub Copilot integration for agent development. 🗂️ Streamlined User Experience across AI Toolkit and Foundry Extension
16/03/2026
OneDrive Office Hours | March 2026
OneDrive Consumer Office Hours are back! Creating space for open conversation around the latest updates and how they support the way you use your files every day. In this month’s session, we’ll walk through what’s new and open the floor for questions, feedback, and shared experiences. Register today-OneDrive Office Hours | March 2026
16/03/2026
Health-Aware Failover for Azure Container Registry Geo-Replication
Azure Container Registry (ACR) supports geo-replication: one registry resource with active-active (primary-primary), write-enabled geo-replicas across multiple Azure regions. You can push or pull through any replica, and ACR asynchronously replicates content and metadata to all other replicas using an eventual consistency model.
16/03/2026
New Microsoft Purview innovations for Fabric to safely accelerate your AI transformation
As organizations adopt AI, security and governance remain core primitives for safe AI transformation and acceleration. After all, data leaders are aware of the notion that: Your AI is only as good as your data. Organizations are skeptical about AI transformation due to concerns of sensitive data oversharing and poor data quality. In fact, 86% of organizations lack visibility into AI data flows, operating in darkness about what information employees share with AI...
16/03/2026
Now in Foundry: VibeVoice-ASR, MiniMax M2.5, Qwen3.5-9B
This week's Model Mondays edition features two models that have just arrived in Microsoft Foundry: Microsoft's VibeVoice-ASR, a unified speech-to-text model that handles 60-minute audio files in a single pass with built-in speaker diarisation and timestamps, and MiniMaxAI's MiniMax-M2.5, a frontier agentic model that leads on coding and tool-use benchmarks with performance comparable to the strongest proprietary models at a fraction of their cost; and...
16/03/2026
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super Now Available on Microsoft Foundry: Open, Efficient Reasoning for Agentic AI
Today, we’re announcing the availability of NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super NIM in Microsoft Foundry,
16/03/2026
AI‑Powered Troubleshooting for Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management
Announcing the DLM Diagnostics MCP Server! Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) policies are critical for meeting compliance and governance requirements across Microsoft 365 workloads. However, when something goes wrong – such as retention policies not applying, archive mailboxes not expanding, or inactive mailboxes not getting purged – diagnosing the issue can be challenging and time‑consuming. To simplify and accelerate this process, we are excited to announce the...
16/03/2026
Announcing the RDP dynamic virtual channel plugin samples
Extending Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is one of those areas where the documentation technically explains everything, but the real-world picture can still be difficult to piece together. At its core, the concept is straightforward: an RDP plugin consists of two cooperating components:
16/03/2026
Safeguarding Trust: The Critical Role of Security in Today’s Nonprofits
Nonprofits run on something deeper than funding, programs, or technology — they run on trust. Communities trust you with their stories, their data, and their wellbeing. Donors trust you to steward resources responsibly. Staff and volunteers trust you to create a safe environment where they can do their best work. And in today’s digital world, protecting that trust starts with security. Digital Tools Are Now Essential — and So Is Security As nonprofits inc...
16/03/2026
Intent Matters: Configuring Network ATC in Windows Admin Center Virtualization Mode
Let's talk about networking. I know, I know—wouldn’t it be nice if there were just a big “EASY” button you could hit to make networking simple? You’ve got VMs to spin up, migrations to finish, and approximately one thousand other things on your plate. You don’t want to think about networking. You just want it t...
16/03/2026
4MINDS, JINETT, and Willow offer transactable partner solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like 4MINDS, JINETT, and Willow deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace. Learn about these offers below: 4MINDS: Deve...
16/03/2026
Microsoft Foundry Model Router: A Developer's Guide to Smarter AI Routing
Introduction When building AI-powered applications on Azure, one of the most impactful decisions you make isn't about which model to use, it's about how your application selects models at runtime. Microsoft Foundry Model Router, available through Microsoft Foundry, automatically routes your inference requests to the best available model based on prompt complexity, latency targets, and cost efficiency. But how do you know it's actually routing correctly? And ...
16/03/2026
From Prototype to Production: Building a Hosted Agent with AI Toolkit & Microsoft Foundry
From Prototype to Production: Building a Hosted Agent with AI Toolkit & Microsoft Foundry Agentic AI is no longer a future concept — it’s quickly becoming the backbone of intelligent, action-oriented applications. But while it’s easy to prototype an AI agent, taking it all the way to production requires much more than a clever prompt. In this blog post - and the accompanying video tutorial - we walk through the end-to-end journey of ...
16/03/2026
Validating Azure Model Router: A Developer's Guide to Smarter AI Routing
Introduction When building AI-powered applications on Azure, one of the most impactful decisions you make isn't about which model to use — it's about how your application selects models at runtime. Azure Model Router, available through Microsoft Foundry, automatically routes your inference requests to the best available model based on prompt complexity, latency targets, and cost efficiency. But how do you know it's actually routing correctly? And how do you ...
16/03/2026
Remove Unnecessary Azure Storage Account Dependencies in VM Diagnostics
In a recent engagement with a customer willing to decrease Shared Access Signature (SAS) tokens usage in their Storage Accounts, we found out that a good amount of SAS token-based requests was associated with VM diagnostics. One practical way to reduce SAS token usage is to eliminate dependencies that require Storage Accounts in the first place, especially when Azure offers managed alternatives. This post focuses on two VM-level features that often introduce (or preserve)...
16/03/2026
Moonshot AI Releases 𝑨𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑹𝒆𝒔𝒊𝒅𝒖𝒂𝒍𝒔 to Replace Fixed Residual Mixing with Depth-Wise Attention for Better Scaling in Transformers
Residual connections are one of the least questioned parts of modern Transformer design. In PreNorm architectures, each layer adds its output back into a running hidden state, which keeps optimization stable and allows deep models to train. Moonshot AI researchers argue that this standard mechanism also introduces a structural problem: all prior layer outputs are […] The post
16/03/2026
IBM AI Releases Granite 4.0 1B Speech as a Compact Multilingual Speech Model for Edge AI and Translation Pipelines
IBM has released Granite 4.0 1B Speech, a compact speech-language model designed for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) and bidirectional automatic speech translation (AST). The release targets enterprise and edge-style speech deployments where memory footprint, latency, and compute efficiency matter as much as raw benchmark quality. What Changed in Granite 4.0 1B Speech At the […] The post
16/03/2026
A Coding Implementation to Design an Enterprise AI Governance System Using OpenClaw Gateway Policy Engines, Approval Workflows and Auditable Agent Execution
In this tutorial, we build an enterprise-grade AI governance system using OpenClaw and Python. We start by setting up the OpenClaw runtime and launching the OpenClaw Gateway so that our Python environment can interact with a real agent through the OpenClaw API. We then design a governance layer that classifies requests based on risk, enforces […] The post
15/03/2026
Meet OpenViking: An Open-Source Context Database that Brings Filesystem-Based Memory and Retrieval to AI Agent Systems like OpenClaw
OpenViking is an open-source Context Database for AI Agents from Volcengine. The project is built around a simple architectural concept: agent systems should not treat context as a flat collection of text chunks. Instead, OpenViking organizes context through a file system paradigm, with the goal of making memory, resources, and skills manageable through a unified […] The post
15/03/2026
LangChain Releases Deep Agents: A Structured Runtime for Planning, Memory, and Context Isolation in Multi-Step AI Agents
Most LLM agents work well for short tool-calling loops but start to break down when the task becomes multi-step, stateful, and artifact-heavy. LangChain’s Deep Agents is designed for that gap. The project is described by LangChain as an ‘agent harness‘: a standalone library built on top of LangChain’s agent building blocks and powered by the […] The post
15/03/2026
Zhipu AI Introduces GLM-OCR: A 0.9B Multimodal OCR Model for Document Parsing and Key Information Extraction (KIE)
Why Document OCR Still Remains a Hard Engineering Problem? What does it take to make OCR useful for real documents instead of clean demo images? And can a compact multimodal model handle parsing, tables, formulas, and structured extraction without turning inference into a resource bonfire? That is the problem targeted by GLM-OCR, introduced by researchers […] The post
15/03/2026
How to Build Type-Safe, Schema-Constrained, and Function-Driven LLM Pipelines Using Outlines and Pydantic
In this tutorial, we build a workflow using Outlines to generate structured and type-safe outputs from language models. We work with typed constraints like Literal, int, and bool, and design prompt templates using outlines.Template, and enforce strict schema validation with Pydantic models. We also implement robust JSON recovery and a function-calling style that generates validated […] The post
15/03/2026
Best practices for securing Microsoft Intune
Microsoft Intune gives IT and security teams a powerful way to manage endpoints at scale - deploying apps, enforcing security baselines, and configuring the settings that keep users productive and your organization protected. That’s why strong admin protections matter, so the right people can make the right changes, in the right scope, with the right safeguards. In this post, we’ll walk through three practical approaches to strengthen Intune protections: Start with...
14/03/2026
Garry Tan Releases gstack: An Open-Source Claude Code System for Planning, Code Review, QA, and Shipping
What if AI-assisted coding became more reliable by separating product planning, engineering review, release, and QA into distinct operating modes? That is the idea behind Garry Tan’s gstack, an open-source toolkit that packages Claude Code into 8 opinionated workflow skills backed by a persistent browser runtime. The tookit describes itself as ‘Eight opinionated workflow skills […] The post
14/03/2026
Recovering Missing Rows (“Gaps”) in Azure SQL Data Sync — Supported Approaches (and What to Avoid)
Azure SQL Data Sync is commonly used to keep selected tables synchronized between a hub database and one or more member databases. In some cases, you may discover a data “gap”: a subset of rows that exist in the source but are missing on the destination for a specific time window, even though synchronization continues afterward for new changes. This post explains supported recovery patterns and what not to do, based on a real support sce...
14/03/2026
Google DeepMind Introduces Aletheia: The AI Agent Moving from Math Competitions to Fully Autonomous Professional Research Discoveries
Google DeepMind team has introduced Aletheia, a specialized AI agent designed to bridge the gap between competition-level math and professional research. While models achieved gold-medal standards at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), research requires navigating vast literature and constructing long-horizon proofs. Aletheia solves this by iteratively generating, verifying, and revising solutions in natural language. […] The post
13/03/2026
New AI-900 Lab Simulations
We’re excited to announce the launch of new AI-900 lab simulations, designed to help educators deliver more interactive, scalable, and learner-friendly AI experiences. As part of Microsoft Learn for Educators (MSLE), eligible educators can access lab seats to provision Azure-based labs for students—supporting interactive learning and skills validation in a guided, low-risk environment. Important
13/03/2026
Title Plan Update - March 13, 2026
📁March 13, 2026 - Title Plan Now Available Access the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at
13/03/2026
Monday Masterclass Season 2 – Week 4 Designing Events Employees Remember
Great events don’t just deliver information — they create moments people remember, return to, and build on. In Week 4 of the Viva Engage Monday Masterclass Season 2, we wrapped up the series by focusing on how to design events that drive participation, trust, and momentum before, during, and after the moment. This session brought together product insights...
13/03/2026
Best practices for scaling channel-led growth in Microsoft Marketplace
Vathsalya Senapathi leads Partner GTM at Tackle, blending co-sell, co-marketing, and operations to drive top of funnel revenue and customer value through cloud and ecosystem partnerships _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________...
13/03/2026
Introducing the Windows NVMe-oF Initiator Preview in Windows Server Insiders Builds
What Is NVMe-over-Fabrics? NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) extends the NVMe protocol—originally designed for local PCIe-attached SSDs—across a network fabric. Instead of using legacy SCSI-based protocols such as iSCSI or Fibre Channel, NVMe-oF allows a host to communicate directly with remote NVMe controllers using the same NVMe command set used for local devices. In this Insider build, Windows Server supports: NVMe-oF over TCP (NVMe...
13/03/2026
Security Review for Microsoft Edge version 146
We have reviewed the new settings in Microsoft Edge version 146 and determined that there are no additional security settings that require enforcement. The Microsoft Edge version 139 security baseline continues to be our recommended configuration which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit. Microsoft Edge version 146 introduced 9 new Computer an...
13/03/2026
Introducing Azure Managed Grafana 12
In this release, Azure Managed Grafana makes it easier to tighten access with current-user Entra authentication, speed up Azure Monitor logs exploration, and level up Prometheus and database monitoring experiences. What’s new in Azure Managed Grafana 12 Use current-user Entra authentication for supported Azure data sources to query with the signed-in user’s permissions. Analyze Azure Monitor logs faster with a new query builder and improved visualization and Exp...
13/03/2026
A Practical Path Forward for Heroku Customers with Azure
On February 6, 2026, Heroku announced it is moving to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and ongoing support. Many customers are now reassessing how their application platforms will support today’s workloads and future innovation. Microsoft is committed to helping customers migrate and modernize applications from platforms like Heroku to Azure. <...
13/03/2026
Enterprise Identity Meets Secure File Transfer: Entra ID Public Preview on Azure Blob Storage SFTP
We are excited to announce the public preview of Entra ID-based access for Azure Blob Storage SFTP. This new capability enables you to use Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) identities (including guest users via Entra Extern...
13/03/2026
Model Context Protocol (MCP) vs. AI Agent Skills: A Deep Dive into Structured Tools and Behavioral Guidance for LLMs
In recent times, many developments in the agent ecosystem have focused on enabling AI agents to interact with external tools and access domain-specific knowledge more effectively. Two common approaches that have emerged are skills and MCPs. While they may appear similar at first, they differ in how they are set up, how they execute tasks, […] The post
13/03/2026
Google AI Introduces ‘Groundsource’: A New Methodology that Uses Gemini Model to Transform Unstructured Global News into Actionable, Historical Data
Google AI Research team recently released Groundsource, a new methodology that uses Gemini model to extract structured historical data from unstructured public news reports. The project addresses the lack of historical data for rapid-onset natural disasters. Its first output is an open-source dataset containing 2.6 million historical urban flash flood events across more than 150 […] The post
13/03/2026
Azure Arc Server Feb 2026 Forum Recap
Please find the recording for the monthly Azure Arc Server Forum at YouTube! During the February 2026 Azure Arc Server Forum, we discussed: Arc Server Reporting & Dashboard (Jeff Pigot, Sr. Solution Engineer): Check out this awesome visual reporting bringing together different management services and experiences across Azure Arc-enabled servers...
12/03/2026
Proactive Health Monitoring and Auto-Communication Now Available for Azure Container Registry
Today, we're introducing Azure Container Registry's (ACR) latest service health enhancement: automated auto-communication through Azure Service Health alerts. When ACR detects degradation in critical operations—authentication, image push, and pull—your teams are now proactively notified through Azure Service Health, delivering better transparency and faster communication without waiting for manual incident reporting. For platform teams, SRE organizations, and ente...
12/03/2026
How to Build an Autonomous Machine Learning Research Loop in Google Colab Using Andrej Karpathy’s AutoResearch Framework for Hyperparameter Discovery and Experiment Tracking
In this tutorial, we implement a Colab-ready version of the AutoResearch framework originally proposed by Andrej Karpathy. We build an automated experimentation pipeline that clones the AutoResearch repository, prepares a lightweight training environment, and runs a baseline experiment to establish initial performance metrics. We then create an automated research loop that programmatically edits the hyperparameters […] The post
12/03/2026
Level up your data security at Microsoft 365 Community Conference
Technology is evolving at a startling rate, and it’s no longer enough for an organization to maintain their security measures, they must evolve along with it. Don’t let your data, employees, or clients become another headline. Join us in Orlando on April 21–23 for the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, where you’ll learn how to safeguard your most valuable data during expert-led discussions and hands-on s...
12/03/2026
Security Community Spotlight: Luca Romero Arrieche Heller
Meet Luca, Modern Workplace and Cloud Consultant at SoftwareOne Iberia, a Microsoft Partner. Luca has been working with Microsoft Security and cloud technologies for over a decade, closely following the evolution of the Microsoft Security ecosystem. Today, Luca focuses on Modern Work and security transformation projects, including large-scale Microsoft 365 migrations, enterprise messaging moderniz...
12/03/2026
Stanford Researchers Release OpenJarvis: A Local-First Framework for Building On-Device Personal AI Agents with Tools, Memory, and Learning
Stanford researchers have introduced OpenJarvis, an open-source framework for building personal AI agents that run entirely on-device. The project comes from Stanford’s Scaling Intelligence Lab and is presented as both a research platform and deployment-ready infrastructure for local-first AI systems. Its focus is not only model execution, but also the broader software stack required to […] The post
12/03/2026
Cumulative Update #3 for SQL Server 2025 RTM
The 3rd cumulative update release for SQL Server 2025 RTM is now available for download at the Microsoft Downloads site. Please note that registration is no longer required to download Cumulative updates. To learn more about the release or servicing model, please visit: CU3 KB Article: https://learn.microsoft.com/troubleshoot/sql/releases/sqlserver-2025/cumulativ...
12/03/2026
Cumulative Update #24 for SQL Server 2022 RTM
The 24th cumulative update release for SQL Server 2022 RTM is now available for download at the Microsoft Downloads site. Please note that registration is no longer required to download Cumulative updates. To learn more about the release or servicing model, please visit: CU24 KB Article: https://learn.microsoft.com/troubleshoot/sql/releases/sqlserver-2022/cumula...
12/03/2026
Accelerating AI adoption through Microsoft Marketplace
AI is no longer an emerging conversation—it has become the defining priority shaping how organizations approach cloud strategy, investment, and innovation. During our February Microsoft Marketplace Customer Office Hours session, our team shared insights into current AI adoption trends, why AI has risen to the top of enterprise priorities, and how Microsoft Marketplace provides a practical, governed path for customers to move faster with confidence. Below is a summary of the key themes ...
12/03/2026
Bulk enable Azure Arc Connected Machine Agent Automatic Upgrade (Tag Scoped) with Azure Cloud Shell
Overview Keeping the Azure Arc Connected Machine agent current is a foundational hygiene task for any hybrid server estate, especially when you’re operating at scale and onboarding hundreds (or thousands) of machines into Arc. The good news: Azure Arc supports an automatic agent upgrade (preview) capability that can be enabled per Arc machine by setting the agentUpgrade.enableAutomaticUpgrade property via Azure Resource...
12/03/2026
Scaling Copilot adoption with the Copilot Adoption Community in Viva Engage
Organizations everywhere are embracing AI, but getting value takes more than turning on a tool. It takes shared learning, practical examples, and a place where people can build confidence over time. The Copilot Adoption Community in Viva Engage is an out-of-the-box template that helps people learn and use Copilot together, whether they are using Microsoft 365 Copilot or Copilot Chat. The best way for employees to learn to use AI is by seeing coworkers like ...
12/03/2026
Empowering.Cloud Community Update – March 2026
The latest Microsoft Teams and Microsoft365 expert community briefings, podcasts and upcoming community events. Expert Briefings Real AI Use Cases in the Contact Centre with Luware Nimbus - Costs, Risks and Benefits https://empowering.cloud/real-ai-use-cases-in-the-contact-centre-...
12/03/2026
Get to know these Agent 365 community all-stars
With the announcement that Agent 365 will be generally available on May 1, 2026 and included in Microsoft 365 packages with and without Teams, many of our community members are eager to learn more about the new control plane for agents. Hopefully you've heard about the upcoming live AMA with the Agent 365 team on March 18, 2026; but meanwhile, we're highlighting a few folks who are creating helpfu...
12/03/2026
Partner Blog | Rising together, leading forward
March gives us an opportunity to reflect on progress, leadership, and the responsibility we carry forward. Women’s History Month is a moment to recognize the women who have shaped our industry and examine the role we play in building what comes next. This week, The WIT Network brought partners and leaders together in San Diego for its International Women’s Day conference,
12/03/2026
Unlock 5 powerful App Advisor capabilities to sell faster on Microsoft Marketplace
Software companies building apps and agents move quickly. But speed alone isn’t enough. Teams also need clear guidance on development decisions, publishing steps, and how to bring solutions to Microsoft Marketplace. App Advisor helps streamline that process. App Advisor helps streamline the process for anyone, with no barriers to start. However, when you sign in and authenticate, the experience becomes even more powerful. Here are 5 reasons to authenticate in Ap...
12/03/2026
Meet the updated Copilot Notebooks experience: Your home for understanding work, projects, and more
Work today isn’t short-lived or linear. Projects span months, inputs come from everywhere across files, meetings, and conversations, and real progress depends on how well teams understand evolving information while turning all of it into clear decisions, updates, and deliverables. That’s why we’re excited to announce the general availability of the refreshed Copilot Notebooks experience across Microsoft 365 Copilot app and OneNote. With an updated three-column layout and powerful Copilot feat...
12/03/2026
Comprehensive Security in the Era of AI: What Nonprofits Need to Know Now
Artificial intelligence is transforming the nonprofit landscape, opening new doors for impact while also introducing new responsibilities. As organizations work tirelessly to support communities, protect vulnerable populations, and steward limited resources, it’s more important than ever to ensure AI is used safely, ethically, and securely. Microsoft’s guide, Comprehensive Security in the Era of AI, offers nonprofits a clear, compassionate roadmap for navigati...
12/03/2026
Image Search Series Part V: Building Histopathology Image Search with Prov-GigaPath
@Alberto Santamaria-Pang, Principal AI Data Scientist, Healthcare ISE and Adjunct Faculty, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine @Asma Ben Abacha, Senior Applied Scientist, HLS AI
12/03/2026
ITAR Compliance in the Microsoft Cloud: Navigating GCC, Azure Commercial, and Azure Government
Why ITAR Compliance Matters in the Cloud The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) govern the export, temporary import, re-export, and transfer of defense articles, services, and related technical data documented on the United States Munitions List (USML). Administered by the United States’ Department of State's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), the ITAR imposes strict requirements on manufacturers, exporters, and brokers of defense-related items - and those re...
12/03/2026
Introducing VibeVoice ASR: Longform, Structured Speech Recognition At Scale
Speech recognition technology continues to make enormous strides—but most systems still struggle with real-world audio: long meetings, multi-speaker conversations, domain-specific terminology, and multilingual discussions that don’t fit neatly into short audio chunks. Today, we’re excited to announce VibeVoice ASR, now available through
12/03/2026
New Microsoft Certified: SQL AI Developer Associate Certification
AI is transforming how data-driven applications are built, and SQL professionals are at the center of this new era. Whether you're a database developer, administrator, analyst, or architect, your SQL expertise is more critical than ever. With the rise of AI, quality data and secure, optimized queries are foundational to building intelligent, scalable solutions. We’re introducing the Microsoft Certified: SQL AI Developer Associate Certification to help you validate your...
12/03/2026
Introducing the Startup-Scale Landing Zone: Get Azure right from day one
If you've been following this blog, you may recall the post
12/03/2026
Changes to Project Web App site creation and unused sites effective April 1, 2026
Microsoft Project Online will be retired on September 30, 2026. As part of this process, starting April 1, 2026, the creation of new Project Web App (PWA) sites will be blocked, and existing tenants without projects across their PWA sites will be blocked from accessing Project Online. What is changing on April 1, 2026...
12/03/2026
Microsoft at NVIDIA GTC 2026: Powering the AI Ecosystem
This year, the Microsoft presence at GTC highlights a simple but powerful idea: AI transformation does not happen alone. It happens through ecosystems. Through a curated series of partner demonstrations and industry conversations, we will showcase how organizations are designing, building, and scaling AI solutions on Microsoft Azure accelerated by NVIDIA. The result is a connected story about how enterprise AI becomes production-ready and delivers measurable business value.
12/03/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: March 12, 2026
Learn about 157 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
12/03/2026
Is the Microsoft MVP Program for You? A Love Letter to Community Builders
Most Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals remember the moment they realized they were already doing the work. Writing that blog post late at night because someone, somewhere, might find it helpful. Answering questions in a forum long after an event ended. Organizing a meetup with no guarantee anyone would show up. Long before the title, the badge, or the email arr...
12/03/2026
Building a Multi-Agent On-Call Copilot with Microsoft Agent Framework
Four AI agents, one incident payload, structured triage in under 60 seconds powered by Microsoft Agent Framework and Foundry Hosted Agents. Multi-Agent Microsoft Agent Framework Foundry Hosted Agents Python SRE / Incident Response
12/03/2026
How to Design a Streaming Decision Agent with Partial Reasoning, Online Replanning, and Reactive Mid-Execution Adaptation in Dynamic Environments
In this tutorial, we build a Streaming Decision Agent that thinks and acts in an online, changing environment while continuously streaming safe, partial reasoning updates. We implement a dynamic grid world with moving obstacles and a shifting goal, then use an online A* planner in a receding-horizon loop to commit to only a few near-term […] The post
11/03/2026
Microsoft Marketplace Partner Digest
March marks a strong quarter of momentum across the Microsoft Marketplace ecosystem, with partners scaling their businesses while delivering high quality customer experiences—directly, through the channel, and alongside Microsoft. From monetizing AI innovation to streamlining post purchase workflows and co-selling motions, partners continue to turn Marketplace readiness into real, repeatable growth. This month’s digest highlights the insights, updates, and opportunities helping software compa...
11/03/2026
Microsoft Teams Takes Center Stage at the 2026 Microsoft 365 Community Conference
Microsoft Teams is where people, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and agents come together to collaborate, communicate, and get work done—before, during, and after every interaction. Contributing to and benefiting from Work IQ, Copilot in Teams understands the context, relationships, and signals behind real work, bringing meetings, calling, chat, and collaboration into a single, connected experience across Microsoft 365. At the 2026 Microsoft 365 Community Conference, Teams will be fro...
11/03/2026
NVIDIA Releases Nemotron 3 Super: A 120B Parameter Open-Source Hybrid Mamba-Attention MoE Model Delivering 5x Higher Throughput for Agentic AI
The gap between proprietary frontier models and highly transparent open-source models is closing faster than ever. NVIDIA has officially pulled the curtain back on Nemotron 3 Super, a staggering 120 billion parameter reasoning model engineered specifically for complex multi-agent applications. Released today, Nemotron 3 Super sits perfectly between the lightweight 30 billion parameter Nemotron 3 […] The post
11/03/2026
Modern Database Protection: From Visibility to Threat Detection with Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Databases sit at the heart of modern businesses. They support everyday apps, reports and AI tools. For example, any time you engage a site that requires a username and password, there is a database at the back end that stores your login information. As organizations adopt multi-cloud and hybrid architectures, databases are generated all the time, creating database sprawl. As a result, tracking and managing every database, catching misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, knowing where sensitive...
11/03/2026
Azure Copilot Migration Agent
Migration and modernization are complex, involving multiple decisions that determine cost, risk, and long‑term success. The timelines stretch and momentum is lost due to fragmented tools and manual planning. For most organizations, this is a continuous motion driven by shifting demands, security pressures, and the need to innovate faster without disrupting what already works. With the release of Azure Copilot Migration Agent, this process is now guided and accelerated with insight‑driv...
11/03/2026
February 2026 Recap: Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Hello Azure Community, We’re excited to share the February 2026 recap for Azure Database for PostgreSQL, featuring a set of updates focused on speed, simplicity, and better visibility. From Terraform support for Elastic Clusters and a refreshed VM SKU selection experience in the Azure portal to built‑in Grafana dashboards, these improvements make it easier to build, opera...
11/03/2026
Save the date: Windows Server Summit – May 11-13, 2026
Windows Server Summit 2026 builds on the strong momentum of last year's event—where you told us you want less marketing and more practical, engineering‑led guidance. If you're responsible for keeping Windows Server environments secure, resilient, and up to date, this year's summit is designed with you in mind. What you'll learn
11/03/2026
Check This Out! (CTO!) Guide (February 2026)
Member: TysonPaul | Microsoft Community Hub Secure DNS with DoH: Public Preview for Windows DNS Server
11/03/2026
Advice for Startups: Build with Confidence Using GitHub
During the Imagine Cup Builder Series, GitHub Developer Advocate Kedasha Kerr shared practical insights on how teams can use GitHub and
11/03/2026
Spotlight On... AI Transformation & the Frontier Firm Playbook
Introduction AI transformation is not a single launch – it’s a multi‑phase journey that blends strategy, change management, and measurable business outcomes. The Frontier Firm Playbo...
11/03/2026
A faster way to find your Word, Excel and PowerPoint files online
Hi, Insiders! My name is Sonia Kulkarni, and I’m a Principal Product Manager on the Office Shared Services and Experiences team. I’m excited to share with you a new feature on Word for the web, Excel for the web, and PowerPoint for the web that allows you to easily...
11/03/2026
Microsoft partners with DataBahn to accelerate enterprise deployments for Microsoft Sentinel
Enterprise security teams are collecting more telemetry than ever across cloud platforms, endpoints, SaaS applications, and on-premises infrastructure. Security teams want broader data coverage and longer retention without losing control of cost and data quality.
11/03/2026
Introducing Agentic Secret Finder: Finding Real Credentials Where Traditional Tools Fail
Agentic Secret Finder (ASF) is an AI-powered capability in Microsoft Security Copilot that detects leaked credentials in unstructured content, such as emails, chat logs, documents, and screenshots, where traditional pattern-matching tools struggle. Agentic Secret Finder (ASF) is “agentic” because it relies on a multi‑step, multi‑agent reasoning workflow rather than a single pass detector. Detection, verification, and contextual analysis ...
11/03/2026
From Single Apps to Scale Solutions: How AI Agents Scale Modernization
AI is rewriting the modernization playbook. Over the past few years, AI has changed software development faster than anything we’ve seen in decades. And it’s not just about writing code faster. AI is reducing the day-to-day friction that slows teams down: upgrades, migrations, test failures, brittle pipelines, incident response, and the ever-growing backlog of technical debt. That operational drag keeps teams stuck maintaining systems instead of building what’s next. Agentic D...
11/03/2026
Segurança Corporativa no Azure VMware Solution (AVS): Como Inspecionar o Tráfego com Firewall NVA
Muitas vezes faz sentido usar uma NVA (Network Virtual Appliance) como firewall dentro do AVS, porque permite reaproveitar a solução de firewall já existente (Palo Alto, Check Point, etc..) e manter a proficiência do time de segurança, evita parte da complexidade de roteamento que pode surgir ao forçar o tráfego passar por um firewall “fora” do AVS . Além disso, administrar esse firewall dentro do AVS continua familiar para quem já opera VMware,...
11/03/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: March 11, 2026
Learn about 128 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
11/03/2026
February 2026 Recap: Azure Database for MySQL
We're excited to share a summary of the Azure Database for MySQL updates from the last couple of months. Extended Support Timeline Update Based on customer feedback requesting additional time to complete major version upgrades, we have extended the grace period before
11/03/2026
Google AI Introduces Gemini Embedding 2: A Multimodal Embedding Model that Lets Your Bring Text, Images, Video, Audio, and Docs into the Embedding Space
Google expanded its Gemini model family with the release of Gemini Embedding 2. This second-generation model succeeds the text-only gemini-embedding-001 and is designed specifically to address the high-dimensional storage and cross-modal retrieval challenges faced by AI developers building production-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. The Gemini Embedding 2 release marks a significant technical shift in how […] The post
11/03/2026
Implementing the Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) / Curated API Pattern Using Azure API Management
Modern digital applications rarely serve a single type of client. Web portals, mobile apps, partner integrations, and internal tools often consume the same backend services—yet each has different performance, payload, and UX requirements. Exposing backend APIs directly to all clients frequently leads to over-fetching, chatty networks, and tight coupling between UI and backend domain models. This is where a Curated API or Backend for Frontend API design pattern becomes useful. ...
11/03/2026
Announcing Fireworks AI on Microsoft Foundry
We’re excited to announce that starting today, Microsoft Foundry customers can access high performance, low latency inference performance of popular open models hosted on the Fireworks cloud from their Foundry projects, and even deploy their own customized versions, too! As part of the Public Preview launch, we’re offering the most popular open models for serverless inference in b...
11/03/2026
Fish Audio Releases Fish Audio S2: A New Generation of Expressive Text-to-Speech (TTS) with Absurdly Controllable Emotion
The landscape of Text-to-Speech (TTS) is moving away from modular pipelines toward integrated Large Audio Models (LAMs). Fish Audio’s release of S2-Pro, the flagship model within the Fish Speech ecosystem, represents a shift toward open architectures capable of high-fidelity, multi-speaker synthesis with sub-150ms latency. The release provides a framework for zero-shot voice cloning and granular […] The post
11/03/2026
How to Build a Self-Designing Meta-Agent That Automatically Constructs, Instantiates, and Refines Task-Specific AI Agents
In this tutorial, we build a Meta-Agent that designs other agents automatically from a simple task description. We implement a system that analyzes the task, selects tools, chooses a memory architecture, configures a planner, and then instantiates a fully working agent runtime. We go beyond static agent templates and instead build a dynamic, self-configuring architecture […] The post
11/03/2026
Announcing the Microsoft AI Power Days Agent-a-thon winners
The February 2026 Microsoft AI Power Days Agent-a-thon brought together builders from around the world with one shared goal—to turn ideas into working AI agents that solve real problems. From first-time builders to advanced practitioners, the creativity, ambition, and practical impact on display exceeded all expectations. Over the course of the Agent-a-thon, participants explored what’s possible with agentic AI—learning, building, and iterating using M...
11/03/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2025 RTM CU2
The Security Update for SQL Server 2025 RTM CU2 is now available for download at the Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update Catalog sites. This package cumulatively includes all previous security fixes for SQL Server 2025 RTM CUs, plus it includes the new security fixes detailed in the KB Article. Security Bulletins:
10/03/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2025 RTM GDR
The Security Update for SQL Server 2025 RTM GDR is now available for download at the Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update Catalog sites. This package cumulatively includes all previous security fixes for SQL Server 2025 RTM, plus it includes the new security fixes detailed in the KB Article. Security Bulletins:
10/03/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2022 RTM CU23
The Security Update for SQL Server 2022 RTM CU23 is now available for download at the Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update Catalog sites. This package cumulatively includes all previous security fixes for SQL Server 2022 RTM CUs, plus it includes the new security fixes detailed in the KB Article. Security Bulletins:
10/03/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2022 RTM GDR
The Security Update for SQL Server 2022 RTM GDR is now available for download at the Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update Catalog sites. This package cumulatively includes all previous security fixes for SQL Server 2022 RTM, plus it includes the new security fixes detailed in the KB Article. Security Bulletins:
10/03/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2019 RTM CU32
The Security Update for SQL Server 2019 RTM CU32 is now available for download at the Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update Catalog sites. This package cumulatively includes all previous security fixes for SQL Server 2019 RTM CUs, plus it includes the new security fixes detailed in the KB Article. Security Bulletins:
10/03/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2019 RTM GDR
The Security Update for SQL Server 2019 RTM GDR is now available for download at the Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update Catalog sites. This package cumulatively includes all previous security fixes for SQL Server 2019 RTM, plus it includes the new security fixes detailed in the KB Article. Security Bulletins:
10/03/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2017 RTM CU31
The Security Update for SQL Server 2017 RTM CU31 is now available for download at the Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update Catalog sites. This package cumulatively includes all previous security fixes for SQL Server 2017 RTM CUs, plus it includes the new security fixes detailed in the KB Article. Security Bulletins:
10/03/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2017 RTM GDR
The Security Update for SQL Server 2017 RTM GDR is now available for download at the Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update Catalog sites. This package cumulatively includes all previous security fixes for SQL Server 2017 RTM, plus it includes the new security fixes detailed in the KB Article. Security Bulletins:
10/03/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2016 SP3 Azure Connect Feature Pack
The Security Update for SQL Server 2016 SP3 Azure Connect Feature Pack is now available for download at the Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update Catalog sites. This package cumulatively includes all previous security fixes for SQL Server 2016 SP3 Azure Connect Feature Pack, plus it includes the new security fixes detailed in the KB Article. Security Bulletins:
10/03/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2016 SP3 GDR
The Security Update for SQL Server 2016 SP3 GDR is now available for download at the Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update Catalog sites. This package cumulatively includes all previous security fixes for SQL Server 2016 SP3, plus it includes the new security fixes detailed in the KB Article. Security Bulletins:
10/03/2026
Purview Community: Call for Sessions!
Microsoft Purview Community Lighting Talks is a virtual event series featuring real-world demos, tips, and solutions directly from you, the Purview Community!The goal of these short, fluff-free lighting sessions is to foster authentic knowledge sharing, community connection, and highlight real experiences to empower others who use Microsoft Purview. The virtual events will be held in a simu-live format across multiple time zones and will include subject-matter experts and the spea...
10/03/2026
Announcing SMTP DANE & MTA STS Connector Modes in Exchange Online
We’re excited to announce the release of SMTP DANE and MTA‑STS connector modes in Exchange Online. This update gives administrators explicit control over how strictly Exchange Online enforces modern mail flow security standards when sending email over outbound connectors. This capability builds on our offerings for SMTP DANE with DNSSEC and
10/03/2026
NVIDIA AI Releases Nemotron-Terminal: A Systematic Data Engineering Pipeline for Scaling LLM Terminal Agents
The race to build autonomous AI agents has hit a massive bottleneck: data. While frontier models like Claude Code and Codex CLI have demonstrated impressive proficiency in terminal environments, the training strategies and data mixtures behind them have remained closely guarded secrets. This lack of transparency has forced researchers and devs into a costly cycle […] The post
10/03/2026
Partner Case Study | EPAM
What does it take to move from AI experimentation to enterprise-wide scale? For EPAM, the answer emerged from a year of foundational work—helping customers fix data estates, aligning stakeholders, and building repeatable engineering practices. As a Microsoft Global Systems Integrator (GSI), EPAM supports customers preparing for scalable adoption, with a focus on agentic AI and production-grade deployments. The company’s long-standing partnership with Microsoft includes 17 specializatio...
10/03/2026
Setting Up a Google Colab AI-Assisted Coding Environment That Actually Works
This article focuses on Google Colab , an increasingly popular, free, and accessible, cloud-based Python environment that is well-suited for prototyping data analysis workflows and experimental code before moving to production systems.
10/03/2026
My MVP Story: Finding My Way Into Data and Community - Deborah Jones’ Journey
In the world of data, some people learn tools - and some turn them into superpowers. Microsoft MVP Deborah Jones is firmly in the second category. She’s self-taught across Power BI,
10/03/2026
Understanding the Standard HDD I/O unit size update and what it means for your workloads
As Azure continues to evolve to support modern workload patterns, we are refining how transactions are measured for Standard HDD managed disks. This update helps align billing more closely with actual I/O behavior while maintaining predictable cost controls for customers.
10/03/2026
Publish to web delivers polished files externally with one click
Hi, Insiders! I am Ekta Dwivedy, a Product Manager on the PowerPoint team. I'm excited to introduce the new Publish to web feature, available in Excel for the web and PowerPoint for the web, and coming soon to Word for the web. It makes it easy for enterprise users to share clean, polished documents with external clients and stakeholders without revealing internal edits, comments, or version history. Publish to web delivers polished files externally with one click You’ve share...
10/03/2026
Sign with a personal touch with eSignature for Microsoft 365
We’ve heard your feedback: you want more personal and natural signing experiences with eSignature for Microsoft 365. Now you can draw your signature directly on PDF files using a stylus, touch, or mouse. No more printing, signing, and scanning; no more settling for typed signatures. Whether you’re approving an official company policy or signing a sales contract, you can now add y...
10/03/2026
What's New in Microsoft EDU - March 2026
Join us on Wednesday, March 25th, 2026 for our latest "What's New in Microsoft EDU" webinar! We will be covering all of the latest product updates from Microsoft Education. These 30-minute webinars are put on by the Microsoft Education Product Management group and happen once per month, this month both 8:00am Pacific Time and 4:00pm Pacific time to cover as many global time zones as possible around the world. And don’t worry – we’ll be recording these and posting on our Microsoft Educat...
10/03/2026
Partner Blog | Azure updates for partners: February 2026
AI is shifting quickly from experimentation to measurable impact. Customers are moving faster and asking for AI that scales profitably, reliably, and globally, without added risk or complexity. With the latest platform investments, Microsoft Azure provides a strong foundation for AI at scale, creating an opportunity for you to differ...
10/03/2026
No Exchange Server Security Updates for March 2026
Although Exchange 2016 and 2019 are now out of support, some customers have purchased the Exchange 2016 and 2019 Extended Security Update (ESU). We have therefore decided that un...
10/03/2026
RSAT capabilities arrive on Arm-based Windows 11 PCs
Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) are now officially supported on Arm-based Windows 11 PCs. You can now remotely manage Windows server roles and features using Windows devices built on Arm processors, just as you would with traditional x64-based PCs. Supporting RSAT on Windows 11 on Arm marks a significant milestone and addresses one of your top requests for enterprise management.
10/03/2026
How Microsoft Marketplace is accelerating AI adoption: Key takeaways from the London AI Tour 2026
London AI Tour 2026 made a double stop in late February—and I had the opportunity to be there for both events. Over two energizing days, thousands of customers and partners came together for immersive AI learning, and across every conversation, session, and demo, one unifying theme stood out: Microsoft Marketplace and its growing channel ecosystem. On 24 Feb at ExCeL London, I joined more than 6,000 business and IT leaders for AI Tour: Customer Day, headlined by Microsoft CEO Satya Nad...
10/03/2026
New Microsoft Certified: Azure Databricks Data Engineer Associate Certification
As a data engineer, you understand that AI performance depends directly on the quality of its data. If the data isn’t clean, well-managed, and accessible at scale, even the most sophisticated AI models won’t perform as expected. Introducing the Microsoft Certified: Azure Databricks Data Engineer Associate Certification, designed to prove that you have the skills required to build and operate reliable data systems by using Azure Databricks. ...
10/03/2026
When Trust Becomes the Attack Vector: Analysis of the EmEditor Supply-Chain Compromise
Attackers compromised the upstream distribution mechanism for EmEditor, a widely used Windows text editor. Instead of delivering malware through phishing or malicious domains, the attackers manipulated server-side logic on the official download site to selectively serve a trojanized installer to public users while preserving legitimate content for administrators. This campaign highlights two recurring challenges in defending modern environments: Up...
10/03/2026
What's new in Azure SRE Agent in the GA release
Azure SRE Agent is now generally available (read the GA announcement). . After months in preview with teams across Microsoft and early customers, here's what's shipping at GA. We use SRE Agent in our team We built SRE Agent to solve our own operational problems first. It investigates our regressions, triages errors daily, and tu...
10/03/2026
Research Drop: Evolving Transformational Leadership in the Age of AI
Research Drop in Brief: Employees who feel supported to integrate agentic AI are 1.8x as likely to be high-frequency AI users (use AI at least daily), yet there is a 28-percentage point gap in perceived support between leaders and ICs, a potential sign that substantive elements of support are getting lost in the rush to adopt AI. Transformational leadership remains a strong foundation, but effective AI leadership requires evolving how these behaviors show up in practice<...
10/03/2026
Azure SRE Agent is Generally Available — What's New
Azure SRE Agent is now generally available (read the GA announcement). . After months in preview with teams across Microsoft and early customers, here's what's shipping at GA. We use SRE Agent in our team We built SRE Agent to solve our own operational problems first. It investigates our regressions, triages errors daily, and tu...
10/03/2026
AI for Communicators: What Copilot Adoption Actually Looks Like
Next month, we’re looking at what Copilot adoption success means and how communicators can lead, not just support it. Join Sarah Lundy (Microsoft Viva Engage) and Alex Snyder (Foot Locker) for a practical, communicator‑focused look at Copilot adoption in the real world, on Thursday April 2nd at 8 am PT. Drawing from the journeys at Foot Locker and Microsoft, this session explores how human‑led change, communities,...
10/03/2026
What It Takes to Give SRE Agent a Useful Starting Point
In our latest posts, The Agent that investigates itself and Azure SRE Agent Now Builds Expertise Like Your Best Engineer Introducing Deep Context, we wrote about a moment that changed how we think abo...
10/03/2026
The Agent that investigates itself
Azure SRE Agent handles tens of thousands of incidents each week for internal Microsoft services and external teams running it for their own systems. Last month, one of those incidents was about the agent itself. Our KV cache hit rate alert started firing. Cached token percentage was dropping acros...
10/03/2026
Migrating On-prem Windows & Linux VMs to Azure Confidential Virtual Machines via Azure Migrate
1. Executive Summary Enterprise cloud adoption increasingly prioritizes trust boundaries that extend beyond traditional infrastructure isolation. While encryption at rest and in transit are foundational, modern organizations must also ensure that data in use (data actively processed in CPU or system memory) remains protected.Azure Confidential Computing (ACC) mitigates emerging threats by enabling hardware-backed Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). These environments isolate...
10/03/2026
Agent Hooks: Production-Grade Governance for Azure SRE Agent
Introduction Azure SRE Agent helps engineering teams automate incident response, diagnostics, and remediation tasks. But when you're giving an agent access to production systems—your databases, your Kubernetes clusters, your cloud resources—you need more than just automation. You need governance. Today, we're diving deep into Agent Hooks, the built-in governance framework in Azure SRE Agent t...
10/03/2026
Azure SRE Agent Now Builds Expertise Like Your Best Engineer Introducing Deep Context
What if SRE Agent already knew your system before the next incident? Your most experienced SRE didn't become an expert overnight. Day one: reading runbooks, studying architecture diagrams, asking a lot of questions. Month three: knowing which services are fragile, which config changes cascade, which log patterns mean real trouble. Year two: diagnosing a production issue at 2 AM from a single alert because they'd built deep, living context about your systems...
10/03/2026
Announcing general availability for the Azure SRE Agent
Today, we’re excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of Azure SRE Agent— your AI‑powered operations teammate that helps organizations improve uptime, reduce incident impact, and cut operational toil by accelerating diagnosis and automating response workflows. This GA release represents a fundamental leap forward—shaped by feedback from hundreds of preview customers—in how agentic AI can be applied to cloud operations, so teams...
10/03/2026
Building Reusable Custom Images for Azure Confidential VMs Using Azure Compute Gallery
Overview Azure Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) provide hardware-enforced protection for sensitive workloads by encrypting data in use using AMD SEV-SNP technology. In enterprise environments, organizations typically need to: Create hardened golden images
10/03/2026
From Text to Tables: Feature Engineering with LLMs for Tabular Data
While large language models (LLMs) are typically used for conversational purposes in use cases that revolve around natural language interactions, they can also assist with tasks like feature engineering on complex datasets.
10/03/2026
Using Different Azure Key Vault Keys for Azure SQL Servers in a Failover Group
Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) in Azure SQL Database encrypts data at rest using a database encryption key (DEK). The DEK itself is protected by a TDE protector, which can be either: A service-managed key (default), or A customer-managed key (CMK) stored in Azure Key Vault. Many enterprises adopt customer-managed keys to meet compliance, key rotation, and security governance requirements. When configuring Geo-replication or Failover Groups, Azure ...
10/03/2026
Microsoft Azure at KubeCon Europe 2026 | Amsterdam, NL - March 23-26
Microsoft Azure is coming back to Amsterdam for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in two short weeks, from March 23-26! As a Diamond Sponsor, we have a full week of sessions, hands-on activities, and ways to connect with the engineers behind AKS and our open-source projects. Here's what's on the schedule: Azure Day with Kubernetes: 23 March 2026 Before the main conference begins, join us at
10/03/2026
How to Create a Harness Pipeline and integrate with Azure
Building reliable, automated CI/CD pipelines is crucial for modern cloud applications. Harness — with its powerful pipeline orchestration — integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Azure, enabling teams to deploy applications faster, with stronger governance, security, and visibility. In this blog, you’ll learn how to create a Harness pipeline and integrate it with Azure services. We will walk through: Introduction to Harness and its role in CI/CD High-level explanati...
10/03/2026
Getting Started with Behave: Writing Cucumber Tests in VS Code
What is Behave? Behave is a BDD test framework for Python that allows you to write tests in plain English using Given–When–Then syntax, backed by Python step definitions. Key benefits: Human‑readable test scenarios using Gherkin Strong alignment between business requirements and test automation Easy integration with CI/CD pipelines Lightweight and IDE‑friendly Prereq...
10/03/2026
Build a Fully Offline RAG App with Foundry Local: No Cloud Required
A practical guide to building an on-device AI support agent using Retrieval-Augmented Generation, JavaScript, and Microsoft Foundry Local. The Problem: AI That Can't Go Offline Most AI-powered applications today are firmly tethered to the cloud. They assume stable internet, low-latency API calls, and the comfort of a managed endpoint. But what happens when your users are in an environment with zer...
