Latest News in the category AI
A news aggregator from various RSS feeds, like technology, gaming, development and general news sites.
go-mssqldb v1.10.0: Better Reliability, Developer Experience, and Standards Compliance
We're excited to announce the release of go-mssqldb v1.10.0, the official Microsoft Go driver for SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.This release brings significant reliability improvements, better standards compliance, and a smoother developer onboarding experience.This release requires Go 1.21+ and is fully compatible with SQL Server 2012 through 2022 and Azure SQL Database.
2 hours ago
Service Principals in Microsoft Power Platform
A service principal, a non‑human application identity in Microsoft Entra ID that authenticates with certificates, never logs in interactively, and keeps running no matter who leaves.In this blog, we will highlight opportunities to strengthen your security posture across the Power Platform with Service Principals alongside ideas for when a Service Principal may not be applicable for your scenario.Power Platform Pipelines are a built-in option for application lifecycle management native to the Power Platform.
3 hours ago
The Journey of Copilot: From Setup to Mastery for Azure SAP customers
As you begin using GitHub Copilot within your SAP development and integration environment, you may notice performance differences, especially when working within corporate networks.GitHub Copilot is no longer a black box, it becomes a trusted, secure, and intelligent AI assistant seamlessly integrated into your Azure and SAP development ecosystem.GitHub Copilot for SAP ABAP in VS Code: Setup Guid... - SAP Community
3 hours ago
Announcing Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 6.1.5
We are pleased to announce the release of Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 6.1.5, the latest servicing update to the 6.1 line. This update focuses on connection performance, error propagation, and vector type metadata correctness. Install or update from NuGet: dotnet add package Microsoft.Data.SqlClient --version 6.1.5 Full release notes:
3 hours ago
Shift-Left Governance for AI Agents: How the Agent Governance Toolkit Helps You Catch Violations
In part one of this series, we covered AGT’s runtime governance: the policy engine, zero-trust identity, execution sandboxing, and the OWASP Agentic AI risk ma...
3 hours ago
Protect Your Streaming Data in Use: Confidential Computing for Azure Event Hubs Dedicated
For organizations in regulated industries — financial services, healthcare, government, defense — the security conversation around data has always revolved around two states: data at rest and data in transit. Encrypt your storage. Encrypt your network traffic. Check, check. But there's a third state that's been much harder to address: data in use. What happens to your events while they're being actively processed by the streaming infras...
4 hours ago
Now generally available: Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365
We're excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365!Microsoft 365 E7 is the Frontier Suite powered by Work IQ, 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, Copilot, Agent 365, and more into a single integrated offer built for customers’ Frontier Transformation. Designed for organizations to move from AI experimentation to scale, it includes Microsoft Entra Suite and advanced Defender, Intune, and Purview capabilities, delivering comprehensive security across agents and employees. Agent 365 is the control plane for customers to observe, govern, and secure both Microsoft and third-party AI agents, grounded in shared intelligence and built with trust to protect the organization.
4 hours ago
Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365 are now generally available
Microsoft 365 E7 is built to do exactly that – combining advanced AI capabilities with enterprise-grade security and governance so organizations can move beyond isolated pilots and deploy AI confidently at scale.Today, Microsoft 365 E7 – the Frontier Suite – is generally available, offering a single, integrated solution that unifies intelligence and trust, so organizations can move from experimentation to enterprise-wide AI adoption. In addition to being included with Microsoft 365 E7, Agent 365 is available as a standalone license at $15 per user per month.
5 hours ago
What’s New in Agent 365: May 2026
Agent 365 is built on three core value pillars: observe, govern, and secure, designed to give IT and security teams clear visibility, consistent controls, and enterprise-grade protection across your entire agent fleet.In this series, we’ll highlight new Agent 365 features and enhancements now and over the months ahead.Registry sync enables AI admins to securely consent to and connect ecosystem partner agent platforms to Agent 365, bringing external agents and their metadata into the Agent 365 registry for a more unified view of your agent population.
5 hours ago
Windows 365 for Agents now in public preview: Run AI agents securely, at scale
AI agents are rapidly evolving from tools that answer questions to performing human-level work inside an enterprise ecosystem, powering essential business workflows that have traditionally been completed manually. But while governance and policy models are emerging, one critical question remains unresolved for IT: where should agents actually run?