10/03/2026
How to Build a Risk-Aware AI Agent with Internal Critic, Self-Consistency Reasoning, and Uncertainty Estimation for Reliable Decision-Making
In this tutorial, we build an advanced agent system that goes beyond simple response generation by integrating an internal critic and uncertainty estimation framework. We simulate multi-sample inference, evaluate candidate responses across accuracy, coherence, and safety dimensions, and quantify predictive uncertainty using entropy, variance, and consistency measures. We implement risk-sensitive selection strategies to balance confidence […] The post
10/03/2026
ByteDance Releases DeerFlow 2.0: An Open-Source SuperAgent Harness that Orchestrates Sub-Agents, Memory, and Sandboxes to do Complex Tasks
The era of the ‘Copilot’ is officially getting an upgrade. While the tech world has spent the last two years getting comfortable with AI that suggests code or drafts emails, ByteDance team is moving the goalposts. They released DeerFlow 2.0, a newly open-sourced ‘SuperAgent’ framework that doesn’t just suggest work; it executes it. DeerFlow is […] The post
10/03/2026
Securing devices faster with hotpatch updates on by default
Windows Autopatch is enabling hotpatch security updates by default to help secure devices even faster.This change in default behavior comes to all eligible[i] devices in Microsoft Intune and those accessing the service via Microsoft Graph API starting with the May 2026 Windows security update.Starting with the May 2026 Windows security update, Windows Autopatch is enabling hotpatch updates by default to help your organization get more secure, quicker.
09/03/2026
Andrew Ng’s Team Releases Context Hub: An Open Source Tool that Gives Your Coding Agent the Up-to-Date API Documentation It Needs
In the fast-moving world of agentic workflows, the most powerful AI model is still only as good as its documentation.Today, Andrew Ng and his team at DeepLearning.AI officially launched Context Hub, an open-source tool designed to bridge the gap between an agent’s static training data and the rapidly evolving reality of modern APIs.The post Andrew Ng’s Team Releases Context Hub: An Open Source Tool that Gives Your Coding Agent the Up-to-Date API Documentation It Needs appeared first on MarkTechPost.
09/03/2026
Anthropic Introduces Code Review via Claude Code to Automate Complex Security Research Using Advanced Agentic Multi-Step Reasoning Loops
Today, Anthropic is double-downing on a more ambitious vision: the AI agent that doesn’t just write your boilerplate, but actually understands why your Kubernetes cluster is screaming at 3:00 AM.With the recent launch of Claude Code […]The post Anthropic Introduces Code Review via Claude Code to Automate Complex Security Research Using Advanced Agentic Multi-Step Reasoning Loops appeared first on MarkTechPost.
09/03/2026
March update: What’s new in Security for partners
Introducing Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite— The next challenge is not building agents, it is operating them with trust at scale. Microsoft 365 E7 brings together Microsoft 365 E5, Entra Suite, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Agent 365 to enable a human-led, agent-operated enterprise.Microsoft is launching “Cyber Pulse,” a new Microsoft Security thought leadership series, starting with Issue 1: An AI Security Report.Submit your partner success story to showcase your impact, highlight your expertise, and demonstrate the measurable success you’re delivering to customers.
09/03/2026
Honoring Women Innovators: How Marisa Redd Is Expanding Childcare Access Through Technology
In Austin, access to childcare remains one of the biggest challenges facing working parents—and Marisa Redd, Senior Director at the Greater Austin YMCA, is helping reshape what’s possible.With Marisa's help, the YMCA introduced Tomorrow Academy, a forward‑thinking early learning model built to increase the availability of high‑quality, affordable childcare across the region.Supported by digital tools like Microsoft Teams, the organization has transformed how staff connect, coordinate, and share expertise.
09/03/2026
March update: What’s new for partners in AI Business Solutions
Microsoft 365 E7 brings together Microsoft 365 E5, Entra Suite, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Agent 365 to enable a human-led, agent-operated enterprise.Save up to 35% with these Microsoft 365 Copilot Business promotional offers, available to all CSP partners on annual commitments (monthly or annual billing) through June 30.Lead a 90-minute interactive Security Immersion Briefing on Microsoft Defender for Business Premium and Microsoft Purview for Business Premium (50–300 licenses) to serve as a trusted security advisor and empower customers to tackle rising cybersecurity threats. We’ve removed execution caps, so partners can now run unlimited briefings with up to 20 open at a time. With new delivery options, distributors and resellers can collaborate or deliver directly—creating more flexibility and scale.
09/03/2026
Learning Zone spotlight: How women won the vote
Women’s History Month: How voting rights were wonWomen’s History Month invites us to look back at the women who pushed boundaries and helped change the course of history.How women won the vote in Microsoft Learning Zone provides a structured, interactive way to explore this history in class. Students examine the contrasting approaches to the fight, analyze key figures, and compare British and American campaigns over time.
09/03/2026
Microsoft Agent Framework, Microsoft Foundry, MCP, Aspire を使った実践的な AI アプリを構築するサンプルが登場
その声に応え、私たちはオープンソースのサンプルアプリ『Interview Coach (面接コーチ)』を作りました。模擬就職面接を行う AI チャット web アプリです。完全なソースコードは GitHub で公開されています： Azure-Samples/interview-coach-agent-framework
09/03/2026
Microsoft Agent Framework, Microsoft Foundry, MCP, Aspire를 활용한 실전 예제 만들기
Microsoft Agent Framework과 Microsoft Foundry, MCP(Model Context Protocol), Aspire등을 어떻게 프로덕션 상황에서 조합할 수 있는지를 보여주는 오픈소스 Interview Coach 샘플입니다.AutoGen의 에이전트 추상화와 Semantic Kernel의 엔터프라이즈 기능(상태 관리, 타입 안전성, 미들웨어, 텔레메트리 등)을 하나로 통합했습니다. 또한 멀티 에이전트 오케스트레이션을 위한 그래프 기반 워크플로우도 추가했습니다.익숙한 패턴. 에이전트는 의존성 주입, IChatClient, 그리고 ASP.NET 앱과 동일한 호스팅 모델을 사용합니다.
09/03/2026
Partner Blog | Introducing Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite
Microsoft 365 E7 is the Frontier Suite, designed for a human-led, agent-operated enterprise, turning human intent into AI action that functions securely and at scale.Microsoft 365 E7 bundles Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Entra Suite, and Agent 365 to serve customers who are ready to scale AI with governance and security.Starting on April 1, 2026, to accelerate Microsoft 365 E5 to Microsoft 365 E7 upsell and Agent 365 adoption, Copilot + Power Accelerate will include Agent 365 across Immersion Briefings, Envisioning and proof of concept (PoC) engagements, and Deployment Accelerators. Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365 will also be included as eligible workloads for core tier one strategic product accelerators and growth levers in Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) incentives.
09/03/2026
Frontline shared mode expands to Germany West Central & Switzerland North
Today, I’m pleased to announce that Windows 365 Frontline in shared mode is now available in Germany West Central and Switzerland North within the Europe geography, bringing Cloud PCs even closer to customers across Europe.With Germany West Central and Switzerland North now supported, customers can place Cloud PCs closer to users to realize lower latency and local data residency through the Microsoft Cloud.Windows 365 Frontline in shared mode is built for workers who need short, task-based access to a Cloud PC and don’t require data persistence.
09/03/2026
Bringing AI assistance to basic plans in Microsoft Planner
Today, we are excited to announce that the Project Manager Agent in Microsoft Planner has been officially renamed to "Planner Agent," and its powerful AI-driven features will be generally available across both plan types.This means that basic and premium plan users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license will have access to intelligent Planner Agent capabilities that help streamline project management and task work.These two features — status report generation and task execution — are the first Planner Agent skills for basic plans.
09/03/2026
Introducing effective settings: See security configurations enforced on your device
See exactly which security configurations are enforced on your deviceWith effective settings, administrators can see the effective value of each security setting on a specific device—along with the configuration source—and quickly identify configuration attempts that didn’t take effect.The effective settings tab is available as a new tab under the configuration management tab on the device page.
09/03/2026
Assigning Process Accountability to Group Policy Refreshes
Gaurav and Itay here with some updates to the Group Policy Service debug logging.Remote GP Update through GPMC and Invoke-GPUpdate, both leverage Scheduled Tasks to trigger a policy refresh on the target machine(s).Modifications to the Advanced Audit Policy configuration via the Local Security Policy console (SecPol) also triggers a GP Refresh.
09/03/2026
Upcoming Compute API Change: Always return non-null securityType
Starting with Azure Compute API version 2025‑11‑01, responses for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) and Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) will include a non‑null securityType value in all operations.With Azure Compute API version 2025‑11‑01, all VM and VM Scale Set operations—including create, update, and GET—will always return a populated securityType field in the response.If you will be using Azure Compute API version 2025‑11‑01, review and update any code that assumes securityType may be null.
09/03/2026
Understanding Hash Join Memory Usage and OOM Risks in PostgreSQL
work_mem is commonly assumed to be a hard upper bound on per‑query memory usage.So, same amount of data being handled by the query in terms of shared memory, but totally different work_mem usage pattern due to the low cardinality and the join method (Hash Join) that put most of those rows in a single bucket and that is not limited by default, so, it can cause OOM errors at any time.Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server Query Store aggregates runtime and (optionally) wait stats over time windows and stores them in azure_sys, with views under query_store.*.
09/03/2026
A closer look at Work IQ
Work IQ is the intelligence layer that personalizes Microsoft 365 Copilot to you and your organization.It is the “brain” behind Copilot that understands context, relationships, and work patterns, so Copilot and agents can be faster, more accurate, and more secure than model companies that are built on connectors alone.Work IQ is comprised of three tightly integrated layers – data, context, and skills & tools. We’ll examine the components in each of these layers, highlight some of what’s coming to make Work IQ even better in the coming months, and share example prompts you can try to see the power of Work IQ in action.
09/03/2026
Enable agents to bring apps into the flow of work—while keeping IT in control
All pre-built partner app experiences will be available via the Microsoft 365 Agent Store by mid-April.MCP Apps and Apps SDK will roll out to GA on web and desktop later this month, with mobile following this spring.All agents can be monitored end‑to‑end using Agent 365—a unified control plane that gives IT a single place to see which agents are live, where they can act, and how they're being used.
09/03/2026
From draft to done: agentic Copilot in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint
Copilot in Word helps you turn working drafts into review-ready documents. It works in the same document your team is editing, so you can coauthor and iterate without creating—or reconciling—copies.Availability: Generally available today in Word on Windows, web, and Mac for Microsoft 365 Copilot users.Availability: PowerPoint is rolling out to web for Microsoft 365 Copilot users.
09/03/2026
Copilot in Outlook: New agentic experiences for email and calendar
Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot marks a shift from single-shot tasks to agentic experiences embedded in the apps where work happens.Copilot in Outlook is grounded in Work IQ—drawing on relevant emails, meetings, calendar preferences, and relationships so the output helps you get work done.Copilot in Outlook now helps you write your first draft directly in the canvas – then iterates with you to get it right. Instead of generating a one-off draft, Copilot writes in place and asks you clarifying questions (goal, audience, tone) and updates the email in place as you respond—so you can refine the message in a few quick turns until it’s ready to send—with every change visible in Outlook, no copy/paste or formatting surprises.
09/03/2026
Check Point and LoadSpring offer transactable solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like Check Point Software Technologies and LoadSpring Solutions deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace.Learn about these offers below:Check Point Cloud Firewall as a Service: With AI-powered prevention, auto-scaling, and integration with Azure-native tools like Microsoft Sentinel, Check Point Cloud Firewall as a Service delivers comprehensive protection for applications, workloads, and data.
09/03/2026
Resource onboarding using Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode
Managing hosts and clusters at scale means understanding what role each system plays and ensuring the right tools are available for that role.Note: The Storage and Networking profile view are still in progress and planned for the general availability release of vMode.Start by creating a resource group to organize your hosts and clusters.
09/03/2026
AI Inferencing in Air-Gapped Environments
In this post we will explore how to deploy in a Kubernetes cluster a Hugging Face-hosted model and a NVIDIA NIM™ microservice, a prebuilt, optimized inference container for rapidly deploying the latest AI models, and at the same time protect your infrastructure against data theft.We will outline the process for deploying a Kubernetes cluster in Azure with the highest level of network security to prevent data exfiltration, and we will also demonstrate the deployment of container images and required model parameters for both optionsThis document presents a practical guide for deploying LLM inferencing solutions in isolated Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters.
09/03/2026
CPOR, DIPOR with a bit of DIOR - Microsoft Cloud usage attributions for Partners - EXPLAINED
As a valued Microsoft Partner you most likely noticed, that there are several types of options (CPOR, CUA, DPOR, MBS, PAL and PRACR) to get recognized and rewarded for your impact in the Microsoft ecosystem. Given their different purpose, you should always choose the option which suits your business needs best and represent the impact recognition you want to drive most. This article intends to provide clarity on the best possible usage for your scenario, so you are backed by a data driven approach.CPOR is a claims‑based model where one or more partners can claim servicing ownership of a Modern Work or Dynamics 365 subscription/workload via Partner Center.What it isPRACR is a KPI where partners report Azure consumption on behalf of a customer for workloads which run in the partners Azure tenant, but utilized by an end customer.
09/03/2026
The ‘Bayesian’ Upgrade: Why Google AI’s New Teaching Method is the Key to LLM Reasoning
Large Language Models (LLMs) are the world’s best mimics, but when it comes to the cold, hard logic of updating beliefs based on new evidence, they are surprisingly stubborn.A team of researchers from Google argue that the current crop of AI agents falls far short of ‘probabilistic reasoning’—the ability to maintain and update a […]The post The ‘Bayesian’ Upgrade: Why Google AI’s New Teaching Method is the Key to LLM Reasoning appeared first on MarkTechPost.
09/03/2026
Can Your M365 Copilot Offer Actually Win Customer Deals?
Note: This tool is designed for Microsoft partners operating within the AI Business Solutions commercial solution area who are building or publishing Microsoft 365 Copilot consulting service offers on the Microsoft Marketplace.M365 Copilot Offer Validation Assessment eliminates guesswork from marketplace offer development.M365 Copilot Offer Validation Assessment provides the objective, guidance-driven analysis you need to create marketplace listings that communicate your expertise, align with Microsoft co-sell priorities, and convert customer interest into engagement.
09/03/2026
The Nightmare of renewing NDES Enrollment Agent Certificates
By default, three version 1 certificate templates are assigned to your Certification Authority by the configuration routine of the NDES service:Provide a name for the new certificate template.NDES Enrollment Agent certificates are highly privileged and should never rely on legacy version 1 templates.
09/03/2026
A Coding Guide to Build a Complete Single Cell RNA Sequencing Analysis Pipeline Using Scanpy for Clustering Visualization and Cell Type Annotation
In this tutorial, we build a complete pipeline for single-cell RNA sequencing analysis using Scanpy.We start by installing the required libraries and loading the PBMC 3k dataset, then perform quality control, filtering, and normalization to prepare the data for downstream analysis.We then identify highly variable genes, perform PCA for dimensionality reduction, and construct […]
09/03/2026
Stop Burning Money in Azure Storage
Azure offers five access tiers — each with a different storage vs. access cost trade-off:Upload directly to the tier that matches the data's actual use.Moving or deleting blobs before the minimum retention period incurs prorated charges.
09/03/2026
Microsoft 365 Copilot can replace Power BI optimization experts today
Slow and inefficient Power BI reports are a widespread cause of low customer satisfaction, bloated costs, wasted compute capacity, and increased total cost of ownership.But what if you could save thousands of dollars in person-hours (often spent on external consultants) by using Microsoft 365 Copilot to analyze your Power BI Desktop files and generate a step-by-step mitigation plan for slow and inefficient reports?In this video, I’ll walk through my methodology for enabling M365 Copilot to read your Power BI Desktop files, produce a consultant-grade 20‑page assessment, and deliver a clear, actionable mitigation plan in less than 20 minutes.
09/03/2026
Andrej Karpathy Open-Sources ‘Autoresearch’: A 630-Line Python Tool Letting AI Agents Run Autonomous ML Experiments on Single GPUs
Andrej Karpathy released autoresearch, a minimalist Python tool designed to enable AI agents to autonomously conduct machine learning experiments.The project is a stripped-down version of the nanochat LLM training core, condensed into a single-file repository of approximately ~630 lines of code.It is optimized for execution on a single NVIDIA GPU.
09/03/2026
Modernizing On‑Prem File Servers: Azure Storage Mover and File Sync
Azure File Sync is a hybrid cloud storage service that centralizes on-premises file shares into Azure Files while preserving the experience of a local Windows file server.Azure Storage Mover is a fully managed migration service used to transfer file data into Azure Storage (Azure Blob containers or Azure file shares) with minimal downtime.In summary, Azure File Sync is an ongoing hybrid file service, and Azure Storage Mover is a one-time (or scheduled) migration service.
08/03/2026
Beyond Accuracy: Quantifying the Production Fragility Caused by Excessive, Redundant, and Low-Signal Features in Regression
At first glance, adding more features to a model seems like an obvious way to improve performance.In practice, however, this instinct often introduces hidden structural risks.The post Beyond Accuracy: Quantifying the Production Fragility Caused by Excessive, Redundant, and Low-Signal Features in Regression appeared first on MarkTechPost.
08/03/2026
Building Next-Gen Agentic AI: A Complete Framework for Cognitive Blueprint Driven Runtime Agents with Memory Tools and Validation
In this tutorial, we build a complete cognitive blueprint and runtime agent framework.We define structured blueprints for identity, goals, planning, memory, validation, and tool access, and use them to create agents that not only respond but also plan, execute, validate, and systematically improve their outputs.The post Building Next-Gen Agentic AI: A Complete Framework for Cognitive Blueprint Driven Runtime Agents with Memory Tools and Validation appeared first on MarkTechPost.
08/03/2026
How to Build Progress Monitoring Using Advanced tqdm for Async, Parallel, Pandas, Logging, and High-Performance Workflows
In this tutorial, we explore tqdm in depth and demonstrate how we build powerful, real-time progress tracking into modern Python workflows.We begin with nested progress bars and manual progress control, then move into practical scenarios such as streaming downloads, pandas data processing, parallel execution, structured logging, and asynchronous tasks.The post How to Build Progress Monitoring Using Advanced tqdm for Async, Parallel, Pandas, Logging, and High-Performance Workflows appeared first on MarkTechPost.
08/03/2026
Yann LeCun’s New AI Paper Argues AGI Is Misdefined and Introduces Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence (SAI) Instead
What if the AI industry is optimizing for a goal that cannot be clearly defined or reliably measured?That is the central argument of a new paper by Yann LeCun, and his team, which claims that Artificial General Intelligence has become an overloaded term used in inconsistent ways across academia and industry.The post Yann LeCun’s New AI Paper Argues AGI Is Misdefined and Introduces Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence (SAI) Instead appeared first on MarkTechPost.
08/03/2026
Google Launches TensorFlow 2.21 And LiteRT: Faster GPU Performance, New NPU Acceleration, And Seamless PyTorch Edge Deployment Upgrades
The most significant update in this release is the graduation of LiteRT from its preview stage to a fully production-ready stack.Moving forward, LiteRT serves as the universal on-device inference framework, officially replacing TensorFlow Lite (TFLite).This update streamlines the deployment of machine learning models to mobile and edge […]
07/03/2026
Microsoft Releases Phi-4-Reasoning-Vision-15B: A Compact Multimodal Model for Math, Science, and GUI Understanding
Microsoft has released Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B, a 15 billion parameter open-weight multimodal reasoning model designed for image and text tasks that require both perception and selective reasoning.It is a compact model built to balance reasoning quality, compute efficiency, and training-data requirements, with particular strength in scientific and mathematical reasoning and understanding user interfaces.What the model […]
06/03/2026
The LLM Inference Optimization Stack: A Prioritized Playbook for Enterprise Teams
vLLM supports disaggregated prefill and decode and Ray Serve can orchestrate separate worker pools for each phase.The open-source model ecosystem has matured to the point where self-hosted inference on open-weight models - running on AKS with Ray Serve and vLLM - is a viable and often preferable alternative to proprietary API access.Part three covers the architecture decisions, security controls, and operational metrics that make enterprise inference deployable — and auditable.
06/03/2026
A Production-Style NetworKit 11.2.1 Coding Tutorial for Large-Scale Graph Analytics, Communities, Cores, and Sparsification
In this tutorial, we implement a production-grade, large-scale graph analytics pipeline in NetworKit, focusing on speed, memory efficiency, and version-safe APIs in NetworKit 11.2.1.We generate a large-scale free network, extract the largest connected component, and then compute structural backbone signals via k-core decomposition and centrality ranking.We also detect communities with PLM and quantify […]
06/03/2026
Available today: GPT-5.4 Thinking in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Today, we’re bringing OpenAI’s GPT‑5.4 Thinking to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio—available in addition to the recent GPT-5.3 Instant update.GPT-5.4 Thinking is now available in Copilot Studio early release cycle environments and begins rolling out today to Microsoft 365 Copilot users with priority access and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat users with standard access.Learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio and start transforming work with Copilot today.
06/03/2026
OpenAI Introduces Codex Security in Research Preview for Context-Aware Vulnerability Detection, Validation, and Patch Generation Across Codebases
OpenAI has introduced Codex Security, an application security agent that analyzes a codebase, validates likely vulnerabilities, and proposes fixes that developers can review before patching.The product is now rolling out in research preview to ChatGPT Enterprise, Business, and Edu customers through Codex web.The product is designed for a […]
06/03/2026
Microsoft Pre-Day: Your first look at what’s next in Security
Kick off RSAC 2026 on Sunday, March 22 at the Palace Hotel for Microsoft Pre‑Day, an exclusive experience designed to set the tone for the week ahead.Hear keynote insights from Vasu Jakkal, CVP of Microsoft Security Business and other Microsoft security leaders as they explore how AI and agents are reshaping the security landscape.The experience concludes with opportunities to connect, including a networking reception and an invite-only dinner for CISOs and security executives.
06/03/2026
Title Plan Update - March 6, 2026
📁March 6, 2026 - Title Plan Now AvailableAccess the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at http://aka.ms/Courseware_Title_Plan to ensure you're always working from the most current version.📌 Reminder: To help you stay informed more quickly and consistently, we’ve moved to a weekly publishing cadence for the title plan.
06/03/2026
Microsoft Global Community Initiative Newsletter (Feb/Mar)
We are actively looking for Community Events to feature in upcoming General Sessions.In honor of Women’s History Month, join us for a special MGCI General Session spotlighting the incredible impact of Women in Tech and Allies communities across the Microsoft ecosystem.The Microsoft Solutions Women in Tech speaker directory on Sessionize is a go‑to resource for discovering talented women across the Microsoft ecosystem—and you can be part of it too.
06/03/2026
Google AI Releases Android Bench: An Evaluation Framework and Leaderboard for LLMs in Android Development
Google has officially released Android Bench, a new leaderboard and evaluation framework designed to measure how Large Language Models (LLMs) perform specifically on Android development tasks.The dataset, methodology, and test harness have been made open-source and are publicly available on GitHub.Benchmark Methodology and Task Design General coding benchmarks often fail to capture the […]
06/03/2026
Where Microsoft MVP Impact Meets Innovation: Microsoft 365 Community Conference 2026
Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are the heartbeat of the Microsoft ecosystem—and at Microsoft 365 Community Conference 2026, your impact takes center stage.Join us April 21–23 in Orlando, Florida for the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, where innovation, community, and real-world expertise come together.Use discount code MVPS to save $200 on your conference pass.
06/03/2026
Advice for Startups Series: Microsoft for Startups
You can build something impressive and still struggle to get it adopted.regardless of how technically impressive the product is.When you build on familiar infrastructure and align with the broader Microsoft ecosystem, you remove friction from the buying process.
06/03/2026
Powerful image editing, now in PowerPoint
I am Rachelle Dong, a Product Manager on the PowerPoint team.You can now edit images directly inside PowerPoint for Windows, Mac, or the web, saving you the time and the hassle required to switch to a separate image-editing app.Select an image in your PowerPoint slide.
06/03/2026
MCP vs mcp-cli: Dynamic Tool Discovery for Token-Efficient AI Agents
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI agents and applications to external tools, APIs, and data sources.MCP (Model Context Protocol) defines the standard for tool sharing and discovery. mcp-cli is the practical tool that makes MCP efficient for AI agents by implementing dynamic context discovery.For AI agent systems, dynamic discovery via mcp-cli is becoming the standard.
06/03/2026
Decision Matrix: API vs MCP Tools — The Great Integration Showdown 🥊
Audience: Engineers + Stakeholders (and anyone who's ever argued about API architecture at lunch)Date: March 2026Author: Sabyasachi Samaddar Purpose Somewhere, right now, two engineers are arguing about the "right" way to call an API. One swears by raw HTTP. The other just discovered MCP and thinks it's the greatest thing since 'git b...
06/03/2026
Liquid AI Releases LocalCowork Powered By LFM2-24B-A2B to Execute Privacy-First Agent Workflows Locally Via Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Liquid AI has released LFM2-24B-A2B, a model optimized for local, low-latency tool dispatch, alongside LocalCowork, an open-source desktop agent application available in their Liquid4All GitHub Cookbook.The release provides a deployable architecture for running enterprise workflows entirely on-device, eliminating API calls and data egress for privacy-sensitive environments.The post Liquid AI Releases LocalCowork Powered By LFM2-24B-A2B to Execute Privacy-First Agent Workflows Locally Via Model Context Protocol (MCP) appeared first on MarkTechPost.
06/03/2026
From Manual Document Processing to AI-Orchestrated Intelligence
Building an IDP Pipeline with Azure Durable Functions, DSPy, and Real-Time AI ReasoningWe use Azure Document Intelligence with the prebuilt-layout model to convert uploaded PDFs into structured Markdown — preserving tables, headings, and reading order.The third option is key: instead of routing through a third-party service, you deploy open-weight models directly on Azure as serverless API endpoints through Azure AI Foundry.
06/03/2026
Agents: Snack Pack
This Agents Snack Pack contains easy‑to‑digest content designed to help you understand agents, one piece at a time.Drill in the fundamentals: What are Microsoft 365 Copilot agents and how to use them |
06/03/2026
Rethinking “Allow my organization to manage my device” Why opt‑in enrollment works better for Intune
A new public preview feature in Microsoft Intune, we’ve introduced a toggle that allows admins to block automatic mobile device management (MDM) enrollment during the modern app sign-in flow on Windows.Keep “MDM user scope” set to All so enrollment is available when needed, but configure the new toggle “Disable MDM enrollment when adding a work or school account on Windows” to Yes so MDM enrollment is not automatically selected by default during app sign in.The new setting“Disable MDM enrollment when adding a work or school account on Windows”:
06/03/2026
Join the Agent 365 'Ask Microsoft Anything' session on March 18
Sign up and participate in the March 18 Agent 365 AMALearn more about the capabilities of Agent 365 in this live 'Ask Microsoft Anything' with product and engineering team experts!Meet the panel of Agent 365 experts
06/03/2026
Security in the agentic era: A new paradigm
Trust is the new control plane: A security leader's guide to the age of AI agentsBy 2027, Microsoft projects that more than 1.3 billion AI agents will be deployed globally — a number that rivals the entire US population.The Microsoft Work Trend Index reinforces the urgency: 95% of organizations are already using AI in some form.
05/03/2026
A Coding Guide to Build a Scalable End-to-End Machine Learning Data Pipeline Using Daft for High-Performance Structured and Image Data Processing
In this tutorial, we explore how we use Daft as a high-performance, Python-native data engine to build an end-to-end analytical pipeline.We start by loading a real-world MNIST dataset, then progressively transform it using UDFs, feature engineering, aggregations, joins, and lazy execution.Also, we demonstrate how to seamlessly combine structured data processing, numerical computation, and […]
05/03/2026
Google AI Releases a CLI Tool (gws) for Workspace APIs: Providing a Unified Interface for Humans and AI Agents
Integrating Google Workspace APIs—such as Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and Sheets—into applications and data pipelines typically requires writing boilerplate code to handle REST endpoints, pagination, and OAuth 2.0 flows. Google AI team just released a CLI Tool (gws) for Google Workspace. The open-source googleworkspace/cli (invoked via the gws command) provides a unified, dynamic command-line interface to […] The post
05/03/2026
Even simpler to Safely Execute AI-generated Code with Azure Container Apps Dynamic Sessions
AI agents are writing code. The question is: where does that code run? If it runs in your process, a single hallucinated import os; os.remove('/') can ruin your day. Azure Container Apps dynamic sessions solve this with on-demand sandboxed environments — Hyper-V isolated, fully managed, and ready in milliseconds. Thanks to your feedback, Dynamic Sessions are now easie...
05/03/2026
Process Explorer v17.1, SDelete v2.06, and Sysmon 1.5.1 for Linux
Process Explorer v17.1 This update to Process Explorer, an advanced process, DLL, and handle viewing utility, fixes a crash generated by processes with long names. SDelete v2.06 This update to SDelete, a command line utility for secure file deletion, adds suppo...
05/03/2026
How Netstar Streamlined Fleet Monitoring and Reduced Custom Integrations with Drasi
When a high-value container goes silent between waystations, logistics teams lose critical visibility, risking delays that can cascade into port congestion and missed connections. Netstar, a connected fleet solutions provider supporting customers like Maersk, faced this challenge as its operations scaled. Timely notifications of delays, arrivals, and status changes became critical to keeping cargo moving efficiently through port systems...
05/03/2026
Introducing GPT-5.4 in Microsoft Foundry
Today, we’re announcing OpenAI’s GPT‑5.4 to be generally available soon in Microsoft Foundry: a model designed to help organizations move from planning work to reliably completing it in production environments. As AI agents are applied to longer, more complex workflows; consistency and follow‑through become as important as raw intelligence. GPT‑5.4 combines stronger reasoning with built in computer use capabilities to support automation scenarios, and dependable execution across tools, files,...
05/03/2026
New Certification for machine learning operations (MLOps) engineers
Do your co-workers rely on you to deploy, operationalize, and maintain machine learning and generative AI solutions in production? Are you working at the intersection of data science, DevOps, and generative AI? If so, the Microsoft Certified: Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) Engineer Associate Certification is designed for you. This Certification validates your ability to operationalize not only traditional machine learning but also generative AI solutions on Azure,...
05/03/2026
OpenAI Releases Symphony: An Open Source Agentic Framework for Orchestrating Autonomous AI Agents through Structured, Scalable Implementation Runs
OpenAI has released Symphony, an open-source framework designed to manage autonomous AI coding agents through structured ‘implementation runs.’ The project provides a system for automating software development tasks by connecting issue trackers to LLM-based agents. System Architecture: Elixir and the BEAM Symphony is built using Elixir and the Erlang/BEAM runtime. The choice of stack focuses […] The post
05/03/2026
Simplify cross-tenant user migrations with Microsoft 365 orchestrator
Hi, Insiders! I am Rebecca Wood, a Product Manager on the Enterprise and Cloud team. I’m excited to tell you about cross-tenant orchestrated user data migration in Microsoft 365, our new product for moving user data and workloads between separate Microsoft 365 tenants. Simplify cross-tenant user migrations with Microsoft 365 orchestrator The orchestrator, also known as cross-tenant orchestrated user data migration, is a self-service product for customers undergoing mergers, ac...
05/03/2026
How to Design an Advanced Tree-of-Thoughts Multi-Branch Reasoning Agent with Beam Search, Heuristic Scoring, and Depth-Limited Pruning
In this tutorial, we build an advanced Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT) multi-branch reasoning agent from scratch. Instead of relying on linear chain-of-thought reasoning, we design a system that generates multiple reasoning branches, scores each branch using a heuristic evaluation function, prunes weak candidates, and continues expanding only the strongest paths. We combine an instruction-tuned transformer model with […] The post
05/03/2026
Sensitivity Labels in OneNote Now Generally Available
We’re excited to announce that sensitivity labels in OneNote have reached General Availability (GA)! This milestone marks a significant step forward in helping organizations protect sensitive information while enabling seamless collaboration across Microsoft 365. Why This Matters Sensitivity labels help organizations control how sensitive data is handled where work happens, including OneNote. Enterprise customers have consistently asked...
05/03/2026
Building a modern, secure, and seamless print experience for Windows
For more than three decades, printing has been an essential, but often fragmented, part of how people work. In every industry, across every type of business, printing is woven into daily workflows: reports sent to office printers, shipping labels generated on shop floors, contracts finalized for signature, and countless documents for routine tasks in between. Yet the underlying print experience has historically been compl...
05/03/2026
The Future of Identity: Self-Service Account Recovery (Preview) in Microsoft Entra
In the modern enterprise, the "Help Desk" is paradoxically both a vital resource and a massive security liability. As organizations move toward phishing-resistant, passwordless environments using passkeys and FIDO2 tokens, a critical question remains: What happens when a user loses their only authentication device? Historically, this required a phone call to a support agent. However, in an era of sophisticated social engineering and AI-generated deepfakes, a human agen...
05/03/2026
Unified AI Weather Forecasting Pipeline thru Aurora, Foundry, and Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro
Weather shapes some of the most critical decisions we make, from protecting our critical infrastructure and global supply chains, to keeping communities safe during extreme events. As climate variability becomes more volatile, an organization’s ability to predict, assess, and plan their response to extreme weather is a defining capability for modern infrastructure owners & operators. This is especially true for the energy and utility sector — even small delays in preparations and r...
05/03/2026
Announcing Public Preview: New Microsoft Teams VDI Optimization for Omnissa
Today, we’re excited to announce the tech preview of the new Microsoft Teams VDI optimization for Omnissa Horizon environments, bringing a modern, high-performance collaboration experience to customers running Teams in virtual desktops. This milestone, achieved in close collaboration with our counterparts from Omnissa’s engineering team, marks the next step in Microsoft’s broader journey to deliver feature parity, reliability, and performance consistency betwee...
05/03/2026
How the latest frontier models unlocked AI in SharePoint: Technical deep dive
Over three years, the SharePoint engineering team iterated through five major architectures for AI-powered page authoring. We over-constrained early models, underestimated discoverability, were delighted by new language model capabilities every few months, and learned to pivot fast when emerging approaches leapfrogged what we already had in flight. This post documents what worked, what didn't, and what we changed at each generation. If you're building AI features, or interested in the ...
05/03/2026
The Practical Path to Tech Leadership: How Women Can Turn Expertise Into Influence
By Guest Blogger Sucheta Gawade In recognition of International Women’s Day, I’d like to share practical, experience-based strategies women in tech can use to accelerate career growth, increase visibility, and overcome common advancement barriers. I’m a U.S.-based technology and thought leader with nearly tw...
05/03/2026
Bringing Organizational Knowledge into the Clinical Workflow
Every day, clinicians spend valuable time looking for information that lives in different places. An email thread from a specialist colleague. A Microsoft Teams discussion about a complex case. Updated organizational processes buried in SharePoint or OneDrive. This information provides context that could be critical to their workflows or help inform their decisions. But that context is not part of their clinical workflow. The result? Clinicians are forced to break their clinical workfl...
05/03/2026
Dragon Copilot centralizes trusted medical content and relevant contextual information in-workflow
Dragon Copilot delivers medical intelligence from trusted sources directly within clinical workflows for healthcare organizations in one solution. We are pleased to announce that we are expanding those knowledge sources with additional best‑in‑class content providers and enabling broader access to your organization’s internal sources with Microsoft 365 Copilot integration. Access information from new credible medical content...
05/03/2026
Why nursing needs a different kind of AI—and how Dragon Copilot delivers
The Dragon Copilot experience for nurses was made generally available (GA) in December 2025 with a clear mission: help nursing staff focus on care, not the computer. From the start, the goal was to create a comprehensive AI clinical assistant—one that works alongside nurses throughout their shift, reduces cognitive load, captures the full scope of care delivered, and translates real clinical work into automated next steps, including documentation—fundamentally transforming workflows to...
05/03/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: March 5, 2026
Learn about 154 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
05/03/2026
From dictation to intelligence at the cursor with Dragon Copilot Desktop
Today’s patient encounters are packed with friction that breaks clinicians’ flow, clouds clinical thinking, and drains the joy from practice. Instead of focusing on patients, listening, assessing, and collaborating on care, clinicians spend visits staring at a screen, wrestling with bloated EHRs, and acting as data entry clerks. They type into endless fields, check boxes, click buttons, and memorize arcane text shortcuts and key sequenc...
05/03/2026
Guide to Upgrade Azure Database for MySQL from 8.0 to 8.4
This guide merges Azure official documentation and best practices from real-world upgrades. Always refer to the latest Azure documentation and portal/CLI for any updates or discrepancies. 1. Background Why Upgrade? MySQL 5.7 reached end of community support in October 2023, and will enter extended support in August 2026. MySQL 8.0 will reach end of community support in April 2026 and will enter extended support in January 2027. <...
05/03/2026
Dragon Copilot brings AI into revenue cycle workflows
Many health systems treat revenue cycle performance solely as a downstream problem. Clinicians complete documentation, teams send notes to coders, queries follow, and everyone works backward to recover what was missed. In some cases, recovery isn’t even possible in this model. With the rise and pervasiveness of AI, there is an opportunity to rethink the model by improving documentation quality and comprehensiveness at the point of care. In this new model, reimbursem...
05/03/2026
Product suite on top of SharePoint - Intelligent Decisioning - SharePoint Partner Showcase
We are excited to share a new episode on our partner showcase series focused on SharePoint in Microsoft 365. In this brief discussion Tony Pounder (CTO), Andy Smith (Director) and
05/03/2026
Building High-Performance Agentic Systems
Most enterprise chatbots fail in the same quiet way. They answer questions. They impress in demos. And then they stall in production. Knowledge goes stale. Answers cannot be audited. The system cannot act beyond generating text. When workflows require coordination, execution, or accountability, the chatbot stops being useful. Agentic systems exist because that model is insufficient. Instead of treating the LLM as the product, agentic architecture embe...
05/03/2026
Troubleshooting Intermittent Query Failures on Azure SQL DB Read Replicas (Error 3947)
Recently, I worked on an interesting customer case involving intermittent query failures while fetching reporting data from a read replica. The customer was running their database on the Azure SQL Database Hyperscale service tier, utilizing the read scale-out replica to offload reporting traffic from the primary compute node. However, while loading reports, the application occasionally took longer than usual and then failed with the following error:<...
05/03/2026
YuanLab AI Releases Yuan 3.0 Ultra: A Flagship Multimodal MoE Foundation Model, Built for Stronger Intelligence and Unrivaled Efficiency
How can a trillion-parameter Large Language Model achieve state-of-the-art enterprise performance while simultaneously cutting its total parameter count by 33.3% and boosting pre-training efficiency by 49%? Yuan Lab AI releases Yuan3.0 Ultra, an open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language model featuring 1T total parameters and 68.8B activated parameters. The model architecture is designed to optimize performance […] The post
05/03/2026
Can you use AI to implement an Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI)?
The Short Answer: Yes. And It's Better Than You Think. If you've worked in healthcare IT for any length of time, you've dealt with this problem. Patient A shows up at Hospital 1 as "Jonathan Smith, DOB 03/15/1985." Patient B shows up at Hospital 2 as "Jon Smith, DOB 03/15/1985." Patient C shows up at a clinic as "John Smythe, DOB 03/15/1985." Same person? Probably. But how do you prove ...
05/03/2026
Evaluating AI Agents: Techniques to Reduce Variance and Boost Alignment for LLM Judges
In an ideal world, an LLM judge would behave like an experienced Subject Matter Expert (SME). To achieve this, we must align the judge with SME preferences and minimize any systematic biases it exhibits. (See our
05/03/2026
🚀 The Great Foundry Shift: Microsoft Foundry New vs Classic Explained
Introduction If you've been working in the Azure AI ecosystem, you've likely noticed a seismic shift happening at ai.azure.com. What was once Azure AI Studio, then became Azure AI Foundry, and has now been rebranded as Microsoft Foundry — but the rebrand is the least interesting part. The architecture, portal experience, agent capabilities, and developer workflows have been fundamentally redesigned.<...
05/03/2026
How to Build an EverMem-Style Persistent AI Agent OS with Hierarchical Memory, FAISS Vector Retrieval, SQLite Storage, and Automated Memory Consolidation
In this tutorial, we build an EverMem-style persistent agent OS. We combine short-term conversational context (STM) with long-term vector memory using FAISS so the agent can recall relevant past information before generating each response. Alongside semantic memory, we also store structured records in SQLite to persist metadata like timestamps, importance scores, and memory signals (preference, […] The post
04/03/2026
From Guesswork to Clarity: GPP Diagnostics Improve in Windows Server 2025 and Windows 11 24H2
Hello AskDS readers! Sagi and Adesh here. Today we’re excited to talk about a change that finally closes one of the longest‑standing troubleshooting gaps in Group Policy Preferences (GPP). GPP ...
04/03/2026
Advancing Windows on Arm in Japan
Worldwide, customers are adopting Arm-powered Copilot+ PCs for the many benefits they provide over traditional PCs. These devices deliver industry-leading performance, outpacing competitors in both every day and demanding workloads, while offering breakthrough battery life that keeps users productive and creative for hours longer than before. With advanced AI acceleration built into every Copilot+ PC, users experience a new level of responsiveness and c...
04/03/2026
Vibe Coding for the NPU
If you just bought a Copilot+ PC and want to know what that NPU can actually do, this is for you. If you manage a fleet of them and need workload placement guidance, this is for you too. Cloud doesn’t have to be the default anymore. The NPU (Neural Processing Unit) is now a practical and accessible development target, making it possible to run advanced AI workloads directly on your device. This means you can take advantage of your PC’s local hardware to get fa...
04/03/2026
LangWatch Open Sources the Missing Evaluation Layer for AI Agents to Enable End-to-End Tracing, Simulation, and Systematic Testing
As AI development shifts from simple chat interfaces to complex, multi-step autonomous agents, the industry has encountered a significant bottleneck: non-determinism. Unlike traditional software where code follows a predictable path, agents built on LLMs introduce a high degree of variance. LangWatch is an open-source platform designed to address this by providing a standardized layer for […] The post
04/03/2026
What’s New in Microsoft Sentinel: March 2026
March brings a set of updates to Microsoft Sentinel focused on helping your SOC automate faster, onboard data with less friction, and detect threats across more of your environment. This month's updates include natural-language playbook generation for more flexible SOAR workflows, streamlined real-time data ingestion with CCF Push, and expanded Kubernetes visibility with a dedicated GKE connector. Together, these innovations help security teams simplify operations, move faster, and str...
04/03/2026
How to streamline Microsoft Marketplace private offers and IP co-sell with AI-powered automation
Kyle Heisner is a veteran GTM and Cloud Marketplace leader at Suger with extensive experience helping software companies scale through strategic partnerships and co-sell programs. He is known for transforming complex cloud ecosystems into clear, repeatable revenue motions.__________...
04/03/2026
Introducing Phi-4-Reasoning-Vision to Microsoft Foundry
Vision reasoning models unlock a critical capability for developers: the ability to move beyond passive perception toward systems that can understand, reason over, and act on visual information. Instead of treating images, diagrams, documents, or UI screens as unstructured inputs, vision reasoning models enable developers to build applications that can interpret visual structure, connect it with textual context, and perform multi-step reasoning to reach actionable conclusions. Today, w...
04/03/2026
Phi-4-Reasoning-Vision-15B: Use Cases In-Depth
Phi-4-Reasoning-vision-15B is Microsoft's latest vision reasoning model released on Microsoft Foundry. It combines high-resolution visual perception with selective, task-aware reasoning, making it the first model in the Phi-4 family to simultaneously achieve both "seeing clearly" and "thinking deeply" as a small language model (SLM). Traditional vision models only perform passive perception — recognizing "what's in"...
04/03/2026
Announcing the General Availability of the Azure Maps Geocode Autocomplete API
It was just last September that we were Introducing the Azure Maps Geocode Autocomplete API but now we’re excited to announce the general availab...
04/03/2026
Become a Microsoft Q&A Product Champion
The Microsoft Q&A Product Champions Program is a community-driven initiative created to recognize and support people who help others by sharing their knowledge across Microsoft Q&A product forums. If you’re already contributing—or want to start—this is your sign. Every question answered, every tip shared, and every problem solved has real impact. In the P...
04/03/2026
Make spring gardening simple with help from Microsoft Copilot
Spring is inching closer, and for many of us, that means it’s time to dust off the gardening gloves and give our outdoor spaces a fresh start. Whether you're nurturing a long‑loved garden or finally committing to planting something, Copilot can help you ease into the season with confidence. With a few well‑crafted prompts, you can turn Copilot into your personal landscape architect. Below are three spring‑ready prompts and what they can help you accomplish. Kickstart yo...
04/03/2026
Why Nonprofit Security Needs Urgent Attention
Nonprofits are facing a rapidly evolving security landscape. Cyberattacks are becoming faster, more targeted, and more sophisticated—driven in part by AI tools that make it easier for threat actors to automate reconnaissance, personalize phishing, and exploit vulnerabilities. Many nonprofits don’t discover breaches for months, leaving sensitive data and mission‑critical operations at risk. At the same time, nonprofits working in humanitarian aid, human rights, health, and advocacy are ...
04/03/2026
Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse sub-item metadata in Microsoft Purview
Working at the intersection of data security, engineering, and governance, the Microsoft Purview product team continually explores capabilities that reshape how organizations understand and manage their data estate. One such capability—the ability to scan and extract metadata from Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse—has generated genuine excitement and strong customer demand. We are pleased to announce the GA of Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse sub‑item metadata in Microsoft Purview. The Pro...
04/03/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: March 4, 2026
Learn about 107 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
04/03/2026
Defending Container Runtime from Malware with Microsoft Defender for Containers
In cloud-native environments, malware protection is no longer traditional antivirus — it is runtime workload security, ensuring containerized applications remain safe throughout their lifecycle. Many organizations focus on scanning container images before deployment. While image scanning is important, this does not stop runtime attacks. Image scanning protects be...
04/03/2026
Building Generative Pages in Power Platform
Artificial Intelligence is now embedded across the Power Platform, and Generative Pages are among its most significant innovations. Instead of manually arranging controls, configuring forms, linking views, or writing Power Fx expressions, creators can now describe their requirements in plain language. Power Apps then converts those instructions into a complete, responsive, and data-enabled page. This article explains how to build Generative Pages step by step, explores the technology b...
04/03/2026
Physical Intelligence Team Unveils MEM for Robots: A Multi-Scale Memory System Giving Gemma 3-4B VLAs 15-Minute Context for Complex Tasks
Current end-to-end robotic policies, specifically Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, typically operate on a single observation or a very short history. This ‘lack of memory’ makes long-horizon tasks, such as cleaning a kitchen or following a complex recipe, computationally intractable or prone to failure. To address this, researchers from Physical Intelligence, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT have […] The post
04/03/2026
Partner Case Study | Cognizant
Cognizant, a 2025 Microsoft Partner of the Year award winner and global services company, is redefining enterprise transformation across industries. By democratizing AI and embedding intelligent automation, Cognizant helps organizations modernize systems, reduce costs, and accelerate growth. Their unique approach—combining deep Microsoft expertise, strategic change management, and a culture of innovation—delivers measurable results, including millions in savings, productivity boosts, and reco...
03/03/2026
Meet SymTorch: A PyTorch Library that Translates Deep Learning Models into Human-Readable Equations
Can symbolic regression be the key to transforming opaque deep learning models into interpretable, closed-form mathematical equations? or Say you have trained your deep learning model. It works. But do you know what it has actually learned? A team of University of Cambridge researchers propose ‘SymTorch’, a library designed to integrate symbolic regression (SR) into […] The post
03/03/2026
The Rise of vLLM in Modern Cloud Development: Revolutionizing AI Inference
Introduction to the AI Cloud BottleneckThe emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized cloud applications, from universal chatbots to automated programming assistants. However, hosting these models in the cloud is notoriously expensive due to the massive computational and memory requirements of hardware accelerators like GPUs. During text generation, models autoregressively produce tokens one at a time, relying on a dynamically growing Key-Value (KV) cache that acts ...
03/03/2026
Announcing the General Availability of the Azure Arc Gateway for Arc-enabled Kubernetes!
We’re excited to announce the General Availability of Arc gateway for Arc‑enabled Kubernetes. Arc gateway dramatically simplifies the network configuration required to use Azure Arc by consolidating outbound connectivity through a small, predictable set of endpoints. For customers operating behind enterprise proxies or firewalls, this means faster onboarding, fewer change requests, and a smoother path to value with Azure Arc. What’s new: To Arc‑en...
03/03/2026
How to Build a Stable and Efficient QLoRA Fine-Tuning Pipeline Using Unsloth for Large Language Models
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to efficiently fine-tune a large language model using Unsloth and QLoRA. We focus on building a stable, end-to-end supervised fine-tuning pipeline that handles common Colab issues such as GPU detection failures, runtime crashes, and library incompatibilities. By carefully controlling the environment, model configuration, and training loop, we show how […] The post
03/03/2026
Introducing GPT-5.3 Chat in Microsoft Foundry: A more grounded way to chat at enterprise scale
OpenAI’s GPT‑5.3 Chat marks the next step in the GPT‑5 series, designed to deliver more dependable, context‑aware chat experiences for enterprise workloads. The model emphasizes steadier instruction handling and clearer responses, supporting high‑volume, real‑world conversations with greater consistency. GPT‑5.3 Chat is coming soon to Microsoft Foundry, where teams will be able to deploy production‑ready chat and agent experiences that are standardized, governed, and built to scale acr...
03/03/2026
Modify Content in Teach: AI-powered tools to adapt your lessons in minutes
Already have great lesson materials? Now you can instantly align them to standards, differentiate for every learner, adjust reading levels, and add real-world examples — all without starting from scratch. Hi everyone! As educators, you have told us that some of your most time-consuming work is not creating lessons — it is adapting them. Adjusting a reading passage for different grade levels, aligning an existing activity to new curriculum standards, or adding scaffold...
03/03/2026
The Story of an Accidental MVP
By Guest Blogger Scott Helmers How I Became Microsoft MVP by Accident I became a Microsoft MVP by accident. In the early 2000s I was part of a team of three people who were designing a new, data-focused style of business process map. We decided to build our software as an add-in to Microsoft V...
03/03/2026
Legacy SharePoint Authentication (IDCRL) Is Retiring — What to Do Before May 1, 2026
Audience: SharePoint admins, M365 admins, and anyone running automations that access SharePoint Online/OneDrive. This post explains what’s changing, how to detect legacy sign-ins, and the practical steps to move to modern authentication (OAuth) before the cutoff dates. Microsoft is turning off a legacy SharePoint sign-in m...
03/03/2026
Available today: GPT-5.3 Instant in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Today, we’re excited to announce the addition of OpenAI’s GPT‑5.3 Instant to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Building on GPT‑5.2 Instant, GPT‑5.3 Instant improves the quality of everyday conversations with more reliably accurate responses, stronger and more expressive writing, and more direct, useful answers—helping Copilot provide a useful response when appropriate, rather than defaulting to disclaimers or declining to proceed. For questions that draw on informatio...
03/03/2026
How to build a Microsoft Marketplace channel practice
Over the past several years, I’ve worked closely with Microsoft channel partners around the world who are navigating one of the biggest route‑to‑market shifts our ecosystem has seen in decades. In a recent Microsoft Marketplace Partner Office Hour,
03/03/2026
Google Drops Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite: A Cost-efficient Powerhouse with Adjustable Thinking Levels Designed for High-Scale Production AI
Google has released Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, the most cost-efficient entry in the Gemini 3 model series. Designed for ‘intelligence at scale,’ this model is optimized for high-volume tasks where low latency and cost-per-token are the primary engineering constraints. It is currently available in Public Preview via the Gemini API (Google AI Studio) and Vertex AI. […] The post
03/03/2026
What’s New in the AI Curriculum for Instructor-Led Training
With the recent announcement of changes to the AI certification paths {The AI job boom is here. Are you ready to showcase your skills?}, we also have several updates coming to Microsoft's AI instructor‑led training (ILT) portfolio over the next few months. As part of the broader curriculum refresh across Mi...
03/03/2026
Managed Identity Support for Azure SQL Database Import & Export services (preview)
Today we’re announcing a public preview that lets Azure SQL Database Import & Export services authenticate with user-assigned managed identity. Now Azure SQL Databases can perform import and export operations with no passwords, storage keys or SAS tokens.
03/03/2026
The AI job boom is here. Are you ready to showcase your skills?
AI isn’t just changing jobs descriptions, it’s redefining how work gets done across every industry, role, and skill level. From marketing to manufacturing, AI is reshaping workflows, speeding up decisions, and opening entirely new career paths. And the impact is massive. According to the World Economic Forum The Future of Jobs Report 2025, advances in AI and tech could cr...
03/03/2026
SharePoint and OneDrive Site User ID Mismatch Explored
SharePoint / OneDrive request access dialog In this post, we walk through why users who look ‘healthy’ on the surface can still experience issues, and we cover practical ways to prevent and fix them across identity lifecycle management, rehire scenarios, tenant changes, and operational hygiene. Who this is for Microsoft 365 / SharePoint admins troubleshooting unexpected Access denied issues in SharePoint or O...
03/03/2026
Implementing / Migrating the BizTalk Server Aggregator Pattern to Azure Logic Apps Standard
While the article focuses on the migration path from BizTalk Server, the template is equally suited for new (greenfield) implementations any team looking to implement the Aggregator pattern natively in Azure Logic Apps can deploy it directly from the Azure portal without prior BizTalk experience. The template source code is open source and available in the
03/03/2026
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Customer Newsletter
Check out monthly news for the rest of the MTP suite here! What's new in Defender for Cloud? Now in public preview, Defender for Cloud provides threat protection for AI agents built with Foundry, as part of the Defender for AI Services plan. Learn more about this in our documentation. De...
03/03/2026
Malware scan results now in blob tags (ADLS Gen2 HNS | Public Preview)
If you’ve been using Defender for Storage malware scanning with ADLS Gen2 storage accounts that have Hierarchical Namespace (HNS), you probably know that the scan happens, but the result isn’t easy to see right where the file lives.
03/03/2026
Getting Started with the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace (for SaaS and AI Agents)
If you build software—whether you’re an early‑stage startup or a seasoned ISV—the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace is one of the fastest ways to reach millions of customers globally, simplify procurement, and enable transactable offers directly inside Microsoft purchasing channels. This post is a simple, public guide to help you understand what the Marketplace is, why it matters, and how to get your first offer live—whether that’s a SaaS app or an AI agent. Why the Microsoft Co...
03/03/2026
Deploying AI Agents to Production: Architecture, Infrastructure, and Implementation Roadmap
You've built an AI agent that works well in development.
03/03/2026
Migrating to the next generation of Virtual Nodes on Azure Container Instances (ACI)
As a quick recap, Virtual Nodes lets Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) burst pods onto Azure Container Instances (ACI) on‑demand, without managing or scaling extra VM nodes. In this article I will demonstrate how you can migrate an existing AKS cluster using the Virtual Nodes managed add-on (legacy), to the new generation of Virtual Nodes on ACI, which is deployed and managed via Helm. More information about Virtual Nodes on Azure Container Instances can be found
03/03/2026
Alibaba Releases OpenSandbox to Provide Software Developers with a Unified, Secure, and Scalable API for Autonomous AI Agent Execution
Alibaba has released OpenSandbox, an open-source tool designed to provide AI agents with secure, isolated environments for code execution, web browsing, and model training. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, the proposed system targets to standardize the ‘execution layer’ of the AI agent stack, offering a unified API that functions across various programming languages and […] The post
03/03/2026
Giving Your AI Agents Reliable Skills with the Agent Skills SDK
AI agents are becoming increasingly capable, but they often do not have the context they need to do real work reliably. Your agent can reason well, but it does not actually know how to do the specific things your team needs it to do. For example, it cannot follow your company's incident response playbook, it does not know your escalation policy, and it has no idea how to page the on-call engineer at 3 AM.
03/03/2026
The Hidden Architecture of Nano Architectures
Why does the same prompt, on the same checkpoint, with temperature set to zero, sometimes produce a different answer only when the system is under real load?If you have ever watched token three flip and then watched the whole completion diverge, you already know this is not a product bug. It is a systems fact. Here is the thing. In pr...
03/03/2026
Transparent and customizable onboarding for modern and legacy Windows devices
Onboarding all devices in your estate is paramount for strong security posture. In fact, Microsoft Threat Intelligence research shows that in the majority of ransomware attacks, the spreader machine was a device that was not yet onboarded. But customers often struggle to follow complex steps that differ by OS, accidentally duplicate devices because they can’t tell whether onboarding is in progress or failed, or have incorrect initial configuration settings causing system incompatibility. That...
03/03/2026
A Coding Guide to Build a Scalable End-to-End Analytics and Machine Learning Pipeline on Millions of Rows Using Vaex
In this tutorial, we design an end-to-end, production-style analytics and modeling pipeline using Vaex to operate efficiently on millions of rows without materializing data in memory. We generate a realistic, large-scale dataset, engineer rich behavioral and city-level features using lazy expressions and approximate statistics, and aggregate insights at scale. We then integrate Vaex with scikit-learn […] The post
03/03/2026
Alibaba just released Qwen 3.5 Small models: a family of 0.8B to 9B parameters built for on-device applications
Alibaba’s Qwen team has released the Qwen3.5 Small Model Series, a collection of Large Language Models (LLMs) ranging from 0.8B to 9B parameters. While the industry trend has historically favored increasing parameter counts to achieve ‘frontier’ performance, this release focuses on ‘More Intelligence, Less Compute.‘ These models represent a shift toward deploying capable AI on […] The post
03/03/2026
ExpressRoute Gateway Microsoft initiated migration
Objective The backend migration process is an automated upgrade performed by Microsoft to ensure your ExpressRoute gateways use the Standard IP SKU. This migration enhances gateway reliability and availability while maintaining service continuity. You receive notifications about scheduled maintenance windows and have options to control the migration timeline. For guidance on upgrading Basic SKU public IP addresses for other networking services, see
03/03/2026
Access fixes released in version 2602 (Build 19725.20126)
Here's a summary of bug fixes in the latest version of Access: Bug NameIssue FixedMonaco query editor applied unwanted autoformatting to passthrough queriesThe ...
02/03/2026
Part 1: Inference at Enterprise Scale: Why LLM Inference Is a Capital Allocation Problem
Part I: The Challenges — Why Inference Is Hard Challenge 1: The Pareto Frontier — You Cannot Optimize Everything Simultaneously Enterprise inference teams run into the same constraint regardless of stack: accuracy, latency, and cost are interdependent. Improving one almost always pressures the others. A larger model improves accuracy but increases latency and GPU costs. A smaller model reduces cost...
02/03/2026
Sunderland City Profile: Frontier transformation in practice
Download the SmartCitiesWorld City Profile – Sunderland Cities everywhere are facing the same pressure: modernize infrastructure, grow the economy, and improve quality of life, without widening inequality. Sunderland offers a credible path forward. Once defined by shipbuilding and coal minin...
02/03/2026
GA of update policy SQL Server 2025 for Azure SQL Managed Instance
We’re happy to announce that the update policy SQL Server 2025 for Azure SQL Managed Instance is now generally available (GA). SQL Server 2025 update policy contains all the latest SQL engine innovation while retaining database portability to the recent major release of SQL Server. Update policy is an instance configuration option that provides flexibility and allows ...
02/03/2026
Windows news you can use: February 2026
Welcome to the February 2026 edition of Windows news you can use. Today marks the start of Microsoft Technical Takeoff—four Mondays of demos, deep dives, and live Q&A for the IT pro community. If you're not tuning in live, all sessions will be recorded, so definitely bookmark any topics of interest and catch up on demand. Speaking of events, we're hosting another Se...
02/03/2026
Azure Databricks Lakebase is now generally available
Modern applications are built on real-time, intelligent, and increasingly powered by AI agents that need fast, reliable access to operational data—without sacrificing governance, scale, or simplicity. To solve for this, Azure Databricks Lakebase introduces a serverless, Postgres-compatible database architecture that separates compute from storage and integrates natively with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform on Azure. Lakebase is now generally available in Azure Databricks enab...
02/03/2026
Claude in Copilot? Excel on Steroids!!
If you’ve been paying attention to Claude lately, you’ve probably noticed one thing. It’s really good at Excel. Not formulas.Not basic charts. I mean understanding structured data. Reasoning across multiple sheets. Spotting correlations. Pulling out insights. The kind of work that usually takes a data analyst or data scientist a lot of time. Here’s the part most people miss. You already get that capability inside Microsoft 365 Copilot. Let me sh...
02/03/2026
Accelerating SaaS success with reference code for Marketplace fulfillment API integration
Boost your growth and reach more customers by replicating your AWS app to Azure to sell through Microsoft Marketplace. This guide will introduce the essential building blocks required for a smooth replication experience and highlight how Marketplace Fulfillment APIs streamline and automate critical post‑purchase workflows. Future posts in this series will explore each topic in more depth to help streamline your multicloud strategy. This post is part of a series on repli...
02/03/2026
People Skills: Expanding skills intelligence to more users and surfaces across Microsoft 365
Since launching in June 2025, People Skills has become foundational within Microsoft 365—powering Copilot, a new generation of Copilot agents, and experiences across M365 that help employees and leaders make better decisions about work, learning, and talent. People Skills is core to
02/03/2026
Inference at Enterprise Scale: Architecting for Cost, Latency, and Efficiency
Part I: The Challenges — Why Inference Is Hard Challenge 1: The Pareto Frontier — You Cannot Optimize Everything Simultaneously Enterprise inference teams run into the same constraint regardless of stack: accuracy, latency, and cost are interdependent. Improving one almost always pressures the others. A larger model improves accuracy but increases latency and GPU costs. A smaller model reduces cost but risks quality degradation. Aggressive optimizati...
02/03/2026
Meet NullClaw: The 678 KB Zig AI Agent Framework Running on 1 MB RAM and Booting in Two Milliseconds
In the current AI landscape, agentic frameworks typically rely on high-level managed languages like Python or Go. While these ecosystems offer extensive libraries, they introduce significant overhead through runtimes, virtual machines, and garbage collectors. NullClaw is a project that diverges from this trend, implementing a full-stack AI agent framework entirely in Raw Zig. By eliminating […] The post
02/03/2026
Now in Foundry: Qwen3.5 Medium Model Series
This week's spotlight focuses on the Qwen3.5 Medium Model Series, now available in Microsoft Foundry. All three models are Vision Language Models (VLMs) built with early-fusion multimodal training, a 262K native context window, and support for 201 languages, released under Apache 2.0. They range from a 27B dense model optimized for latency-sensitive deployments to a 122B sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that activates only 10B parameters per inference call, deliver...
02/03/2026
Prepare for the retirement of the Microsoft 365 Fundamentals certification
To ensure our program offerings align with customer and market demand, we regularly review our applied skilling and certification requirements for Solutions Partner designations and retire certain certifications and skilling requirements. As part of that review, we're retiring the Microsoft 365 Fundamentals certification on March 31, 2026. As of this date, partners will no longer be able to obtain this certification. For partners who were certified before the retirement, the certificat...
02/03/2026
Windows Autopatch update readiness brings insights to IT
We’re excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Windows Autopatch update readiness, bringing a new level of clarity, control, and confidence to your update management experience. This release is designed to help you anticipate issues, streamline deployments, and maintain organizational resilience, all within your existing Windows Autopatch license. Windows Autopatch is available for customers with Windows Enter...
02/03/2026
Introducing new agentic building in SharePoint and more updates
Today, we celebrate SharePoint’s 25th birthday and kick off a 2-week global SharePoint hackathon, an open invitation for our entire community to build, experiment, and help shape what’s next. A huge thank you for being part of the best community in tech! We are grateful for the trust customers have placed in SharePoint to sto...
02/03/2026
The Next Chapter of Microsoft Teams in Virtualized Environments
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has long been a critical deployment model for Microsoft Teams, especially for organizations that rely on centralized desktops for security, compliance, and scale. Over the past six years, Microsoft has invested heavily in improving the Teams experience in VDI—listening to customer feedback, addressing operational pain points, and rethinking how collaboration workloads should run in virtualized environments. That journey has now reached an important ...
02/03/2026
Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter - March 2026
In this issue: Ace Aviator of the Month News from our product group News from our community Ace Aviator of the Month March 2026's Ace Aviator:
02/03/2026
Departmental billing for Microsoft 365 Backup is now available!
As organizations continue to scale Microsoft 365, protecting data has become a technical and operational requirement. Microsoft 365 Backup delivers fast, native recovery for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange—helping organizations respond quickly to accidental deletion, ransomware, and other disruptive events. Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability...
02/03/2026
AiCarpus and CallMiner offer transactable partner solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like AiCarpus and CallMiner deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace. Learn about these offers below:
02/03/2026
Build Semantic Search with LLM Embeddings
Traditional search engines have historically relied on keyword search.
02/03/2026
Monthly news - March 2026
Microsoft DefenderMonthly news - March 2026 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from February 2026. We are now including news related to Defender for Cloud in the Defender portal. For all other Defender for Cloud news, have a look at the dedicated Defender for Cloud Monthly News <...
02/03/2026
Why Developers and DBAs love SQL’s Dynamic Data Masking (Series-Part 1)
Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) is one of those SQL features (available in SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, Azure SQL MI, SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric) that both developers and DBAs can rally behind. Why? Because it delivers a simple, built-in way to protect sensitive data—like phone numbers, emails, or IDs—without rewriting application logic or duplicating security rules across layers. With just a single line of T-SQL, you can configure masking directly at the column level...
02/03/2026
Demystifying the Client Repeatable Feature in Edge
Autofill behavior in modern browsers can sometimes feel confusing—especially when suggestions suddenly stop appearing even though data is still being entered correctly. In Microsoft Edge, this behavior is often caused by a feature called the Client Repeatable Feature. This article explains how Autofill works in Edge, how Frequently Saved Data (FSD) and Parsable Name are used, why Autofill suggestions get blocked, and how this behavior ...
02/03/2026
FireRedTeam Releases FireRed-OCR-2B Utilizing GRPO to Solve Structural Hallucinations in Tables and LaTeX for Software Developers
Document digitization has long been a multi-stage problem: first detect the layout, then extract the text, and finally try to reconstruct the structure. For Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), this often leads to ‘structural hallucinations’—disordered rows, invented formulas, or unclosed syntax. The FireRedTeam has released FireRed-OCR-2B, a flagship model designed to treat document parsing as a […] The post
02/03/2026
How to Build an Explainable AI Analysis Pipeline Using SHAP-IQ to Understand Feature Importance, Interaction Effects, and Model Decision Breakdown
In this tutorial, we build an advanced explainable AI analysis pipeline using SHAP-IQ to understand both feature importance and interaction effects directly inside our Python environment. We load a real-world dataset, train a high-performance Random Forest model, and then apply the SHAP-IQ interaction index to compute precise, theoretically grounded explanations of model predictions. We extract […] The post
02/03/2026
Google AI Introduces STATIC: A Sparse Matrix Framework Delivering 948x Faster Constrained Decoding for LLM Based Generative Retrieval
In industrial recommendation systems, the shift toward Generative Retrieval (GR) is replacing traditional embedding-based nearest neighbor search with Large Language Models (LLMs). These models represent items as Semantic IDs (SIDs)—discrete token sequences—and treat retrieval as an autoregressive decoding task. However, industrial applications often require strict adherence to business logic, such as enforcing content freshness or […] The post
01/03/2026
Foundry Local Web UI for IIS
If you've been exploring local AI with Microsoft Foundry Local, you've learned that running a chatbot frontend on Windows Server or Windows Client that you can access over the network comes with a challenging set of dependencies. FoundryLocalWebUI is a simple, self-contained web frontend for Foundry Local that runs on IIS, works on both Windows Server and Windows Clien...
01/03/2026
How to Design a Production-Grade Multi-Agent Communication System Using LangGraph Structured Message Bus, ACP Logging, and Persistent Shared State Architecture
In this tutorial, we build an advanced multi-agent communication system using a structured message bus architecture powered by LangGraph and Pydantic. We define a strict ACP-style message schema that allows agents to communicate via a shared state rather than calling each other directly, enabling modularity, traceability, and production-grade orchestration. We implement three specialized agents, a […] The post
01/03/2026
Alibaba Team Open-Sources CoPaw: A High-Performance Personal Agent Workstation for Developers to Scale Multi-Channel AI Workflows and Memory
As the industry moves from simple Large Language Model (LLM) inference toward autonomous agentic systems, the challenge for devs have shifted. It is no longer just about the model; it is about the environment in which that model operates. A team of researchers from Alibaba released CoPaw, an open-source framework designed to address this by […] The post
01/03/2026
A Complete End-to-End Coding Guide to MLflow Experiment Tracking, Hyperparameter Optimization, Model Evaluation, and Live Model Deployment
In this tutorial, we build a complete, production-grade ML experimentation and deployment workflow using MLflow. We start by launching a dedicated MLflow Tracking Server with a structured backend and artifact store, enabling us to track experiments in a scalable, reproducible manner. We then train multiple machine learning models using a nested hyperparameter sweep while automatically […] The post
01/03/2026
Claude in Copilot? Excel on Steriods!!
If you’ve been paying attention to Claude lately, you’ve probably noticed one thing. It’s really good at Excel. Not formulas.Not basic charts. I mean understanding structured data. Reasoning across multiple sheets. Spotting correlations. Pulling out insights. The kind of work that usually takes a data analyst or data scientist a lot of time. Here’s the part most people miss. You already get that capability inside Microsoft 365 Copilot. Let me sh...
28/02/2026
GenRec Direct Learning: Moving Ranking from Feature Pipelines to Token-Native Sequence Modeling
Authors: Chunlong Yu, Han Zheng, Jie Zhu, I-Hong Jhuo, Li Xia, Lin Zhu, Sawyer Shen TL;DR Most modern ranking stacks rely on large generative models as feature extractors
28/02/2026
Google DeepMind Introduces Unified Latents (UL): A Machine Learning Framework that Jointly Regularizes Latents Using a Diffusion Prior and Decoder
Generative AI’s current trajectory relies heavily on Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) to manage the computational cost of high-resolution synthesis. By compressing data into a lower-dimensional latent space, models can scale effectively. However, a fundamental trade-off persists: lower information density makes latents easier to learn but sacrifices reconstruction quality, while higher density enables near-perfect reconstruction but […] The post
28/02/2026
Grok 4.0 Goes GA in Microsoft Foundry and Grok 4.1 Fast Arrives with Major Enhancements
We first brought Grok 4.0 to Microsoft Foundry in September 2025, marking an important milestone in expanding Foundry’s multi-model ecosystem with frontier reasoning models from xAI. Since then, customer interest and usage have continued to build as developers explored Grok’s strengths in fast reasoning, sense-making, and interpretation of complex, ambiguous information. Today, we’re excited to announce that Grok 4.0 is now gen...
28/02/2026
A Coding Implementation to Build a Hierarchical Planner AI Agent Using Open-Source LLMs with Tool Execution and Structured Multi-Agent Reasoning
In this tutorial, we build a hierarchical planner agent using an open-source instruct model. We design a structured multi-agent architecture comprising a planner agent, an executor agent, and an aggregator agent, where each component plays a specialized role in solving complex tasks. We use the planner agent to decompose high-level goals into actionable steps, the […] The post
28/02/2026
Part 2: Safely Cleaning Orphaned Records in Change Tracking Side Tables
Applies to: Azure SQL Database (Change Tracking enabled) Recap (Part 1) In Part 1, we covered how to detect “orphaned” records in Change Tracking (CT) side tables — rows whose sys_change_xdes_id no longer has a matching transaction entry in the commit table (sys.syscommittab). This situation often leads to unexpected CT growth and “stuck cleanup” symptoms because the mapping data required for normal cleanup is missing...
28/02/2026
Troubleshooting Change Tracking cleanup growth and orphaned rows in Azure SQL Database
Applies to: Azure SQL DatabaseScenario: Change Tracking (CT) side tables grow unexpectedly, and “orphaned” rows appear after switching between auto-cleanup and custom/scheduled manual cleanup. The problem (what we observed) In the case tracked, the discussion focused on Change Tracking cleanup behavior—including unexpected growth in CT side tables and orphaned records. The customer also ...
28/02/2026
Cannot enable Change Data Capture (CDC) on Azure SQL Database: Msg 22830 + Error 40529 (SUSER_SNAME)
Issue While enabling CDC at the database level on Azure SQL Database using: EXEC sys.sp_cdc_enable_db; GO the operation fails. Error The customer observed the following failure when running sys.sp_cdc_enable_db: Msg 22830: Could not update the metadata that indicates the database is enabled for Change Data Capture. Failure occurred when executing drop user cdc ...
28/02/2026
DORA exit planning for Azure SQL Database: a practical, “general guidance” blueprint
Why this matters: Under the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), many financial entities are strengthening requirements around ICT risk management, third‑party risk oversight, and—critically—exit planning / substitutability. Microsoft provides resources to help customers navigate DORA, including a DORA compliance hub in the Microsoft Trust Center. This post distills general guida...
28/02/2026
Offline vs. Immutable Backups for Azure SQL Database (General Guidance)
Security and compliance teams often ask for “offline backups” and “immutable backups” as part of ransomware resilience, audit readiness, and recovery strategy. In Azure SQL Database, these terms map to different capabilities and operating models. Immutable backups (WORM) are supported natively for Long-Term Retention (LTR) backups in Azure SQL Database, using time-based and ...
28/02/2026
How to Build Interactive Geospatial Dashboards Using Folium with Heatmaps, Choropleths, Time Animation, Marker Clustering, and Advanced Interactive Plugins
In this Folium tutorial, we build a complete set of interactive maps that run in Colab or any local Python setup. We explore multiple basemap styles, design rich markers with HTML popups, and visualize spatial density using heatmaps. We also create region-level choropleth maps from GeoJSON, scale to thousands of points using marker clustering, and […] The post
27/02/2026
Running Text to Image and Text to Video with ComfyUI and Nvidia H100 GPU
This guide provides instructions on how to set up and run Text to Image and Text to Video generation using ComfyUI with an Nvidia H100 GPU on Azure VMs. ComfyUI is a node-based user interface for Stable Diffusion and other AI models. It allows users to create complex workflows for image and video generation using a vi...
27/02/2026
Unlocking High-Performance Inference for DeepSeek with NVFP4 on NVIDIA Blackwell
Summary We partnered closely with NVIDIA to unlock high-performance single-node inference for DeepSeek-V3.2 on NVIDIA Blackwell. By leveraging NVIDIA’s new NVFP4 checkpoint for DeepSeek-V3.2 combined with NVIDIA TensorRT LLM on NVIDIA Blackwell, we achieved breakthrough inference performance. These experiments were performed on a single node (2 Grace Blackwell s...
27/02/2026
Title Plan Update - February 27, 2026
📁February 27, 2026 - Title Plan Now Available Access the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at
27/02/2026
Agent mode in Excel now works with your local files
Hello Insiders! I am Prash Shirolkar, a Product Manager on the Excel team. I am thrilled to announce that Agent mode in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat now enables you to query modern (.xlsx, .xlsb, .xlsm) locally stored Excel workbooks on Windows and Mac desktop. Agent mode in Excel now works with your local files Previously, insights and analysis from Excel Agent mode were limited to Excel workbooks stored in the cloud. With this new feature, analyzing your locally saved Excel wo...
27/02/2026
Unlocking NVIDIA Blackwell for DeepSeek: A Collaborative Breakthrough in High-Performance Inference
Summary We partnered closely with NVIDIA to unlock high-performance inference for DeepSeek-V3.2 on the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 platform. By leveraging NVIDIA’s new NVFP4 checkpoint for DeepSeek-V3.2 combined with TensorRT-LLM on Blackwell GPUs, we achieved breakthrough inference performance. Using an aligned apples-to-apples benchmark met...
27/02/2026
Sakana AI Introduces Doc-to-LoRA and Text-to-LoRA: Hypernetworks that Instantly Internalize Long Contexts and Adapt LLMs via Zero-Shot Natural Language
Customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) currently presents a significant engineering trade-off between the flexibility of In-Context Learning (ICL) and the efficiency of Context Distillation (CD) or Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Tokyo-based Sakana AI has proposed a new approach to bypass these constraints through cost amortization. In two of their recent papers, they introduced Text-to-LoRA (T2L) and […] The post
27/02/2026
Ask Microsoft Anything: Data & AI Security in the Real World
At RSA this year, we’re hosting Ask the Experts: Data & AI Security in the Real World a live, unscripted conversation with Microsoft Security engineers and product leaders who are actively building and securing AI systems on a scale. And if you’re not attending in person, you can join the conversation online through Tech Community.
27/02/2026
Microsoft Foundry: An End-to-End Platform for Building, Governing, and Scaling AI
Microsoft Foundry: What It Is and How to Get Started As organizations accelerate their adoption of AI, one challenge consistently emerges: how to move from experimentation to production at scale in a secure, responsible, and efficient way. Microsoft Foundry exists to address exactly that challenge. What Is Microsoft Foundry? Microsoft Foundry is an end-to-end platform experience that brings together Microsoft’s AI development, deployment, and governance capabilities i...
27/02/2026
Microsoft at NVIDIA GTC 2026
Microsoft returns to NVIDIA GTC 2026 in San Jose with a strong presence across conference sessions, in‑booth theater talks, live demos, and executive‑level ancillary events. Together with NVIDIA and our partner ecosystem, Microsoft is showcasing how Azure AI infrastructure enables AI training, inference, and production at global...
27/02/2026
Copilot can reschedule conflicting events in Outlook
Hi, Insiders! I’m Julia Foran, a Principal Product Manager on the Microsoft Time and Places team. I’m excited to share with you a new Microsoft 365 Copilot capability in new Outlook for Windows and Outlook for the web that can help you manage conflicting meetings and appointments in your busy calendar. Copilot can reschedule conflicting events in Outlook You can now have Copilot in Outlook reschedule personal appointments and one-on-one meetings if a conflicting event arises t...
27/02/2026
What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot | February 2026
Welcome to the February 2026 edition of What's New in Microsoft 365 Copilot! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements to keep Microsoft 365 admins up to date with Copilot features that help your users be more productive and efficient in the apps they use every day. Also new this month—the Microsoft Agent 365 blog and discussion space on Microsoft Tech Community. We recommend fol...
27/02/2026
Top 5 Microsoft Sentinel Queries for Threat Hunting
Threat hunting in Microsoft Sentinel goes beyond relying on scheduled analytics rules. It’s about proactively asking better questions of your data to uncover stealthy or emerging attacker behavior before it turns into an incident. Effective hunting helps security teams spot activity that may never trigger an alert but still represents meaningful risk. Over time, these proactive hunts strengthen overall detection coverage and improve SOC maturity. In this post, I’ll walk through five hi...
27/02/2026
Top 5 Microsoft Sentinel Queries for Threat Hunting
Threat hunting in Microsoft Sentinel goes beyond relying on scheduled analytics rules. It’s about proactively asking better questions of your data to uncover stealthy or emerging attacker behavior before it turns into an incident. Effective hunting helps security teams spot activity that may never trigger an alert but still represents meaningful risk. Over time, these proactive hunts strengthen overall detection coverage and improve SOC maturity. In this post, I’ll walk through five hi...
27/02/2026
Can LLM Embeddings Improve Time Series Forecasting? A Practical Feature Engineering Approach
Using large language models (LLMs) — or their outputs, for that matter — for all kinds of machine learning-driven tasks, including predictive ones that were already being solved long before language models emerged, has become something of a trend.
27/02/2026
What’s New in Windows Group Policy Preferences Debug Logging
Hello again — this is Potti Tagore Nadh from Directory Services team. When troubleshooting Windows components, administrators often rely on enhanced logging to diagnose issues quickly and accurately. Group Policy Preferences (GPP) provide verbose debug logging capabilities for each client-side extension (CSE). Traditionally, these settings were available only through domain-based Group Policy Objects (GPOs). With the release of February 2026 preview updates on Windows 11 24H2 an...
27/02/2026
Optimising AI Costs with Microsoft Foundry Model Router
Microsoft Foundry Model Router analyses each prompt in real-time and forwards it to the most appropriate LLM from a pool of underlying models. Simple requests go to fast, cheap models; complex requests go to premium ones, all automatically. I built an interactive demo app so you can see the routing decisions, measure latencies, and compare costs you...
27/02/2026
Creating a Fun Multi-Agent Content Strategy System with Microsoft Agent Framework
That's what we're building in this tutorial. Using Microsoft Agent Framework, we'll create a multi-agent system where three specialised AI agents collaborate to help gaming content creators craft posts that actually perform. One agent generates platform-native content. Another evaluates it the way TikTok's, Twitter's, or YouTube's recommendation algorithm would. A third reacts as a real audience member, complete with the slang, biases, and short attention span of an actual person scrolling th...
27/02/2026
Perplexity Just Released pplx-embed: New SOTA Qwen3 Bidirectional Embedding Models for Web-Scale Retrieval Tasks
Perplexity has released pplx-embed, a collection of multilingual embedding models optimized for large-scale retrieval tasks. These models are designed to handle the noise and complexity of web-scale data, providing a production-ready alternative to proprietary embedding APIs. Architectural Innovations: Bidirectional Attention and Diffusion Most Large Language Models (LLMs) utilize causal, decoder-only architectures. However, for embedding tasks, […] The post
27/02/2026
Building AI Agents That Wait For Humans
The Problem You have an AI agent that's brilliant at analyzing production incidents. It can examine logs, correlate metrics, identify root causes, and propose remediation steps in seconds. But here's the thing -- you don't want it executing changes to production without human oversight. So you build a workflow: Agent analyzes the incident Human reviews the analysis
27/02/2026
Announcing ReFS Boot for Windows Server Insiders
We’re excited to announce that Resilient File System (ReFS) boot support is now available for Windows Server Insiders in Insider Preview builds. For the first time, you can install and boot Windows Server on an ReFS-formatted boot volume directly through the setup UI. With ReFS boot, you can finally bring modern resilience, scalability, and performance to your server’s most critical volume — the OS boot volume. Why ReFS Boot? Modern workloads demand more from ...
27/02/2026
Word, Excel and PowerPoint Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot: Overview + live demo- February 2026 M365 Champions Community call
Hello Champions! Here’s a recap and top Q+A from our February M365 Champions monthly call of 2026, featuring Word, Excel and PowerPoint Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot with Alex Yang, Chelsea Fesik and Sangeeta Kul...
27/02/2026
Microsoft Research Introduces CORPGEN To Manage Multi Horizon Tasks For Autonomous AI Agents Using Hierarchical Planning and Memory
Microsoft researchers have introduced CORPGEN, an architecture-agnostic framework designed to manage the complexities of realistic organizational work through autonomous digital employees. While existing benchmarks evaluate AI agents on isolated, single tasks, real-world corporate environments require managing dozens of concurrent, interleaved tasks with complex dependencies. The research team identifies this distinct problem class as Multi-Horizon Task […] The post
27/02/2026
USB Driver Documentation Updates on UCSI, USB4 Testing
Over the past few months, we've been running a freshness pass across the USB driver documentation on Microsoft Learn and the
27/02/2026
🎟️ Backstage Pass to CommunityDays.org
Ever wondered what really happens behind the scenes at CommunityDays.org? The February Microsoft Global Community Initiative (MGCI) General Session pulled back the curtain and delivered a true backstage pass - complete with a hands‑on walkthrough of the platform. Led by
26/02/2026
Accelerate massive growth by co-selling through Microsoft Marketplace with App Advisor guidance
Co-selling with Microsoft is one of the most powerful growth levers available to software companies to sell to enterprises. But on its own, co-sell is not a strategy. The real acceleration happens when you combine them. When you publish a transactable offer in Microsoft Marketplace and make it Azure IP co-sell eligible, you unlock joint selling with...
26/02/2026
Unlocking value with Microsoft Sentinel data lake
As security telemetry explodes and AI‑driven defense becomes the norm, it is critical to centralize and retain massive volumes of data for deep analysis and long‑term insights. Security teams are fundamentally rethinking how they manage, analyze, and act on security data. The Microsoft Sentinel data lake is a ...
26/02/2026
Finding and Remediating EWS App Usage Before Retirement
In this post, we wanted to share a practical walk-through of discovering which Azure AD app registrations are still using Exchange Web Services (EWS), plus what the Kiosk/Frontline license changes mean as you plan your move to Microsoft Graph. Microsoft has announced that Exchange Online EWS blocking with start on October 1, 2026. If you have line-of-business apps, third-party tools, or automation that still depends on EWS, you need two things: (1) an inventory of what’s using EWS toda...
26/02/2026
Viva Engage masterclass season 2—Session 3: Campaigns and storytelling
When communication is intentional, it doesn’t just inform. It creates clarity and connection. In Session 3 of the Viva Engage Masterclass (season 2), we covered practical ways to build that impact with Storylines, Campaigns, and series-based storytelling.
26/02/2026
Oracle Database@Azure Is Now Generally Available in West Europe (Amsterdam)
As organizations across Europe accelerate their cloud modernization and AI adoption, data locality, compliance, and performance remain critical decision factors. Over the past year, Microsoft and Oracle have worked closely to rapidly expand the global footprint of Oracle Database@Azure, bringing Oracle’s enterprise‑grade database services natively into Azure datacenters around the world. Today, we are excited to announce that Oracle Database@Azure is now g...
26/02/2026
Azure Container Registry Premium SKU Now Supports 100 TiB Storage
Today, we're excited to announce that Azure Container Registry Premium SKU now supports up to 100 TiB of registry storage—a 2.5x increase from the previous 40 TiB limit, and a 5x increase from the original 20 TiB limit just two years ago. We've also improved geo-replication data sync speed, reducing data sync times for new replicas. We're also introducing an updated Portal experience
26/02/2026
From ESPN to the Spreadsheet Arena: How Excel MVPs Powered the Microsoft Excel World Championship
If you’ve ever watched someone do serious data work in Excel - building a model that feels like magic or using a perfectly crafted LAMBDA to do in one line what used to take a page of helper columns - you already understand the spirit...
26/02/2026
From AI pilots to public decisions: what it really takes to close the intelligence gap
Across the public sector, the conversation about AI has shifted. The question is no longer whether AI can generate insight—most leaders have already seen impressive pilots. The harder question is whether those insights survive the realities of government: public scrutiny, auditability, cross‑department delivery, and the need to explain decisions in plain language. That challenge was recently articulated by
26/02/2026
Dashboards with Grafana - Now in Azure Portal for PostgreSQL
Monitoring Azure Database for PostgreSQL just got significantly simpler. With the new Azure Monitor Dashboards with Grafana, you can visualize key metrics and logs directly inside Azure Portal - no Grafana servers to deploy, no configuration to manag...
26/02/2026
Azure SRE Agent Architecture and Creation: Practical Benefits for SAP on Azure Customers
Introduction: SRE Agent is an AI-powered service designed to support site reliability engineering practices through automation and intelligent decision-making. It reduces operational toil, improves uptime, and delivers consistent results by seamlessly integrating with Azure services and external systems to perform operational tasks wit...
26/02/2026
What's New in Microsoft Intune – February
Every IT environment has workarounds. Policies are duplicated instead of edited because there's no approval process. Apple software updates are pushed to every device because Declarative Device Management (DDM) policies couldn't filter by ownership type. Workarounds aren't just inconvenient. They can increase risk. Duplicate policies, broad software updates, and unchecked changes expand the attack surface ...
26/02/2026
Partner Blog | Build customer trust at scale with role-based certifications
As AI moves from experimentation to production, customers are raising the standard for what “ready” looks like. They want partners who can design and deliver solutions with security and responsible AI in mind, scope work accurately, and execute reliably across geographies and teams. In this environment, certifications are no longer a nice-to-have. They are a signal of capability and a practical way to build consistency at scale. A
26/02/2026
Google AI Just Released Nano-Banana 2: The New AI Model Featuring Advanced Subject Consistency and Sub-Second 4K Image Synthesis Performance
In the escalating ‘race of “smaller, faster, cheaper’ AI, Google just dropped a heavy-hitting payload. The tech giant officially unveiled Nano-Banana 2 (technically designated as Gemini 3.1 Flash Image). Google is making a definitive pivot toward the edge: high-fidelity, sub-second image synthesis that stays entirely on your device. The Technical Leap: Efficiency over Scale The […] The post
26/02/2026
Announcing Public Preview: Simplified Machine Provisioning for Azure Local
Deploying infrastructure at the edge has always been challenging. Whether it’s retail stores, factories, branch offices, or remote sites, getting servers racked, configured, and ready for workloads often require skilled IT staff on-site. That process is slow, expensive, and error-prone, especially when deployments need to happen at scale. To address this, we’re introducing Public Preview of Simplified Machine Provisioning for Azure Local - a new way to provision...
26/02/2026
Don’t Get Locked Out: Why Every Organization Needs Emergency Access Accounts
When systems fail—or when administrators suddenly lose access—the ability to regain control quickly can determine whether your nonprofit continues delivering essential services or faces major disruption. Emergency Access Accounts (also known as break‑glass accounts) give you a crucial safety net, ensuring your team can restore services, manage users, and adjust security settings even when normal admin access is unavailable. This updated guide explains
26/02/2026
Introducing a faster, more intelligent, end-to-end insider risk investigation experience
Modern insider risk investigations succeed or fail based on how quickly teams can move from signal to clarity. That’s why the latest Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management (IRM) investigation enhancements are designed as a progressive 3-step acceleration model, starting with AI‑driven prioritization, followed by faster validation, and easier escalations. Step 1: Accelerat...
26/02/2026
Announcing general availability of Azure Intel® TDX confidential VMs
We’re excited to announce the general availability of Azure’s next generation of confidential virtual machines, powered by 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors with Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel® TDX). These new confidential VMs make it easier than ever for organizations to move their most sensitive workloads to the cloud—without requiring any ...
26/02/2026
Microsoft Credentials roundup: February 2026 edition
February 2026 brings major updates to Microsoft Credentials—four new Microsoft Certifications and six new Microsoft Applied Skills now generally available (GA). Designed to help you keep your skills current in today’s AI-powered workplace, they demonstrate the AI abilities that employers need in not only technical but also business roles. In this roundup, we cover what’s new, what’s changing, and what’s coming up. What’s new: Certifications We’ve introduced four ne...
26/02/2026
Announcing extended support for Fine Tuning gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini
At Build 2025, we announced post-retirement, extended deployment and inference support for fine tuned models. Today, we’re excited to announce we’re extending fine-tuning training for current customers of our most popular Azure OpenAI models: gpt-4o (2024-08-06) and gpt-4o-mini (2024-07-18). Hundreds of customers have pushed trillions of tokens through fine-tuned versions of these models and we’re happy to provide even more runway for ...
26/02/2026
New Azure API management service limits
Azure API Management operates on finite physical infrastructure. To ensure reliable performance for all customers, the service enforces limits calibrated based on: Azure platform capacity and performance characteristics Service tier capabilities Typical customer usage patterns Resource limits are interrelated and tuned to prevent any single aspect from disrupting overall service performance. Changes to service limits - 2026 update S...
26/02/2026
What’s New in Microsoft Teams | February 2026
Welcome to the February edition of What’s new in Microsoft Teams. This month’s updates are all about helping you stay in flow: getting the most useful information to you faster, and reducing a few everyday frictions. Take custom meeting recap templates: now you can choose from a few different preset formats, or prompt Copilot to shape your AI-generated notes to match your work style. Recaps also now feature visual references, so you can see the images that wer...
26/02/2026
Windows Server 2025 Remote Desktop Session Host Capacity Planning Whitepaper
The Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) is a role service available on Windows Server 2025, which allows multiple users to access desktops and applications hosted on a single machine simultaneously. This document serves as a guide for capacity planning of Remote Desktop Session Host servers running Windows Server 2025.
26/02/2026
Public Preview: Restrict usage of user delegation SAS to an Entra ID identity
Shared access signatures (SAS) grant time-bound, scoped access to Azure Storage resources without sharing account keys. Over time, Azure Storage has continued to strengthen SAS security, moving from account keys to user delegation (UD) SAS secured by Microsoft Entra ID. Today, we’re taking the next step forward by announcing pu...
26/02/2026
KV Caching in LLMs: A Guide for Developers
Language models generate text one token at a time, reprocessing the entire sequence at each step.
26/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 26, 2026
Learn about 204 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
26/02/2026
Luo agentteja! Microsoft EMEA Partner Hackathon 26.3.2026
Kaikki Microsoft‑kumppanit ovat lämpimästi tervetulleita osallistumaan energiseen ja innovatiiviseen Microsoft EMEA Partner Hackathoniin 26.3.2026 klo 11 alkaen! Tämä tapahtuma tarjoaa ainutlaatuisen mahdollisuuden oppia uutta ja rakentaa konkreettisia tekoälypohjaisia liiketoimintaratkaisuja modernien Microsoft-teknologioiden avulla oikein skenaarioiden pohjalta. Tapahtuma kestää enintään 6 tuntia. Kerro online-tapahtumasta myös kollegoillesi ja voitte tehdä haasteen vaikkap...
26/02/2026
Exploring Azure Face API: Facial Landmark Detection and Real-Time Analysis with C#
In today’s world, applications that understand and respond to human facial cues are no longer science fiction—they’re becoming a reality in domains like security, driver monitoring, gaming, and AR/VR. With Azure Face API, developers can leverage powerful cloud-based facial recognition and analysis tools without building complex machine learning models from scratch. In t...
26/02/2026
Nous Research Releases ‘Hermes Agent’ to Fix AI Forgetfulness with Multi-Level Memory and Dedicated Remote Terminal Access Support
In the current AI landscape, we’ve become accustomed to the ‘ephemeral agent’—a brilliant but forgetful assistant that restarts its cognitive clock with every new chat session. While LLMs have become master coders, they lack the persistent state required to function as true teammates. Nous Research team released Hermes Agent, an open-source autonomous system designed to […] The post
26/02/2026
Building a Privacy-First Hybrid AI Briefing Tool with Foundry Local and Azure OpenAI
Introduction Management consultants face a critical challenge: they need instant AI-powered insights from sensitive client documents, but traditional cloud-only AI solutions create unacceptable data privacy risks. Every document uploaded to a cloud API potentially exposes confidential client information, violates data residency requirements, and creates compliance headaches. The solution lies in a hybrid architecture that combines the speed and privacy of on-device AI with the...
26/02/2026
Stop Drawing Architecture Diagrams Manually: Meet the Open-Source AI Architecture Review Agents
Hey everyone! I am Shivam Goyal, a Microsoft MVP, and I am super excited to share a project that is going to save you a massive amount of time. Designing software architecture is arguably one of the most creative and enjoyable parts of engineering. Documenting it, reviewing it for security flaws, and keeping the diagrams updated as the system evolves? Not so much. <...
26/02/2026
Building a Dual Sidecar Pod: Combining GitHub Copilot SDK with Skill Server on Kubernetes
Why the Sidecar Pattern? In Kubernetes, a Pod is the smallest deployable unit — a single Pod can contain multiple containers that share the same network namespace and storage volumes. The Sidecar pattern places auxiliary containers alongside the main application container within the same Pod. These Sidecar containers extend or enhance the main container's functionality without modifying it.
26/02/2026
Cybersecurity in the Age of Digital Acceleration: Securing Intelligence, Assets, and Trust
Over the past four decades, Information Technology has evolved from modest on-premise systems with limited storage to a boundless, cloud-driven ecosystem that powers global commerce, governance, defense, and daily life. What began in the mid-1980s as hardware-centric computing has transformed into an intelligent, distributed, always-on digital universe. Today, storage is virtually infinite. Processing is instantaneous. Markets operate 24/7. Transactions occur across continents in milliseconds...
26/02/2026
How to Access a Shared OneDrive Folder in Azure Logic Apps
What is the problem? A common enterprise automation scenario involves copying files from a OneDrive folder shared by a colleague into another storage service such as SharePoint or Azure Blob Storage using Azure Logic Apps. However, when you configure the OneDrive for...
26/02/2026
Tailscale and LM Studio Introduce ‘LM Link’ to Provide Encrypted Point-to-Point Access to Your Private GPU Hardware Assets
For the modern AI developer productivity is often tied to a physical location. You likely have a ‘Big Rig’ at home or the office—a workstation humming with NVIDIA RTX cards—and a ‘Travel Rig,’ a sleek laptop that’s perfect for coffee shops but struggles to run even a quantized Llama-3 variant. Until now, bridging that gap […] The post
26/02/2026
How to Build an Elastic Vector Database with Consistent Hashing, Sharding, and Live Ring Visualization for RAG Systems
In this tutorial, we build an elastic vector database simulator that mirrors how modern RAG systems shard embeddings across distributed storage nodes. We implement consistent hashing with virtual nodes to ensure balanced placement and minimal reshuffling as the system scales. We visualize the hashing ring in real time and interactively add or remove nodes to […] The post
26/02/2026
New ETH Zurich Study Proves Your AI Coding Agents are Failing Because Your AGENTS.md Files are too Detailed
In the high-stakes world of AI, ‘Context Engineering’ has emerged as the latest frontier for squeezing performance out of LLMs. Industry leaders have touted AGENTS.md (and its cousins like CLAUDE.md) as the ultimate configuration point for coding agents—a repository-level ‘North Star’ injected into every conversation to guide the AI through complex codebases. But a recent […] The post
26/02/2026
Microsoft Marketplace at Channel Partners Conference & Expo 2026
If you’re a channel partner, you’ve probably felt the shift: customers are relying on trusted advisors like you now more than ever as they transition to an AI-first world. As part of this change, channel‑led sales through Microsoft Marketplace have grown rapidly over the past year, fueled by new offer constructs and simplified procurement paths that make it easier for partners to source, bundle, and deliver the cloud and AI solutions customers need, while accelerati...
26/02/2026
Announcing new public preview capabilities in Azure Monitor pipeline
Azure Monitor pipeline, similar to ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process, enhances traditional data collection methods. It streamlines data collection from various sources through a unified ingestion pipeline and utilizes a standardized configuration approach that is more efficient and scalable. As Azure Monitor pipeline is used in more complex and security‑sensiti...
25/02/2026
Meet FLUX.2 [flex] for Text‑Heavy Design and UI Prototyping Now Available on Microsoft Foundry
Within the FLUX.2 family, FLUX.2 [flex] is the specialist for text and graphic design production, while FLUX.2 [pro] is optimized for photorealistic and cinematic-quality outputs. Use FLUX.2 [flex] when typography, logos, UI copy, or on-brand visual accuracy is the priority
25/02/2026
Renaming an Azure SQL DB encrypted with DB level-CMK can render it Inaccessible
Issue An issue was brought to our attention recently by a customer where we noticed that the cx DB was Inaccessible. On further investigation, it was concluded that the database was encrypted with DB level CMK & the DB was renamed, which had made it inaccessible. Here’s the error message you may get:
25/02/2026
Automating Large‑Scale Data Management with Azure Storage Actions
Azure Storage customers increasingly operate at massive scale, with millions or even billions of items distributed across multiple storage accounts. As the scale of the data increases, managing the data introduces a different set of challenges. In a recent episode of Azure Storage Talk, I sat down with S...
25/02/2026
Cloud cost optimization and performance in a transition to AI-first
AI is reshaping how organizations build, deploy, and scale technology—and it is dramatically changing how cloud investments are evaluated. As AI workloads increase cloud consumption, organizations are under growing pressure to balance innovation with cost control, performance, and governance. Cloud cost optimization is no longer a periodic exercise. It is an ongoing, cross-functional discipline that spans development, IT, finance, and procurement. Microsoft Marketplace plays a critical...
25/02/2026
Imagine Cup 2026 Semifinalist: Builder Series Mentors
For semifinalists, this stage is about depth. Sharpening your architecture. Pressure-testing your assumptions. Strengthening your path to scale. The mentors joining this year’s Builder Series have walked that road themselves and are stepping in to help teams think bigger, build smarter, and move forward with clarity. Neil Roodlyn Ne...
25/02/2026
Partner Blog | Copilot monetization for SMBs: Start with Copilot Chat, scale with agents
This post kicks off a five-part series for Microsoft partners on the Copilot monetization opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Each post follows a repeatable approach aligned to the Microsoft Customer Engagement Methodology (MCEM) and the Win Formula—from building credibility as Customer Zero to driving adoption and measurable outcomes, then extending value with agents and specializations. If you’re looking for practical...
25/02/2026
Reading GPSVC Like a Crime Novel
Hello again — this is Adesh Prabhu from Directory Services team. A long time ago (and we mean a long time ago), we published a deep dive explaining how to troubleshoot Group Policy by reading the Group Policy Client Service (GPSVC) debug log. That post, A Treatise on Group Policy Troublesh...
25/02/2026
Accelerating AKS Upgrades with Fleet Manager: Finding the Right Balance
At the heart of AKS Fleet Manager upgrades are three foundational concepts: update runs, update stages, and update groups.
25/02/2026
Authorization and Identity Governance Inside AI Agents
Designing Authorization‑Aware AI Agents Enforcing Microsoft Entra ID RBAC in Copilot Studio As AI agents move from experimentation to enterprise execution, authorization becomes the defining line between innovation and risk. AI agents are rapidly evolving from experimental assistants into enterprise operators—retrieving user data, triggering workflows, and invoking protected APIs. While many early implementations rely on prompt‑level ...
25/02/2026
Get started with PagerDuty MCP server in Azure SRE Agent
Get started with PagerDuty MCP server in Azure SRE Agent Connect Azure SRE Agent to PagerDuty's incident management platform using the official PagerDuty MCP server for incidents, on-call schedules, services, escalation policies, and more. Overview The PagerDuty MCP server is a cloud-hosted bridge between your PagerDuty account and Azure SRE Agent. Once configured, it enables real-time interac...
25/02/2026
Get started with Datadog MCP server in Azure SRE Agent
Get started with Datadog MCP server in Azure SRE Agent Connect Azure SRE Agent to Datadog's observability platform using the official Datadog MCP server for logs, metrics, traces, incidents, and more. Overview The Datadog MCP server is a cloud-hosted bridge between your Datadog organization and Azure SRE Agent. Once configured, it enables real-time interaction with logs, metrics, APM traces, mon...
25/02/2026
Get started with Atlassian Rovo MCP server in Azure SRE Agent
Get started with Atlassian Rovo MCP server in Azure SRE Agent Connect Azure SRE Agent to Jira, Confluence, Compass, and Jira Service Management using the official Atlassian Rovo MCP server. Overview The Atlassian Rovo MCP server is a cloud-hosted bridge between your Atlassian Cloud site and Azure SRE Agent. Once configured, it enables real-time interaction with Jira, Confluence, Compass, ...
25/02/2026
The JavaScript AI Build-a-thon Season 2 starts March 2!
Most applications used by millions of people every single day are powered by JavaScript/TypeScript. But when it comes to AI, most learning resources and code samples assume you're working in Python and will leave you trying to stitch scattered tutorials together to build AI into your stack. The JavaScript AI Build-a-thon is a free, hands-on program designed to close that gap. Over the course of four weeks (March 2 - March 31, 2026), you'...
25/02/2026
Stop Writing Plumbing! Use the New Logic Apps MCP Server Wizard
As part of our continued investment in making Logic Apps a first‑class platform for providing AI agents with connectivity, we’ve introduced the new Logic Apps MCP server configuration experience—a guided, in‑portal workflow that lets you turn any existing Standard logic app into a fully functional MCP server. With just a few clicks, you can configure authentication, generate API keys, create or manage MCP servers, and convert workflows into discoverable MCP tools that agents can call securely...
25/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 25, 2026
Learn about 119 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
25/02/2026
How to Combine LLM Embeddings + TF-IDF + Metadata in One Scikit-learn Pipeline
Data fusion , or combining diverse pieces of data into a single pipeline, sounds ambitious enough.
25/02/2026
Liquid AI’s New LFM2-24B-A2B Hybrid Architecture Blends Attention with Convolutions to Solve the Scaling Bottlenecks of Modern LLMs
The generative AI race has long been a game of ‘bigger is better.’ But as the industry hits the limits of power consumption and memory bottlenecks, the conversation is shifting from raw parameter counts to architectural efficiency. Liquid AI team is leading this charge with the release of LFM2-24B-A2B, a 24-billion parameter model that redefines […] The post
25/02/2026
Best Practice: Using Self-Signed Certificates with Java on Azure Functions (Linux)
If you are developing Java applications on Azure Functions (Linux dedicated plan) and need to connect to services secured by self-signed certificates, you have likely encountered the dreaded SSL handshake error: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target By default, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) only trusts certificates signed by well-k...
25/02/2026
Rethinking Background Workloads with Azure Functions on Azure Container Apps
Objective The blog explores background workload use cases where Azure Functions on Azure Container Apps provide clear advantages over traditional Container App Jobs. Here is an overview of Azure functions and Container App Jobs on Azure Container Ap...
25/02/2026
Nasdaq builds thoughtfully designed AI for board governance with PostgreSQL on Azure
Authored by: Charles Federssen, Partner Director of Product Management for PostgreSQL at Microsoft and Mohsin Shafqat, Senior Manager, Software Engineering at Nasdaq When people think of Nasdaq, they usually think of markets, trading floors, and financial data moving at extraordinary speed. But behind the scenes, Nasdaq also plays an equally critical role in how boards of directors govern, deliberate, and make decisions. Nasd...
25/02/2026
ICYMI : Behind the Build with RSA: Identity Resilience in the Age of AI
Behind the Build is an ongoing series spotlighting standout Microsoft partner collaborations. Each edition dives into the technical and strategic decisions that shape real-world integrations—highlighting engineering excellence, innovation, and the shared customer value created through partnership. RSA and Microsoft share a long, multiyear partnership shaped not by a single product or integration, but by shared customers grappling with some of today’s most complex security chal...
25/02/2026
Meta AI Open Sources GCM for Better GPU Cluster Monitoring to Ensure High Performance AI Training and Hardware Reliability
While the tech folks obsesses over the latest Llama checkpoints, a much grittier battle is being fought in the basements of data centers. As AI models scale to trillions of parameters, the clusters required to train them have become some of the most complex—and fragile—machines on the planet. Meta AI Research team just released GCM […] The post
25/02/2026
New Azure Open AI models bring fast, expressive, and real‑time AI experiences in Microsoft Foundry
Modern AI applications, whether voice‑first experiences or building large software systems, rarely fit into a single prompt. Real work unfolds over time: maintaining context, following instructions, invoking tools, and adapting as requirements evolve. When these foundations break down through latency spikes, instruction drift, or unreliable tool calls, both user conversations and developer workflows are impacted. OpenAI’s latest models address this shared challenge by prioritizing cont...
24/02/2026
A Coding Implementation to Simulate Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance with Asyncio, Malicious Nodes, and Latency Analysis
In this tutorial, we implement an end-to-end Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) simulator using asyncio. We model a realistic distributed network with asynchronous message passing, configurable delays, and Byzantine nodes that intentionally deviate from the protocol. By explicitly implementing the pre-prepare, prepare, and commit phases, we explore how PBFT achieves consensus under adversarial conditions while […] The post
24/02/2026
OneDrive Sync Up Episode 22: File Archive with Trent Green
If you've been using site archive to manage cold data, you know the value of moving inactive content to cheaper storage. But sometimes you don't want to archive an entire site — you just need to archive specific files that haven't been touched in years. That's exactly what file archive lets you do. On this month's episode of Sync Up, Trent gave us a live demo showing how simple the experience is: Select your files, click archive, done. He also walked through the 7-day instant undo window (in ...
24/02/2026
Build Sensitivity Label‑Aware, Secure RAG with Azure AI Search and Purview
Introduction: Why This Matters Now Most developers building solutions with Azure AI Search haven’t had to think about Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels before. Sensitivity labels are applied at the source—SharePoint, OneLake, O...
24/02/2026
HLK Testing Updates for Software and Filter Drivers
All drivers that participate in the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP) are expected to meet Microsoft’s baseline quality, reliability, and security requirements before they are signed and distributed. These requirements are enforced through Hardware Lab Kit (HLK) testing and certification workflows. Historically, HLK testing coverage was most consistently applied to hardware device drivers. As a result, software drivers and filter drivers did not always receive the s...
24/02/2026
Microsoft Partners: Accelerate Your AI Journey at AgentCon 2026 (Free Community Event)
Recently, a customer asked me a question many Microsoft partners are hearing right now: “We have Copilot — how do we actually use AI to change the way we work?” That question captures where we are in the AI journey today. Organizations have moved past curiosity. Now they’re looking for trusted partners who can turn AI into real business...
24/02/2026
What's New in Excel (February 2026)
Welcome to the February 2026 update. This month we are excited to announce expanded availability for Agent Mode in Excel, as well that you can now query modern Excel workbooks (like .xlsx, .xlsb, .xlsm, .ods) stored locally on your device using Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, on Windows and Mac.In addition, we've heard your feedback that working across multiple Copilot entry points can feel fragmented; and to address this, the editing...
24/02/2026
Alibaba Qwen Team Releases Qwen 3.5 Medium Model Series: A Production Powerhouse Proving that Smaller AI Models are Smarter
The development of large language models (LLMs) has been defined by the pursuit of raw scale. While increasing parameter counts into the trillions initially drove performance gains, it also introduced significant infrastructure overhead and diminishing marginal utility. The release of the Qwen 3.5 Medium Model Series signals a shift in Alibaba’s Qwen approach, prioritizing architectural […] The post
24/02/2026
App Skills is evolving with Copilot in Excel
We are continuing to streamline the ways people engage with Copilot in Excel, and we've heard your feedback that working across multiple Copilot entry points can feel fragmented. To address this, Copilot in Excel is transitioning toward a more unified experience so users can easily choose between conversational assistance and direct editing capabilities.As part of this effort, the editing capabilities that App Skills provided will be integrated into
24/02/2026
Spotlight: Top 10 MVP Theater Sessions from Microsoft Ignite
The Top 10 MVP Theater Sessions — Now On Demand Every year, Microsoft Ignite brings together some of the brightest minds in our global community and our Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) continue to play a major role. This year, MVPs once ...
24/02/2026
Windows first sign-in restore experience now available
The first sign-in restore experience is now generally available as part of Windows Backup for Organizations! This means that the restore functionality is now available beyond Microsoft Entra joined devices, expanding to support the needs of hybrid-managed environments. Help employees at your organization get productive faster on a new or reimaged Windows 11 device—witho...
24/02/2026
Partner Case study | Insight
As organizations and leaders race to embrace the potential of AI, sometimes, the hardest part of the transformation isn’t choosing the right technology—it’s getting people to use it. Employees may hesitate to modify established workflows, feel resistant to new technology, or simply not know how or where to start. This can stall even the most ambitious AI strategies. Insight Enterprises—a Fortune 500 solutions integrator and longtime Microsoft partner—deeply understands this challenge. ...
24/02/2026
Microsoft at PGConf India 2026
I’m genuinely excited about PGConf India 2026. Over the past few editions, the conference has continued to grow year over year—both in size and in impact—and it has firmly established itself as one of the key events on the global PostgreSQL calendar. That momentum was very evident again in the depth, breadth, and overall quality of the program for PGConf India 2026. Microsoft is proud to be a
24/02/2026
AI Security in Azure with Microsoft Defender for Cloud: Learn the How, Join the Session
As organizations accelerate AI adoption, securing AI workloads has become a top priority. Unlike traditional cloud applications, AI systems introduce new risks—such as prompt injection, data leakage, and model misuse—that require a more integrated approach to security and governance. To help developers and security teams understand and address these challenges, we are hosting Azure Decoded: Ki...
24/02/2026
Protect browser-based work on agency-managed Windows PCs
From SaaS apps and internal web portals to AI-powered tools, the browser is now a major workspace for many employees and contractors alike. This shift has introduced new opportunities for organizations to enable an extended workforce. At the same time, it creates new data protection complexities for IT administrators. Securing corporate data has traditionally relied on full device management. However, when work occurs on a Wi...
24/02/2026
Build Sensitivity Label‑Aware, Secure RAG with Azure AI Search and Purview
1. Introduction: Why This Matters Now Many Azure AI Search developers have no visibility into Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels, since labeling and encryption happen at the document source (SharePoint, On...
24/02/2026
Behind the Build with RSA: Identity Resilience in the Age of AI
Behind the Build is an ongoing series spotlighting standout Microsoft partner collaborations. Each edition dives into the technical and strategic decisions that shape real-world integrations—highlighting engineering excellence, innovation, and the shared customer value created through partnership. RSA and Microsoft share a long, multiyear partnership shaped not by a single product or integration, but by shared customers grappling with some of today’s m...
24/02/2026
Disrupt AWS attacks automatically in Microsoft Sentinel
Attacks move faster than security teams can react. They spread across identities, endpoints, and SaaS apps in minutes, overwhelming analysts with signals and leaving little time to act. By the time an incident is investigated, the attacker has often already moved on escalating impact and business continuity. Organizations need a way to respond and get ahead of these attacks. That’s why we built
24/02/2026
Akkodis and Microsoft share field‑tested tips for your AI skilling program
Generative AI technology is creating unprecedented opportunities to improve your business efficiency, fuel innovation, and gain a competitive edge. Given these benefits, equipping your workforce with the skills to effectively use AI-powered tools is a high priority. At the same time, the rapid evolution of AI technology, along with the potential impacts on your established processes, means that matching people with the right skills requires a deliberate approach. Akkodis and Microsoft...
24/02/2026
Query your local Excel files with Copilot Chat
Hi, Insiders! I am Prash Shirolkar, a Product Manager on the Excel team. I’m excited to share that you can now query modern Excel workbooks (like .xlsx, .xlsb, .xlsm, .ods) stored locally on your device using Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, on Windows and Mac. Now you have the flexibility to query Copilot Chat wherever your Excel files are located. Query your local Excel files with Copilot Chat Previously, insights and analysis from Copilot Chat were limited to...
24/02/2026
SharePoint Showcase: Using SharePoint Embedded to create AI-ready infrastructure
Across industries like financial services, healthcare, government, and legal, some of the most critical business processes still rely on documents trapped in legacy systems; isolated from Microsoft 365, disconnected from collaboration, and invisible to AI. As organizations embrace Copilot and AI‑assisted workflows, that disconnect is no longer just inconvenient. It’s a blocker. That’s why SharePoint Embedded (SPE) is taking center stage in this month’s Share...
24/02/2026
The Safest Way for Nonprofits to Validate Conditional Access Policies Before Enforcing Them
Nonprofits rely on secure, reliable access to Microsoft 365 to serve communities, support staff and volunteers, and protect sensitive data. Conditional Access (CA) in Microsoft Entra ID is one of the strongest tools available to safeguard identities—but a misconfigured policy can unintentionally block staff, volunteers, donors, or even your entire organization. That’s why Report‑Only Mode is essential. It allows nonprofits to test Conditional Access policies safely, wi...
24/02/2026
Introducing Run Oracle Your Way on Oracle Database@Azure – a new technical webinar series
Oracle Database@Azure was purpose-built to enable enterprises to bring Oracle databases to Azure. With this jointly engineered solution, customers can:
24/02/2026
Learning Zone spotlight: Ace your note-taking skills
A monthly spotlight from the Learning Zone collection, featuring ready-to-use lessons that bring timely classroom topics and practical learning skills into your teaching. Strengthen habits that make learning last By this time of the semester, the early energy of a new term has settled, content is getting denser, and assessments are already visible on the horizon. It is a good moment to ask a simple question: Are your students’ notes helping them, or jus...
24/02/2026
Evolving the Network Operations Agent Framework: Driving the Next Wave of Autonomous Networks
The original announcement of the Network Operations Agent (NOA) Framework outlined a bold mission: provide telecom operators with a modular, multiagent foundation to accelerate the journey toward autonomous networks. NOA combined intelligent agents, unified data acc...
24/02/2026
Multi-tenancy in Agentic AI – session recap
Software as a Service (SaaS) enables software development companies (SDCs) to deliver their products as managed services to customers. Whether offered business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C), the way a product—new or existing—is designed to support multiple tenants (such as customers, user groups, or internal departments) can vary based on many factors. ‑to‑business (B2B) or business‑to‑consumer (B2C), the way a product—new or existing—is designed to support multiple tenants ...
24/02/2026
Google DeepMind Researchers Apply Semantic Evolution to Create Non Intuitive VAD-CFR and SHOR-PSRO Variants for Superior Algorithmic Convergence
In the competitive arena of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), progress has long been bottlenecked by human intuition. For years, researchers have manually refined algorithms like Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) and Policy Space Response Oracles (PSRO), navigating a vast combinatorial space of update rules via trial-and-error. Google DeepMind research team has now shifted this paradigm with […] The post
24/02/2026
RAG vs. Context Stuffing: Why selective retrieval is more efficient and reliable than dumping all data into the prompt
Large context windows have dramatically increased how much information modern language models can process in a single prompt. With models capable of handling hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of tokens, it’s easy to assume that Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is no longer necessary. If you can fit an entire codebase or documentation library into the context window, […] The post
24/02/2026
On-Premises Manufacturing Intelligence
Manufacturing facilities face a fundamental dilemma in the AI era: how to harness artificial intelligence for predictive maintenance, equipment diagnostics, and operational insights while keeping sensitive production data entirely on-premises. Industrial environments generate proprietary information, CNC machining parameters, quality control thresholds, equipment performance signatures, maintenance histories, that represents competitive advantage accumulated over decades of process optimizati...
24/02/2026
Composio Open Sources Agent Orchestrator to Help AI Developers Build Scalable Multi-Agent Workflows Beyond the Traditional ReAct Loops
For the past year, AI devs have relied on the ReAct (Reasoning + Acting) pattern—a simple loop where an LLM thinks, picks a tool, and executes. But as any software engineer who has tried to move these agents into production knows, simple loops are brittle. They hallucinate, they lose track of complex goals, and they […] The post
24/02/2026
Upcoming IT Management and Security in the AI Era events on Tech community!
We’re excited to invite you to IT Management and Security in the AI Era, on Thursday, February 26th, from 8:00AM to 10:30 AM Pacific.<...
24/02/2026
Beyond Simple API Requests: How OpenAI’s WebSocket Mode Changes the Game for Low Latency Voice Powered AI Experiences
In the world of Generative AI, latency is the ultimate killer of immersion.Until recently, building a voice-enabled AI agent felt like assembling a Rube Goldberg machine: you’d pipe audio to a Speech-to-Text (STT) model, send the transcript to a Large Language Model (LLM), and finally shuttle text to a Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine.The post Beyond Simple API Requests: How OpenAI’s WebSocket Mode Changes the Game for Low Latency Voice Powered AI Experiences appeared first on MarkTechPost.
23/02/2026
How to Build a Production-Grade Customer Support Automation Pipeline with Griptape Using Deterministic Tools and Agentic Reasoning
In this tutorial, we build an advanced Griptape-based customer support automation system that combines deterministic tooling with agentic reasoning to process real-world support tickets end-to-end. We design custom tools to sanitize sensitive information, categorize issues, assign priorities with clear SLA targets, and generate structured escalation payloads, all before involving the language model. We then use […] The post
23/02/2026
Introducing the next generation of SOC automation: Sentinel playbook generator
Security teams today operate under constant pressure. They are expected to respond faster, automate more, and do so without sacrificing precision. Traditional security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) approaches have helped, but they still rely heavily on rigid templates, limited action libraries, and workflows stretched across multiple portals. Building and maintaining automation is often slow and constrained at exactly the time organizations need more flexibility. Something nee...
23/02/2026
Building MCP Apps with Azure Functions MCP Extension
Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of MCP App support in the Azure Functions MCP (Model Context Protocol) extension! You can now build MCP Apps using the Functions MCP Extension in Python, TypeScript, and .NET. What are MCP Apps...
23/02/2026
Accelerating revenue in telecommunications through Agentic Sales Processes
Executive Summary Telecommunications providers are under unprecedented pressure to reignite revenue growth amid market saturation, commoditization of core services, rising infrastructure costs, and intensifying competition from digital‑native players. At the same time, customers demand seamless, personalized, digital‑first experiences—while regulatory constraints, legacy systems, and talent gaps limit agility and innovation. These forces require a fundamental shift in how telecoms ge...
23/02/2026
Introducing a refreshed design, task chat, and more in Microsoft Planner
We’re excited to announce that a modernized user interface and new features are now rolling out to basic plans in both Planner in Teams and Planner for the web. The updated design offers enhanced navigation, responsive layouts, a new goals view for setting objectives and priorities, and task chat—one of your most requested features—to enable real-time collaboration and @ mentioning team members. This release aims to make planning easier for everyday users while preparing for future AI-...
23/02/2026
Windows Server Secure Boot playbook for certificates expiring in 2026
This guidance describes the tools and options available to help organizations update Secure Boot certificates on Windows Server before the certificates begin expiring in June 2026. Note: This guidance does not apply to Azure Local hosts, Windows PCs or Generation 1 Hyper-V VMs. For Azure Local information, see
23/02/2026
YellowHat 2026: the ultimate Defender’s gathering
By Guest Blogger: Marteen Goet Level 400+ content: no fluff, just tech With 250 attendees in person and thousands more tuning in worldwide, we explored the absolute cutting edge of Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Entra. True to the mission, YellowHat skipped the basics to tackle the most advanced ...
23/02/2026
Building Knowledge-Grounded Conversational AI Agents with Azure Speech Photo Avatars
From Chat to Presence: The Next Step in Conversational AI Chat agents are now embedded across nearly every industry, from customer support on websites to direct integrations inside business applications designed to boost efficiency and productivity. As these agents become more capable and more visible, user expectations are also rising: conversations should feel natural, trustworthy, and engaging. While text‑only chat agents work well for many scenarios, voice‑enabled agents t...
23/02/2026
Introducing the next generation of SOC automation: Sentinel SOAR playbook generator
Security teams today operate under constant pressure. They are expected to respond faster, automate more, and do so without sacrificing precision. Traditional security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) approaches have helped, but they still rely heavily on rigid templates, limited action libraries, and workflows stretched across multiple portals. Building and maintaining automation is often slow and constrained at exactly the time organizations need more flexibility. Something nee...
23/02/2026
Mastering gin_pending_list_limit: How This parameter shapes GIN index insert performance
GIN (Generalized Inverted Index) indexes are a cornerstone of PostgreSQL when working with JSONB, arrays, and full-text search. They provide excellent read performance, but their write behavior—especially under sustained insert workloads—can vary dramatically depending on how data is primarily written and how GIN index maintenance is configured. One often-overlooked configuration in this space is the interaction between the fastupdate and gin_pending_list_limit se...
23/02/2026
What’s trending on Hugging Face: PubMedBERT Base Embeddings, Paraphrase Multilingual MiniLM, BGE-M3
The embedding model landscape has evolved beyond one-size-fits-all solutions. Today’s developers navigate a set of deliberate trade‑offs: domain specialization to improve accuracy in vertical applications, multilingual capabilities to support global use cases, and retrieval strategies that optimize performance at scale. Once a model demonstrates strong semantic performance, predictable behavior, and broad community support, it often becomes a trusted reference baseline that developers build a...
23/02/2026
Turn Your ECM/DMS into AI Infrastructure with SharePoint Embedded
TL;DR: SharePoint Embedded helps customers easily bring their legacy ECM/DMS apps into the modern era, delivering Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Purview security and compliance, and Microsoft 365 Office collaboration capabilities automatically, as part of the project. Across a range of industries including healthcare, manufacturing, government, financial services, and legal, organizations face a common reality: vital business operations depend on documents w...
23/02/2026
Security baseline for Windows Server 2025, version 2602
Microsoft is pleased to announce the February 2026 Revision (v2602) of the security baseline package for Windows Server 2025! You can download the baseline package from the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit, test the recommended configurations in your environment, and customize / implement them as appropriate. Summary of Changes in This Release This...
23/02/2026
Create an Organizational Assets Library (including Multi-Geo & Information Barriers guidance)
Overview This guide walks through a practical approach to setting up SharePoint Online (SPO) Organizational Assets Libraries (OAL). It includes optional guidance for more complex tenants—such as Multi-Geo and Information Barriers (IB) - because those scenarios are often under-documented. What you’ll accomplish: Create and register Organizational Assets Libraries so templates, fonts, and brand images are available in Office apps, with notes for Multi-Geo,...
23/02/2026
Notes From the Field: Finding and Remediating EWS App Usage Before Retirement
In this post, we wanted to share a practical walk-through of discovering which Azure AD app registrations are still using Exchange Web Services (EWS), plus what the Kiosk/Frontline license changes mean as you plan your move to Microsoft Graph. Microsoft has announced that Exchange Online EWS blocking with start on October 1, 2026. If you have line-of-business apps, third-party tools, or automation that still depends on EWS, you need two things: (1) an inventory of what’s using EWS toda...
23/02/2026
Unlock AI Agent communication, enhance customer engagement with MCP servers in Microsoft Marketplace
In this guest blog post, Josip Antoliš, Senior Principal Engineer at Infobip, discusses how MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers available in Microsoft Marketplace empower organizations to connect AI agents across multiple communication channels, driving richer customer engagement and operational efficiency. As organizations race to become AI-first enterprises, a critical question emerges: How do you break your AI agents out of the prison of a chat box in a sidebar of your web...
23/02/2026
Installing Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode
So far, we’ve introduced Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode (vMode) and discussed the architectural changes in Windows Admin Center necessary to implement both virtualization and...
23/02/2026
Managed Identity on SQL Server On-Prem: The End of Stored Secrets
The Problem with Credentials in SQL Server For an On-Premises SQL Server to access Azure services, you traditionally need to store secrets: Common Scenarios Requiring Credentials Scenario Required Credential Backup to URL (Azure Blob) Storage account key or SAS token
23/02/2026
Beyond Accuracy: 5 Metrics That Actually Matter for AI Agents
AI agents , or autonomous systems powered by agentic AI, have reshaped the current landscape of AI systems and deployments.
23/02/2026
Introducing Data Series Colors: tell clearer stories with ADX Dashboards
A frequent request we receive from dashboard editors is the ability to have control over color settings. Until now, color assignments in ADX dashboards were largely automatic. While this worked for basic scenarios, it often fell short in operational and reporting use cases where color isn’t decoration - it’s meaning. Today, we’re introducing Data Series Colors, a new capability that gives editors direct control over how colors are applied to their visuals. ...
23/02/2026
Rethinking Ingress on Azure: Application Gateway for Containers Explained
Introduction Azure Application Gateway for Containers is a managed Azure service designed to handle incoming traffic for container-based applications. It brings Layer-7 load balancing, routing, TLS termination, and web application protection outside of the Kubernetes cluster and into an Azure-managed data plane. By separating traffic manage...
23/02/2026
Integrating Microsoft Foundry with OpenClaw: Step by Step Model Configuration
Step 1: Deploying Models on Microsoft Foundry Let us kick things off in the Azure portal. To get our OpenClaw agent thinking like a genius, we need to deploy our models in Microsoft Foundry. For this guide, we are going to focus on deploying gpt-5.2-codex on Microsoft Foundry with OpenClaw. Navigate to your AI Hub, head over to the model catal...
23/02/2026
Taalas is replacing programmable GPUs with hardwired AI chips to achieve 17,000 tokens per second for ubiquitous inference
In the high-stakes world of AI infrastructure, the industry has operated under a singular assumption: flexibility is king. We build general-purpose GPUs because AI models change every week, and we need programmable silicon that can adapt to the next research breakthrough. But Taalas, the Toronto-based startup thinks that flexibility is exactly what’s holding AI back. […] The post
23/02/2026
How to Troubleshoot Azure Functions Not Visible in Azure Portal
How to Troubleshoot Azure Functions Not Visible in Azure Portal Overview Azure Functions is a powerful serverless compute service that enables you to run event-driven code without managing infrastructure. When you deploy functions to Azure, you expect to see them listed in the Azure Portal under your Function App. However, there are situations where your functions may not appear in the portal, even though they were successfully depl...
23/02/2026
VectifyAI Launches Mafin 2.5 and PageIndex: Achieving 98.7% Financial RAG Accuracy with a New Open-Source Vectorless Tree Indexing.
Building a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline is easy; building one that doesn’t hallucinate during a 10-K audit is nearly impossible. For devs in the financial sector, the ‘standard’ vector-based RAG approach—chunking text and hoping for the best—often results in a ‘text soup’ that loses the vital structural context of tables and balance sheets. VectifyAI is […] The post
23/02/2026
A Coding Guide to Instrumenting, Tracing, and Evaluating LLM Applications Using TruLens and OpenAI Models
In this tutorial, we focus on building a transparent and measurable evaluation pipeline for large language model applications using TruLens. Rather than treating LLMs as black boxes, we instrument each stage of an application so that inputs, intermediate steps, and outputs are captured as structured traces. We then attach feedback functions that quantitatively evaluate model […] The post
23/02/2026
Forget Keyword Imitation: ByteDance AI Maps Molecular Bonds in AI Reasoning to Stabilize Long Chain-of-Thought Performance and Reinforcement Learning (RL) Training
ByteDance Seed recently dropped a research that might change how we build reasoning AI.For years, devs and AI researchers have struggled to ‘cold-start’ Large Language Models (LLMs) into Long Chain-of-Thought (Long CoT) models.Most models lose their way or fail to transfer patterns during multi-step reasoning.
22/02/2026
A New Google AI Research Proposes Deep-Thinking Ratio to Improve LLM Accuracy While Cutting Total Inference Costs by Half
For the last few years, the AI world has followed a simple rule: if you want a Large Language Model (LLM) to solve a harder problem, make its Chain-of-Thought (CoT) longer. But new research from the University of Virginia and Google proves that ‘thinking long’ is not the same as ‘thinking hard’. The research team […] The post
22/02/2026
How to Design an Agentic Workflow for Tool-Driven Route Optimization with Deterministic Computation and Structured Outputs
In this tutorial, we build a production-style Route Optimizer Agent for a logistics dispatch center using the latest LangChain agent APIs. We design a tool-driven workflow in which the agent reliably computes distances, ETAs, and optimal routes rather than guessing, and we enforce structured outputs to make the results directly usable in downstream systems. We […] The post
21/02/2026
Is There a Community Edition of Palantir? Meet OpenPlanter: An Open Source Recursive AI Agent for Your Micro Surveillance Use Cases
The balance of power in the digital age is shifting. While governments and large corporations have long used data to track individuals, a new open-source project called OpenPlanter is giving that power back to the public. Created by a developer ‘Shin Megami Boson‘, OpenPlanter is a recursive-language-model investigation agent. Its goal is simple: help you […] The post
21/02/2026
A Coding Guide to High-Quality Image Generation, Control, and Editing Using HuggingFace Diffusers
In this tutorial, we design a practical image-generation workflow using the Diffusers library. We start by stabilizing the environment, then generate high-quality images from text prompts using Stable Diffusion with an optimized scheduler. We accelerate inference with a LoRA-based latent consistency approach, guide composition with ControlNet under edge conditioning, and finally perform localized edits via […] The post
21/02/2026
Regional Endpoints for Geo-Replicated Azure Container Registries (Private Preview)
Imagine you're running Kubernetes clusters in multiple Azure regions—East US, West Europe, and Southeast Asia. You've configured ACR with geo-replication so your container images are available everywhere, but you've noticed something frustrating: you can't control which replica your clusters pull from. Sometimes your East US cluster pulls from West Europe, and you have no way to pin it to the co-located replica or troubleshoot why routing behaves unexpectedly.
21/02/2026
Title Plan Update - February 20, 2026
📁February 20, 2026 - Title Plan Now Available Access the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at
20/02/2026
How to enable HTTPS support for Microsoft Connected Cache for Enterprise and Education
Starting on June 16th, 2026, or soon after, Intune will enforce HTTPS content delivery for customers using Microsoft Connected Cache for Enterprise and Education. To continue using Microsoft Connected Cache to localize Intune Win32 app downloads and reduce the bandwidth impact on your network, you’ll need to configure HTTPS on Connected Cache nodes. Without this configuration, devices will still fetch the requested content, but they’ll fall back to the Content Deli...
20/02/2026
HLS Copilot Use Case Webinar Series
Friday 2/27 - Taming the Excel Jungle of Clinician SchedulingNurse clinicians face enough pressure without spending hours wrestling with six‑week schedules in Excel. Even with time‑tracking systems in place, many teams still export schedules, staff details, and skills into spreadsheets to manually resolve conflicts and coverage gaps—adding frustration and stress to an already demanding role. In this HLS webinar on February 27 at 12:00 PM ET
20/02/2026
How to Design a Swiss Army Knife Research Agent with Tool-Using AI, Web Search, PDF Analysis, Vision, and Automated Reporting
In this tutorial, we build a “Swiss Army Knife” research agent that goes far beyond simple chat interactions and actively solves multi-step research problems end-to-end. We combine a tool-using agent architecture with live web search, local PDF ingestion, vision-based chart analysis, and automated report generation to demonstrate how modern agents can reason, verify, and produce […] The post
20/02/2026
Plan for Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 2016 LTSB end of support
Three Windows products first released in 2016 are close to reaching end of support (EOS) on the following dates: Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016: October 13, 2026
20/02/2026
NVIDIA Releases DreamDojo: An Open-Source Robot World Model Trained on 44,711 Hours of Real-World Human Video Data
Building simulators for robots has been a long term challenge. Traditional engines require manual coding of physics and perfect 3D models. NVIDIA is changing this with DreamDojo, a fully open-source, generalizable robot world model. Instead of using a physics engine, DreamDojo ‘dreams’ the results of robot actions directly in pixels. Scaling Robotics with 44k+ Hours […] The post
20/02/2026
What to Expect from the Copilot & AI Sessions at Microsoft 365 Community Conference
AI isn’t a side conversation at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference—it’s at the center of how work is changing.The Copilot, Agents, & Copilot Services Sessions are designed for anyone who wants to move beyond curiosity and into real-world application.One of the biggest themes across the sessions are the evolution from AI as a helper to AI as an active participant in work.
20/02/2026
Skype for Business for Mac Client Update – Version 16.31.31 Released
We’re pleased to announce the availability of Skype for Business for Mac client version 16.31.31, the latest update for customers who continue to rely on Skype for Business in their daily communications.Customers using Skype for Business on Mac are encouraged to move to this latest version to benefit from the most up‑to‑date client build and to ensure continued supportability.Note that for the time being, we have left the previous Skype for Business on Mac download (Version 16.31.11) as an available download in case you still need it during your upgrade process.
20/02/2026
Learn to maximize your productivity at the proMX Project Operations + AI Summit 2026
As organizations accelerate AI adoption across business applications, mastering how Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions, Copilot, and agents work together is becoming a strategic priority. Fortunately, businesses no longer need to rely on speculation — they can gain practical insights with fellow industry professionals during a unique two-day event: On April 21-22, 2026, Microsoft and
20/02/2026
When Group Policy Goes Haywire: Spotting registry.pol Corruption Fast
If you’re in charge of Group Policy settings, you know how critical the registry.pol file is and how nerve-wracking it can be when things go awry. Luckily, Windows now provides much more actionable insight when corruption is detected in this vital file. Rather than introducing a new event or log, the existing Group Policy error, Event ID 1096 in the System event log...
20/02/2026
🚀 Git-Driven Deployments for Microsoft Fabric Using GitHub Actions
👋 Introduction If you've been working with Microsoft Fabric, you've likely faced this question: "How do we promote Fabric items from DEV → QA → PROD reliably, consistently, and with proper governance?" Many teams default to the built-in Fabric Deployment Pipelines — and they work great for simpler scenarios. But what happens when your enterprise demands: 🔒 Centralized governance across all pla...
20/02/2026
Empowering.Cloud Community Update – February 2026
The latest Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 expert community briefings, podcasts and upcoming community events. Expert Briefings: Microsoft Places in 2026: APIs, Desk Booking, and Copilot Context https://empowering.cloud/microsoft-places-in-2026-apis-desk-booking-and-copilot-context/
20/02/2026
Learning Cost Efficient AI Agents Development on Azure
The Maximize the Cost Efficiency of AI Agents on Azure webinar is designed to help answer these questions.This session provides practical guidance on designing and scaling AI agents on Azure while keeping cost efficiency in mind.Rather than focusing only on tools and services, the webinar helps learners and educators understand how architectural decisions, model choices, and usage patterns directly impact cost, performance, and outcomes.
20/02/2026
Building an AI Study Agent - How GitHub Copilot CLI & SDK helped Reimagine LMS
This is what the Model Context Protocol provides, a standard that connects AI native apps/ agents to data and tools dynamically.In the steps above, Copilot CLI uses this very same protocol to pull data from external sources, accessing documentation on how the MCP architecture works and how to build and connect to MCP servers, and in a single prompt, is able to extend my existing backend (API Layer) into an MCP server with tools that will allow the agent to perform actions dynamically.Enter GitHub Copilot SDK
20/02/2026
Seamless Migrations From Self Hosted Nginx Ingress To The AKS App Routing Add-On
The Kubernetes Steering Committee has announced that the Nginx Ingress controller will be retired in March 2026.Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers a managed routing add-on which also implements Nginx as the Ingress Controller.There is also an updated version of the App Routing add-on in the works, that will be based on Istio to allow for transition off Nginx Ingress.
20/02/2026
Using Azure API Management with Azure Front Door for Global, Multi‑Region Architectures
Azure provides two complementary services that help achieve this: Azure API Management (APIM) as the API gateway and Azure Front Door (AFD) as the global entry point and load balancer.That led us to design the solution detailed in this article which explains how to configure multi‑regional, active‑active APIM behind Azure Front Door using Custom origins and regional gateway endpoints.To make your APIM publicly accessible, you need to front it with both an Application Gateway and an Azure Front Door because:
20/02/2026
NVIDIA Releases Dynamo v0.9.0: A Massive Infrastructure Overhaul Featuring FlashIndexer, Multi-Modal Support, and Removed NATS and ETCD
This is the most significant infrastructure upgrade for the distributed inference framework to date.This update simplifies how large-scale models are deployed and managed.The release focuses on removing heavy dependencies and improving how GPUs handle multi-modal data.
20/02/2026
How to Build Transparent AI Agents: Traceable Decision-Making with Audit Trails and Human Gates
In this tutorial, we build a glass-box agentic workflow that makes every decision traceable, auditable, and explicitly governed by human approval.We design the system to log each thought, action, and observation into a tamper-evident audit ledger while enforcing dynamic permissioning for high-risk operations.By combining LangGraph’s interrupt-driven human-in-the-loop control with a hash-chained database, we […]
20/02/2026
Beautifully invisible: The engineering intelligence behind Surface for Business displays
Open a Surface Copilot+ PC, and the display just feels right. Whites look clean, text is sharp, and colors stay true and consistent in varied lighting conditions. Move from a bright office to a dim café and the screen keeps pace, adjusting as the light around you changes. That sense of ease is deliberate. It comes from years of engineering designed to make the display feel natural in any setting, with work that is meant to be invisible rather than attention-grabbing. In this blog post, we’ll ...
20/02/2026
Build a Custom SSL Certificate Monitor with Azure SRE Agent: From Python Tool to Production Skill
TL;DR Expired SSL certificates cause outages that are 100% preventable. In this post, you’ll learn how to create a custom Python tool in Azure SRE Agent that checks SSL certificate expiry across your domains, then wrap it in a skill that gives your agent a complete certificate health audit workflow. The result: your SRE Agent proactively flags certificates expiring in the next 30 days and recommends renewal actions , before they become 3 AM pages. <...
20/02/2026
Host Declarative Markdown-Based Agents on Azure Functions
Like many of you, the Azure Functions team and others at Microsoft have been building agents for our day-to-day work using mostly markdown and configuration: like AGENTS.md instructions, skills, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools. These sophisticated and powerful agents run locally right in VS Code or the Copilot CLI. But inevitably, the question comes up: "How do I share this agent with my team by running it in the cloud?" <...
20/02/2026
Cross Forest Enrollment – PKISync.PS1
Here is the link: Cross Forest - Certificate Enrollment | Microsoft Community Hub PKIsync.ps1 script At this time, we’re going to keep things simple. The goal is to create an Active Directory resource Forest (Source Forest) that will host an Enterprise CA; it will be responsible for issuing all certificates.
19/02/2026
Google AI Releases Gemini 3.1 Pro with 1 Million Token Context and 77.1 Percent ARC-AGI-2 Reasoning for AI Agents
Google has officially shifted the Gemini era into high gear with the release of Gemini 3.1 Pro, the first version update in the Gemini 3 series. This release is not just a minor patch; it is a targeted strike at the ‘agentic’ AI market, focusing on reasoning stability, software engineering, and tool-use reliability. For devs, […] The post
19/02/2026
Copilot adoption: Move your org from pilot to production with this guide
Are you an IT admin or Copilot adoption lead ready to safely start or scale your rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot? Piecing together the right guidance can be something of a treasure hunt so we created a trusted, single starting point for you: 8 Copilot & agent hubs every adoption leader should bookmark. This guide is organized around the typical adoption lifecycle (plan → b...
19/02/2026
A Coding Implementation to Build Bulletproof Agentic Workflows with PydanticAI Using Strict Schemas, Tool Injection, and Model-Agnostic Execution
In this tutorial, we build a production-ready agentic workflow that prioritizes reliability over best-effort generation by enforcing strict, typed outputs at every step. We use PydanticAI to define clear response schemas, wire in tools via dependency injection, and ensure the agent can safely interact with external systems, such as a database, without breaking execution. By […] The post
19/02/2026
The Copilot resource guide to share with your employees
From customers driving Microsoft Copilot adoption, one request we hear a lot is: “Can you send me to a simple starting place?” Now we can. Essential Copilot resource hubs for employees is a trusted, easy-to-share guide that rounds up key Microsoft-owned Copilot learning and support hubs. It's designed to help you speed up Copilot onboarding and get your employees buil...
19/02/2026
Personalize your Message center experience for Windows news
Did you know that you can filter and focus Message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center to prioritize Windows changes? While there's a lot going on in the world of Windows management every day, you don't need to feel overwhelmed. Message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center exists to help keep you and your organization informed of the latest Windows updates, new features, hardening changes, and more. Let's review a few tools that can make it a lot more...
19/02/2026
OneDrive on Mac gets Liquid Glass with an All-New Activity Center
OneDrive on macOS is a core part of the OneDrive ecosystem, designed to deliver a great experience for working with your files directly on your Mac. Over the years, we’ve continued to improve OneDrive for Mac, and we’ve also listened closely to your feedback. We want OneDrive to feel truly native on macOS, with a fast, reliable sync experience you can count on every day.
19/02/2026
Large Mailbox Migration to Exchange Online
Migrating large mailboxes is challenging for enterprise Exchange teams, especially when mailboxes are over 100 GB or contain extensive recoverable items. Using Exchange Messaging Records Management (MRM) to reduce mailbox size before migration can speed up moves to Exchange Online. Why Use MRM Before a Large Mailbox Migration? Many organizations place mailboxes on litigation hold or in-place hold, causing the recoverable items in these mailboxes to grow significantly, often ex...
19/02/2026
Bringing AI fluency to every corner of the organization (even yours!)
The real question is, “Are you fluent enough to lead with it?”Regardless of your role or team, AI is likely already part of your world. In this blog post, the first in a series of three, I share practical tips, including six easy steps, that turn AI from a buzzword into your work GPS. In fact, according to the January 2025 LinkedIn Economic Graph Work Change Report: AI Is Coming to Work, “By 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change, with AI emerging as a catalyst.”
19/02/2026
Accelerate Your UEBA Journey: Introducing the Microsoft Sentinel Behaviors Workbook
In our recent announcement, we introduced the UEBA Behaviors layer - a breakthrough capability that transforms noisy, high-volume security telemetry into clear, human-readable behavioral insights.The Behaviors layer answers the critical question: "Who did what to whom, and why does it matter?" by aggregating and sequencing raw events into normalized, MITRE ATT&CK-mapped behaviors.Today, we announce the Microsoft Sentinel Behaviors Workbook (part of the “UEBA essentials solution” in the content hub) - a purpose-built, interactive analytics workbook that helps you extract maximum value from the Behaviors layer across your investigation, hunting, and detection workflows.
19/02/2026
Three ways to run KQL on Microsoft Sentinel data lake: Interactive, Async, or Jobs
With Microsoft Sentinel data lake, you can run KQL directly on data in the lake, unlocking flexibility for investigations and hunting.We'll explain how these options work in real SOC workflows and guide you in selecting the right KQL execution mode, so you can avoid unnecessary frustration and re-runs.Microsoft Sentinel data lake gives security teams flexibility at scale, when the right query mode is used at the right time.
19/02/2026
Announcing general availability for Microsoft Teams optimization in Amazon WorkSpaces
This release introduces the first-ever Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) optimization for Microsoft Teams on Amazon WorkSpaces for Windows endpoints, delivering a seamless, high-performance collaboration experience.With this release, AWS environments now offer VDI support for Teams, bringing long-requested capabilities to both Personal and Pool Windows WorkSpaces client configurations.Multimedia Offloading: Audio and video processing are now offloaded from the virtual desktop to users’ endpoint devices, resulting in smoother, more responsive calls and meetings.
19/02/2026
Data Quality (DQ) for Standalone Data Assets at Microsoft Purview
A standalone data asset is a dataset that is not linked to any data product.To start measuring and monitoring the data quality of a standalone data asset, first add the asset from the data map to a governance domain.You can also associate a standalone data asset—along with its data quality scores and rules—to a data product.
19/02/2026
The Rise of Agentic BSS in the IQ Era: from Systems of Record to Systems of Outcome
Authors: Rode Kirk and Rick Lievano Telecom Business Support Systems (BSS) are entering their most consequential transformation since digital billing. As networks become programmable, products become composable, and customers expect real‑time, personalized experiences, the traditional BSS stack—designed fo...
19/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 19, 2026
Learn about 240 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
19/02/2026
Monetize your AI apps and agents on Marketplace to realize growth
Ready to stop guessing how to monetize your offer? Skip right to App Advisor Software development companies are building faster than ever. But when it comes to sales, the key to monetization happens early. Monetization, packaging, and operational execution helps determine whether your AI solution becomes a growth engi...
19/02/2026
Azure Database Migration Service Expands to New Azure Regions
As organizations continue to modernize their data estates and migrate to Azure, regional availability plays a critical role in meeting data residency, compliance, and performance requirements. We’re excited to announce the expanded regional availability of Azure Database Migration Service (DMS), making it easier for customers to migrate their databases to Azure closer to where their applications and users reside.Azure Database Migration Service is now generally available in the following Azure regions as part of our latest regional expansion: In these newly available regions, Azure Database Migration Service supports key migration scenarios, including migrations:
19/02/2026
Windows Hello for Business - Registered Methods and Last-used Method
Hi folks – Mike Hildebrand here! Today, I bring you a short post about gaining more awareness of Windows Hello for Business (WHFB) configuration information from across your fleet of Windows PCs. A while back, after being asked by numerous customers for a way to get more details about their WHFB deployment, I published a post about using Entra sign-in log data and a custom Log Analytics Workbook to obtain that information. NOTE: In my 12 days of Christmas blog-a-thon, I posted about creative uses of Intune Proactive Remediations.
19/02/2026
Building a Simple MCP Server in Python
Have you ever tried connecting a language model to your own data or tools? If so, you know it often means writing custom integrations, managing API schemas, and wrestling with authentication.
19/02/2026
Celebrating Community and Curiosity at Swetugg Stockholm 2026
Every February, Swetugg transforms Stockholm into a vibrant gathering place for developers, architects, cloud practitioners, and community builders from across the Nordics and beyond. The 2026 edition continued that tradition with even more energy, deeper technical conversations, and an unmistakable sense of belonging—one that mirrors the very...
19/02/2026
Agentic Code Fixing with GitHub Copilot SDK and Foundry Local
Introduction AI-powered coding assistants have transformed how developers write and review code. But most of these tools require sending your source code to cloud services, a non-starter for teams working with proprietary codebases, air-gapped environments, or strict compliance requirements. What if you could have an intelligent coding agent that finds bugs, fixes them, runs your tests, and produces PR-ready summaries, all without a single byte leaving your machine? The
19/02/2026
Building HIPAA-Compliant Medical Transcription with Local AI
Building HIPAA-Compliant Medical Transcription with Local AI Introduction Healthcare organizations generate vast amounts of spoken content, patient consultations, research interviews, clinical notes, medical conferences. Transcribing these recordings traditionally requires either manual typing (time-consuming and expensive) or cloud transcription services (creating immediate HIPAA compliance concerns). Every audio file sent to external APIs exposes Protected Health Informati...
19/02/2026
Migrating Workloads from AWS to Azure: A Structured Approach for Cloud Architects
The foundation of a successful migration is maintaining a like-for-like architecture during the transition.A principle often violated in practice: the workload team currently responsible for the workload in AWS and who will ultimately own it in Azure should perform the migration.Read the full series and share it with cloud architects, IT leaders, and DevOps teams in your network who are planning or executing migrations:
19/02/2026
Reactive Incident Response with Azure SRE Agent: From Alert to Resolution in Minutes
SRE Agent portal overview with incident list The Reactive Incident Challenge Your monitoring is solid. Alerts fire when they should. But then what? Alert lands in Teams/PagerDuty On-call engineer wakes up, logs in Starts investigating: "What's broken? Why? How do I fix it?" 20 minutes later, they're still gathering context The alert was fast. The human response? Not so much....
19/02/2026
Zyphra Releases ZUNA: A 380M-Parameter BCI Foundation Model for EEG Data, Advancing Noninvasive Thought-to-Text Development
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are finally having their ‘foundation model’ moment.Zyphra, a research lab focused on large-scale models, recently released ZUNA, a 380M-parameter foundation model specifically for EEG signals.ZUNA is a masked diffusion auto-encoder designed to perform channel infilling and super-resolution for any electrode layout.
19/02/2026
[Tutorial] Building a Visual Document Retrieval Pipeline with ColPali and Late Interaction Scoring
In this tutorial, we build an end-to-end visual document retrieval pipeline using ColPali.We focus on making the setup robust by resolving common dependency conflicts and ensuring the environment stays stable.We render PDF pages as images, embed them using ColPali’s multi-vector representations, and rely on late-interaction scoring to retrieve the most relevant pages for […]
19/02/2026
From "Maybe Next Quarter" to "Running Before Lunch" on Container Apps - Modernizing Legacy .NET App
In early 2025, we wanted to modernize Jon Galloway's MVC Music Store — a classic ASP.NET MVC 5 app running on .NET Framework 4.8 with Entity Framework 6. The goal was straightforward: address vulnerabilities, enable managed identity, and deploy to Azure Container Apps and Azure SQL. No more plaintext connection strings. No more passwords in config files.
18/02/2026
Tavus Launches Phoenix-4: A Gaussian-Diffusion Model Bringing Real-Time Emotional Intelligence And Sub-600ms Latency To Generative Video AI
The ‘uncanny valley’ is the final frontier for generative video. We have seen AI avatars that can talk, but they often lack the soul of human interaction. They suffer from stiff movements and a lack of emotional context. Tavus aims to fix this with the launch of Phoenix-4, a new generative AI model designed for […] The post
18/02/2026
Azure Recognized as an NVIDIA Cloud Exemplar, Setting the Bar for AI Performance in the Cloud
As AI models continue to scale in size and complexity, cloud infrastructure must deliver more than theoretical peak performance. What matters in practice is reliable, end-to-end, workload-level AI performance—where compute, networking, system software, and optimization work together to deliver predictable, repeatable results at scale. This directly translates to business value: efficient full-stack infrastructure accelerates time-to-market, maximizes ROI on GPU and cloud investments, and enab...
18/02/2026
Microsoft 365 Copilot Government Events Are Hitting the Road & Coming to a City Near YOU
Did Someone Say Prompt‑a‑thon?! M365 Copilot Government Events Are Hitting the Road Generative AI is no longer a “future” conversation—it’s happening now across government. And there’s no better way to move from curiosity to confidence than getting hands on with M365 Copilot alongside peers and experts who understand your mission. That’s why we’re excited to bring M365 Copilot Government in‑person experiences to cities...
18/02/2026
Hardware Lab Kit API Updates and New Unreferenced File Check in February Refresh
What’s Changing? The refreshed Windows Hardware Lab Kit (HLK) available starting February 2026 for Windows 11, version 25H2, Windows Server 2025, and Windows 11, version 24H2 will introduce a new check during HLK packaging. If the attached driver pa...
18/02/2026
Navigating the 2025 holiday season: Insights into Azure’s DDoS defense
The holiday season continues to be one of the most demanding periods for online businesses. Traffic surges, higher transaction volumes, and user expectations for seamless digital experiences all converge, making reliability a non-negotiable requirement. For attackers, this same period presents an opportunity: even brief instability can translate into lost revenue, operational disruption, and reputational impact. This year, the most notable shift wasn’t simply the size of attacks, but <...
18/02/2026
Unlocking Document Understanding with Mistral Document AI in Microsoft Foundry
Enterprises today face a familiar yet formidable challenge: mountains of documents -contracts, invoices, reports, forms - remain locked in unstructured formats. Traditional OCR (optical character recognition) captures text, but often struggles with context, layout complexity, or multilingual content. The result? Slow workflows, error-prone manual reviews, and missed insights.
18/02/2026
Google DeepMind Releases Lyria 3: An Advanced Music Generation AI Model that Turns Photos and Text into Custom Tracks with Included Lyrics and Vocals
Google DeepMind is pushing the boundaries of generative AI again. This time, the focus is not on text or images. It is on music. The Google team recently introduced Lyria 3, their most advanced music generation model to date. Lyria 3 represents a significant shift in how machines handle complex audio waveforms and creative intent. […] The post
18/02/2026
Access bug fixes — Versions 2511 through 2601
Version 2511 (Build 19426) Bug Name Issue Fixed Query Design view showed incorrect joins after selecting SQL text When using the Monaco SQL editor with a query containing multiple joins, selecting text in SQL view with Ctrl+A
18/02/2026
Unlocking Document Intelligence with Mistral Document AI in Microsoft Foundry
Enterprises today face a familiar yet formidable challenge: mountains of documents -contracts, invoices, reports, forms - remain locked in unstructured formats. Traditional OCR (optical character recognition) captures text, but often struggles with context, layout complexity, or multilingual content. The result? Slow workflows, error-prone manual reviews, and missed insights.
18/02/2026
Updates to HLK Waiver Management - Coming Soon
The HLK Team is making some updates to how waivers are tracked internally.filters will be published/downloaded in the same way, filters will get applied in the HLK the same way, and manual waivers will be applied to submissions in the same way.However, the IDs of all manual waivers will be updated because of the switch (IDs for waivers with automatic filters will remain the same).
18/02/2026
It's now easier to attain the Microsoft Azure VMware Solution specialization
To expand the specialization opportunity to more partners, Microsoft has removed the Azure VMware Solution (AVS) technical assessment requirement from the Microsoft AVS specialization. This change makes both attaining and renewing the specialization significantly easier for partners. VMware is a leading provid...
18/02/2026
Azure Migrate: Now Supporting Premium SSD V2, Ultra and ZRS Disks as Targets
We are excited to announce that we have added assessment and migration support for Premium SSD v2,
18/02/2026
Unlocking the power of Notebooks with Microsoft Sentinel data lake
Co-authors: Vandana Mahtani, Ashwin Patil Security operations are rapidly evolving, driven by AI and the need for scalable, cost-effective analytics. A key differentiator of the Sentinel data lake is its native integration with Jupyter Notebooks, which brings powerful data science and machine learning capabilities directly into security oper...
18/02/2026
Get started with Elasticsearch MCP server in Azure SRE Agent
Overview The Elasticsearch MCP server enables Azure SRE Agent to interact with your Elasticsearch clusters using natural language. Query your logs, analyze metrics, check cluster health, and troubleshoot issues conversationally. This integration uses Elastic's Agent Builder MCP endpoint, the recommended approach for Elastic 9.2.0+ and Elasticsearch Serverless projects. Key capabilities
18/02/2026
AI-Powered RAN and the Intelligent Edge: Microsoft’s Vision for the Future of Telecom
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly converging with telecommunications infrastructure, promising to transform how networks are built, optimized, and monetized.At Mobile World Congress, Microsoft is sharing a strategic vision for AI in the RAN (AI-RAN) and intelligent edge computing.The push for edge AI in telecom is about extending the power of the cloud out to the network’s edge, closer to where data is generated and consumed.
18/02/2026
Monday Masterclass Season 2 – Week 2: AI Powered Engagement in Viva Engage
AI has officially moved from an interesting add‑on to a core part of how modern organizations communicate and connect.In Week 2 of the Viva Engage Masterclass – AI‑Powered Engagement, we explored what that shift really means for employees, leaders, and communicators—and how Viva Engage is becoming the place where human connection and AI scale together.Week 2 focused on how to amplify your impact with it.
18/02/2026
AI in Action: Meet the 2026 Imagine Cup Semifinalists
Semifinalist teams across both the Launch and Scale paths will receive personalized mentorship, technical guidance, and direct exposure to Microsoft and industry experts.A panel of judges will select the top teams to advance to the Imagine Cup World Championship, where they’ll compete on a global stage.Clear for All is reimagining access to books for blind and visually impaired students by replacing costly Braille production with an inclusive, voice-command reading platform.
18/02/2026
Why Customers Win When SAP Joule and Microsoft Copilot Work Together
SAP and Microsoft have announced and delivered a unified AI experience that allows users to access SAP business processes and Microsoft 365 productivity capabilities without switching contexts or applications.Historically, enterprise work has been fragmented.SAP and Microsoft’s Joule–Copilot integration directly addresses this disconnect by enabling a bi‑directional flow of context and actions across both platforms.
18/02/2026
How Cloud + AI Solutions Empower Nonprofits to Do More with Less
Cloud technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are helping nonprofits overcome these challenges.Together, cloud and AI help nonprofits:Azure enables nonprofits to:
18/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 18, 2026
Learn about 88 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs.Acumens Customer Rebate Management: Acumens Customer Rebate from SBC Dynamics ERP is an app for automating customer rebate processes.Book a half-day workshop with a customer service expert and a solution architect from Softronic for a customization road map.
18/02/2026
A Practical Guide to Azure DDoS Protection Cost Optimization
To protect these resources, Azure offers enhanced DDoS protection capabilities (Network Protection and IP Protection) that customers can apply based on workload exposure and business requirements.Now that you know the main scenarios, the decision tree below can help you determine which SKU best fits your environment based on feature requirements and scale:Use the PowerShell script below to list existing DDoS Protection Plans and associate virtual networks with a consolidated plan.
18/02/2026
Agentify Your App with GitHub Copilot’s Agentic Coding SDK
For years, GitHub Copilot has served as a powerful pair programming tool for programmers, suggesting the next line of code.
18/02/2026
Identifying Orphaned Records in Change Tracking Side Tables (Read‑Only Health Check)
When Change Tracking (CT) is enabled, SQL Server (and Azure SQL Database) stores lightweight change metadata so applications can query “what changed since version X?”.This post walks through a read-only T‑SQL script that detects and counts orphaned records across all CT side tables in a database.The script reads the CT retention period from sys.change_tracking_databases:
18/02/2026
SQL MI Private Endpoint in One Picture
Connections only in one direction, from PE to SQL MI and traffic in port 1433When using PE, there’s no need to set up VNET peering or public endpointPE can be created in different Azure tenant
18/02/2026
Google Introduces Jetpack Compose Glimmer: A New Spatial UI Framework Designed Specifically for the Next Generation of AI Glasses
Google is moving beyond the rectangular screen.The result is Jetpack Compose Glimmer, a design system built specifically for display AI glasses.For devs and data scientists, this is a shift from designing for pixels to designing with light.
18/02/2026
Upcoming webinar: Maximize the Cost Efficiency of AI Agents on Azure
That’s exactly what the Maximize the Cost Efficiency of AI Agents on Azure webinar is designed to address.The webinar will provide practical guidance on building and scaling AI agents on Azure with financial discipline in mind.Lee Stott is a Principal Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, working in the Core AI Developer Relations Team.
18/02/2026
Cohere Releases Tiny Aya: A 3B-Parameter Small Language Model that Supports 70 Languages and Runs Locally Even on a Phone
Cohere AI Labs has released Tiny Aya, a family of small language models (SLMs) that redefines multilingual performance.While many models scale by increasing parameters, Tiny Aya uses a 3.35B-parameter architecture to deliver state-of-the-art translation and generation across 70 languages.The release includes 5 models: Tiny Aya Base (pretrained), Tiny Aya Global (balanced instruction-tuned), and […]
18/02/2026
Logic Apps Agentic Workflows with SAP - Part 2: AI Agents
Part 2 focuses on the AI-shaped portion of the destination workflows: how the Logic Apps Agent is configured, how it pulls business rules from SharePoint, and how its outputs are converted into concrete workflow artifacts.In Part 1, the goal was to make the integration deterministic: stable payload shapes, stable response shapes, and predictable error propagation across SAP and Logic Apps. Concretely, Part 1 established:In this solution, the Data Validation Agent runs inside the destination workflow after the inbound SAP payload has been normalized into a single CSV string.
18/02/2026
Logic Apps Agentic Workflows with SAP - Part 1: Infrastructure
When you integrate Azure Logic Apps with SAP, the “hello world” part is usually easy. The part that bites you later is data quality. In SAP-heavy flows, validation isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s what makes the downstream results meaningful. If invalid data slips through, it can get expensive fast: you may create incorrect business documents, trigger follow-up processes, and end up in a cleanup path that’s harder (and more manual) than building validation upfront. And in “all-or-...
18/02/2026
Extending Windows 365 Reserve with Windows 365 Boot
Windows 365 Reserve provides secure, temporary access to a pre-configured Cloud PC when a physical device is unavailable or short-term access is needed, whether due to device loss, delay in issuing devices, or security or technical issues.The user powers on the device, signs in with the familiar Windows 11 login experience, and is instantly connected to their Reserve Cloud PC with all their apps, files, and settings, just like using their original device.Learn more about Windows 365 Reserve and Windows 365 Boot:
18/02/2026
My MVP Story: Nathalie Leenders’ Journey From Salon Chair to Solution Builder
Nathalie Leenders speaking to a room of 900 people at the Power Platform Community ConferenceMVP Nathalie Leenders speaking at the Power Platform Community ConferenceWhether you’re considering a career change, exploring the Power Platform, or quietly wondering if you could ever become an MVP, Nathalie’s advice is the same: don’t be afraid to go for it.
18/02/2026
Partner Case Study | TTEC Digital
TTEC Digital, 2025 Microsoft Dynamics 365 Service Partner of the Year, is helping a leading global airline upgrade its customer support and create standout experiences when travelers need it most: around the clock.As an award-winning Microsoft Solutions Partner, global customer experience (CX) innovator TTEC Digital leverages AI in solution architecture and implementation methodology to reduce complexity, drive operational excellence, and streamline customer experiences.The company’s Microsoft practice focuses on AI Business Solutions and Cloud & AI Platforms, including Microsoft Azure, Copilot, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform.
18/02/2026
Upcoming February 2026 Microsoft 365 Champion Community Call
Join our next community call on February 24, 2026, to learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot features in PowerPoint.The join link will be sent to you in email with your webinar registration confirmation.While our calls are open to everyone, you must be a member of the Microsoft 365 Champion Program in order to access the presentation materials - the access link is in the initial welcome email and the monthly newsletter emails sent the week before the community calls.
17/02/2026
HLK February Refresh Release for Windows 11 Version 25H2 and Windows Server 2025
Microsoft is pleased to announce that a refreshed HLK for Windows 11, version 25H2 and Windows Server 2025 is available starting February 17, 2026.In addition, the refreshed kit includes a new check for unreferenced files. If the attached driver package includes one or more files that were not referenced by an .inf, a new warning will display at the end of packaging. The PackageWriter class in the Microsoft.Windows.Kits.Hardware.ObjectModel.Submission namespace has been updated to provide access to this new information from the HLK API. Please see Attention: HDC is changing the policy on signing unreferenced files in driver packages |The 25H2 RTM HLK is being refreshed, this HLK helps support certifying drivers for Windows 11, version 25H2 and Windows Server 2025. For the following FAQ’s, the 25H2 RTM release will be referenced to as “RTM HLK” and the upcoming release in February 2026 will be referenced as “refresh HLK.
17/02/2026
Attention: HDC is changing the policy on signing unreferenced files in driver packages
Audit your packages for unreferenced files (files not listed in INF sections such as SourceDisksFiles, CatalogFile, or other driver package manifest references.Ensure the driver package only contains the files needed for the functioning of the driver package Note: The February 2026 refresh of the HLK will showcase a warning at package creation time if unreferenced files are found in the driver.
17/02/2026
How Azure SRE Agent Can Investigate Resources in a Private Network
When you configure Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS) with publicNetworkAccessForQuery: Disabled, all public queries to your Log Analytics Workspace are blocked.To enable Azure SRE Agent to query these protected workspaces, deploy Azure Functions inside your VNet as a secure query proxy.Many organizations secure their Log Analytics Workspaces using Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS) with Private Endpoints.
17/02/2026
Join the IT Management and Security in the AI Era Digital Event
We’re excited to invite you to IT Management and Security in the AI Era, on Thursday, February 26th, from 8:00AM to 10:30 AM Pacific.This digital event is designed to help IT and security professionals answer questions with clarity and confidence, grounded in the latest Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities and controls. IT Management and Security in the AI Era brings together insights, demos, and deep dives from Microsoft experts, giving you a practical understanding of how to prepare your environments for Copilot and agents while managing risks responsibly.
17/02/2026
Anthropic Releases Claude 4.6 Sonnet with 1 Million Token Context to Solve Complex Coding and Search for Developers
Today, the company announced Claude 4.6 Sonnet, a model designed to transform how devs and data scientists handle complex logic.Alongside this release comes Improved Web Search with Dynamic Filtering, a feature that uses internal code execution to verify facts in real-time.The post Anthropic Releases Claude 4.6 Sonnet with 1 Million Token Context to Solve Complex Coding and Search for Developers appeared first on MarkTechPost.
17/02/2026
AI with Zero Trust Security
And as AI reshapes both work and the risk landscape, this series will show how Microsoft helps you to implement Zero Trust seamlessly.Today, I’ll start with an overview of the Zero Trust architecture.We’ll look at the vulnerabilities that can arise and the core defenses, both new and existing, that you can deploy to mitigate them.
17/02/2026
OneDrive Office Hours | February 2026
OneDrive Consumer Office Hours are back!February 2026This month's special topic: "File-level Archive" with the Trent Green!
17/02/2026
Agentic Logic Apps Integration with SAP - Part 2: AI Agents
Part 2 focuses on the AI-shaped portion of the destination workflows: how the Logic Apps Agent is configured, how it pulls business rules from SharePoint, and how its outputs are converted into concrete workflow artifacts.Follow a hands-on walkthrough for building an agent workflow and connecting it to an Azure OpenAI deployment (Logic Apps Labs is a good step-by-step reference).The design here is intentionally straightforward: the workflow converts each agent parameter into a first‑class workflow output (via Compose actions and one variable assignment), then binds those values directly into the Office 365 email body.
17/02/2026
Agentic Logic Apps Integration with SAP - Part 1: Infrastructure
In this section I show three practical ways to surface workflow failures back to SAP using the Logic Apps action “Send exception to SAP server”, and the corresponding ABAP patterns used to handle them.If you want more control than the default, you can configure the action to raise a named exception declared in your ABAP function module interface.After the workflow identifies invalid rows (via the Data Validation Agent) and emails a verification summary, it can optionally call a second SAP RFC to save the failed rows as IDocs for later processing.
17/02/2026
Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Microsoft Foundry-Frontier Performance for Scale
Last week, we took a major step forward with the availability of Claude Opus 4.6 in Microsoft Foundry, bringing frontier AI capable of deep reasoning, agentic workflows, and complex decision-making to enterprise developers and builders.Claude Sonnet 4.6 is available today in Microsoft Foundry, and it is designed for teams who want frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work at scale.With stronger financial modeling intelligence and improved spreadsheet capabilities, Sonnet 4.6 is a strong fit for analysis, compliance review, and data summarization workflows where precision and iteration speed matter.
17/02/2026
How to Build an Advanced, Interactive Exploratory Data Analysis Workflow Using PyGWalker and Feature-Engineered Data
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to move beyond static, code-heavy charts and build a genuinely interactive exploratory data analysis workflow directly using PyGWalker.We start by preparing the Titanic dataset for large-scale interactive querying.These analysis-ready engineered features reveal the underlying structure of the data while enabling both detailed row-level exploration and high-level aggregated […]
17/02/2026
Cloudflare Releases Agents SDK v0.5.0 with Rewritten @cloudflare/ai-chat and New Rust-Powered Infire Engine for Optimized Edge Inference Performance
Cloudflare has released the Agents SDK v0.5.0 to address the limitations of stateless serverless functions in AI development.In standard serverless architectures, every LLM call requires rebuilding the session context from scratch, which increases latency and token consumption.The Agents SDK’s latest version (Agents SDK v0.5.0) provides a vertically integrated execution layer where compute, state, […]
17/02/2026
Genesis Mission: How Microsoft & the U.S. Department of Energy Accelerate Scientific
The Genesis Mission brings together the DOE’s 17 National Laboratories, advanced experimental facilities, large‑scale scientific datasets, and next‑generation computing resources into a more integrated scientific discovery platform.Microsoft is working with Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to apply AI in a targeted, responsible way to streamline portions of the nuclear licensing and permitting workflow.Azure Government Secret and Azure Government Top Secret are engineered to meet U.S. government requirements for classified data handling and enable government agencies and national laboratories to adopt cloud and AI technologies for sensitive scientific, energy, and national security missions without compromising security, compliance, or mission assurance.
17/02/2026
Why Protective DNS from Microsoft Marketplace partner Infoblox is foundational for Modern Zero Trust
In this guest blog post, Anant Vadlamani, Vice President of Product Management at Infoblox, discusses the importance of Zero Trust for preemptive security and how enterprises can proactively block threats and enforce secure connectivity across all devices and cloud workloads by adopting Protective DNS and Zero Trust DNS, available in the Microsoft Marketplace.What once seemed like an ambitious framework is becoming the baseline expectation for enterprises. According to Gartner, 63 percent of organizations worldwide have implemented Zero Trust in full or in part. The rationale is simple: The traditional perimeter is gone, cyberattacks are more sophisticated and AI-driven, and breaches are common, despite organizations putting in several “detect and respond” solutions.While organizations are busy securing identities, devices, applications, and networks, many continue to implicitly trust Domain Name System (DNS) — the very foundation of internet connectivity.
17/02/2026
Public Preview: Automatic zone balance for Virtual Machine Scale Sets
We're excited to announce the public preview of automatic zone balance for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets.This new capability helps you maintain zone-resilient workloads with zero manual intervention.Automatic zone balance continuously monitors your scale set and redistributes VMs across availability zones, reducing the risk that a single zone failure disproportionately impacts your applications.
17/02/2026
Introducing library management in Microsoft Defender
Security analysts working with live response in Microsoft Defender often rely on scripts and tools to triage, investigate, and remediate threats.The new library management experience in Defender brings powerful enhancements to how security teams manage scripts and files used in live response.Centralized script and file management – Security teams can now upload, manage, and clean up their entire collection of Live Response scripts and files outside of an active investigation.
17/02/2026
RDP Shortpath (UDP) over Private Link is now generally available
UDP support over Private Link for Azure Virtual Desktop is now generally available.This release enables a direct, high‑performance, UDP‑based RDP connection between AVD session hosts and clients over Azure Private Link using RDP Shortpath for managed networks.Together, these options support customers with strict private network boundaries by allowing RDP traffic over both TCP and UDP transports, using defined private IPs when Private Link is in use.‑based RDP connectivity over Private Link.
17/02/2026
Azure API Management - Unified AI Gateway Design Pattern
As an AI Gateway, Azure API Management enables organizations to implement centralized AI mediation, governance, and developer access control across AI services.This blog post introduces the Unified AI Gateway design pattern, a customer developed architecture pattern designed by Uniper, that builds on API Management’s policy extensibility to create a flexible and maintainable solution for managing AI services across providers, models, and environments. Uniper runs this pattern in production today to optimize AI governance and operational efficiency, enhance the developer experience, and manage AI costs.Note: The Unified AI Gateway described in this post is a customer-implemented design pattern built using Azure API Management policy extensibility.
17/02/2026
Microsoft and Ericsson Advance Enterprise Mobility with Windows 11 and Surface 5G Laptops
The Ericsson Enterprise 5G Connect solution, which has been validated on Microsoft Surface 5G devices, is built on top of enterprise managed cellular connectivity capabilities native to Windows 11.This solution is now being piloted by Ericsson and its preview customers to deliver fast, reliable connectivity to enable AI-driven productivity for today’s mobile workforce—with the manageability enterprises need to operate at scale.Enterprise managed cellular connectivity is a native Windows capability that, when integrated with Microsoft Intune, provides organizations with centralized control and customization of cellular connectivity on Windows 11 PCs.
17/02/2026
Distribute PostgreSQL 18 with Citus 14
The Citus 14.0 release is out and includes PostgreSQL 18 support!The Citus database is an open-source extension of Postgres that brings the power of Postgres to any scale, from a single node to a distributed database cluster.Citus 14.0 introduces support for PostgreSQL 18.
17/02/2026
Your Guide to Microsoft at RSAC™ 2026
AI is accelerating both opportunity and exposure at a pace security leaders haven’t seen before.At RSAC 2026, we’ll show how an AI‑first, end‑to‑end security platform enables you to defend every layer of the AI stack and secure with agentic AI. Read our full guide on making the most of RSAC 2026 Conference. What to experience at RSAC 2026 with Microsoft
17/02/2026
Learn about Iron Mountain's transactable partner solution in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like Iron Mountain deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace.Learn about Iron Mountain's offer below:Iron Mountain InSight DXP: InSight DXP unifies digital and physical information and integrates with core business systems to deliver the single pane of glass view you need for strategic oversight.
17/02/2026
Writing a great session abstract for FabCon & SQLCon
Before you hit submit, run your abstract by a friend. Does it make sense to the technical and/or non-technical? Do the grammar & spelling check out?Does it fit within the character count? Lastly, a few "don'ts"Don't include your name in the abstract if you know the review is done blind.If you can't convey a concept on your own in 400 characters, how can we trust that you can speak on the concept for a full hour?
17/02/2026
LLM Embeddings vs TF-IDF vs Bag-of-Words: Which Works Better in Scikit-learn?
Machine learning models built with frameworks like scikit-learn can accommodate unstructured data like text, as long as this raw text is converted into a numerical representation that is understandable by algorithms, models, and machines in a broader sense.
17/02/2026
Enhancing everyday coordination - Cloudwell - SharePoint Partner Showcase
We are excited to share a new episode on our partner showcase series focused on SharePoint in Microsoft 365.In this brief discussion and demonstration, Chris Alechko, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Cloudwell, and Pat McGown, Co-Founder at Cloudwell and Microsoft MVP, join Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft to showcase how Cloudwell builds secure, native experiences on top of SharePoint and Microsoft 365 using SharePoint Framework (SPFx).By building natively with SPFx, Cloudwell delivers solutions that are secure by design, leverage Microsoft 365 identity and permissions, and feel like a natural extension of SharePoint rather than third-party add-ons.
17/02/2026
Building a Smart Building HVAC Digital Twin with AI Copilot Using Foundry Local
This article demonstrates building a sample smart building digital twin with an AI-powered operations copilot, implemented using DigitalTwin, React, Three.js, and Microsoft Foundry Local.You'll learn how to architect physics-based simulators that model thermal dynamics, implement 3D visualizations of building systems, integrate natural language AI control, and design fault injection systems for testing and training.The complete implementation with simulation engine, 3D visualization, AI copilot, and fault injection system is available at github.com/leestott/DigitalTwin.
17/02/2026
Agoda Open Sources APIAgent to Convert Any REST pr GraphQL API into an MCP Server with Zero Code
Today, travel giant Agoda is tackling this problem head-on.They have officially launched APIAgent, an open-source tool designed to turn any REST or GraphQL API into a Model Context Protocol (MCP) […]The post Agoda Open Sources APIAgent to Convert Any REST pr GraphQL API into an MCP Server with Zero Code appeared first on MarkTechPost.
17/02/2026
How to Build Human-in-the-Loop Plan-and-Execute AI Agents with Explicit User Approval Using LangGraph and Streamlit
In this tutorial, we build a human-in-the-loop travel booking agent that treats the user as a teammate rather than a passive observer.We design the system so the agent first reasons openly by drafting a structured travel plan, then deliberately pauses before taking any action.We expose this proposed plan in a live interface where […]
16/02/2026
Alibaba Qwen Team Releases Qwen3.5-397B MoE Model with 17B Active Parameters and 1M Token Context for AI agents
Alibaba Cloud just updated the open-source landscape.Today, the Qwen team released Qwen3.5, the newest generation of their large language model (LLM) family.The most powerful version is Qwen3.5-397B-A17B.
16/02/2026
Partner Blog | Introducing Partner Marketing Center Pro
Partner Marketing Center Pro is an AI-driven hub that brings key marketing tools into one convenient, intuitive platform. Now, you can run end-to-end marketing campaigns powered by AI, with key features including asset customization, intelligent translation, comprehensive campaign reporting, and an AI assistant that supports you through each step. Partner Marketing Center Pro is developed with modern, AI-powered marketing capabilities designed for you to generate targeted demand, personalize outreach at scale, and move faster from launch to measurable results.Over the coming months, we will continue adding new features that strengthen targeting, streamline execution, and improve performance insights across your campaigns.
16/02/2026
Hello, world.
Agent 365 is the control plane for AI agents.To help organizations take control of agent sprawl, we introduced Microsoft Agent 365 at Microsoft Ignite on November 18, 2025.Watch Nirav Shah and Shilpi_Sinha, Partner Director of Agent 365 deliver a 40-minute technical deep dive followed by Q&A from participants in the Copilot Acceleration Team's CAT AI webinar, "Everything you need to know about Microsoft Agent 365."
16/02/2026
Top 7 Small Language Models You Can Run on a Laptop
Powerful AI now runs on consumer hardware.
16/02/2026
Agents League: Join the Reasoning Agents Track
In a previous blog post, we introduced Agents League, a two‑week AI agent challenge running February 16–27, and gave an overview of the three available tracks.Why Build Reasoning Agents on Microsoft Foundry?Live Coding Battle: Reasoning Agents
16/02/2026
Agentic Code Fixing with GitHub Copilot SDK and Foundry Local
By combining the GitHub Copilot SDK for agent orchestration with Foundry Local for on-device inference, this project creates a fully autonomous coding workflow that operates entirely on your hardware.The agent scans your repository, identifies bugs and code smells, applies fixes, verifies them through your test suite, and generates a comprehensive summary of all changes, completely offline and secure.By running the AI model on-device through Foundry Local and using the GitHub Copilot SDK for orchestration, you get the intelligence of agentic coding workflows with complete data sovereignty.
16/02/2026
Google DeepMind Proposes New Framework for Intelligent AI Delegation to Secure the Emerging Agentic Web for Future Economies
However, most current multi-agent systems rely on brittle, hard-coded heuristics that fail when the environment changes.Google DeepMind researchers have proposed a new solution.The research team argued that for the ‘agentic web’ to scale, agents must move beyond simple […]
16/02/2026
A Coding Implementation to Design a Stateful Tutor Agent with Long-Term Memory, Semantic Recall, and Adaptive Practice Generation
In this tutorial, we build a fully stateful personal tutor agent that moves beyond short-lived chat interactions and learns continuously over time.We design the system to persist user preferences, track weak learning areas, and selectively recall only relevant past context when responding.By combining durable storage, semantic retrieval, and adaptive prompting, we demonstrate how […]
16/02/2026
Moonshot AI Launches Kimi Claw: Native OpenClaw on Kimi.com with 5,000 Community Skills and 40GB Cloud Storage Now
Moonshot AI has officially brought the power of OpenClaw framework directly to the browser.The newly rebranded Kimi Claw is now native to kimi.com, providing developers and data scientists with a persistent, 24/7 AI agent environment.This update moves the project from a local setup to a cloud-native powerhouse.
15/02/2026
Meet ‘Kani-TTS-2’: A 400M Param Open Source Text-to-Speech Model that Runs in 3GB VRAM with Voice Cloning Support
A new open-source contender, Kani-TTS-2, has been released by the team at nineninesix.ai.This model marks a departure from heavy, compute-expensive TTS systems.Instead, it treats audio as a language, delivering high-fidelity speech synthesis with a remarkably small footprint.
15/02/2026
Getting Started with OpenClaw and Connecting It with WhatsApp
OpenClaw is a self-hosted personal AI assistant that runs on your own devices and communicates through the apps you already use—such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, and more.It can answer questions, automate tasks, interact with your files and services, and even speak or listen on supported devices, all while keeping you in control of […]The post Getting Started with OpenClaw and Connecting It with WhatsApp appeared first on MarkTechPost.
15/02/2026
Google AI Introduces the WebMCP to Enable Direct and Structured Website Interactions for New AI Agents
Google is officially turning Chrome into a playground for AI agents.This method is slow, breaks easily, and consumes massive amounts of compute.Google has introduced a better way: the Web […]
15/02/2026
How to Build a Self-Organizing Agent Memory System for Long-Term AI Reasoning
In this tutorial, we build a self-organizing memory system for an agent that goes beyond storing raw conversation history and instead structures interactions into persistent, meaningful knowledge units.We design the system so that reasoning and memory management are clearly separated, allowing a dedicated component to extract, compress, and organize information.The post How to Build a Self-Organizing Agent Memory System for Long-Term AI Reasoning appeared first on MarkTechPost.
14/02/2026
Security Review for Microsoft Edge version 145
We have reviewed the new settings in Microsoft Edge version 145 and determined that there are no additional security settings that require enforcement.The Microsoft Edge version 139 security baseline continues to be our recommended configuration which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit.Microsoft Edge version 145 introduced 11 new Computer and User settings; we have included a spreadsheet listing the new settings to make it easier for you to find.
14/02/2026
Navigating the 2026 holiday season: Insights into Azure’s DDoS defense
We observed a rise in burst style DDoS events—fast-ramping, high-intensity surges distributed across multiple resources, designed to overwhelm packet processing and connection-handling layers before traditional bandwidth metrics show signs of strain.Attack duration is an attacker advantage when defenses rely on humans to notice, diagnose, and react. Design for minute-long spikes: assume attacks will be short, sharp, and high PPS such that your protections should engage automatically. Watch the right signals: alert on PPS spikes and service health (disconnect rates, latency/jitter), not bandwidth alone. To achieve comprehensive protection, implement layered security: deploy Azure DDoS Protection for network-layer (Layers 3 and 4) volumetric mitigation with always-on monitoring, adaptive tuning, telemetry, and alerting; combine it with Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) to defend the application layer (Layer 7) against sophisticated techniques like HTTP floods; and integrate Azure Firewall for additional network perimeter controls.
14/02/2026
Title Plan Update - February 13, 2026
📁February 13, 2026 - Title Plan Now AvailableAccess the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at http://aka.ms/Courseware_Title_Plan to ensure you're always working from the most current version.📌 Reminder: To help you stay informed more quickly and consistently, we’ve moved to a weekly publishing cadence for the title plan.
13/02/2026
Exa AI Introduces Exa Instant: A Sub-200ms Neural Search Engine Designed to Eliminate Bottlenecks for Real-Time Agentic Workflows
In the world of Large Language Models (LLMs), speed is the only feature that matters once accuracy is solved.For an AI agent performing 10 sequential searches to solve a complex task, a 1-second delay per search creates a 10-second lag.The post Exa AI Introduces Exa Instant: A Sub-200ms Neural Search Engine Designed to Eliminate Bottlenecks for Real-Time Agentic Workflows appeared first on MarkTechPost.
13/02/2026
[In-Depth Guide] The Complete CTGAN + SDV Pipeline for High-Fidelity Synthetic Data
In this tutorial, we build a complete, production-grade synthetic data pipeline using CTGAN and the SDV ecosystem.We start from raw mixed-type tabular data and progressively move toward constrained generation, conditional sampling, statistical validation, and downstream utility testing.Rather than stopping at sample generation, we focus on understanding how well synthetic data preserves structure, distributions, […]
13/02/2026
A BizTalk Migration Tool: From Orchestrations to Logic Apps Workflows
The BizTalk Migration Starter is available here: haroldcampos/BizTalkMigrationStarter and consists of four main projects and a test project, each targeting a specific aspect of BizTalk migration:The BTMtoLMLMigrator is a tool that converts BizTalk Maps (.btm files) to the Logic Apps Mapping Language (.lml files).Upload your BizTalk artifacts in the Data directory, and run your tests using the Test explorer.
13/02/2026
DCasv6 and ECasv6 confidential VMs in Azure Government Cloud
Today, we are announcing the launch of the DCasv6 and ECasv6 series of confidential virtual machines (CVMs) in Azure Government.Confidential virtual machines address one of the barriers to multi-tenant cloud adoption: When deployed on Azure Government, Confidential VMs combine physical isolation, sovereign operations, and hardware-enforced cryptographic isolation into a single execution environment.The DCasv6 and ECasv6-series virtual machines built on 4th Generation AMD EPYC™ processors are the first in Azure Government to implement AMD SEV-SNP.
13/02/2026
Partner Blog | Expanded partner benefits are now available: What’s new in February 2026
Expanded partner benefits are now available across the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program.You’ll find a range of meaningful additions designed to empower you to move faster with AI, support security needs, and improve go-to-market execution.Azure credit updates: Azure benefits are being updated across multiple offers, including new additions and increases in value for certain cloud benefits.
13/02/2026
Kyutai Releases Hibiki-Zero: A3B Parameter Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation Model Using GRPO Reinforcement Learning Without Any Word-Level Aligned Data
Kyutai has released Hibiki-Zero, a new model for simultaneous speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) and speech-to-text translation (S2TT).The system translates source speech into a target language in real-time.Unlike previous models, Hibiki-Zero does not require word-level aligned data for training.
13/02/2026
What's new in Viva Insights
As we move further into 2026, we’re excited to announce a variety of new powerful tools and reporting capabilities for Viva Insights that make it easier to understand how your organization's adoption and use of Microsoft 365 Copilot compares to other uses of it both within and outside your company.We’re thrilled to announce the initial rollout of the Agent Dashboard, a powerful new functionality for the Viva Insights web app that provides leaders and analysts with actionable insights into agent adoption.This powerful new Power BI template allows users to learn more about the impact of agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio, and how their deployed across channels in the organization.
13/02/2026
Multi-Geo In-Region Routing General Availability
By default, all inbound anonymous and hybrid email to a Microsoft 365 tenant with Multi-Geo enters Exchange Online in the tenant’s region first and then is relayed within Microsoft’s secure internal network to the email recipient.With In-Region Routing, customers can control the geographic location where inbound email enters Exchange Online for:Multi-Geo In-Region Routing helps ensure that anonymous inbound email and hybrid inbound email enters Exchange Online in the same geography as the recipient user – provided the tenant is properly configured.
13/02/2026
Introducing Security Dashboard for AI (Now in Public Preview)
To address these needs, we are excited to announce the Security Dashboard for AI, previously announced at Microsoft Ignite, is available in public preview. This unified dashboard aggregates posture and real-time risk signals from Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview - enabling users to see left-to-right across purpose-built security tools from within a single pane of glass. The dashboard equips CISOs and AI risk leaders with a governance tool to discover agents and AI apps, track AI posture and drift, and correlate risk signals to investigate and act across their entire AI ecosystem.The Security Dashboard for AI provides leaders with unified AI risk visibility by aggregating security, identity, and data risk across Defender, Entra, Purview into a single interactive dashboard experience.The dashboard also features an AI inventory with comprehensive views to support AI assets discovery, risk assessments, and remediation actions for broad coverage of AI agents, models, MCP servers, and applications. The dashboard provides coverage for all Microsoft AI solutions supported by Entra, Defender and Purview—including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Copilot Studio agents, and Microsoft Foundry applications and agents—as well as third-party AI models, applications, and agents, such as Google Gemini, OpenAI ChatGPT, and MCP servers.
13/02/2026
🚀 AI Toolkit for VS Code — February 2026 Update
Version 0.30.0 is packed with new capabilities that make agent development more discoverable, debuggable, and production-ready—from a brand-new Tool Catalog, to an end-to-end Agent Inspector, to treating evaluations as first-class tests.The new Tool Catalog is a centralized hub for discovering, configuring, and integrating tools into your AI agents.The new Agent Inspector turns agent debugging into a first-class experience inside VS Code.
13/02/2026
Google DeepMind Introduces Aletheia: The AI Agent Moving from Math Competitions to Fully Autonomous Professional Research Discoveries
Google DeepMind team has introduced Aletheia, a specialized AI agent designed to bridge the gap between competition-level math and professional research.While models achieved gold-medal standards at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), research requires navigating vast literature and constructing long-horizon proofs.Aletheia solves this by iteratively generating, verifying, and revising solutions in natural language.
13/02/2026
SSMA Copilot for SAP ASE (Sybase)
However, as modernization accelerates, more customers are actively seeking reliable and automated paths to migrate Sybase workloads to Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL Targets.While Sybase’s T-SQL dialect shares several similarities with Microsoft SQL Server, its procedural code contains deep complexities—extended syntax, non-standard constructs, legacy system tables, and database‑scoped behaviors that often break traditional rule-based converters.To address these challenges, the SQL Migration team is expanding Copilot-based code conversion capabilities to SSMA SAP ASE, following the same intuitive user flow as the Oracle-to-SQL Copilot released earlier.
13/02/2026
How to Align Large Language Models with Human Preferences Using Direct Preference Optimization, QLoRA, and Ultra-Feedback
In this tutorial, we implement an end-to-end Direct Preference Optimization workflow to align a large language model with human preferences without using a reward model.We combine TRL’s DPOTrainer with QLoRA and PEFT to make preference-based alignment feasible on a single Colab GPU.We train directly on the UltraFeedback binarized dataset, where each prompt has […]
13/02/2026
Announcing the 2026 Microsoft 365 Community Conference Keynotes
The Microsoft 365 Community Conference returns to Orlando this April, bringing together thousands of builders, innovators, creators, communicators, admins, architects, MVPs, and product makers for three unforgettable days of learning and community.Building for the future: Microsoft 365, Agents and AI, what's new and what's nextIn this keynote, Charles Lamanna will share how Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Power Apps, and Agent 365 come together to help makers build powerful agents and help IT teams deploy and govern them at scale.
13/02/2026
Modernizing for the AI Era: Accelerating Application Transformation with Agentic Tools
Organizations are entering a new phase of digital transformation where AI is not simply an enhancement—it is a fundamental change in how applications are designed, delivered, and operated.Yet many companies still rely on aging, monolithic, or poorly documented applications that were never built to work in an AI‑driven, cloud‑optimized world.McKinsey estimates that organizations lose up to $85 billion annually due to delayed modernization and accumulated technical debt.⁽¹⁾ Gartner reports that 40% of developer time is consumed maintaining legacy systems instead of building new capabilities.⁽²⁾ IDC notes that up to 66% of IT budgets intended for innovation get diverted to keeping legacy systems alive.⁽³⁾ In the AI era, this drag on innovation has become untenable.
12/02/2026
Azure Landing Zone and compliance for Banks (Indian Banks)
1. Azure Landing Zone for BanksAzure Landing Zone (ALZ) is a predefined, policy-driven cloud foundation that enables banks to securely host regulated workloads while meeting governance, security, audit, and compliance mandates.Centralized identity and access management
12/02/2026
OpenAI Releases a Research Preview of GPT‑5.3-Codex-Spark: A 15x Faster AI Coding Model Delivering Over 1000 Tokens Per Second on Cerebras Hardware
OpenAI just launched a new research preview called GPT-5.3 Codex-Spark.While the standard GPT-5.3 Codex focuses on deep reasoning, Spark is designed for near-instant response times.It is the result of a deep hardware-software integration between OpenAI and Cerebras.
12/02/2026
Cumulative Update #2 for SQL Server 2025 RTM
The 2nd cumulative update release for SQL Server 2025 RTM is now available for download at the Microsoft Downloads site.Starting with SQL Server 2017, we adopted a new modern servicing model.Update Center for Microsoft SQL Server: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/releases/download-and-install-latest-updates
12/02/2026
Azure WAF Compliance with MCP-Driven SRE Agent
Enter the Azure SRE Agent: an AI-powered compliance engine that discovers all resources, assesses them against all 5 WAF pillars AND your organization's specific standards in minutes, then generates exact remediation commands with quantified impact.Azure SRE Agent transforms Azure governance by combining autonomous resource discovery, multi-pillar WAF assessment, and organization-specific compliance enforcement.Open an issue on GitHub or reach out to the Azure SRE team.
12/02/2026
Partner Blog | Simplify and scale operations with the latest technical and API enhancements
That’s why Microsoft is rolling out a set of security, technical, and commerce updates designed to strengthen the partner ecosystem, modernize integrations, and reduce the risk of service disruption.Recent improvements strengthening partner security and reliabilityOver the past few months, we’ve made progress on several technical and API enhancements to support consistent workflows and give partners clear, actionable paths to meeting requirements.
12/02/2026
Is This AGI? Google’s Gemini 3 Deep Think Shatters Humanity’s Last Exam And Hits 84.6% On ARC-AGI-2 Performance Today
Google announced a major update to Gemini 3 Deep Think today.This update is specifically built to accelerate modern science, research, and engineering.It represents a pivot toward a ‘reasoning mode’ that uses internal verification to solve problems that previously required human expert intervention.
12/02/2026
Public Preview Announcement: Empower Real-Time Security with Microsoft Sentinel’s CCF Push Feature
Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of our latest innovation, the Sentinel Codeless Connector Framework (CCF) Push feature.CCF Push addresses a critical need: enabling seamless, automated, and immediate delivery of security data to Sentinel, so teams can respond to threats as they happen.The Obsidian Threat and Activity Feed for Microsoft Sentinel delivers deep visibility into SaaS application activity, helping security teams detect account compromise and insider threats.
12/02/2026
Microsoft Entra Agent ID explained
See every agent in one place, understand what it can access, detect agent sprawl early, and apply least-privilege permissions using the same Microsoft Entra tools you already use for users — without introducing new governance models.That’s where Microsoft Entra Agent ID comes in.Moving to the agent registry, you get visibility for each agent in your tenant and what platform they were built on and whether they have an Agent ID or not.
12/02/2026
Azure Government or Azure Commercial for CJIS 6.0: Choosing Your Compliance Path
Since 2014, United States criminal justice agencies have trusted Microsoft Azure Government to manage Criminal Justice Information (CJI).As first announced with the release of CJIS Security Policy (CJISSECPOL) v5.9.1, agencies have the option to utilize Azure Commercial for CJIS workloads by leveraging advanced technical controls in place of traditional personnel screening.Step 7: Update your SEIP/SSP Since you are using Azure Commercial, your System Security Plan (SSP) must explicitly state that you are using encryption as the compensating control for the lack of vendor personnel screening.
12/02/2026
Partner Blog | Protecting customer trust with fraud prevention and resilience
It is a business risk that can erode customer trust, disrupt operations, and create real financial exposure, including revenue loss or customer churn.Microsoft fraud prevention work underscores the scale of what the ecosystem is facing.According to an August 2025 white paper, Three Lessons from Microsoft’s Fight Against Fraud, the company stopped $4 billion in fraud attempts, blocked around 1.6 million bot sign-ups per hour, and rejected 49,000 fraudulent partnership enrollments.
12/02/2026
You’re invited! Microsoft AI Power Days: Agent-a-thon, February 19, 2026
To help you get started, we invite you to the Microsoft AI Power Days: Agent-a-thon—a global, immersive experience designed to help you build agents, one step at a time.The Agent-a-thon is part of a larger digital event, Microsoft AI Power Days: Building Frontier Firms for the Agentic AI Era — Your Trusted Path to Secure Cloud & AI.Prepare for the live session.
12/02/2026
Release Announcement of SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v10.5
We’re pleased to announce the release of SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v10.5, delivering meaningful improvements across multiple flavours of SSMA to further simplify and de‑risk database modernization to Azure SQL and SQL Server.SSMA v10.5 introduces AI-assisted code conversion powered by Microsoft Copilot for SAP ASE (Sybase)—bringing the same modern Copilot experience already available in SSMA for Oracle to Sybase migrations.With this capability, customers can now use Copilot to accelerate conversion of complex Sybase T‑SQL objects like procedures, functions, triggers, and other database objects to SQL Server and Azure SQL–compatible code.
12/02/2026
MCP-Driven Azure SRE for Databricks
Azure SRE Agent is an AI-powered operations assistant built for incident response and governance.Azure SRE Agent integrates with Azure Databricks through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to provide:Open an issue on GitHub or reach out to the Azure SRE team.
12/02/2026
Get alignment early to build AI apps and agents and sell on Marketplace
According to Microsoft research of Frontier firms: Frontier firms are succeeding because they align business intent, technical design, and security expectations before building AI apps and agents. They don’t treat alignment as a workshop or a slide deck. They treat it as a prerequisite to building agents that actually work, scale, and earn trust. Microsoft helps you adopt this same approach through structured guidance in App Advisor, AI envisioning resources, and practical checklists designed to keep teams aligned from design through deployment.
12/02/2026
How to Manage "Grounding with Bing" Resources Programmatically
This blog shows you how to programmatically manage "Grounding with Bing" resources using Azure Resource Manager (ARM), giving you version-controlled, repeatable deployments that fit into your existing DevOps workflows.In this blog, we are introducing Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to manage "Grounding with Bing" resources using programmatic deployments.Azure Resource Manager (ARM) offers a unified platform for deploying, managing, and monitoring Azure resources, including custom search configurations. Utilizing ARM templates enables you to automate the provisioning and configuration of custom search resources, promoting consistency and repeatability across various environments.
12/02/2026
Kantar reduces storage costs with Microsoft 365 Archive
Kantar, a global leader in marketing data and analytics, is embracing Gen AI to save time, improve quality, and deliver better results to both employees and customers.After moving content to Microsoft 365 and rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot, Kantar faced increasing storage costs.By adopting Microsoft 365 Archive, Kantar has successfully reduced storage costs and improved data quality.
12/02/2026
Celebrating Community Impact at Scale: Workplace Ninja Finland Hosts Its Biggest Live Event Yet
The Workplace Ninja Finland User Group has reached an exciting milestone, hosting its third—and largest—live event since its relaunch two years ago.Bringing together nearly 150 IT professionals, MVPs, and community contributors, the event in November 2025 showcased the growing appetite for in‑person technical learning and reaffirmed Finland's vibrant role in the global Workplace Ninja community.But two years ago, a team of Finnish MVPs and dedicated volunteers reignited the initiative under the global Workplace Ninja brand.
12/02/2026
AI for Communicators celebrates SharePoint’s 25th
SharePoint is celebrating its 25th anniversary and we are bringing some of the latest announcements for communicators.Join us for a forward‑looking conversation on how communications work is evolving, and how SharePoint is helping teams navigate what’s next.If you’re eager to hear the latest on announcement day, be sure to tune in on March 2nd for the SharePoint at 25 birthday event- and get a first look of what's next-aka.ms/SPat25
12/02/2026
Check This Out! (CTO!) Guide (January 2026)
Microsoft Community HubSummary: The January 2026 Azure Arc Server Forum highlighted new machine management features in Azure Compute Hub, updates on Windows Server Hot Patch and its billing, a preview of TPM-based onboarding to Azure Arc, and a recap of major 2025 SQL Server announcements.Summary: The 2025.12.01 release of Azure CycleCloud Workspace for Slurm introduces integrated Prometheus monitoring with managed Grafana dashboards, Entra ID Single Sign-On for secure authentication, support for ARM64 compute nodes, and compatibility with Ubuntu 24.04 and AlmaLinux 9.
12/02/2026
Azure PostgreSQL Lesson #15: Private DNS in Another Subscription Causing Server Deployment Failures
A customer attempted to deploy Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server using private networking (VNet injection + Private DNS).The Virtual Network and Private DNS zone were hosted in a different subscription than the PostgreSQL server.If your PostgreSQL Flexible Server deployment fails with an Internal error in a private network setupcheck resource provider registration across subscriptions before touching networking.
12/02/2026
Deprecation of the -Credential Parameter in Exchange Online PowerShell
The -Credential parameter in Exchange Online PowerShell relies on ROPC, and therefore cannot meet MFA or Conditional Access requirements.To align with MFA enforcement, modern authentication principles, and Microsoft’s broader security standards, support for the -Credential parameter will be removed from new Exchange Online PowerShell versions released after June 2026.After June 2026: new versions of the Exchange Online PowerShell modules released post 2026 will no longer include support for the -Credential parameter.
12/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 12, 2026
Learn about 252 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs.It simplifies managing cyber risks, compliance, and insurance requirements without needing large in-house teams, making enterprise-level protection accessible and cost-effective for organizations with limited security resources.The workshop assesses your current landscape, identifies quick wins, and creates a custom roadmap covering governance, security, and integration.
12/02/2026
Implementing Azure Lighthouse: A Technical Guide for Service Providers and Enterprises
Managing resources across multiple tenants is a common challenge for managed service providers (MSPs) and large enterprises.Microsoft’s Azure Lighthouse addresses the challenge of managing resources across tenants at scale by allowing service providers and customers to delegate access to specific scopes in the customer’s tenant.This article introduces the core architecture and operational model of Azure Lighthouse and provides guidance for implementers along with lesser-known tips to help you succeed.
12/02/2026
Choosing Between PCA and t-SNE for Visualization
For data scientists, working with high-dimensional data is part of daily life.
12/02/2026
SSMA Copilot for SAP ASE (Sybase)
However, as modernization accelerates, more customers are actively seeking reliable and automated paths to migrate Sybase workloads to Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL Targets.While Sybase’s T-SQL dialect shares several similarities with Microsoft SQL Server, its procedural code contains deep complexities—extended syntax, non-standard constructs, legacy system tables, and database‑scoped behaviors that often break traditional rule-based converters.To address these challenges, the SQL Migration team is expanding Copilot-based code conversion capabilities to SSMA SAP ASE, following the same intuitive user flow as the Oracle-to-SQL Copilot released earlier.
12/02/2026
Building a Local Research Desk: Multi-Agent Orchestration
Using Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) for orchestration and Foundry Local for on-device inference, this demo shows how to create a four-agent research pipeline that runs entirely on your hardware, no API keys, no data leaving your network, and complete control over every step.Beyond the research workflow, the web UI includes five interactive demos showcasing different MAF capabilities.With Microsoft Agent Framework for orchestration and Foundry Local for inference, you can build production-quality workflows that run entirely on your hardware.
12/02/2026
Teaching AI Development Through Gamification:
Teaching AI Development Through Gamification: Building an Interactive Learning Platform with Foundry LocalWe'll dive into Foundry Local Learning Adventure, a JavaScript-based game that teaches AI fundamentals through five interactive levels.You'll learn how to create engaging educational experiences, integrate local AI models using Foundry Local, design progressive difficulty curves, and build cross-platform applications that run both in browsers and terminals.
12/02/2026
Securing A Multi-Agent AI Solution Focused on User Context & the Complexities of On-Behalf-Of.
How we built an enterprise-grade multi-agent system that preserves user identity across AI agents and DatabricksWhen building AI-powered applications for the enterprise, a common challenge emerges: how do you maintain user identity and access controls when an AI agent queries backend services on behalf of a user?In this post, I’ll walk through how we solved this challenge for a current enterprise customer by implementing Microsoft Entra ID On-Behalf-Of (OBO) secure flow in a custom multi-agent LangGraph solution, enabling our Databricks Genie agent to query data and the data agent designed to modify or update delta tables, to do so as the authenticated user, while preserving all RBAC policies.
12/02/2026
Securing Multi-Agent AI with User Context: Entra ID OBO for Databricks Genie.
How we built an enterprise-grade multi-agent system that preserves user identity across AI agents and DatabricksWhen building AI-powered applications for the enterprise, a common challenge emerges: how do you maintain user identity and access controls when an AI agent queries backend services on behalf of a user?In this post, I’ll walk through how we solved this challenge for a current enterprise customer by implementing Microsoft Entra ID On-Behalf-Of (OBO) secure flow in a custom multi-agent LangGraph solution, enabling our Databricks Genie agent to query data and the data agent designed to modify or update delta tables, to do so as the authenticated user, while preserving all RBAC policies.
12/02/2026
How to Build a Matryoshka-Optimized Sentence Embedding Model for Ultra-Fast Retrieval with 64-Dimension Truncation
In this tutorial, we fine-tune a Sentence-Transformers embedding model using Matryoshka Representation Learning so that the earliest dimensions of the vector carry the most useful semantic signal.We train with MatryoshkaLoss on triplet data and then validate the key promise of MRL by benchmarking retrieval quality after truncating embeddings to 64, 128, and 256 dimensions.The post How to Build a Matryoshka-Optimized Sentence Embedding Model for Ultra-Fast Retrieval with 64-Dimension Truncation appeared first on MarkTechPost.
12/02/2026
Public Preview: Azure Monitor pipeline transformations
The Azure Monitor pipeline extends the data collection capabilities of Azure Monitor to edge and multi-cloud environments.It enables at-scale data collection (data collection over 100k EPS), and routing of telemetry data before it's sent to the cloud.The pipeline can cache data locally and sync with the cloud when connectivity is restored and route telemetry to Azure Monitor in cases of intermittent connectivity. Learn more about this here - Configure Azure Monitor pipeline - Azure Monitor |
12/02/2026
General Availability: IP Network Firewalls for Azure Managed HSM
We are excited to announce the General Availability of IP Firewalls for Azure Key Vault Managed HSM in all public regions.The feature allows you to authorize a particular service to access your managed HSM through the Managed HSM Firewall by adding its IP address to the Key Vault Managed HSM firewall allowlist.For a full list of the current Managed HSM Trusted Services, see Azure Key Vault Trusted Services.
12/02/2026
Beyond iptables: Scaling AKS Networking with nftables and Project Calico
Last year, Microsoft’s decision to support kube-proxy in nftables mode reflects a broader reality, the traditional iptables model is becoming a structural bottleneck for modern Kubernetes platforms, including managed environments such as AKS.In this blog we are going to use Microsoft’s latest kube-proxy preview features to create a Bring Your Own CNI cluster configured for nftables, and use Project Calico to establish networking and security on it.Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) now includes preview support for running kube-proxy in nftables mode.
11/02/2026
Announcing database instructions and a lot of fixes in SQL Server Management Studio 22.3
In January we released SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22.2.1 and I commented that it might look like a minor release, but it really wasn’t. That’s true for SSMS 22.3 as well, which dropped yesterday (February 10). Read on to learn what’s new and a couple changes that may impact your daily workflow.In this release we also updated to later releases of Microsoft.Data.SqlClient (MDS) and SQL Management Objects (SMO). While these updates are invisible and foundational to core SSMS functionality, they are quite impactful to components like third-party extensions that have dependencies on them. We are aware that SSMS 22.3 does not work when certain third-party extensions are installed, and we are following up with extension owners based on feedback items that have already been opened.In the event that you ever need to rollback to a previous release, you can do that from the Visual Studio Installer. From the SSMS 22 entry in the VS Installer, select More > Rollback to previous version. If you happen to uninstall SSMS entirely, you can find previous versions on the Release History page. While you can install different major versions of SSMS side by side (e.g. SSMS 21.6 and 22.3), you can only install one version of SSMS 22 GA on your machine.
11/02/2026
Microsoft Tech Community Release Notes – 26.01
We’re excited to share the latest updates to the Microsoft Tech Community!This release focuses on improving User Group management, along with a collection of behind‑the‑scenes updates and bug fixes designed to make everyday interactions on the platform smoother and more reliable.These enhancements also lay the groundwork for future discoverability and filtering improvements across the platform.Expanded Group Hub metadata fields
11/02/2026
News to Know – Volume 3, Edition 2, February 2026
In March, we will kick off the Dynamic Topics private preview with a small group of customers.Viva Glint is introducing integration with Organizational Data in Microsoft 365, providing an enterprise‑grade approach to connecting people data across Viva experiences.Viva Customer Connection Program is now the Employee Experience Customer Connection program
11/02/2026
International Day of Women & Girls in Science: Where Barriers Fall and Breakthroughs Rise
When women aren’t better represented in science, the world loses the breakthroughs we need most. Today, women make up just 35% of STEM graduates and only one‑third of researchers, while 122 million girls around the world are still out of school — a staggering amount of unrealized potential.On the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we’re honoring the organizations showing what’s possible when those barriers fall.When women lead, innovation accelerates, equity expands, and the future opens wider for all of us.
11/02/2026
How to Build an Atomic-Agents RAG Pipeline with Typed Schemas, Dynamic Context Injection, and Agent Chaining
In this tutorial, we build an advanced, end-to-end learning pipeline around Atomic-Agents by wiring together typed agent interfaces, structured prompting, and a compact retrieval layer that grounds outputs in real project documentation.Also, we demonstrate how to plan retrieval, retrieve relevant context, inject it dynamically into an answering agent, and run an interactive loop that […]The post How to Build an Atomic-Agents RAG Pipeline with Typed Schemas, Dynamic Context Injection, and Agent Chaining appeared first on MarkTechPost.
11/02/2026
Windows 365 now supported in New Zealand North
Today I’m pleased to announce that Windows 365 is now available in the New Zealand North region, bringing Cloud PCs even closer to our customers around the world. With this expansion, organizations in and around New Zealand can benefit from lower latency, improved performance, and local data residency, all delivered through our trusted Microsoft Cloud.Because Microsoft manages the networking for you, choosing the Australasia geography where New Zealand North has been added to lets the service optimize Cloud PC placement automatically for performance and resilience.Start provisioning in the new region and give your organization the performance and resiliency benefits immediately.
11/02/2026
Deploying Custom Models with Microsoft Olive and Foundry Local
Optimize your model with Olive, serve with Foundry Local or a custom server.It handles ONNX conversion, graph optimization, and quantization in a single command.You now have end-to-end skills for building production SLM applications: understanding the landscape, local development with Foundry Local, agentic applications with function calling, multi-agent architectures, model optimization with Olive, and deploying custom models to the edge.
11/02/2026
Celebrate International Day of Women and Girls in Science with help from Copilot
February 11, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, is about more than recognizing past achievements.Designing a mentorship program to support women in ITCreating pathways for girls in science and technology
11/02/2026
Meet Victor Addae
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.The Microsoft Student Ambassadors program has been a defining milestone in my growth as an aspiring AI, cloud, and data professional.
11/02/2026
What’s new in Microsoft Sentinel: February 2026
The Microsoft 365 Copilot connector brings Microsoft 365 Copilot audit logs and activity data into Sentinel, giving security teams visibility into how Microsoft 365 Copilot is being used across their organization.Microsoft is modernizing data connectors by shifting from Azure Function based connectors to the codeless connector framework (CCF).Deadline to migrate the Sentinel experience from Azure to Defender extended to March 2027
11/02/2026
Meet Tauqeer Ahmad
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.The Microsoft Student Ambassadors program has been a game-changer for my career and personal growth.
11/02/2026
From Local MCP Server to Hosted Web Agent: App Service Observability, Part 2
In Part 1, we introduced the App Service Observability MCP Server — a proof-of-concept that lets GitHub Copilot (and other AI assistants) query your App Service logs, analyze errors, and help debug issues through natural language.That version runs locally alongside your IDE, and it's great for individual developers who want to investigate their apps without leaving VS Code.In this post, we'll show how we took the same set of MCP tools and wrapped them in a hosted web application — deployed to Azure App Service with a chat UI and a built-in Azure OpenAI agent.
11/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 11, 2026
Learn about 87 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs.Accion Labs - Value-Based Care as a Service: Value-Based Care as a Service is a Microsoft Azure-based healthcare model prioritizing patient outcomes and cost efficiency.CARE integration with ECM Smart Connect streamlines document management in Dynamics 365 Business Central.
11/02/2026
Sertifiointiviikot tulevat Maaliskuussa
Microsoftin Certification Week -tapahtumat tarjoavat kumppaneille erinomaisen mahdollisuuden vahvistaa osaamista, kuroa umpeen osaamisvajeita ja vauhdittaa liiketoimintaa – joustavasti verkossa.Maaliskuun aikana järjestettävät englanninkieliset Certification Weekit keskittyvät erityisesti Cloud & AI Platformiin, Securityyn sekä AI Business Solutions -ratkaisuihin.Kun olet mukana vähintään 80% tunneista ja labroista, niin saat ILMAISEN vouncherin varsinaiseen sertifiointitenttiin.
11/02/2026
The Machine Learning Practitioner’s Guide to Speculative Decoding
Large language models generate text one token at a time.
11/02/2026
Accelerating SCOM to Azure Monitor Migrations with Automated Analysis and ARM Template Generation
Accelerating SCOM to Azure Monitor Migrations with Automated Analysis and ARM Template GenerationWith Azure Monitor increasingly becoming the destination platform, many organizations face a familiar challenge: migrating from System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).The community-driven SCOM to Azure Monitor Migration Tool accepts Management Pack XML files and produces several outputs designed to accelerate migration planning and execution.
11/02/2026
Agents League: Two Weeks, Three Tracks, One Challenge
We're inviting all developers to join Agents League, running February 16-27.It's a two-week challenge where you'll build AI agents using production-ready tools, learn from live coding sessions, and get feedback directly from Microsoft product teams.Agents League starts on February 16th and runs through Feburary 27th.
11/02/2026
NVIDIA Researchers Introduce KVTC Transform Coding Pipeline to Compress Key-Value Caches by 20x for Efficient LLM Serving
Serving Large Language Models (LLMs) at scale is a massive engineering challenge because of Key-Value (KV) cache management.As models grow in size and reasoning capability, the KV cache footprint increases and becomes a major bottleneck for throughput and latency.For modern Transformers, this cache can occupy multiple gigabytes.
11/02/2026
Meet Sandro Speth
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.The Microsoft Student Ambassadors program strengthened my resume by providing me with practical experience in modern technologies, community engagement, and technical leadership.
11/02/2026
Meet Nirajan Acharya
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.Through Student Ambassadors, I gained real leadership experience by conducting awareness sessions, giving free training to students, and working on impactful community projects, turning my resume into a reflection of meaningful contribution rather than just technical achievements.
11/02/2026
Meet Megha Vishwakarma
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.The Microsoft Student Ambassadors program has played a pivotal role in shaping my growth, both personally and professionally.
11/02/2026
Meet Dominik Skowron
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.How has being part of the Microsoft Student Ambassadors community helped you connect with other tech enthusiasts and expand your global network?
11/02/2026
Meet Beatriz Tavernaro Cardoso
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.Having access to Microsoft’s tools and resources played a central role in my development as an AI-focused developer.
11/02/2026
Meet Alejandra Perez
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.As I advanced, I received invitations to speak at the Student Summit and Microsoft Reactor, and the program inspired me to apply for the GitHub Campus Experts program.
11/02/2026
Meet Abayomi Abiodun
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.Being part of the Microsoft Student Ambassadors community has been one of the most transformational experiences of my tech journey.
11/02/2026
Google AI Introduces Natively Adaptive Interfaces (NAI): An Agentic Multimodal Accessibility Framework Built on Gemini for Adaptive UI Design
Google Research is proposing a new way to build accessible software with Natively Adaptive Interfaces (NAI), an agentic framework where a multimodal AI agent becomes the primary user interface and adapts the application in real time to each user’s abilities and context.Instead of shipping a fixed UI and adding accessibility as a separate layer, […]The post Google AI Introduces Natively Adaptive Interfaces (NAI): An Agentic Multimodal Accessibility Framework Built on Gemini for Adaptive UI Design appeared first on MarkTechPost.
11/02/2026
February update: What’s New in Azure for Partners
New secure migration partner investments available for Microsoft Defender for Cloud: InfraDB-specialized and Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP) partners with the Solutions Partner for Security designation are now eligible for workshop incentives to help drive Defender for Cloud in migration and modernization projects. Access helpful resources on the new Cloud Security Envisioning Workshop.Join us on March 10, 2026, for an exclusive partner preview of the upcoming Microsoft Azure Summit: Migrate & Modernize with Agentic AI event. You’ll get early access to key messages, product announcements, and breakout themes, plus insight into how these updates translate into concrete partner opportunities.Microsoft-in-a-Day workshops: The Microsoft-in-a-Day workshops are a powerful business development opportunity to position yourself as a subject matter expert on Fabric and Power BI, engage with new customers directly, and grow your pipeline of opportunities. Learn more about how to get started.
10/02/2026
How to Design Complex Deep Learning Tensor Pipelines Using Einops with Vision, Attention, and Multimodal Examples
In this tutorial, we walk through advanced usage of Einops to express complex tensor transformations in a clear, readable, and mathematically precise way.We demonstrate how rearrange, reduce, repeat, einsum, and pack/unpack let us reshape, aggregate, and combine tensors without relying on error-prone manual dimension handling.The post How to Design Complex Deep Learning Tensor Pipelines Using Einops with Vision, Attention, and Multimodal Examples appeared first on MarkTechPost.
10/02/2026
Introducing the Viva Engage Track at the 2026 Microsoft 365 Conference
Whether you’re trying to cut through the noise, connect leaders with employees, or bring clarity to AI-driven change, the role of the modern communicator is evolving fast.At this year’s M365 Community Conference, we’re excited to bring you the Viva Engage Track — a focused learning path designed to help communicators, HR leaders, IT partners, and community champions build connected, informed, and high‑performing workplaces.Across three days, this track walks you through the full modern comms lifecycle — strategy, storytelling, measurement, deployment, AI readiness, and community activation.The deeper native integration of Viva Engage inside Microsoft Teams -making communities, events, campaigns, and storylines feel seamless across devices and workstyles.
10/02/2026
Lake-Only Ingestion for Microsoft Defender Advanced Hunting Tables is Now Generally Available
Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability (GA) of lake‑only ingestion for Microsoft XDR Advanced Hunting tables into Microsoft Sentinel Data Lake.This release enables lake‑only ingestion for Advanced Hunting data from:To enable Advanced Hunting tables for Sentinel data lake ingestion:
10/02/2026
Partner Blog | Cloud & AI Platforms, Part 5: Innovating with Azure AI apps and agents.
Across industries, AI is reshaping how applications are designed, built, and delivered. We are witnessing the shift from point solutions to systems, with Copilots and agents that can reason, act, and collaborate across workflows.That shift is creating both urgency and opportunity for partners. At the same time, organizations are rapidly moving from prebuilt generative AI apps toward customized or custom-built solutions, with IDC projecting that shift from 40% today to 70% in the next 24 months.
10/02/2026
What to know about Windows 11, version 26H1
Windows 11, version 26H1 is a targeted release that supports some of the new device innovations coming in 2026.Windows 11, version 26H1 will only be available on new devices with select new silicon as they come to market in early 2026.Devices running Windows 11, version 26H1 will not be able to update to the next annual feature update in the second half of 2026.
10/02/2026
Released: February 2026 Exchange Server Security Updates
Microsoft has released Security Updates (SUs) for vulnerabilities found in:Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE)Customers who enrolled in the Extended Security Update (ESU) program are eligible to receive the February 2025 security updates for Exchange Server 2016 and 2019.
10/02/2026
No Skype for Business Server Security Updates for February 2026
We have therefore decided that until the end of this Skype for Business 2015 and 2019 ESU period (April 2026) we will make an explicit update related announcement even if we DO NOT release anything for that particular month. There are no security releases for any version of Skype for Business Server in February 2026, for customers with SfB 2015/SfB 2019 ESU, or SfB SE.The Skype for Business Team
10/02/2026
Partner Case Study | HRIZONS EX
Employee surveys have become a cornerstone of modern workforce strategy, offering organizations a direct line to employee sentiment and a powerful lever for change.When Microsoft transitioned away from first-party services for the employee survey solution Microsoft Viva Glint, HRIZONS EX became one of the first authorized consultancies to support customers through the shift.Their consulting-as-a-service model provides ongoing strategic support metered to an organization’s unique needs rather than a one-size-fits-all, one-time implementation—which made them an ideal fit for a leading global skin care company.
10/02/2026
AlphaLife Sciences powers regulatory-compliant AI workflows with PostgreSQL on Azure
At Microsoft Ignite, AlphaLife Sciences CEO and Founder Sharon Chen shared how her team is building an AI-powered content authoring platform on top of Azure Database for PostgreSQL, designed specifically for the demands of regulated life sciences workflows. She also explained why the team is excited about Azure HorizonDB as a new PostgreSQL service that is built to meet the needs of modern enterprise workloads. This post explores how AlphaLife Sciences uses PostgreSQL as more than a data store. It’s a semantic foundation for compliant, auditable AI agents.At the core of AlphaLife Sciences’ platform is Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
10/02/2026
Strengthen your cloud security expertise with new AI security training
To help meet that need, we’re releasing a wave of new and updated Microsoft Learn offerings this month, designed to help you secure AI workloads, modernize incident response, strengthen identity governance, optimize security operations across the Microsoft Cloud, and more.New Microsoft Applied Skills: Secure AI Solutions in the CloudMicrosoft Applied Skills: Secure AI Solutions in the Cloud validates your ability to secure AI workloads across Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Foundry.
10/02/2026
Research Drop: Fighting AI Slop with Meta-Cognition around AI
When employees aren’t intentional or thoughtful with their AI use, it can drive quality issues and increase “workslop,” and 60% of employees report skipping accuracy checks.AI use without intentional habits can degrade quality, erode trust, and even harm team performance.Concerningly, our research shows that 60% of employees skip accuracy checks when using AI, which accelerates the AI slop prevalence.
10/02/2026
Alibaba Open-Sources Zvec: An Embedded Vector Database Bringing SQLite-like Simplicity and High-Performance On-Device RAG to Edge Applications
Alibaba Tongyi Lab research team released ‘Zvec’, an open source, in-process vector database that targets edge and on-device retrieval workloads.It is positioned as ‘the SQLite of vector databases’ because it runs as a library inside your application and does not require any external service or daemon.It is designed for retrieval augmented generation (RAG), […]
10/02/2026
My MVP Story: How a 12+ Year MVP Veteran Sparked a Nationwide AI Movement in Vietnam
This mission later led me to co-found Master Learning Hub Academy, a Microsoft Global Training Partner in Vietnam dedicated to helping learners and organizations master Microsoft technologies in meaningful ways.In early 2025, my team and I at Master Learning Hub Academy launched AI Fridays 2025, a free, six-week nationwide learning series designed to make Microsoft AI more approachable and practical for everyone.Trong Manh Nguyen is a Microsoft MVP in Cloud & Datacenter Management and the Training Director and Co-founder of Master Learning Hub Academy, a Microsoft Global Training Partner in Vietnam.
10/02/2026
10 Nonprofit Technology Myths Debunked: What Cloud + AI Really Mean for Your Mission
Cloud technology and AI can help.They reduce busywork, strengthen security, and free your team to focus on what matters.Here are the 10 biggest nonprofit technology myths debunked.
10/02/2026
Update: Changing the Account Name Entity Mapping in Microsoft Sentinel
The upcoming update introduces more consistent and predictable entity data across analytics, incidents, and automation by standardizing how the Account Name property is populated when using UPN‑based mappings in analytic rules.Going forward, Account Name property will consistently contain only the UPN prefix, with new dedicated fields added for the full UPN and UPN suffix.Logic App Playbook and SecurityAlert table receives:
10/02/2026
Document Clustering with LLM Embeddings in Scikit-learn
Imagine that you suddenly obtain a large collection of unclassified documents and are tasked with grouping them by topic.
10/02/2026
Adding AI Personality to Browser Games
This article demonstrates exactly that: integrating AI-powered dynamic commentary into a browser game using Spaceinvaders-FoundryLocal, vanilla JavaScript, and Microsoft Foundry Local.You'll learn how to integrate local AI into client-side games, design AI personality systems that enhance rather than distract, implement context-aware commentary generation, and architect optional AI features that don't break core gameplay when unavailable.The complete implementation with game engine, AI integration, backend proxy, and deployment instructions is available at github.com/leestott/Spaceinvaders-FoundryLocal.
10/02/2026
How to Set Up Claude Code with Microsoft Foundry Models on macOS
Here is how you can set up Claude Code to run locally on macOS while leveraging the stability of models deployed on Microsoft Foundry.You need an active Azure subscription where the Microsoft Foundry environment is initialized.You can start using Claude Code locally, powered entirely by the model deployment running in your Microsoft Foundry environment.
10/02/2026
Customer review: Maplytics delivers strong value through smart location visualization
Inogic's Maplytics, an app published to Microsoft Marketplace, integrates Microsoft Azure and Bing Maps geolocation features into Microsoft Dynamics 365, Dataverse, Power Pages, and Power Apps, empowering field, sales, and service teams to make faster, smarter, location-driven decisions.Maplytics enables smart location visualization by plotting car shops, repair centers, and service stations on interactive maps with customizable pushpins.How is customer service and support for Maplytics?
10/02/2026
How to Build a Privacy-Preserving Federated Pipeline to Fine-Tune Large Language Models with LoRA Using Flower and PEFT
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to federate fine-tuning of a large language model using LoRA without ever centralizing private text data.We simulate multiple organizations as virtual clients and show how each client adapts a shared base model locally while exchanging only lightweight LoRA adapter parameters.By combining Flower’s federated learning simulation engine with […]
10/02/2026
Azure Arc Jumpstart Template for Hybrid Logic Apps Deployment
Today I’m sharing a new Azure Arc Jumpstart template (Jumpstart Drop) that implements a hybrid deployment for Azure Logic Apps (Standard) on Azure Arc-enabled AKS cluster which enables deployment with a single command that sets up a complete, working environment for testing your scenarios.Hybrid deployment model allows you to run Logic Apps workloads on your own infrastructure, providing you with the option to host your integration solutions on premises, in a private cloud, or even in a third-party public cloud.You can find more information in this article:Set up your own infrastructure for Standard logic app workflows - Azure Logic Apps |
10/02/2026
Announcing Application Insights SDK 3.x for .NET
Today, we’re excited to take the next step on that journey with a major release of the Application Insights SDK 3.x for .NET.With Application Insights SDK 3.x, developers can migrate to OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation with dramatically less effort.The new SDK automatically routes your classic Application Insights Track* APIs calls through a new mapping layer that emits OpenTelemetry signals under the hood.
10/02/2026
Secure DNS with DoH: Public Preview for Windows DNS Server
Today we’re opening the public preview of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) for Windows DNS Server, bringing encrypted, authenticated DNS to the heart of your on‑premises network.IETF introduced two standards for encrypting DNS:The public preview of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is included in the February 10th 2026 update of Windows Server 2025 and is disabled by default.
09/02/2026
Fueling New Experiences in Microsoft 365 Copilot with Expanded Copilot Connectors Catalog
Copilot connectors help unify that fragmented data by securely extending Microsoft 365 Copilot to external systems.Going into 2026, across all enterprise AI tools, Microsoft has one of the fastest growing and most extensive connector ecosystems with over 100 Copilot connectors and counting.This month, we’re thrilled to announce the General Availability of 35 new Copilot connectors built by Microsoft to meet your external data needs.
09/02/2026
Microsoft AI Proposes OrbitalBrain: Enabling Distributed Machine Learning in Space with Inter-Satellite Links and Constellation-Aware Resource Optimization Strategies
Earth observation (EO) constellations capture huge volumes of high-resolution imagery every day, but most of it never reaches the ground in time for model training.Downlink bandwidth is the main bottleneck.Images can sit on orbit for days while ground models train on partial and delayed data.
09/02/2026
Partner Blog | Simplify and scale operations with the latest technical and API enhancements
To support this shift, Microsoft is delivering a set of security‑first, API‑driven, and commerce‑aligned technical updates across Partner Center and related platforms.These changes are designed to reduce risk, improve resilience, and simplify how partners integrate with Microsoft platforms—all while supporting more consistent, scalable operations across customer lifecycle scenarios.Recent enhancements strengthening partner security and reliability
09/02/2026
Now in Foundry: Qwen3-Coder-Next, Qwen3-ASR-1.7B, Z-Image
This week's spotlight features three models from that demonstrate enterprise-grade AI across the full scope of modalities.From low latency coding agents to state-of-the-art multilingual speech recognition and foundation-quality image generation, these models showcase the breadth of innovation happening in open-source AI.This week's Model Mondays edition highlights Qwen3-Coder-Next, an 80B MoE model that activates only 3B parameters while delivering coding agent capabilities with 256k context;
09/02/2026
From signal to strategy: Closing attack paths with identity intelligence
In the first half of 2025 alone, identity-based attacks surged more than 32% and its estimated that 97% of them are password focused.Today we are excited to share more about how Microsoft Defender can help security professionals proactively understand how identity-related risks, like leaked credentials, relate back to critical assets, helping security professionals proactively close potential entry points before they can be exploited.Understanding leaked credentials and attack paths:
09/02/2026
Windows Admin Center Architectural Changes
Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode is a new experience that helps you manage your virtualization infrastructure across your Hyper-V clusters, storage (SAN, NAS, and HCI), and networking configurations.In our last blog, we introduced Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode (vMode) and laid out the concepts of modes.Windows Admin Center has evolved to support both server administration and virtualization roles.
09/02/2026
What’s new in FinOps toolkit 13 – January 2026
This release focuses on stability and usability improvements across FinOps hubs, Power BI reports, and Azure Optimization Engine with a few key additions, like configuring Key Vault purge protection when deploying FinOps hubs and support for format and compression when creating Cost Management exports via PowerShell.In case you haven’t heard, the FinOps toolkit is an open-source collection of tools and resources that help you learn, adopt, and implement FinOps in the Microsoft Cloud.To support this momentum, I’m also working on a set of premium, paid services designed to help organizations deploy, customize, and scale the FinOps toolkit with confidence.
09/02/2026
Azure SQL’s Native JSON Type: Optimized for Performance
Instead of saving JSON as raw text, Azure SQL can store it in a binary representation that’s optimized for fast reads, efficient in-place updates, and compact storage.JSON data is stored in a native binary format, not as plain textTo measure the performance impact of migrating JSON from nvarchar/varchar to the native JSON binary type, a test environment was set up with six tables on Azure SQL Database (General Purpose, Gen5, 2 vCores).
09/02/2026
SQLDBControlPlaneFirstPartyApp explained
The SQLDBControlPlaneFirstPartyApp is an internal Azure application used by the Azure SQL Database control plane to synchronize resource state between the SQL engine and Azure Resource Manager (ARM).For example, the “Azure SQL Database” application is a First Party App that enables Azure AD authentication and other identity-related features for Azure SQL Database.Disable sign-in to the SQLDBControlPlaneFirstPartyApp app
09/02/2026
Choosing the Right Model in GitHub Copilot: A Practical Guide for Developers
GitHub Copilot now supports multiple AI models, each optimized for different workflows, from quick edits to deep debugging to multi-step agentic tasks that generate or modify code across your entire repository.but only if we know how to choose the right model at the right time.This is written from the perspective of real-world customer conversations, GitHub Copilot demos, and enterprise adoption journeys
09/02/2026
Build an AI-Powered Space Invaders Game
Build an AI-Powered Space Invaders Game: Integrating LLMs into HTML5 Games with Microsoft Foundry LocalIn this tutorial, we'll explore how to create an HTML5 game with integrated Large Language Model (LLM) features using Microsoft Foundry Local.The combination of GitHub Copilot CLI for development assistance and Foundry Local for runtime AI gives you powerful tools to bring intelligent applications to life.
09/02/2026
Meet OAT: The New Action Tokenizer Bringing LLM-Style Scaling and Flexible, Anytime Inference to the Robotics World
Robots are entering their GPT-3 era.For years, researchers have tried to train robots using the same autoregressive (AR) models that power large language models (LLMs).If a model can predict the next word in a sentence, it should be able to predict the next move for a robotic arm.
09/02/2026
A Coding Implementation to Establish Rigorous Prompt Versioning and Regression Testing Workflows for Large Language Models using MLflow
In this tutorial, we show how we treat prompts as first-class, versioned artifacts and apply rigorous regression testing to large language model behavior using MLflow.We design an evaluation pipeline that logs prompt versions, prompt diffs, model outputs, and multiple quality metrics in a fully reproducible manner.By combining classical text metrics with semantic similarity […]
09/02/2026
CRL & AIA Publishing Guidance (Practical PKI Part 2)
In this blog post, we will be covering CRL and AIA publishing guidance with a focus on the Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) offline root Certificate Authority (CA).In Part 2 of our series, we will focus on the certificate revocation list (CRL) and authority information access (AIA) extensions with an example of manual maintenance on an offline root certificate authority (CA).IETF RFC 3280 defines the Authority Information Access (AIA) extension as “how to access CA information and services for the issuer of the certificate in which the extension appears.”
09/02/2026
ByteDance Releases Protenix-v1: A New Open-Source Model Achieving AF3-Level Performance in Biomolecular Structure Prediction
How close can an open model get to AlphaFold3-level accuracy when it matches training data, model scale and inference budget?ByteDance has introduced Protenix-v1, a comprehensive AlphaFold3 (AF3) reproduction for biomolecular structure prediction, released with code and model parameters under Apache 2.0.The model targets AF3-level performance across protein, DNA, RNA and ligand structures while […]
08/02/2026
How to Design Production-Grade Mock Data Pipelines Using Polyfactory with Dataclasses, Pydantic, Attrs, and Nested Models
In this tutorial, we walk through an advanced, end-to-end exploration of Polyfactory, focusing on how we can generate rich, realistic mock data directly from Python type hints.We start by setting up the environment and progressively build factories for data classes, Pydantic models, and attrs-based classes, while demonstrating customization, overrides, calculated fields, and the generation […]The post How to Design Production-Grade Mock Data Pipelines Using Polyfactory with Dataclasses, Pydantic, Attrs, and Nested Models appeared first on MarkTechPost.
08/02/2026
Smart Pipelines Orchestration: Designing Predictable Data Platforms on Shared Spark
In Azure Synapse, Spark pools are commonly shared across pipelines to optimize cost and utilization.This post describes an orchestration pattern that makes priority explicit, allowing critical workloads to run predictably on shared Spark compute without modifying Spark code, configuration, or cluster capacity.Orchestrating data movement and transformation in Azure Data Factory - Training |
08/02/2026
Google AI Introduces PaperBanana: An Agentic Framework that Automates Publication Ready Methodology Diagrams and Statistical Plots
Generating publication-ready illustrations is a labor-intensive bottleneck in the research workflow.A research team from Google and Peking University introduce new framework called ‘PaperBanana‘ which is changing that by using a multi-agent system to automate high-quality academic diagrams […]The post Google AI Introduces PaperBanana: An Agentic Framework that Automates Publication Ready Methodology Diagrams and Statistical Plots appeared first on MarkTechPost.
07/02/2026
How to Build a Production-Grade Agentic AI System with Hybrid Retrieval, Provenance-First Citations, Repair Loops, and Episodic Memory
In this tutorial, we build an ultra-advanced agentic AI workflow that behaves like a production-grade research and reasoning system rather than a single prompt call.We ingest real web sources asynchronously, split them into provenance-tracked chunks, and run hybrid retrieval using both TF-IDF (sparse) and OpenAI embeddings (dense), then fuse results for higher recall and […]The post How to Build a Production-Grade Agentic AI System with Hybrid Retrieval, Provenance-First Citations, Repair Loops, and Episodic Memory appeared first on MarkTechPost.
07/02/2026
NVIDIA AI releases C-RADIOv4 vision backbone unifying SigLIP2, DINOv3, SAM3 for classification, dense prediction, segmentation workloads at scale
NVIDIA’s C-RADIOv4 is a new agglomerative vision backbone that distills three strong teacher models, SigLIP2-g-384, DINOv3-7B, and SAM3, into a single student encoder.It extends the AM-RADIO and RADIOv2.5 line, keeping similar computational cost while improving […]The post NVIDIA AI releases C-RADIOv4 vision backbone unifying SigLIP2, DINOv3, SAM3 for classification, dense prediction, segmentation workloads at scale appeared first on MarkTechPost.
07/02/2026
Microsoft Global Community Initiative Newsletter (Jan/Feb)
MGCI Regional Leader Applications are Now Open!We are now accepting applications to become a Regional Leader for the Microsoft Community!Looking for amazing women speakers in the Microsoft ecosystem? 💜 The Microsoft Solutions Women in Tech speaker directory on Sessionize is a go‑to resource for community leaders and event organizers.
06/02/2026
Announcing Microsoft Azure Network Adapter (MANA) support for Existing VM SKUs
In February 2026, Azure will be deploying the Microsoft Azure Network Adapter (MANA) for existing VM Size Families. The intent is to provide the benefits of new server hardware to customers of existing VM SKUs as they work towards migrating to newer SKUs.To determine whether your VMs are impacted and what actions (if any) you should take, start with MANA support for existing VM SKUs.This article provides additional information about which VM Sizes are eligible to be deployed on the new MANA-enabled hardware, what actions (if any) you should take, and how to determine if the workload has been deployed on MANA-enabled hardware.
06/02/2026
Title Plan Update - February 6, 2026
📁February 6, 2026 - Title Plan Now AvailableAccess the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at http://aka.ms/Courseware_Title_Plan to ensure you're always working from the most current version.📌 Reminder: To help you stay informed more quickly and consistently, we’ve moved to a weekly publishing cadence for the title plan.
06/02/2026
A Coding, Data-Driven Guide to Measuring, Visualizing, and Enforcing Cognitive Complexity in Python Projects Using complexipy
In this tutorial, we build an end-to-end cognitive complexity analysis workflow using complexipy.We start by measuring complexity directly from raw code strings, then scale the same analysis to individual files and an entire project directory.Along the way, we generate machine-readable reports, normalize them into structured DataFrames, and visualize complexity distributions to understand how […]
06/02/2026
Waymo Introduces the Waymo World Model: A New Frontier Simulator Model for Autonomous Driving and Built on Top of Genie 3
Waymo is introducing the Waymo World Model, a frontier generative model that drives its next generation of autonomous driving simulation.The system is built on top of Genie 3, Google DeepMind’s general-purpose world model, and adapts it to produce photorealistic, controllable, multi-sensor driving scenes at scale.Waymo already reports nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles […]
06/02/2026
Compliance Meets AI: What’s New in Insider Risk Management for Copilot
That’s exactly why our latest Compliance Meets AI session, “What’s New – Insider Risk Management for Copilot,” focused on how organizations can confidently secure data in an increasingly agent-driven world.In this session, Kevin Uy walked through what’s new (and what’s next) in Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management, with a strong spotlight on Copilot, AI agents, and Security Copilot integration.From real-world risk scenarios to live demos, this was a practical deep dive into protecting your organization while still empowering innovation.
06/02/2026
Mirrored Azure SQL Database Not Replicating: Running but No Data
This blog walks through a real-world troubleshooting scenario where mirroring looked healthy on the surface, but replication never started. This article discusses Mirrored Azure SQL Database Not Replicating in Microsoft Fabric scenario.Microsoft Fabric Mirrored Databases from Azure SQL Database - Microsoft Fabric |
06/02/2026
Strategic Data Replication Enhances a Single Source of Truth Architecture for Analytics & AI
Strategic Data Replication is not Many Sources of Truth, and can be complimentary to a Single Source of Truth architectural design.Even in a highly regulated Healthcare data ecosystem, strategic replication can maintain a compliant source of truth as part of a larger strategy to scale and control costs.The concepts of single source of truth, data replication, data redundancy, and data duplication are often convoluted and can lead to misunderstandings that result in poorly performing and unnecessarily expensive architectures.I've published a new video that attempts to unwind the problem.
06/02/2026
Kimi-K2.5 Now in Microsoft Foundry
Kimi K-2.5 is now available in Microsoft Foundry Kimi K2.5, Moonshot AI’s next generation multimodal and agentic model, is now available in Microsoft Foundry.This new release delivers major advances in vision language integration, agentic execution, scaling efficiency, and multimodal coding workflows.
06/02/2026
Azure Blob Tiering: Clarity, Truths, and Practical Guidance for Architects
“Cold tier is slower to restore than Hot.”This article clarifies these points, explains how Azure Blob Storage behaves at scale, and provides a reference architecture for large backup repositories.Azure Blob Storage separates availability from cost using four access tiers:
06/02/2026
Chat with Your App Service Logs Using GitHub Copilot
We've built a proof-of-concept MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that exposes App Service observability tools directly to AI assistants like GitHub Copilot in VS Code.It can be accessed from your preferred IDE like VS Code, or directly in your CLI such as GitHub Copilot CLI or Claude Code.This is a proof-of-concept demonstrating what an App Service AI observability tool could look like.
06/02/2026
Choosing the Right Intelligence Layer for Your Application
One of the most common questions developers ask when planning AI-powered applications is: "Should I use the GitHub Copilot SDK or the Microsoft Agent Framework?" It's a natural question, both technologies let you add an intelligence layer to your apps, both come from Microsoft's ecosystem, and both deal with AI agents.The short answer is this: the Copilot SDK puts Copilot inside your app, while the Agent Framework lets you build your app out of agents.When deciding between the Copilot SDK and the Agent Framework, or both, consider these questions about your application.
06/02/2026
Unlock outbound traffic insights with Azure StandardV2 NAT Gateway flow logs
StandardV2 NAT Gateway is the next evolution of outbound connectivity in Azure.This blog will focus on how enabling StandardV2 NAT Gateway flow logs can be beneficial for your team along with some tips to get the most out of the data.The following query will generate a table and chart of the total packets sent per minute from your source IP to the destination IP through your NAT gateway in the last 24 hours.
06/02/2026
Proactive Resiliency in Azure for Specialized Workload i.e. Citrix VDI on Azure Design Framework.
In this post, I’ll share my perspective on designing cloud architectures for near-zero downtime.We’ll explore how adopting multi-region strategies and other best practices can dramatically improve reliability.The discussion will be technically and architecturally driven covering key decisions around network architecture, data replication, user experience continuity, and cost management but also touch on the business angle of why this matters.
06/02/2026
Centralized cluster performance metrics with ReFrame HPC and Azure Log Analytics
This is where the combination of ReFrame HPC, a powerful and feature rich testing framework, and Azure Log Analytics can help improve confidence and assurance in the performance and accuracy of a system. Here we will look at how to configure ReFrame HPC specifically for Azure: Deploying the required Azure resources, running a test and capturing the results in Log Analytics for analysis.By standardizing on the combination of ReFrame HPC and Azure Log Analytics for testing and reporting of performance data across our clusters, whether Slurm based, Azure CycleCloud or existing on-prem clusters, you can gain unprecendented visibility and confidence in the systems you manage and the codes you deploy that were previously hard to obtain.
06/02/2026
From Zero to 16 Games in 2 Hours
From Zero to 16 Games in 2 Hours: Teaching Prompt Engineering to Students with GitHub Copilot CLIInstead, we witnessed something remarkable: 16 fully functional HTML5 games created in under two hours, all from students with varying programming experience.By teaching students to communicate clearly with AI, we transformed a traditional coding workshop into a rapid prototyping session that exceeded everyone's expectations.
06/02/2026
Complete Guide to Deploying OpenClaw on Azure Windows 11 Virtual Machine
Deploying OpenClaw on an Azure virtual machine instead of your personal computer offers significant security benefits:This deployment script uses Azure CLI to automate the installation of OpenClaw and its dependencies on a Windows 11 virtual machine.Add Node.js and npm global paths to the system PATH environment variable:
06/02/2026
Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.6 With 1M Context, Agentic Coding, Adaptive Reasoning Controls, and Expanded Safety Tooling Capabilities
Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4.6, its most capable model to date, focused on long-context reasoning, agentic coding, and high-value knowledge work.The model builds on Claude Opus 4.5 and is now available on claude.ai, the Claude API, and major cloud providers under the ID claude-opus-4-6.The post Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.6 With 1M Context, Agentic Coding, Adaptive Reasoning Controls, and Expanded Safety Tooling Capabilities appeared first on MarkTechPost.
05/02/2026
Get started with Dynatrace MCP server in Azure SRE Agent
Dynatrace provides a hosted MCP server that enables Azure SRE Agent to interact with the Dynatrace observability platform via SSE (Server-Sent Events) transport.Query logs, investigate problems, analyze security vulnerabilities, and execute DQL (Dynatrace Query Language), and generate timeseries forecasts directly from your SRE Agent conversations.Create a Platform Token
05/02/2026
Join us at SQLCon 2026
SQLCon 2026, the premier Microsoft SQL Community Conference, is co-located with the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference (FabCon) from March 16-20, 2026! Register today!This year, your Azure Data Community worlds collide, bringing the SQL and Fabric communities together for a brand-new experience.Unforgettable experiences: Join us for both keynotes at the State Farm Arena and celebrate at the legendary attendee party at the Georgia Aquarium.
05/02/2026
Introducing Copilot Connector Checker
Copilot connector content powers other Microsoft 365 intelligent experiences like Microsoft Search, Context IQ and AgentsWhat is the Copilot Connector Checker?The Copilot Connector Checker is a lightweight, self‑service tool that helps you quickly validate your third‑party prerequisites before configuring a connector.
05/02/2026
OpenAI Just Launched GPT-5.3-Codex: A Faster Agentic Coding Model Unifying Frontier Code Performance And Professional Reasoning Into One System
OpenAI has just introduced GPT-5.3-Codex, a new agentic coding model that extends Codex from writing and reviewing code to handling a broad range of work on a computer.The model combines the frontier coding performance of GPT-5.2-Codex with the reasoning and professional knowledge capabilities of GPT-5.2 into a single system, and it runs 25% faster […]The post OpenAI Just Launched GPT-5.3-Codex: A Faster Agentic Coding Model Unifying Frontier Code Performance And Professional Reasoning Into One System appeared first on MarkTechPost.
05/02/2026
February update: What's new in AI Business Solutions for Partners
For a limited time, save up to 35% with these Microsoft 365 Copilot Business promotional offers available to all Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners until March 31, 2026, on annual commitments (monthly or annual billing).15% off Microsoft 365 Copilot Business for 1–300 seats ($18/user/month*)Promo Extended! Strengthen data security for Copilot at a lower cost with Microsoft Purview Suite for Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is available at 50% off through June 30, 2026, to support enterprise organizations in reducing costs and strengthen data security.
05/02/2026
EP 35 | Business Central Data Migration Without Chaos
That’s exactly how host, Anthony Carrano with Dunamis Marketing, opened a recent episode of IAMCP Profiles in Partnership episode “Ledger Migrator: Automating Financial Migration for Business Central Partners,” featuring Ledger Migrator founders Robert Papier and Gerry Allan.In this post, we’ll break down the most useful insights from the conversation and show how Ledger Migrator’s approach is becoming a real advantage for partners.Ledger Migrator allows partners to transfer complete financial history—not just opening balances—so customers move to Business Central with full data continuity.
05/02/2026
More logical navigation through Word documents for screen readers
I’m happy to announce a new setting in Microsoft Word for Windows that allows you to use the up and down arrow keys to move through all the content in your document based on the logical reading order.More logical navigation through Word documents for screen readersThis change is available to Word for Windows users running Version 2603 (Build 19727.20000) or later.
05/02/2026
Frontline Agent: An Out-of-the-Box AI Assistant for Every Frontline Teammate
For this reason, we’re excited to introduce Frontline Agent, now available in Public Preview.This purpose-built, persona-tuned AI assistant is designed to help frontline workers across industries like retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and hospitality find information quickly, stay caught up, and coordinate work with confidence.Frontline Agent is available out-of-the-box in Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as in the Microsoft Teams chat rail.
05/02/2026
General Availability of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Graph API for E3 Customers
As of December 1st, 2025, the Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Graph API Standard hit General Availability (GA).It provides a programmatic way to manage eDiscovery cases, searches, holds, and exports for organizations that have only M365 E3 licenses.To enable investigators to authenticate and use the eDiscovery cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph API PowerShell module; the Microsoft Graph Command Line Tools enterprise app must be added to Entra ID and the appropriate Graph API permissions consented to.
05/02/2026
How to Build Production-Grade Data Validation Pipelines Using Pandera, Typed Schemas, and Composable DataFrame Contracts
Schemas, and Composable DataFrame ContractsIn this tutorial, we demonstrate how to build robust, production-grade data validation pipelines using Pandera with typed DataFrame models.We start by simulating realistic, imperfect transactional data and progressively enforce strict schema constraints, column-level rules, and cross-column business logic using declarative checks.We show how lazy validation helps us surface multiple […]
05/02/2026
Building Secure, Enterprise Ready AI Agents with Purview SDK and Agent Framework
At Microsoft Ignite, we announced the public preview of Purview integration with the Agent Framework SDK—making it easier to build AI agents that are secure, compliant, and enterprise‑ready from day one.AI agents are quickly moving from demos to production.Purview SDK brings Microsoft’s enterprise data security and compliance directly into the agent runtime, so governance travels with the agent—not after it.
05/02/2026
What's New in Microsoft Intune – January 2026
In this blog post, I’ll highlight the recent capabilities that I’m personally excited about.Today, many organizations customize app deployments outside Intune using PowerShell scripts to handle prerequisite checks, post-install steps, dependencies, and registry updates.It means app deployment gets faster, customization gets easier, and teams in highly regulated industries like finance and healthcare can use the script to enforce compliance steps as part of the app installation process.
05/02/2026
EPAM is fast-tracking AI readiness with Microsoft Credentials
By combining Microsoft Certifications and Microsoft Applied Skills with its own skill-building programs, EPAM is helping employees validate their technical expertise and demonstrate real-world proficiency with Microsoft technologies.EPAM is reducing onboarding time by nearly half, shrinking the ramp-up time from three and a half months to just two.Applied Skills help new engineers get project‑ready faster and retain knowledge better, freeing managers to focus on strategic client work.
05/02/2026
How Sales Development Agent Helps Teams Scale Outbound Outreach Without Sacrificing Quality
Enterprise sales organizations face a persistent challenge: scaling outbound operations while maintaining message quality, brand consistency, and conversion performance.The Sales Development Agent (SDA) addresses this gap through a fundamentally different approach. Rather than relying on sellers to manually handle repetitive qualification and early-stage outreach, SDA consistently executes your defined playbook at scale, freeing your team to focus on what they do best: building relationships and closing deals with pre-qualified, high-intent prospects. We’ve recently announced the Microsoft Sales Bench, a new collection of evaluation benchmarks designed to assess the performance of AI-powered sales agents across real-world scenarios.
05/02/2026
January 2026 Recap: Azure Database for PostgreSQL
A new Ansible module is now available with support for the latest GA REST API features, enabling customers to automate provisioning and management of Azure Database for PostgreSQL resources.We have released updated SDKs for Go, Java, JavaScript, .NET, and Python, built on the latest GA REST API (2025‑08‑01).Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server now supports a broader set of resiliency and lifecycle management capabilities on Premium SSD v2, enabling production‑grade PostgreSQL deployments with improved durability, availability, and operational flexibility.
05/02/2026
MVPs Global Student Innovation: Sprint to Imagine Cup 2026
Microsoft MVPs played a pivotal role in igniting student creativity through Sprint to Imagine Cup 2026 engagements.These community-driven sessions brought Agentic AI, Azure AI, and Copilot Studio directly to universities and developer communities across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.What began as local sprints evolved into a global movement democratizing innovation and empowering thousands of students to build their first AI-powered solutions.
05/02/2026
Exchange Online EWS, Your Time is Almost Up
Exchange Web Services (EWS) is approaching end of service in Exchange Online.In 2023, we announced that EWS will be disabled in Exchange Online in October 2026.Today we’re announcing we will use a phased, admin controllable disablement plan that starts in October 2026 and concludes with a complete shutdown of EWS in 2027.
05/02/2026
Observability in Generative AI: Building Trust with Systematic Evaluation in Microsoft Foundry
Evaluators are specialized tools used to assess the behavior of generative AI models, applications, and agents.By embedding evaluation and monitoring across model selection, preproduction testing, and production operation, Microsoft Foundry enables teams to make trust measurable and maintain high standards of quality, safety, and reliability as AI systems scale.Transparency Note for Safety Evaluations: Microsoft Foundry risk and safety evaluations (preview) Transparency Note - Microsoft Foundry |
05/02/2026
Build an AI app or agent faster to sell on Marketplace with App Advisor
When paired with focused build and alignment checklists, App Advisor helps you ship faster and prepare your solution for the Marketplace from day one.The Create an Agent MVP in 30 Days checklist turns Microsoft Foundry best practices into an actionable build plan. It’s organized around the same well-architected pillars, making it easy to move from design to implementation without losing alignment.See the difference when you build with the proven framework of Microsoft Foundry and selling well-architected apps and agents in Marketplace.
05/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 5, 2026
Learn about 172 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs.CluedIn combines automated data management capabilities with governance to produce consistent, high-quality, trusted data outputs across the enterprise.Bytello can be accessed by voice, signature, social account, or QR code, and data is isolated in a secure, account-specific space, separate from other users.
05/02/2026
SDC Academy live Webcast and Recordings
We’re excited to introduce our live webcast series,designed to help Software Development Companies (SDCs) succeed by providing consolidated resources and expert-led sessions.Marketplace Hero for Software Development Companies - Thursday, February 12, 2026 15:00 - 16:00 Berlin Time - Registration Link
05/02/2026
Automating Azure OpenAI/Foundry Model Lifecycle Management
It scans your Azure subscriptions, finds every OpenAI and AI Foundry deployment, pulls actual usage data from Azure Monitor, and flags models that are about to retire.Full documentation, parameters, and examples are in the [README](https://github.com/anishek-microsoft/foundry_model_audit).Deploy the script as an Azure Function with a timer trigger.
05/02/2026
AKS Tenant Migration: Considerations and Approach
When an Azure subscription is shifted between directories (Azure AD tenants), the Azure Container Registry (ACR) cannot be directly transferred in its current state.This blog outlines the necessary steps to transition the ACR from one tenant to another tenant.Assign the User Managed Identity contributor permissions on source ACR in source tenant
05/02/2026
An AI led SDLC: Building an End-to-End Agentic Software Development Lifecycle with Azure and GitHub.
Suddenly, AI tools and agents are picking up more and more of today’s complicated and advanced tasks.In 2025, GitHub released the open-source Spec Kit: a tool that enables the goal of placing a specification at the centre of the engineering process.Talking of coding agents, GitHub Copilot’s coding agent is an autonom
05/02/2026
Building engaging forms with SharePoint - Plumsail - SharePoint Partner Showcase
Plumsail builds solutions for the Microsoft 365 and SharePoint ecosystem, including custom form tools, a ticketing system, an organizational chart, and document generation capabilities.The session showcases and demonstrates the capabilities of Plumsail Forms, a custom solution for creating modern and fully customizable forms for SharePoint Online, that combines two connected products: Forms for SharePoint for internal processes and Public Web Forms for secure data collection from external users. By building natively on the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), Plumsail's solutions function as integral parts of Microsoft 365, inheriting native Entry security and data residency within the customer tenant.
05/02/2026
Writing Effective Prompts for Testing Scenarios: AI Assisted Quality Engineering
Across enterprises, quality engineering teams are actively shifting from manual-heavy testing approaches to AI-first QA, where tools like GitHub Copilot participate throughout the SDLC—from requirement analysis to regression triage.They use AI to “generate test cases” or “write automation,” but struggle with inconsistent outputs, shallow coverage, and trust issues.This blog moves past basic prompting tips to cover QA practices, focusing on effective prompt design and common pitfalls.
05/02/2026
Agents League: Build, Learn, and Level Up Your AI Skills
We're inviting the next generation of developers to join Agents League, running February 16-27.It's a two-week challenge where you'll build AI agents using production-ready tools, learn from live coding sessions, and get feedback directly from Microsoft product teams.Agents League starts on February 16th and runs through February 27th.
05/02/2026
Mistral AI Launches Voxtral Transcribe 2: Pairing Batch Diarization And Open Realtime ASR For Multilingual Production Workloads At Scale
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is becoming a core building block for AI products, from meeting tools to voice agents.Mistral’s new Voxtral Transcribe 2 family targets this space with 2 models that split cleanly into batch and realtime use cases, while keeping cost, latency, and deployment constraints in focus.The release includes: Both models are […]
05/02/2026
Mitä Microsoft Partner of the Year merkitsee asiakkaillemme ja mitä AI-first tarkoittaa Vivictalle?
Vivictan rooli Microsoft-kumppanina on yhdistää asiakkaan liiketoimintatavoitteet, Microsoftin teknologia ja käytännön toteutusosaaminen.AI-first tarkoittaa Vivictalle sitä, että tekoäly on luonteva osa ratkaisuja alusta alkaen – turvallisesti ja vastuullisesti.Rakennamme tekoälyagentteja osaksi liiketoimintaprosesseja: asiakaspalveluun, taloushallinnon rutiineihin ja kenttähuoltoon.
05/02/2026
NVIDIA AI Release VibeTensor: An AI Generated Deep Learning Runtime Built End to End by Coding Agents Programmatically
NVIDIA has released VIBETENSOR, an open-source research system software stack for deep learning.VIBETENSOR is generated by LLM-powered coding agents under high-level human guidance.The system asks a concrete question: can coding agents generate a coherent deep learning runtime that spans Python and JavaScript APIs down to C++ runtime components and CUDA memory management and […]
05/02/2026
Marketplace Partner Digest
Welcome to the February edition of the Marketplace Partner Digest. This month’s roundup brings together the most important Microsoft Marketplace updates, program changes, and partner‑focused resources to help you strengthen your co‑sell motions, optimize your listings, and accelerate revenue through Microsoft Marketplace.⚙️The skilling requirements for the Microsoft Azure VMware Solution specialization will change in January 2026.
05/02/2026
Join Microsoft as we share more on Maia 200 in the Bay Area
In the next major step in our AI Infrastructure evolution, last week we introduced Maia 200, a breakthrough inference accelerator engineered to dramatically improve the economics of AI token generation.Microsoft engineering leaders will be showcasing our latest silicon innovation in San Francisco this month.Microsoft has submitted a technical whitepaper around Maia 200 as part of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC).
04/02/2026
Coming Soon! SC‑5009 Instructor-led Training
Announcing SC‑5009: Secure AI solutions in the cloud using Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft EntraThis new ILT is scheduled to be released on March 27, 2026.This course will bring together cloud security and identity content to help learners prepare for the Secure AI Solutions in the Cloud Applied Skills assessment and deepen their Microsoft Entra skills for real‑world scenarios.
04/02/2026
How to Build Efficient Agentic Reasoning Systems by Dynamically Pruning Multiple Chain-of-Thought Paths Without Losing Accuracy
In this tutorial, we implement an agentic chain-of-thought pruning framework that generates multiple reasoning paths in parallel and dynamically reduces them using consensus signals and early stopping.We focus on improving reasoning efficiency by reducing unnecessary token usage while preserving answer correctness, demonstrating that self-consistency and lightweight graph-based agreement can serve as effective proxies for […]The post How to Build Efficient Agentic Reasoning Systems by Dynamically Pruning Multiple Chain-of-Thought Paths Without Losing Accuracy appeared first on MarkTechPost.
04/02/2026
Driving Global SMB Impact Through AI Powered, Partner Led Digital Sales
Join Siew Hoon Goh, General Manager of Microsoft’s Global Vendor Digital Sales (VDS) organization, as she shares how VDS is transforming SMB engagement through digitally‑scaled, partner‑centric sales motions that deliver impact worldwide.Under her leadership, VDS has become a core engine in Microsoft’s SMB strategy—driving significant YoY revenue growth, pioneering AI‑forward sales capabilities, and strengthening global alignment across Americas, EMEA, and Asia.In this session, Siew Hoon Goh will explore:
04/02/2026
Zero Trust with Azure Firewall, Azure DDoS Protection and Azure WAF: A practical use case
It is within this context that combining the use of Azure Firewall, Azure DDoS Protection and Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) services to secure Web Applications while protecting the network perimeter becomes important.Defense-in-depth: Why Azure WAF, Azure DDoS Protection and Azure Firewall are essential for Zero TrustIn these sections ahead, we examine the common network and application-layer attack vectors that target modern web applications and illustrate how Azure WAF, Azure DDoS protection, and Azure Firewall, when layered strategically, work in tandem to mitigate these threats.
04/02/2026
ZoomIt v10.0, Sysmon 1.5 for Linux, Sigcheck v2.91, RAMMap v1.62, and RDCMan v3.12
This update to Sysmon for Linux, a tool that monitors and logs system activity including process lifetime, network connections, file system writes, and more, adds EbpfEvent for monitoring Linux EBPF program loading.This update to RAMMap, an advanced physical memory usage analysis utility for Windows, fixes a display bug for file streams containing non-printable characters.This update to RDCMan, a tool for managing and connecting to Remote Desktop sessions, fixes IPv6 parsing, and fixes a double click bug.
04/02/2026
How Nonprofits Can Strengthen Cybersecurity with Small Steps (That Make a Big Difference)
Discover tailored events and training opportunities designed to help you maximize your impact and strengthen your organization’s security posture.Learn how to configure SIEM and SOAR capabilities in Microsoft Sentinel to strengthen your security operations.Explore how Microsoft Security Copilot combines generative AI with Microsoft’s security tools to help analysts investigate incidents and automate tasks.
04/02/2026
Google Introduces Agentic Vision in Gemini 3 Flash for Active Image Understanding
Frontier multimodal models usually process an image in a single pass.Google’s new Agentic Vision capability in Gemini 3 Flash changes this by turning image understanding into an active, tool using loop grounded in visual […]The post Google Introduces Agentic Vision in Gemini 3 Flash for Active Image Understanding appeared first on MarkTechPost.
04/02/2026
Azure Automated Virtual Machine Recovery: Minimizing Downtime
Azure Automated VM Recovery requires no setup or configuration.Automated VM recovery is essential to keeping cloud services resilient, reliable, and interruption-free.Over the past 18 months, this solution has cut average VM downtime by more than half, significantly enhancing reliability and customer experience.
04/02/2026
Join a Partner Project Ready Workshop to turn your expertise into impact
With a new year just beginning, now is the time to build the skills that power key roles across your organization.Make skilling a priority to turn expertise into real business impact across AI, cloud, and security skill sets.Check out the upcoming Project Ready Workshops for AI Business Solutions, Cloud & AI Platforms, and Security.
04/02/2026
Serverless GPU Tutorial: Build an AI Image Generator with Azure Functions on Container Apps
In this tutorial, we'll show you how to build one using Azure Functions running on Azure Container Apps with serverless GPUs.We're going to create an API that turns text descriptions into images using Stable Diffusion.Part 4: Create the Container App with Azure Functions
04/02/2026
Azure Virtual Desktop is now available in US Gov Texas in Azure Government
Today Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is now available in the USGov Texas region of Azure Government, providing customers with an additional region for deploying secure and flexible virtual desktop environments that support a broad range of mission needs.Azure Virtual Desktop is continually improving to offer secure, dependable, and high-quality experiences on Azure Government.Customers can now create host pools in the USGov Texas region, helping reduce connection latency and improving how quickly users can access and interact with their Azure Virtual Desktop environments.
04/02/2026
Introducing the EMEA SDC Academy: A Centralized Hub for Deep Technical Enablement
Software Development Companies (SDCs) across EMEA are building faster, smarter, and more scalable solutions than ever before.To support this momentum, we’re excited to introduce the SDC Academy - a new technical content hub designed to help SDCs accelerate innovation and bring high‑quality solutions to market.This blog and webinar series brings together expert‑led deep dives, architectural guidance, and applied best practices across the Microsoft ecosystem, including Azure, AI, Marketplace, and multi‑tenant design patterns.
04/02/2026
How AI Is Transforming Performance Testing
Yet, in today’s world of distributed microservices, unpredictable user behaviour, and global-scale cloud environments, traditional performance testing methods are struggling to keep up.Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI) — not as another industry buzzword, but as a real enabler of smarter, faster, and more predictive performance testing.From smarter workload generation to advanced anomaly detection and predictive modelling, AI shifts testing from reactive validation to proactive optimization.
04/02/2026
Export Your ML Model in ONNX Format
When building machine learning models, training is only half the journey.
04/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 4, 2026
1099 Per-Line Control for Dynamics 365 Business Central: Evergrowth Consulting’s 1099 Per-Line Control module for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central lets organizations assign 1099 amounts at the line-item level during purchase entry, improving accuracy and auditability while eliminating year-end reconciliations and manual adjustments.Available for U.S. users, the solution supports SOX and NI 52-109 compliance and requires Microsoft IRS Forms activation. AKQUINET 365 Notes: AKQUINET 365 Notes enhances Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with intelligent, context-based notifications during document processing.Designed for customers who need to modernize their infrastructure while meeting stringent government security requirements, this service from Arctic IT will move your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management from the Commercial Cloud to the U.S. Government Community Cloud (GCC/GCC High) for streamlined compliance.
04/02/2026
AI AGENT RACE FINLAND 2026 käynnistyy!
Nominoinnin tulee perustua todelliseen asiakastarpeeseen, jossa tekoälyagentti on käytössä tuotannossa tai selkeästi siirtymässä tuotantoon.Voittajat ja muut parhaat asiakastoteutukset julkaistaan ja juhlistetaan 28.4.2026 Microsoft AI Tour -tapahtuman lavalla. AI Agent Race 2026 on kutsu kumppaneille siirtyä agenttimoodiin – rakentaa, ottaa käyttöön ja osoittaa, miten tekoälyagentit tuottavat todellista ja kestävää arvoa asiakkaille.
04/02/2026
ImportExportJobError, SQL72012, SQL72014, SQL72045.
When trying to Import .bacpac file via Azure Portal, it fails with below error:The DAC framework hit a hard error and failed due to conflicts with existing system objects in the target database.Import a BACPAC File to Create a Database in Azure SQL Database - Azure SQL Database & Azure SQL Managed Instance |
04/02/2026
Building with Azure OpenAI Sora: A Complete Guide to AI Video Generation
In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore how to integrate both Sora 1 and Sora 2 models from Azure OpenAI Service into a production web application.We'll cover API integration, request body parameters, cost analysis, limitations, and the key differences between using Azure AI Foundry endpoints versus OpenAI's native API.This blog post is based on real-world implementation experience building LemonGrab, my AI video generation platform that integrates both Sora 1 and Sora 2 through Azure AI Foundry.
04/02/2026
Rethinking Documentation Translation: Treating Translations as Versioned Software Assets
I am the maintainer of Co-op Translator,an open-source tool for automating multilingual documentation translation,used across multiple large documentation repositories, includingMicrosoft’s For Beginners series.In large documentation repositories, translation problems rarely fail loudly.They fail quietly, and they accumulate over time.Translations are treated as versioned software assets, not static outputs.
04/02/2026
Azure CLI Windows MSI Upgrade Issue: Root Cause, Mitigation, and Performance Improvements
Azure CLI on Windows MSI Upgrade IssueAbout six months ago, some Windows users experienced an Azure CLI crash after upgrading via the MSI installer from Azure CLI 2.76.0 (or earlier) to 2.77.0 (or later).The MSI upgrade process for Azure CLI on Windows has been significantly improved.
04/02/2026
A Coding Implementation to Train Safety-Critical Reinforcement Learning Agents Offline Using Conservative Q-Learning with d3rlpy and Fixed Historical Data
In this tutorial, we build a safety-critical reinforcement learning pipeline that learns entirely from fixed, offline data rather than live exploration.We design a custom environment, generate a behavior dataset from a constrained policy, and then train both a Behavior Cloning baseline and a Conservative Q-Learning agent using d3rlpy.The post A Coding Implementation to Train Safety-Critical Reinforcement Learning Agents Offline Using Conservative Q-Learning with d3rlpy and Fixed Historical Data appeared first on MarkTechPost.
04/02/2026
Inside CodeMash 2026: A Geek Family Reunion (Powered by Microsoft MVPs)
Microsoft MVP meet-up at the CodeMash 2026 conferenceThis year, Microsoft MVPs covered cloud, AI, security, data, and developer tools - and also gave back through volunteer leadership, from helping with speaker/session selection to supporting safety and inclusion.CodeMash is built for builders - and the MVP sessions leaned hard into practical, hands-on takeaways - from AI and cloud to security, data, and developer productivity.
04/02/2026
The Microsoft Copilot Data Connector for Microsoft Sentinel is Now in Public Preview
We are happy to announce a new data connector that is available the public: the Microsoft Copilot data connector for Microsoft Sentinel.The new Microsoft Copilot data connector will allow for audit logs and activities generated by different offerings of Copilot to be ingested into Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Sentinel data lake.The connector is available for all customers within Microsoft Sentinel, but will only ingest data for environments that have access to Copilot licenses and SCUs as the activities rely on Copilot being used.
03/02/2026
The Agentic SOC Era: How Sentinel MCP Enables Autonomous Security Reasoning
Security teams already have access to enormous volumes of telemetry across identity, endpoint, network, and cloud. The real challenge isn’t collecting more data. It’s turning that data into faster decisions and better protection. This is where AI changes the game.
03/02/2026
Qwen Team Releases Qwen3-Coder-Next: An Open-Weight Language Model Designed Specifically for Coding Agents and Local Development
Qwen team has just released Qwen3-Coder-Next, an open-weight language model designed for coding agents and local development. It sits on top of the Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B backbone. The model uses a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with hybrid attention. It has 80B total parameters, but only 3B parameters are activated per token. The goal is to match the […] The post
03/02/2026
How to Build Advanced Quantum Algorithms Using Qrisp with Grover Search, Quantum Phase Estimation, and QAOA
In this tutorial, we present an advanced, hands-on tutorial that demonstrates how we use Qrisp to build and execute non-trivial quantum algorithms. We walk through core Qrisp abstractions for quantum data, construct entangled states, and then progressively implement Grover’s search with automatic uncomputation, Quantum Phase Estimation, and a full QAOA workflow for the MaxCut problem. […] The post
03/02/2026
Reference Architecture for Highly Available Multi-Region Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Introduction Cloud-native applications often support critical business functions and are expected to stay available even when parts of the platform fail. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) already provides strong availability features within a single region, such as availability zones and a managed control plane. However, a regional outage is still a scenari...
03/02/2026
Architecting an Azure AI Hub-and-Spoke Landing Zone for Multi-Tenant Enterprises
A large enterprise customer adopting AI at scale typically needs three non‑negotiables in its AI foundation: End‑to‑end tenant isolation across network, identity, compute, and data Secure, governed traffic flow from users to AI services Transparent chargeback/showback for shared AI and platform services At the same time, the platform must enable rapid onboarding of new tenants or applications and s...
03/02/2026
Extending Defender’s AI Threat Protection to Microsoft Foundry Agents
AI is moving from responses to actions In our previous announcement, we introduced new threat protection capabilities for custom AI applications, helping organizations detect prompt injections, jailbreak attempts, sensitive data exposure, and other AI-specific risks. But the AI landsca...
03/02/2026
Agents in OneDrive Now Generally Available: Your AI Assistant Built with Your Own Content
If you’ve ever wished Copilot could remember the context of a project, understand the documents your team already relies on, or answer repeat questions without retracing your steps, Agents in OneDrive were built for you. Rather than asking Copilot the same questions across individual files, you can now create an Agent that understands an entire set of documents, project plans, specs, meeting notes, research, or decks, and responds with answers grounded in your content. What is ...
03/02/2026
Partner Blog | Unlocking the profitability multiplier: Maximizing revenue with Microsoft Marketplace
As organizations look to build their AI-first strategies, Microsoft partners are central to turning that ambition into customer outcomes and advancing frontier transformation. Customers are asking for guidance on how to right-size their cloud and AI investments to maximize impact without compromising on security or governance. At the same time, expectations are rising—software companies need mechanisms to scale their software and shorten time-to-value while channel partners need to curate AI ...
03/02/2026
Partner Case Study | Mead Johnson Nutrition
In the race to innovate, global enterprises aren’t usually held back by a lack of ideas but rather by the friction hidden in their data. Legacy SAP systems, siloed data storage environments, and inconsistent data structures can quietly slow operations, including reporting, forecasting, compliance, and even cutting-edge AI adoption. This friction can be especially acute in the retail life sciences and consumer health sectors, where any new products must adhere to strict standards of saf...
03/02/2026
Cloud forensics: Forensic readiness and incident response in Azure Virtual Desktop
Co-authors: Dan Weinstock and Christoph Dreymann Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) has rapidly become a core tool for enabling remote work at scale. Consequently, it’s also emerging as a target for threat actors. Recent Microsoft Incident Response engagements show that threat actors are exploiting AVD deployments for lateral movement and persistence. By hijacking legitimate AVD user accounts, they gain what is essentially a trusted “endpoint” inside the network without hav...
03/02/2026
Admin tasks in Microsoft Intune: Centralized control today, AI-ready for tomorrow
IT admins make daily, quiet decisions that determine whether an organization stays secure, compliant, and productive. They review privilege requests, security remediation actions, and high-impact configuration changes across multiple consoles. Given the growing breadth of their daily responsibilities, scattered decision points could lead to slower response times, increased risks, and make audit readiness harder to maintain.
03/02/2026
Short month survival guide: Planning, checklists, and calendar wins with Copilot
February may be the shortest month of the year, but it doesn’t have to be the least productive. With Microsoft 365 Copilot, you can turn tight timelines into big wins by planning smarter, streamlining tasks, and reclaiming your calendar. Here’s how to make every day count in February. Plan smarter with Copilot When time is limited, planning becomes your superpower. Copilot can help you create a roadmap that prioritizes what matters most. Copilot prompt:
03/02/2026
Retina 1.0 Is Now Available
We are excited to announce the first major release of Retina - a significant milestone for the project. This version brings along many new features, enhancements and bug fixes. The Retina maintainer team would like to thank all contributors, community members, and early adopters who helped make this 1.0 release possible. What is Retina? Retina is an open-source, Kubernetes network o...
03/02/2026
What’s New in Microsoft Teams | January 2026 – ISE Edition
Welcome to 2026! This first ’What’s new in Teams’ of the year is a “2-in-1” edition. We’re not only introducing the usual monthly range of new features and capabilities designed to enhance your Teams experience, we’re also shining a spotlight on the Teams features that will be showcased at the Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) 2026 conference in Barcelona, Spain. ISE brings together technology leaders, partners, and customers from around the world, making it the perfect venue to demonstr...
03/02/2026
Microsoft Teams events: A new unified experience makes it easier to discover, create, and manage events
Today’s organizational challenges and growing complexity can make it difficult to create meaningful connections with audiences, whether engaging employees or reaching a dispersed customer base. Having the right tools to navigate the demands of large-scale communication for digital and hybrid events is critical to achieving business objectives. We are excited to introduce the new Teams events experience designed to simplify how events are discov...
03/02/2026
Retiring Teams live events: The next chapter for events at scale in Microsoft Teams
Today, we’re announcing the retirement of Microsoft Teams live events and the associated Microsoft Graph APIs used to create Teams live events. This change will go into effect June 30, 2026, as part of our ongoing effort to continue to modernize our event experiences and deliver a more powerful and flexible solution for large-scale communications. While Teams live events will no longer be available to schedule after the retirement date...
03/02/2026
Jamf Software and Opsera offer transactable solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like Jamf Software and Opsera deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace. Learn about these offers below:
03/02/2026
Monthly news - February 2026
Microsoft DefenderMonthly news - February 2026 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from January 2026. Defender for Cloud has its own Monthly News post, have a look
03/02/2026
MDEP at ISE 2026: A New Era for Enterprise Devices
At Microsoft, after years of building operating systems, Android apps and devices, and supporting customers who depend on robust, secure platforms in shared spaces, one thing has become clear: Enterprises need an enterprise‑grade Android platform. The Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP) is an enterprise‑grade software platform designed to meet the highest standards of security, reliability, ease of deployment, and innovation. Built on the robust foundation of the AOSP, MDEP prov...
03/02/2026
Alternatives After the Deprecation of the Azure SQL Migration Extension in Azure Data Studio
The Azure SQL Migration extension for Azure Data Studio is being deprecated and will be retired by February 28, 2026. As part of our unified and streamlined migration strategy for Azure SQL, we are consolidating all migration experiences into a consistent, scalable platform. If you are currently using the Azure SQL Migration extensio...
03/02/2026
How to Build Safe Natural Language-Driven APIs
TL;DR Building production natural language APIs requires separating semantic parsing from execution. Use LLMs to translate user text into canonical structured requests (via schemas), then execute those requests deterministically. Key patterns: schema completion for clarification, confidence gates to prevent sil...
03/02/2026
The Perfect Fusion of GitHub Copilot SDK and Cloud Native
In today's rapidly evolving AI landscape, we've witnessed the transformation from simple chatbots to sophisticated agent systems. As a developer and technology evangelist, I've observed an emerging trend—it's not about making AI omnipotent, but about enabling each AI Agent to achieve excellence in specific domains. Today, I want to share an exciting technology stack: GitHub Copilot SDK (a development toolkit that embeds production-grade agent engines i...
03/02/2026
How to Build Multi-Layered LLM Safety Filters to Defend Against Adaptive, Paraphrased, and Adversarial Prompt Attacks
In this tutorial, we build a robust, multi-layered safety filter designed to defend large language models against adaptive and paraphrased attacks. We combine semantic similarity analysis, rule-based pattern detection, LLM-driven intent classification, and anomaly detection to create a defense system that relies on no single point of failure. Also, we demonstrate how practical, production-style safety […] The post
03/02/2026
Support tip: Resolve device noncompliance with Mobile Threat Defense partner apps
Using a Mobile Threat Defense (MTD) solution, such as Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, with Microsoft Intune helps keep your organization’s resources protected and allows you to block devices that aren’t compliant with your organization’s policies. When an MTD detects a threat or determines that a device is noncompliant the device user will see one of two types of messages indicating: Install and activate partner app: The device needs the [MTD ...
02/02/2026
Virtualization Mode Unlocked
Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode is a new experience that helps you manage your virtualization infrastructure across your Hyper-V clusters, storage (SAN, NAS, and HCI), and networking configurations. Download Now in Public Preview! When searching for a new virtualization platform, one...
02/02/2026
Part 3: Build custom email security reports with Power BI and workbooks in Microsoft Sentinel
TL;DR: We're releasing a brand-new Power BI template for email security reporting and a major update (v3) to the Microsoft Sentinel workbook. Both solutions share the same rich visuals and insights. Choose Power BI for quick deployment without Sentinel, or the Sentinel workbook for extended data retention and multi-tenant scenarios. Get started in minutes with either option. Introduction Security teams in both small and large organizations tr...
02/02/2026
Windows news you can use: January 2026
Welcome to the January 2026 Windows news you can use, including new capabilities in Windows Backup for Organizations and Windows 365. Coming up on February 5, there will be another Secure Boot AMA, so please tune in to get answers to your questions. Then, on Mondays in March, join us for deep dives, AMAs, and more at Microsoft Technical Takeoff for Windows and Microsoft Intune. Check ou...
02/02/2026
Google Releases Conductor: a context driven Gemini CLI extension that stores knowledge as Markdown and orchestrates agentic workflows
Google has introduced Conductor, an open source preview extension for Gemini CLI that turns AI code generation into a structured, context driven workflow. Conductor stores product knowledge, technical decisions, and work plans as versioned Markdown inside the repository, then drives Gemini agents from those files instead of ad hoc chat prompts. From chat based coding […] The post
02/02/2026
How We Built an AI Operations Agent Using MCP Servers and Dynamic Tool Routing
In this post, we’re going to tackle a massive challenge in the agent space: Safety and Visibility. We are going to build a practical demo that connects two distinct MCP servers to a single agent service using the Microsoft Agents SDK and Azure OpenAI. To top it off, we’ll wrap it all in a lightweight web UI (AG-UI) that streams text, traces tool calls, and—crucially—gates state-changing actions behind ...
02/02/2026
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Customer Newsletter
What's new in Defender for Cloud? Now in public preview, Microsoft Security Private Link allows for private connectivity between Defender for Cloud and your workloads. For more information, see our public documentation<...
02/02/2026
Stand out as an authority on cloud sovereignty with the Digital Sovereignty specialization
The Digital Sovereignty specialization is designed to drive meaningful business outcomes. It differentiates your organization as a sovereign cloud leader, building trust with customers in compliance-heavy regions. It also opens access to high-value projects in regulated industries such as government, defense, banking, and healthcare. The Digital Sovereignty...
02/02/2026
Streamlined Moderation Approvals, Now in All Outlook Clients
Introduction Email Moderation in Exchange Online ensures messages that need human review don’t slip through. Today’s workflow, however, can be constraining and confusing: To approve or reject messages moderators must use Outlook clients that support voting buttons (not all of them do, e.g. Outlook Mobile), and they may receive multiple app...
02/02/2026
The Statistical Cost of Zero Padding in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)
What is Zero Padding Zero padding is a technique used in convolutional neural networks where additional pixels with a value of zero are added around the borders of an image. This allows convolutional kernels to slide over edge pixels and helps control how much the spatial dimensions of the feature map shrink after convolution. Padding […] The post The Stat...
02/02/2026
Turning Nonprofit Data Into Real Mission Power
Nonprofits today are surrounded by more data than ever before — but turning that information into real mission impact is still a challenge for many organizations. When data lives in disconnected systems or isn’t being used to its full potential, it becomes a barrier instead of a strength. With a thoughtful, mission‑aligned data strategy, however, data can become one of the most powerful tools your organization has. Harnessing Your Data to Drive Nonprofit Mission Success
02/02/2026
Tune in, skill up: Windows at Tech Takeoff 2026
Four Mondays. Dozens of Windows and Windows‑in‑the‑cloud deep dives. One perfect chance to skill up. Microsoft Technical Takeoff is back for 2026—and if you're focused on Windows, Windows 365, or Azure Virtual Desktop, this year's lineup is packed with practical demos, real‑world insights, and direct access to engineering teams to help you deploy faster, recover smarter, protect better, and optimize with confidence.<...
02/02/2026
IP Co-Sell best practices: What high performing SDCs do to accelerate Microsoft Marketplace success
Barbara Treviño (BT) is Director of Strategic Partnerships & Alliances at Labra. She is a seasoned partnership leader with more than a decade of experience across sales, partner operations, alliances, enablement, programs, and cloud marketplace go-to-market. ______________________...
02/02/2026
What is trending in Hugging Face on Microsoft Foundry? Feb, 2, 2026
Open‑source AI is moving fast, with important breakthroughs in reasoning, agentic systems, multimodality, and efficiency emerging every day. Hugging Face has been a leading platform where researchers, startups, and developers share and discover new models. Microsoft Foundry brings these trending Hugging Face models into a production‑ready experience, where developers can explore, evaluate, and deploy them within their Azure environment. Our weekly Model Monday’s series highlights Hugging Face...
02/02/2026
Serverless Workspaces are generally available in Azure Databricks
Recently, we announced that Serverless Workspaces in public preview. Today, we are excited to share that Serverless Workspaces are generally available in Azure Databricks....
02/02/2026
What's in store for Intune at Microsoft Technical Takeoff 2026
It’s almost time for Microsoft Technical Takeoff, our month‑long digital skilling event designed to help IT admins and technical decision-makers go deeper with Windows, Microsoft Intune, and Windows 365. Every Monday in March, you’ll get fresh technical content, hands‑on guidance, and direct engagement with the engineering teams who build the products you use every day.
02/02/2026
UEBA Solution Power Boost: Practical Tools for Anomaly Detection
We are unveiling a major enhancement of Microsoft Sentinel’s UEBA Essentials solution. This update includes expanded multi-cloud anomaly detection queries across Azure, AWS, GCP, and Okta, as well as new queries leveraging the anomalies table. These enhancements allow users to rapidly identify high-risk anomalies, establish long-term baselines, align patterns with MITRE ATT&CK, highlight complex malicious IP activities, and generate comprehensive anomalous activity profiles for any user w...
02/02/2026
Make math inclusive for everyone with Microsoft 365
Hi, Insiders! I’m Peter Wu, a Principal Software Engineer on the PowerPoint team. Last fall, I shared many improvements to math in Microsoft 365, and I’m back this semester with even more. Make math inclus...
02/02/2026
Introducing communities in Teams: Unifying company communication and connection
Today, we’re excited to introduce a new, unified experience that brings Viva Engage communities directly into Microsoft Teams now rolling out in public preview. As organizations strive to strengthen culture and connect distributed teams, we’re making it easier than ever for people to engage with their communities in the flow of work, right alongside chats, channels, and meetings. Communities power learning, dialogue, and engagement across the organization. They enable modern, two‑way c...
02/02/2026
Manage and reduce storage growth in Microsoft 365 with Orchestry
Storage overages in Microsoft 365 rarely come from a single misstep or event —they build up quietly over time —version history accumulating in active libraries, inactive content lingering long after projects end, and legacy sites that were migrated as-is and never revisited. Because the growth is gradual, many organizations only notice the issue when a storage alert appears in the admin center. Microsoft 365 now offers more ways to manage where content lives and new way...
02/02/2026
Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter - February 2026
In this issue: Ace Aviator of the Month News from our product group News from our community Ace Aviator of the Month February 2026’s Ace Aviator:
02/02/2026
AI‑Powered Performance Test Analysis using GHCP
Problem StatementPerformance testing teams often face significant challenges in comparing JMeter test results across environments or test runs.Manual comparison and analysis of multiple result files is time-consuming, error-prone, and lacks actionable insights. SolutionAn AI-powered solution leveraging GHCP has been developed to address the identified challenge. This sol...
02/02/2026
Hardening Spring Boot Health Probes on AKS: How to Prevent Restart Storms Before They Start
Overview Transient platform degradations can turn into outages if health probes are overly strict or wired to the wrong endpoint. In this case study, multiple incidents were reported in which many Spring Boot pods restarted in a short time window on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), contributing to visible downtime. A key lesson is that probing the consolidated /actuator/health endpoint can amplify blast radius: if any health contributor degrades, the overall endpoint can report...
02/02/2026
Unable to configure Audit settings for Azure SQL.
While configuring Auditing settings for Azure SQL, the deployment may fail and following error is encountered: Failed to save Auditing settings for server. The client has permission to perform action 'Microsoft.OperationalInsights/workspaces/sharedKeys/action' on scope '/subscriptions/SubID-ABC/resourceGroups/ResourceGroupName/providers/Microsoft.Sql/servers/ServerName/databases/master/providers/microsoft.insig...
02/02/2026
A Beginner’s Reading List for Large Language Models for 2026
The large language models (LLMs) hype wave shows no sign of fading anytime soon: after all, LLMs keep reinventing themselves at a rapid pace and transforming the industry as a whole.
02/02/2026
TLS 1.3 in SQL Server 2025: What It Really Changes for Security
Why TLS 1.3 matters TLS (Transport Layer Security) is the protocol that encrypts traffic between clients and servers. For many years, most SQL Server environments have relied on TLS 1.2, which dates back to 2008.
02/02/2026
Benchmarking Local AI Models
Introduction Selecting the right AI model for your application requires more than reading benchmark leaderboards. Published benchmarks measure academic capabilities, question answering, reasoning, coding, but your application has specific requirements: latency budgets, hardware constraints, quality thresholds. How do you know if Phi-4 provides acceptable quality for your document summarization use case? Will Qwen2.5-0.5B meet your 100ms response time requirement? Does your edge devic...
02/02/2026
NVIDIA AI Brings Nemotron-3-Nano-30B to NVFP4 with Quantization Aware Distillation (QAD) for Efficient Reasoning Inference
NVIDIA has released Nemotron-Nano-3-30B-A3B-NVFP4, a production checkpoint that runs a 30B parameter reasoning model in 4 bit NVFP4 format while keeping accuracy close to its BF16 baseline. The model combines a hybrid Mamba2 Transformer Mixture of Experts architecture with a Quantization Aware Distillation (QAD) recipe designed specifically for NVFP4 deployment. Overall, it is an ultra-efficient […] The post
02/02/2026
How to Build Memory-Driven AI Agents with Short-Term, Long-Term, and Episodic Memory
In this tutorial, we build a memory-engineering layer for an AI agent that separates short-term working context from long-term vector memory and episodic traces. We implement semantic storage using embeddings and FAISS for fast similarity search, and we add episodic memory that captures what worked, what failed, and why, so the agent can reuse successful […] The post
02/02/2026
A Coding and Experimental Analysis of Decentralized Federated Learning with Gossip Protocols and Differential Privacy
In this tutorial, we explore how federated learning behaves when the traditional centralized aggregation server is removed and replaced with a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer gossip mechanism. We implement both centralized FedAvg and decentralized Gossip Federated Learning from scratch and introduce client-side differential privacy by injecting calibrated noise into local model updates. By running controlled experiments […] The post
02/02/2026
Multiple secondaries for Azure SQL Database failover groups (Public Preview)
Azure SQL Database failover groups are a business continuity capability that helps you manage geo-replication and coordinated failover of one or more databases from a primary Azure SQL logical server to a secondary logical server in another region. A key benefit is automatic endpoint redirection: your application can keep using the same listener endpoints, and connections are routed to the current primary after a geo-failover. Unt...
31/01/2026
Robbyant Open Sources LingBot World: a Real Time World Model for Interactive Simulation and Embodied AI
Robbyant, the embodied AI unit inside Ant Group, has open sourced LingBot-World, a large scale world model that turns video generation into an interactive simulator for embodied agents, autonomous driving and games. The system is designed to render controllable environments with high visual fidelity, strong dynamics and long temporal horizons, while staying responsive enough for […] The post
31/01/2026
Title Plan Update - January 30, 2026
📁January 30, 2026 - Title Plan Now Available Access the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at
30/01/2026
AI2 Releases SERA, Soft Verified Coding Agents Built with Supervised Training Only for Practical Repository Level Automation Workflows
Allen Institute for AI (AI2) Researchers introduce SERA, Soft Verified Efficient Repository Agents, as a coding agent family that aims to match much larger closed systems using only supervised training and synthetic trajectories. What is SERA? SERA is the first release in AI2’s Open Coding Agents series. The flagship model, SERA-32B, is built on the […] The post
30/01/2026
A Coding Implementation to Training, Optimizing, Evaluating, and Interpreting Knowledge Graph Embeddings with PyKEEN
In this tutorial, we walk through an end-to-end, advanced workflow for knowledge graph embeddings using PyKEEN, actively exploring how modern embedding models are trained, evaluated, optimized, and interpreted in practice. We start by understanding the structure of a real knowledge graph dataset, then systematically train and compare multiple embedding models, tune their hyperparameters, and analyze […] The post
30/01/2026
February update: What's new in Security for Partners
Navigate to News and Announcements, Incentives and Offers, Skilling and Events, Go-To-Market,
30/01/2026
Architecting Trust: A NIST-Based Security Governance Framework for AI Agents
Architecting Trust: A NIST-Based Security Governance Framework for AI Agents The "Agentic Era" has arrived. We are moving from chatbots that simply talk to agents that act—triggering APIs, querying databases, and managing their own long-term memory. But with this agency comes unprecedented risk. How do we ensure these autonomous entities remain secure, compliant, and predictable? In this post, Umesh Nagdev and Abhi Singh, showcase a Security Governanc...
30/01/2026
Azure Local LENS workbook—deep insights at scale, in minutes
Azure Local at scale needs fleet-level visibility As Azure Local deployments grow from a handful of instances to hundreds (or even thousands), the operational questions change. You’re no longer troubleshooting a single environment—you’re looking for patterns across your entire fleet: Which sites are trending with a specific health issue? Where are workload deployments increasing over time, do we have enough capacity available? Wh...
30/01/2026
SQL + AI: Get ready for a fun new experience, launching next week!
The SQL community is leveling up! We’re launching a lightweight, beginner friendly SQL + AI contest designed to spark awareness of SQL Server 2025’s new AI capabilities—from connecting to an AI model, to generating embeddings, to exploring what’s possible when natural language intelligence meets your database.&n...
30/01/2026
Multiple secondaries for failover groups is now in public preview
Failover groups for Azure SQL Database is a business continuity solution that lets you manage the replication and failover of databases to another Azure SQL logical server. With failover groups, you get automatic endpoint redirection, so you don't have to change the connection string for your application after a geo-failover—connections are automatically routed to the current primary. Until now, Azure SQL failover groups have only supported one secondary. We're excited to a...
30/01/2026
Education: A year in review with AI-powered learning tools
Hi Insiders! Our mission continues to focus on promoting equitable and successful learning outcomes for all students. Last year, we made updates to our products and services to further impact our goal, whether it was providing new AI experiences for educators and students to spark their curiosity and master crucial skills or enhancing accessibility and security features for a safe and inclusive school environment. Let’s look back at some of 2025’s biggest achievements with Micro...
30/01/2026
What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot | January 2026
Welcome to the January 2026 edition of What's New in Microsoft 365 Copilot! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements to keep Microsoft 365 admins up to date with Copilot features that help your users be more productive and efficient in the apps they use every day. This month we have a special announcement to share: we’ve refreshed the Microsoft 365 Roadmap to make it easier...
30/01/2026
Conditional Access for Canvas Apps with Entra
In today's Power Platform landscape, administrators have a tough task securing the ever-increasing inventory of Canvas Apps across their tenant. Canvas apps often connect to sensitive data, run on a variety of devices, and serve diverse groups of users. That is why Conditional Access has become one of the most powerful tools in an admin’s toolkit, giving you fine grained control over how, where, and under what conditions users can access your apps.
30/01/2026
Export and import for Azure SQL database with a sequence
A few scenarios where sequencing is useful: Generating Unique Identifiers: When you need a unique sequential number for each new row (e.g., order numbers, invoice numbers). Unlike identity columns, sequences can be shared across multiple tables. Custom Auto-Increment Logic: When auto-increment needs to be independent of a specific table. When multiple tables need to use the same numbering ...
30/01/2026
Microsoft Unveils Maia 200, An FP4 and FP8 Optimized AI Inference Accelerator for Azure Datacenters
Maia 200 is Microsoft’s new in house AI accelerator designed for inference in Azure datacenters. It targets the cost of token generation for large language models and other reasoning workloads by combining narrow precision compute, a dense on chip memory hierarchy and an Ethernet based scale up fabric. Why Microsoft built a dedicated inference chip? […] The post
30/01/2026
DeepSeek AI Releases DeepSeek-OCR 2 with Causal Visual Flow Encoder for Layout Aware Document Understanding
DeepSeek AI released DeepSeek-OCR 2, an open source document OCR and understanding system that restructures its vision encoder to read pages in a causal order that is closer to how humans scan complex documents. The key component is DeepEncoder V2, a language model style transformer that converts a 2D page into a 1D sequence of […] The post
30/01/2026
Splitting single-tenant Microsoft Defender XDR Sentinel logs in multiple company scenarios
Introduction Let’s consider a scenario in which a parent holding company – Contoso Group – owns two different companies – Contoso Beverages and Contoso Food – and uses a single, shared, multi-domain Entra ID tenant for all the Contoso Group companies. Contoso Group is licensing Entra ID P2 and Microsoft Defender XDR, but each company runs its own Security Operations Center, with its own SIEM (Microsoft Sentinel). While it is trivial to segregate resource logs that are s...
30/01/2026
A Coding Deep Dive into Differentiable Computer Vision with Kornia Using Geometry Optimization, LoFTR Matching, and GPU Augmentations
We implement an advanced, end-to-end Kornia tutorial and demonstrate how modern, differentiable computer vision can be built entirely in PyTorch. We start by constructing GPU-accelerated, synchronized augmentation pipelines for images, masks, and keypoints, then move into differentiable geometry by optimizing a homography directly through gradient descent. We also show how learned feature matching with LoFTR […] The post
30/01/2026
Minimum Usage in Azure App Testing
Load testing is most effective when it closely mirrors real-world usage and when test infrastructure is used efficiently. We recently launched AI-assisted load test authoring which enables mirroring real-world usage. Today, we are taking another step for the efficient use of test infrastructure. Behind every load test run, there is dedicate...
30/01/2026
Introduction to Copilot Role Stories
AI is becoming a core part of how people across every industry get work done. From marketers creating content faster, to clinicians improving patient care, to insurance teams automating claims and authorizations, Microsoft Copilot and AI Agents are helping people focus on what matters most. In Role Stories we walk through real-world scenarios in specific industries and job roles that show how Copilot boosts productivity, reduces manual work, and helps teams deliver bet...
30/01/2026
Unlocking the power of Partner Center reporting: Why these insights matter for Marketplace success
For publishers in the Microsoft commercial marketplace, having the right data at the right time is essential. Understanding how customers engage with your offers, how revenue flows through billing and payout cycles, and how subscriptions or usage evolve over time directly influences your go‑to‑market decisions, financial planning, and customer management strategies. During a recent Microsoft webinar focused on Partner Center reporting,
30/01/2026
🦞 Deploy MoltBot to Azure Container Apps: Your 24/7 AI Assistant in 30 Minutes
🚀 The Quick Version: Create a Discord bot, clone the repo, run azd up, invite bot to server, start chatting. Total time: ~25 minutes. Total cost: ~$40-60/month. Why Azure Container Apps over other options? ✅ Managed Identity - No credentials in config files ✅ Built-in Secrets - API keys never exposed in logs ✅ Automatic HTTPS - Fre...
30/01/2026
Ant Group Releases LingBot-VLA, A Vision Language Action Foundation Model For Real World Robot Manipulation
How do you build a single vision language action model that can control many different dual arm robots in the real world? LingBot-VLA is Ant Group Robbyant’s new Vision Language Action foundation model that targets practical robot manipulation in the real world. It is trained on about 20,000 hours of teleoperated bimanual data collected from 9 […] The post
30/01/2026
Announcing the Microsoft 365 Community Conference 2026
Your front row seat to the future of intelligent work The Microsoft 365 Community Conference is back April 21–23, 2026, at Loews Sapphire Falls and Loews Royal Pacific Resort in Orlando, Florida. This year’s theme — a beacon for builders, innovators, and icons of intelligent work — reflects the momentum across Microsoft 365 and Copilot as we enter a new era of AI‑powered productivity. Across three days, attendees will...
29/01/2026
🌍✨ We’re Now Accepting Applications for MGCI Regional Leaders!
The Microsoft Global Community Initiative (MGCI) is now accepting applications for our next cohort of Regional Leaders - volunteer community champions who help shape, support, and amplify Microsoft technical communities worldwide. 💡 Why Become a MGCI Regional Leader?
29/01/2026
Advancing Windows security: Disabling NTLM by default
Windows is moving toward a more secure authentication model by phasing out New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM) in favor of stronger, Kerberos‑based alternatives. Let’s look at enhanced auditing and upcoming tools to help prepare your organization for disabling NTLM by default. The evolution of Windows authentication
29/01/2026
Discover why to build AI apps and agents with Microsoft and sell through Marketplace
Customer demand for AI is accelerating fast. And your company's AI app or agent should be there to meet it. In this fiscal year, Microsoft has already seen 2x growth in customers purchasing AI products through Microsoft Marketplace, while also being the largest catalog of AI apps and agents in the industry.
29/01/2026
Interested in Being a Guest on the Microsoft Security Podcast at RSA?
Going to RSA? We’re recording short, 15-minute Microsoft Security podcast conversations live at the conference- focused on real-world practitioner experience. No pitches, no slides, no marketing. Just an honest conversation about what you’re seeing, what’s changed, and what you’d tell a peer. If you’re doing the work and want to share your perspective, we’d love to hear from you. Take the survey to let us know you a...
29/01/2026
Supporting ChatGPT on PostgreSQL in Azure
Affan Dar, Vice President of Engineering, PostgreSQL at Microsoft Adam Prout, Partner Architect, PostgreSQL at Microsoft Panagiotis (Panos) Antonopoulos, Distinguished Engineer, PostgreSQL at Microsoft Th...
29/01/2026
Excel as a Literate Computation Surface for AI
[This article was originally published by Sumit Chauhan on LinkedIn.] AI systems perform robust computation, but their outputs are typically dissociated from the structure of the computation itself. Answers are delivered as fluent summaries, scripts, or static artifacts. Explanations may accompa...
29/01/2026
Tech for Good in Action: Accessibility, AI, and Expanding Our Community Impact
Accessibility is not a niche topic. It is a fundamental aspect of inclusive technology, and a shared responsibility for everyone who builds, teaches, and communicates about tech. This message was at the heart of a recent Global Skills session that brought together Microsoft MVPs and community leaders to explore how technology, AI, and communication can be used as powerful tools for social good.
29/01/2026
From SOP Overload to Simple Answers: Building Q&A Agents With SharePoint Online + Agent Builder
Turning SOPs Into Simple Q&A Agents is possibly one of the fastest wins for public‑sector teams. Take the SOPs and guidance you already have, upload them to SharePoint Online (what's that? they're already there? I know!). Then, create an agent using nothing but descriptive natural language. No code. No connectors. No fuss. (Disclaimer: these claims are the author's personal boasts, not all use cases or requirements will match this example and therefore these statements are no...
29/01/2026
Beyond the Chatbox: Generative UI, AG-UI, and the Stack Behind Agent-Driven Interfaces
Most AI applications still showcase the model as a chat box. That interface is simple, but it hides what agents are actually doing, such as planning steps, calling tools, and updating state. Generative UI is about letting the agent drive real interface elements, for example tables, charts, forms, and progress indicators, so the experience feels […] The post
29/01/2026
Azure NetApp Files Elastic ZRS service level - File Storage High Availability Made Easy
Table of Contents Abstract Introduction Why it matters How it works What are we enabling? <...
29/01/2026
Production-grade API Gateway patterns for Microsoft Foundry
Most startup teams start with the simplest thing that can work. One or two apps call Microsoft Foundry model endpoints directly, traffic is predictable, and “routing” is just a config value in the app. The gateway pattern becomes necessary when Foundry stops being “an integration” and becomes “a shared platform”. That shift shows up in a few reliable signals: You do not fully con...
29/01/2026
New content types supported in multi-tenant content distribution
Onboard new tenants and maintain a consistent security baseline We’re excited to announce a set of new content types that are now supported by the multi-tenant content distribution capability in the Defender portal: You can now distribute analytics rules, automation rules, workbooks, and alert tuning built in rules. What is content distribution? Content distribution is a powerful multi-tenant feature that enables scalable management of security content across tenants....
29/01/2026
SharePoint Showcase: Automation updates for smarter workflows & business processes
The way work gets done continues to evolve. Across organizations, everyday tasks are moving beyond manual handoffs toward intelligent, connected workflows where AI helps coordinate activity and people focus on outcomes. In this month’s SharePoint Showcase, we’re spotlighting updates that make business process automation simpler, more flexible, and more closely aligned where you work. Creating automation now lives right where work happens for SharePoint files, lists, and pages enabling ...
29/01/2026
Microsoft Graph User Configuration API (preview) - now available
We wanted to post a quick note that on the Microsoft 365 Developer Blog, a new post was published discussing availability of the preview of Microsoft Graph User Configuration API. This is important to all of our customers and partners utilizing Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online today. As we have mentioned previously, EWS in Exchange Online is
29/01/2026
UPDATE: New timeline for transitioning Sentinel experience to Defender portal
We’re sharing an important update to help Microsoft Sentinel customers and partners plan a smooth transition to the Microsoft Defender portal. In July 2025, we announced that Microsoft Sentinel SIEM customers would have to transition from the Azure portal experience to the Defender portal by July 1, 2026. Since then, we’ve seen a large percentage of our customers adopt the new experience, however, we’ve heard consistent feedback from customers and partners—particularly those managing S...
29/01/2026
Monday Masterclass Season 2 – Week 1: Beyond the Basics in Viva Engage
We hear repeatedly how valuable it is to have a space dedicated to practical guidance, real world examples, and direct access to product experts. Monday Masterclass Season 2 builds on the essentials while introducing capabilities that help organizations scale their employee communications and community strategy with confidence. This year’s program includes four live ...
29/01/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: January 29, 2026
Learn about 227 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
29/01/2026
7 Important Considerations Before Deploying Agentic AI in Production
The promise of agentic AI is compelling: autonomous systems that reason, plan, and execute complex tasks with minimal human intervention.
29/01/2026
Exploring Traffic Manager Integration for External DNS
When you deploy externally accessible applications into Kubernetes, there is usually a requirement for creating some DNS records pointing to these applications, to allow your users to resolve them. Rather than manually creating these DNS records, there are tools that will do this work for you, one of which is External DNS. External DNS can watch your Kubernetes resource configuration for s...
29/01/2026
Building Interactive Agent UIs with AG-UI and Microsoft Agent Framework
Introduction Picture this: You've built an AI agent that analyzes financial data. A user uploads a quarterly report and asks: "What are the top three expense categories?" Behind the scenes, your agent parses the spreadsheet, aggregates thousands of rows, and generates visualizations. All in 20 seconds. But the user? They see a loading spinner. Nothing else. No "reading file" message, no "analyzin...
29/01/2026
Google DeepMind Unveils AlphaGenome: A Unified Sequence-to-Function Model Using Hybrid Transformers and U-Nets to Decode the Human Genome
Google DeepMind is expanding its biological toolkit beyond the world of protein folding. After the success of AlphaFold, the Google’s research team has introduced AlphaGenome. This is a unified deep learning model designed for sequence to function genomics. This represents a major shift in how we model the human genome. AlphaGenome does not treat DNA […] The post
29/01/2026
Azure PostgreSQL Lesson Learned #14: Hitting the Max Storage Limits Blocking Further Scale‑Up
Co‑authored with HaiderZ-MSFT Case Overview A customer attempted to increase storage for their Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server but was unable to exceed 32 TiB. Investigation confirmed that the server was deployed in a region where the maximum supported storage...
29/01/2026
Alibaba Introduces Qwen3-Max-Thinking, a Test Time Scaled Reasoning Model with Native Tool Use Powering Agentic Workloads
Qwen3-Max-Thinking is Alibaba’s new flagship reasoning model. It does not only scale parameters, it also changes how inference is done, with explicit control over thinking depth and built in tools for search, memory, and code execution. Model scale, data, and deployment Qwen3-Max-Thinking is a trillion-parameter MoE flagship LLM pretrained on 36T tokens and built on […] The post
29/01/2026
How to Design Self-Reflective Dual-Agent Governance Systems with Constitutional AI for Secure and Compliant Financial Operations
In this tutorial, we implement a dual-agent governance system that applies Constitutional AI principles to financial operations. We demonstrate how we separate execution and oversight by pairing a Worker Agent that performs financial actions with an Auditor Agent that enforces policy, safety, and compliance. By encoding governance rules directly into a formal constitution and combining […] The post
29/01/2026
Introducing Unit Test Agent Profiles for Logic Apps & Data Maps
I did some experimentation this week with GitHub Copilot custom agents and custom prompts. The result was a couple of agents to help with creation of unit tests for Logic Apps Standard workflows and data maps. These agent profiles are designed to keep test artifacts consistent and maintainable by separating discovery, specification, data generation, and implementation. Specifications serve as the single source of truth; generated code and data follow...
28/01/2026
From Ingress to Gateway API: A pragmatic path forward (and why it matters now)
If you operate Kubernetes at scale, you've felt it: "Ingress YAML sprawl", annotation archaeology, and the creeping sense that your edge configuration is one upstream change away from becoming fragile. Over the last couple of years, the Kubernetes networking community has been steadily moving toward a clearer, more expressive model for north-south traffic management: Gateway API. That shift has accelerated recently for a v...
28/01/2026
ICYMI | How Microsoft is empowering Frontier Transformation with Intelligence + Trust
At Microsoft Ignite in November, we introduced Frontier Transformation — a holistic reimagining of business aligning AI with human ambition to help organizations achieve their highest aspirations and growth potential. While AI Transformation centered on efficiency and productivity, Frontier Transformation challenges us to do more for humanity by democratizing intelligence to unlock creativity and innovation for or...
28/01/2026
MBZUAI Releases K2 Think V2: A Fully Sovereign 70B Reasoning Model For Math, Code, And Science
Can a fully sovereign open reasoning model match state of the art systems when every part of its training pipeline is transparent. Researchers from Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) release K2 Think V2, a fully sovereign reasoning model designed to test how far open and fully documented pipelines can push long horizon […] The post
28/01/2026
Microsoft Sentinel and Dataverse Integration
Integrating Microsoft Sentinel with Microsoft Dataverse brings advanced, unified security monitoring to your Power Platform environments. Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)...
28/01/2026
Trust DigiCert Global Root G2 Certificate Authority to Avoid Exchange Online Email Disruption
To avoid mail flow disruption between your organization and Exchange Online, organizations that send or receive email to or from Exchange Online must ensure that their servers and clients trust the DigiCert Global Root G2 Certificate Authority and its subordinate CAs before April 30, 2026. You can find a comprehensive list of the root and subordinate certificate authority chain in the
28/01/2026
Automated Test Framework - Missing Tests in Test Explorer
Have your tests created using the Logic Apps Standard Automated Test Framework disappeared from the Test Explorer in VS Code all of a sudden? The answer is a mismatch between the MSTest versions used. A recent update in the C# DevKit extension changed the minimum requirements for the MSTest library - it now requires the minimum of 3.7.*. The project scaffolding created byt the Logic Apps Standard extension uses 3.0.2 The good news is that you can fix this by just changing packag...
28/01/2026
Announcing General Availability of RDP Shortpath Configuration via GPO and Microsoft Intune
We are pleased to announce the general availability (GA) of centralized RDP Shortpath configuration using Microsoft Intune and Group Policy (GPO). This update gives IT administrators a unified, policy-driven way to control which RDP Shortpath modes (Managed, Public/STUN, Public/TURN) are enabled across Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) session hosts and Windows 365 Cloud P...
28/01/2026
Your Data, Your Choices: Understanding Microsoft’s Privacy Commitments
Today, we celebrate National Data Privacy Day. At Microsoft, privacy is more than a legal requirement, it’s a foundation for customer trust and a core part of how products and services are built. As digital life expands and technologies like artificial intelligence play a bigger role in everyday tasks, we continue to invest deeply in privacy, transparency, and responsible innovation. Learn more about
28/01/2026
Upcoming Conditional Access change: Improved enforcement for policies with resource exclusions
In alignment with Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative, we are taking the following proactive security measures for defense-in-depth. Please review the changes and take any required actions to prepare. What is changing? Today
28/01/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: January 28, 2026
Learn about 180 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
28/01/2026
Microsoft-kumppaneiden menestystarinoita Suomessa käsittelevä blogipostaus-sarja käynnistyy!
Keväällä 2026 käynnistyy kumppanifoorumin blogisarja, jossa esitellään Microsoft-kumppaneiden menestystarinoita. Sarja alkaa Partner of the Year 2025 -voittajalla Vivictalla. Nostamme esiin voittajien tarinoita sekä konkreettisia esimerkkejä ratkaisuista ja innovaatioista, jotka tuottavat mitattavaa arvoa asiakkaille ja vahvistavat ekosysteemin kehitystä Suomessa. POTYA 2025 -voittajat edustavat suomalaisten kumppaneiden osaamista ja yhteistyön ...
28/01/2026
GitHub Copilot SDK and Hybrid AI in Practice: Automating README to PPT Transformation
Introduction In today's rapidly evolving AI landscape, developers often face a critical choice: should we use powerful cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) that require internet connectivity, or lightweight Small Language Models (SLMs) that run locally but have limited capabilities? The answer isn't either-or—it's hybrid models—combining the strengths of both to create AI solutions that are secure, efficient, and powerful. This article explores hybrid mode...
28/01/2026
Tencent Hunyuan Releases HPC-Ops: A High Performance LLM Inference Operator Library
Tencent Hunyuan has open sourced HPC-Ops, a production grade operator library for large language model inference architecture devices. HPC-Ops focuses on low level CUDA kernels for core operators such as Attention, Grouped GEMM, and Fused MoE, and exposes them through a compact-C and Python API for integration into existing inference stacks. HPC-Ops runs in large […] The post
28/01/2026
Conditional Access for Agent Identities in Microsoft Entra
AI agents are rapidly becoming part of everyday enterprise operations summarizing incidents, analyzing logs, orchestrating workflows, or even acting as digital colleagues. As organizations adopt these intelligent automations, securing them becomes just as important as securing human identities. Microsoft Entra introduces Agent Identities and extends Conditional Access to them but with very limited controls compared to traditional users and workload ide...
28/01/2026
What's New in Excel (January 2026)
Happy New Year, and welcome to the January 2026 update! We’re excited to share that Agent Mode in Excel is now generally available in Excel on Windows and is rolling out to Excel on Mac over the coming days. This month also brings the general availability of the full Power Query experience in Excel for the web. In addition, Windows Insider users can access new import functions and descriptive error cards, and Office Scripts now supports saving and emailing files as a PDF across all platforms<...
28/01/2026
Compliance Meets AI: DLP for Copilot Is Better Than Ever.
Last week we hosted Session 2 of our “Compliance Meets AI” series, and the focus couldn’t be more timely: Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Microsoft 365 Copilot. The conversation was practical, candid, and packed with real-world guidance for organizations navigating AI adoption responsibly. If you missed it, no worries we have you covered. You can view the recording below.
28/01/2026
Making AI Apps Enterprise-Ready with Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Foundry
Building AI apps is easy. Shipping them to production is not. Microsoft Foundry lets developers bring powerful AI apps and agents to production in days. But managing safety, security, and compliance for each one quickly becomes the real bottleneck. Every enterprise AI project hits the same wall: security reviews, data classification, audit trails, DLP policies, retention requirements. Teams spend months building custom logging pipelines and governance systems that never quite keep up w...
28/01/2026
Moonshot AI Releases Kimi K2.5: An Open Source Visual Agentic Intelligence Model with Native Swarm Execution
Moonshot AI has released Kimi K2.5 as an open source visual agentic intelligence model. It combines a large Mixture of Experts language backbone, a native vision encoder, and a parallel multi agent system called Agent Swarm. The model targets coding, multimodal reasoning, and deep web research with strong benchmark results on agentic, vision, and coding […] The post
27/01/2026
The Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode preview build has been updated!
At Ignite last year, we announced Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode (vMode), a purpose-built experience to help you easily manage on-premises Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization at scale – across multiple hosts and clusters – while effortlessly bridging your environment with Azure Arc for a true hyb...
27/01/2026
Announcing General Availability of Azure Da/Ea/Fasv7-series VMs based on AMD ‘Turin’ processors
Today, Microsoft is announcing the general availability of Azure’s new AMD based Virtual Machines (VMs) powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC™ (Turin) processors. These VMs include general-purpose (Dasv7, Dalsv7), memory-optimized (Easv7), and compute-optimized (Fasv7, Falsv7, Famsv7) series, available with or without local disks. Azure’s latest AMD based VMs offer faster CPU performance, greater scalability, and flexible configurations, making them the ideal choice for high perfor...
27/01/2026
SAP + Microsoft 365: A Unified AI Experience That Works Where You Work
Coauthors: Angel Zhu, Senior Product Manager, M365 Copilot Agent Ecosystem and Christoph Ruehle, Principal Product Manager, Joule/SAP Business AI at SAP We’ve all experienced it: you’re reviewing data, a message pings, an email comes in, and suddenly you’re juggling inboxes, chats, and screens just to finish one workflow. Those small interruptions feel routine — yet employees switch between apps over 1,200 times per day, adding up to weeks of lost productivity ea...
27/01/2026
Microsoft Hero: How Community Sparked a Global Movement
By guest blogger Saeid Dahl. Introduction There comes a moment when numbers stop being just metrics and start telling a story. After more than 160 live sessions over the past two years, thousands of hours of shared learning, and a global audience that has grown to over 7,000 members and subscribers, we felt compell...
27/01/2026
DSGym Offers a Reusable Container Based Substrate for Building and Benchmarking Data Science Agents
Data science agents should inspect datasets, design workflows, run code, and return verifiable answers, not just autocomplete Pandas code. DSGym, introduced by researchers from Stanford University, Together AI, Duke University, and Harvard University, is a framework that evaluates and trains such agents across more than 1,000 data science challenges with expert curated ground truth and […] The post
27/01/2026
Enhance AI Productivity with Designed for Surface Accessories
In today’s workplaces, productivity thrives when technology helps people work smarter and with less friction. AI tools designed to support the way people think, create, and solve problems can help users move through tasks with greater confidence and clarity. But productivity and great AI experiences often benefit from more than compute power. Designed for Surface (DfS) accessories ...
27/01/2026
Updated Exchange Online SMTP AUTH Basic Authentication Deprecation Timeline
We understand that many customers continue to face real challenges modernizing legacy email workflows and need sufficient time to adopt viable, secure alternatives. Based on customer feedback and visibility into adoption progress, we are refining the
27/01/2026
How Tree-KG Enables Hierarchical Knowledge Graphs for Contextual Navigation and Explainable Multi-Hop Reasoning Beyond Traditional RAG
In this tutorial, we implement Tree-KG, an advanced hierarchical knowledge graph system that goes beyond traditional retrieval-augmented generation by combining semantic embeddings with explicit graph structure. We show how we can organize knowledge in a tree-like hierarchy that mirrors how humans learn, from broad domains to fine-grained concepts, and then reason across this structure using […] The post
27/01/2026
Microsoft Industrial AI Partner Guide: Choosing the Right Data Expertise for Every Stage
As organizations scale Industrial AI, the challenge shifts from technology selection to deciding who should lead which part of the journey -- and when. Which partners should establish secure connectivity? Who enables production grade, AI ready industrial data? When do systems integrators step in to scale globally? This Partner Guide helps customers navigate these decisions with clarity and confidence: Identify which partners align to...
27/01/2026
Partner Case Study | Heathrow Scientific
Heathrow Scientific, an innovative manufacturer and distributor of laboratory equipment, wanted to transform its finance and purchasing operations by migrating from its on-premises reporting system to a cloud-based solution. The company collaborated with Microsoft partner Western Computer to consolidate financial and business data in Dynamics 365 Business Central, incorporating the visualization tools of Power BI to track key performance metrics. Heathrow’s digital transformatio...
27/01/2026
Silicon to Systems: How Microsoft Engineers AI Infrastructure from the Ground Up
Every Copilot prompt or Microsoft Teams call runs on infrastructure most users never see. Behind these experiences across general purpose compute and AI is a purpose-built, end-to-end hardware and software system engineered specifically for modern AI workloads. Microsoft’s investment in custom silicon and systems is designed to enable infrastructure optimized for performance, power-efficiency, and cost. In Silicon to Systems, Microsoft leaders and engineers walk through how cu...
27/01/2026
General availability of source specific filters in Copilot Search
We’re excited to share that source specific filters are now generally available worldwide in Copilot Search 🎉. This release addresses a longstanding challenge in enterprise search: helping users move seamlessly from broad discovery ...
27/01/2026
Upcoming M365 Copilot Government Roadshow Dates
There’s never been a more exciting time to explore what Microsoft 365 Copilot and agentic AI can do for your organization. To help you build momentum, sharpen skills, and accelerate real adoption, we’re rolling out a series of immersive, hands‑on experiences across multiple cities. These sessions are designed to help teams move beyond the basics and start building high‑impact solutions that transform the way they work. Below is an overview of three upcoming events—each offering deep te...
27/01/2026
Enterprise Adoption Guide: Microsoft Dev Box
Audience: Platform Engineering, Cloud Architects, Security Teams, and Developer Leads Purpose: A practical, opinionated guide to plan, implement, and scale Microsoft Dev Box—covering decisions, trade‑offs, and best practices for real‑world enterprise adoption. Why This Guide Exists Developer onboarding and environment consistency are critical for productivity. Traditional approaches—manual laptop setup, dependency mismatches, and restrictive security—slow teams down and...
27/01/2026
Advance Your SOC Skills with the Power of Microsoft Sentinel data lake and graph
Microsoft Sentinel has evolved beyond a traditional SIEM into a unified, AI-ready security platform that brings data, analytics, intelligence, and automation together. At the core are Microsoft Sentinel data lake and Microsoft Sentinel graph: data lake enables long-term retention and high-scale analytics, and graph adds entity relationships to speed investigations. We have updated skilling to reflect these changes, so defenders can build the right hands-on skills faster.1...
27/01/2026
Agent Mode in Excel is now generally available on desktop
Agent Mode in Excel, part of Microsoft 365 Copilot, is now generally available on Windows, with Mac rolling out over the coming days — extending access beyond Excel for the web, which launched in ...
27/01/2026
The 3 Invisible Risks Every LLM App Faces (And How to Guard Against Them)
Building a chatbot prototype takes hours.
27/01/2026
Transforming Retry-After Headers in Azure APIM: A Step-by-Step Guide
In this blog post, you'll learn how to customize the Retry-After response header in Azure API Management (APIM) rate-limiting policies, enhancing your API's flexibility and user experience. While it does not delve into the specifics of the rate-limit or rate-limit-by-key policies, it provides a practical guide for altering the Retry-After header. For detailed information on the rate-limit policy, please visit
27/01/2026
In Summa, synvert ClearPeaks, and Asignet offer transactable solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like In Summa, synvert ClearPeaks, and Asignet deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace. Learn about these offers below:
27/01/2026
Moving Forward: Alternatives After Azure Data Studio - Azure SQL Migration Extension Deprecation
If you're currently using the Azure SQL Migration extension, this blog will guide you through recommended alternatives for every phase of your migration—whether you are moving to Azure SQL Managed Instance, SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, or Azure SQL Database. What's happening to Azure SQL Migration extension in ADS? Azure SQL Migration extension in Azure Data Studio officially retires on February 28, 2026 along with Azure Data Studio. This change aims to ...
27/01/2026
Enable auditing to identify Change Tracking history table drops using Extended Events (Azure SQL Db)
When Change Tracking is enabled, the system-maintained history table dbo.MSChange_tracking_history is a key place to look for cleanup progress and errors. For example, Microsoft’s troubleshooting guidance for Change Tracking auto-cleanup explicitly references querying the history table to validate whether cleanup is running and whether there are cleanup errors. In real-world environments, teams sometimes observe that dbo.MSChange_tracking_history
27/01/2026
The Hidden Memory Architecture of LLMs
Your LLM is not running out of intelligence. It is often hitting context and runtime memory limits. I’m Hazem Ali — Microsoft AI MVP, Distinguished AI and ML Engineer /...
27/01/2026
Azure Arc for SQL Server: Executive Summary for Enterprise Clients
The Azure Connected Machine Agent is the foundation of Azure Arc.With the SQL Server extension active, configure monitoring capabilities.Begin with a pilot deployment on a non production SQL Server to validate network connectivity and familiarize your team with the Azure Arc experience.
27/01/2026
Unifying Scattered Observability Data from Dynatrace + Azure for Self-Healing with SRE Agent
What if an AI agent could unify data from third-party observability platforms with Azure deployment history and act on it automatically—every week, before users even notice?Using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), you can connect external observability platforms like Dynatrace directly to your agent.It correlates Dynatrace log analysis with Azure Container Apps deployment history, generates correlation charts, and executes rollbacks when confidence is high.
27/01/2026
“Automating Export of Microsoft Sentinel Analytic Rules mapped to MITRE Tactics & Techniques”
1. Introduction In modern Security Operations Centers (SOCs), mapping detections to the MITRE ATT&CK framework is critical. MITRE ATT&CK provides a structured, globally recognized model of adversary behavior, categorized into Tactics (goals) and Techniques (methods). Microsoft Sentinel analytic rules frequently include MITRE mappings, but viewing or exporting these at scale isn’t straightforward within the portal. Security teams ofte...
27/01/2026
When and why startups add a Gateway in front of Microsoft Foundry
Note: This post focuses on when and why startups begin adopting a gateway in front of Microsoft Foundry. In a follow-up article, we’ll go into a technical deep dive, covering design decisions, operational tradeoffs, latency considerations, observability, and patterns used in production-scale environments. Most teams don’t hit scaling challenges with Microsoft Foundry on day one. ...
27/01/2026
How a Haystack-Powered Multi-Agent System Detects Incidents, Investigates Metrics and Logs, and Produces Production-Grade Incident Reviews End-to-End
In this tutorial, we design this implementation to demonstrate how Haystack enables building advanced, agentic AI systems that go far beyond toy examples while remaining fully runnable. We focus on a cohesive, end-to-end setup that highlights orchestration, stateful decision-making, tool execution, and structured control flow, demonstrating how complex agent behavior can be cleanly expressed. We […] The post
27/01/2026
Building a Reliable Real Time Data Pipeline with Microsoft Fabric
The Two Pillars That Determine Success Data Quality Cannot Be an Afterthought The most common mistake we see is treating data quality as something to address after the pipeline is running. This approach creates technical debt that compounds over time and erodes trust in your data. Your CDC pipeline will ingest millions of events daily. Without proper validation at each layer, small issues become major problems. A single source system changing a column from integer to ...
27/01/2026
How SRE Agent Pulls Logs from Grafana and Creates Jira Tickets Without Native Integrations
Your tools. Your workflows. SRE Agent adapts. SRE Agent natively integrates with PagerDuty, ServiceNow, and Azure Monitor. But your team might use Jira for incident tracking. Grafana for dashboards. Loki for logs. Prometheus for metrics. These aren't natively supported. That doesn't matter. SRE Agent supports MCP, the Model Context Protocol. Any MCP-compatible server extends the agent's capabilities. Connect your Grafana instance. Connect your Jira...
27/01/2026
Compliance Meets AI 2026 Kickoff: DSPM for AI
🚀 Compliance Meets AI 2026 Kickoff: DSPM for AI What a great way to kick off the Compliance Meets AI 2026 series! For the first session we took a deep dive into Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI and explored how organizations can govern, protect, and gain visibility into generative AI usage—without slowing innovation. If you missed the session, don't worry you can watch the recording here
26/01/2026
Celebrating Community Manager Appreciation Day - January 26
Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day, and I want to take a moment to shine a bright, well‑deserved spotlight on the people who ensure our communities feel supported, informed, inspired, and connected: our Community Managers. In the Microsoft ecosystem, community managers do far more than answer questions or keep conversations flowing. They are the bridge between customers and product teams. They elevate voices. They create belonging. They h...
26/01/2026
When and why startups add a Gateway in front of Azure AI Foundry
Most teams don’t hit scaling challenges with Azure AI Foundry on day one. Early on, things are simple. One or two applications call Foundry directly. Traffic is predictable. Model experimentation moves fast. Everything works, and there’s no reason to add extra layers. Then adoption grows. More applications start calling the same models. Traffic becomes spiky. Teams want better v...
26/01/2026
5 Essential Digital Skills Every Nonprofit Needs for 2026 and Beyond
With small teams and big missions, capacity comes from skills, not just software licenses. The right skill stack compounds value across your programs, fundraising, operations, and partnerships. Below are the five essential digital skills (plus starter steps you can take this month). Data Literacy — Turning Information into Insight Data powers everything from fundraising decisions to program outcomes.Every ...
26/01/2026
Introducing the Azure Static Web Apps Skill for GitHub Copilot
From "Built" to "Deployed" in Minutes You've just finished building something great: A marketing landing page for your startup A portfolio site showcasing your work A documentation site for your open-source project An e-commerce storefront built with Next.js An internal dashboard for your team A blog with your latest content
26/01/2026
A New Habit for a New Era | Make “Mastering AI” Your New Year’s Resolution
New Year’s is all about fresh starts—and this year, nothing offers more potential than AI. So, make a resolution that will transform both your personal and professional life: learn to use AI effectively. Just as regular exercise strengthens your body, making AI a daily habit will transform how you work - unlocking new opportunities and giving you more time to focus on what matters most. The key is consistency: make it a habit to ask, “How can AI help ...
26/01/2026
What is going on with RC4 in Kerberos?
Howdy everyone! The cat is out of the bag when it comes to Microsoft’s forward outlook on RC4 usage in Kerberos. In the past few months, we have published the following.
26/01/2026
Windows 365 now supported in Brazil South
Today, we’re pleased to announce that Windows 365 is now available in the Brazil South region. Organizations can now provision Cloud PCs closer to their users in Brazil and across South America, helping reduce latency and support regional data residency requirements. With this update, Brazil South joins the list of su...
26/01/2026
Partner Blog | January 2026 skilling kickoff: Turn readiness into growth
A new year is a natural planning moment. Partners are navigating various pressures and opportunities, including fast-moving AI, shifting cloud workloads, rising security expectations, and data becoming a bigger part of every solution motion. In that environment, skilling can’t be treated as an optional add-on. It’s a core business priority that supports what partners care about most: winning wo...
26/01/2026
Wireshark walkthrough: observing an Azure SQL Database TDS connection on the wire
One of the most effective ways to truly understand how Azure SQL Database connectivity works is to observe the connection at the packet level. A short Wireshark capture clearly shows the interaction between TCP, TLS, TDS, and the Azure SQL gateway / redirect flow. This section walks through what you should expect to see in a healthy Azure SQL Database connection. 1. Captur...
26/01/2026
Azure SQL Database and the TDS protocol: how it works (networking + protocol deep dive)
If you’ve ever opened a packet capture for an Azure SQL Database connection, you’ve seen a very “SQL-shaped” conversation riding on top of TCP: Tabular Data Stream (TDS). TDS is the application-layer request/response protocol used by SQL clients to talk to SQL Server family services—including Azure SQL Database. It’s the on-the-wire format that carries login/authentication, encryption negotiation,
26/01/2026
Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations is now generally available
Every data security investigation starts with the same question: What data security risks are buried in this data? Exposed credentials in thousands of files across a data estate. Evidence of fraud hidden in vendor communications. Sensitive documents accidentally shared to a large group. Finding these risks manually — reviewing content file by file, message by message — is no longer viable when organizations are managing 220 zettabytes of data
26/01/2026
Leveling Up Your Machine Learning: What To Do After Andrew Ng’s Course
Finishing Andrew Ng's machine learning course
26/01/2026
Accelerating Microsoft 365 Copilot Adoption with Automated Readiness Assessment
Note: This playbook is designed for Microsoft partners operating within the AI Business Solutions commercial solution area to support their customers with the adoption journey of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The Copilot Readiness Challenge...
26/01/2026
Driving DevSecOps Standards: Microsoft’s Role in Shaping NIST SP 1800-44 Volume B
We are grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) SP 1800-44 Volume B – DevSecOps Architecture. This publication represents a significant step forward in defining a reference architecture for secure software development, and we appreciate the collaborative efforts of all involved. Security is woven throughout the development lifecycle, addressing challenges such as open-source risk, s...
26/01/2026
Building a TOTP Authenticator App on Azure Functions and Azure Key Vault
Two-factor authentication (2FA) has become a cornerstone of modern digital security, serving as a crucial defense against unauthorized access and account compromises. While many organizations rely on popular authenticator apps like Microsoft Authenticator, there's significant value in understanding how to build and customize your own TOTP (Time-based One-Time Password) solution. This becomes particularly relevant for those requiring specific customizations, enhanced security controls, or seam...
26/01/2026
Deep dive into the Maia 200 architecture
Maia 200 is a breakthrough inference architecture engineered to dramatically shift the economics of large-scale token generation. As Microsoft’s first silicon and system platform optimized specifically for AI inference, Maia 200 is built for modern reasoning and large language models, delivering the most efficient performance per dollar of any inference system deployed in Azure and ...
26/01/2026
Where Partners Build and Scale: Partner-Built Security Copilot Agents in Security Store
At Microsoft, we believe that security is a team sport. That’s why we are committed to meeting customers where they are, integrating with the solutions they already use to ensure that everyone can take advantage of the agentic capabilities of Security Copilot. And it’s not just an idea—it’s a reality. We’re excited to share why partners such as BlueVoyant, OneTrust, and Tanium chose to build agents with Security Copilot—and the value this brings to their customers. By watching t...
26/01/2026
NVIDIA Revolutionizes Climate Tech with ‘Earth-2’: The World’s First Fully Open Accelerated AI Weather Stack
For decades, predicting the weather has been the exclusive domain of massive government supercomputers running complex physics-based equations. NVIDIA has shattered that barrier with the release of the Earth-2 family of open models and tools for AI weather and climate prediction accessible to virtually anyone, from tech startups to national meteorological agencies. In a move […] The post
26/01/2026
New in Excel for the web: The full Power Query experience
We’ve reached yet another milestone in Excel for the web: The full Power Query user experience is now generally available, including the import wizard and Power Query Editor.After we released the ability to refresh Power Query data from authenticated data sources, we were able to unlock the ability to complete the full user journey of importing data and editing it using Power Query.Connect to the data source.
26/01/2026
GitHub Copilot + SQL Server: Understanding the Security Analyzer
What problem is this trying to solve? Many security issues in applications come from the database layer: poorly written queries, dynamic SQL, or code that exposes more data than it should. These problems are often hard to spot, especially in large or older codebases. The MSSQL extension for VS Code (v1.37+) now integrates GitHub Copilot with a dedicated chat participant:
26/01/2026
Building Agents with GitHub Copilot SDK: A Practical Guide to Automated Tech Update Tracking
Introduction In the rapidly evolving tech landscape, staying on top of key project updates is crucial. This article explores how to leverage GitHub's newly released Copilot SDK to build intelligent agent systems, featuring a practical case study on automating daily update tracking and analysis for Microsoft's Agent Framework. GitHub Copilot SDK: Embedding AI Capabilities into Any Application SDK Overview On January 22, 2026, GitHub of...
26/01/2026
Créer votre première application avec PowerApps
De nos jours, créer une application n’est plus réservés uniquement qu’aux développeurs. Avec Microsoft Power Apps, tout le monde peut concevoir des applications d’entreprise professionnelles sans écrire une seule ligne de code. C’es la magie qu’on appelle le low-code / no-code. On peut construire une application en quelques minutes, gérer des données sur Excel, SharePoint ou Dataverse et aussi générer automatiquement l’application à partir d’une simple description avec...
26/01/2026
Engineering a Local-First Agentic Podcast Studio: A Deep Dive into Multi-Agent Orchestration
The transition from standalone Large Language Models (LLMs) to Agentic Orchestration marks the next frontier in AI development. We are moving away from simple "prompt-and-response" cycles toward a paradigm where specialized, autonomous units—AI Agents—collaborate to solve complex, multi-step problems. As a Technology Evangelist, my focus is on building these production-grade systems entirely on the edge, ensuring privacy, speed, and cost-effici...
26/01/2026
What is Clawdbot? How a Local First Agent Stack Turns Chats into Real Automations
Clawdbot is an open source personal AI assistant that you run on your own hardware. It connects large language models from providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI to real tools such as messaging apps, files, shell, browser and smart home devices, while keeping the orchestration layer under your control. The interesting part is not that […] The post Wh...
26/01/2026
StepFun AI Introduce Step-DeepResearch: A Cost-Effective Deep Research Agent Model Built Around Atomic Capabilities
StepFun has introduced Step-DeepResearch, a 32B parameter end to end deep research agent that aims to turn web search into actual research workflows with long horizon reasoning, tool use and structured reporting. The model is built on Qwen2.5 32B-Base and is trained to act as a single agent that plans, explores sources, verifies evidence and […] The post
25/01/2026
A Coding Implementation to Automating LLM Quality Assurance with DeepEval, Custom Retrievers, and LLM-as-a-Judge Metrics
We initiate this tutorial by configuring a high-performance evaluation environment, specifically focused on integrating the DeepEval framework to bring unit-testing rigor to our LLM applications. By bridging the gap between raw retrieval and final generation, we implement a system that treats model outputs as testable code and uses LLM-as-a-judge metrics to quantify performance. We move […] The post
25/01/2026
How Machine Learning and Semantic Embeddings Reorder CVE Vulnerabilities Beyond Raw CVSS Scores
In this tutorial, we build an AI-assisted vulnerability scanner that goes beyond static CVSS scoring and instead learns to prioritize vulnerabilities using semantic understanding and machine learning. We treat vulnerability descriptions as rich linguistic artifacts, embed them using modern sentence transformers, and combine these representations with structural metadata to produce a data-driven priority score. Also, […] The post
24/01/2026
Supercharging SharePoint Metadata with the Knowledge Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Organizations adopting Microsoft 365 Copilot are quickly realizing that great AI outcomes depend on great data foundations. But for many teams, keeping SharePoint content well‑structured, tagged, and optimized for search has always been a challenge. Enter Knowledge Agent (Preview) - now included with Microsoft 365 Copilot (premium) - a powerful new capability that automates metadata enrichment inside SharePoint. In just a few minutes, it can transform ...
23/01/2026
GitHub Releases Copilot-SDK to Embed Its Agentic Runtime in Any App
GitHub has opened up the internal agent runtime that powers GitHub Copilot CLI and exposed it as a programmable SDK. The GitHub Copilot-SDK, now in technical preview, lets you embed the same agentic execution loop into any application so the agent can plan, invoke tools, edit files, and run commands as part of your own […] The post GitHub Releases Copilot-SDK to ...
23/01/2026
Course Retirement Announcement: AZ-1010 and MS-4007
The following instructor‑led courses are scheduled to retire. You can find all past and upcoming retirements here: Course retirement | Microsoft Learn. Please note that it may take some time for newly announced courses to appear on the page. MS-4007: Microsoft 365 Copilot user Enablement Specialist