5 hours ago
AI‑Accelerated AVM Refactoring: Modernizing Legacy IaC Safely and Swiftly
In one anonymized engagement, an AI‑assisted audit found that **43% of module invocations (~10 modules) ** still relied on legacy, non‑AVM wrappers — even though modernization work was already underway.But in a live estate, each change must be checked through one lens: **state safety**.Microsoft’s AVM guidance now explicitly discusses **AI‑assisted IaC solution development** — pairing AVM modules with AI tools to speed delivery while keeping humans in control.
8 hours ago
Qwen AI Releases Qwen-Scope: An Open-Source Sparse AutoEncoders (SAE) Suite That Turns LLM Internal Features into Practical Development Tools
Qwen Team Introduces Qwen-Scope: An Open-Source Sparse Autoencoder Suite That Turns LLM Internals into Practical Development ToolsThe post Qwen AI Releases Qwen-Scope: An Open-Source Sparse AutoEncoders (SAE) Suite That Turns LLM Internal Features into Practical Development Tools appeared first on MarkTechPost.
12 hours ago
From Terminal to Autonomous Coding: Mastering GitHub Copilot CLI ACP Server
This article will take you from zero to advanced, covering concepts, architecture, setup, and real-world use cases.The Agent Client Protocol (ACP) is an open standard designed to connect clients (like IDEs or tools) with AI agents in a consistent and interoperable way.GitHub Copilot CLI can run as an ACP-compatible server, exposing its AI capabilities programmatically.
13 hours ago
A Coding Deep Dive into Agentic UI, Generative UI, State Synchronization, and Interrupt-Driven Approval Flows
In this tutorial, we build the entire Agentic UI stack from the ground up using plain Python, without relying on external frameworks to abstract away the core ideas.We implement the AG-UI event stream to make agent behavior observable in real time, and we bring in A2UI as a declarative layer that allows interfaces to […]The post A Coding Deep Dive into Agentic UI, Generative UI, State Synchronization, and Interrupt-Driven Approval Flows appeared first on MarkTechPost.
15 hours ago
Moonshot AI Open-Sources FlashKDA: CUTLASS Kernels for Kimi Delta Attention with Variable-Length Batching and H20 Benchmarks
Moonshot AI releases FlashKDA, a high-performance implementation of Kimi Delta Attention that plugs directly into the flash-linear-attention ecosystem — and benchmarks show it's meaningfully faster.The post Moonshot AI Open-Sources FlashKDA: CUTLASS Kernels for Kimi Delta Attention with Variable-Length Batching and H20 Benchmarks appeared first on MarkTechPost.
19 hours ago
AHEAD helps us launch the Strategic Azure Storage Services Partner Program
Authors: Aung Oo, Vice President Azure Storage Product Management Parker Leavitt, Partner Account Manager, AHEAD Special thanks to: Michael Johnson, Vice President, Cloud, AHEAD AHEAD background AHEAD was formed in 2007 and possesses deep expertise in Infrastructure, Cloud Platforms, AI, Analytics, Networking, Storage, Sec...
19 hours ago
Microsoft Research’s World-R1 Uses Flow-GRPO and 3D-Aware Rewards to Inject Geometric Consistency Into Wan 2.1 Without Architectural Changes
Microsoft Research's World-R1 Uses Reinforcement Learning to Force 3D Consistency Into Text-to-Video Models The post Microsoft Research’s World-R1 Uses Flow-GRPO and 3D-Aware Rewards to Inject Geometric Consistency Into Wan 2.1 Without Architectural Changes appeared first on
19 hours ago
Announcing Native PowerShell Tooling for ReFS Snapshots
We’re excited to share a new open-source PowerShell module on GitHub that provides PowerShell-native management of ReFS snapshots. It wraps the existing refsutil streamsnapshot in cmdlets designed for scripting and automation, with pipeline support and consistent error handling.
19 hours ago
Introducing DeepSeek V4 Flash and V4 Pro in Microsoft Foundry
As AI adoption matures, the conversation is shifting from model capability to system design, how to orchestrate models that deliver the right balance of quality, speed, and cost. Today, we’re expanding the Microsoft Foundry model catalog with
20 hours ago
SASE 101: How to get started with secure access in a cloud-first world
As organizations adopt cloud applications, hybrid work, and distributed teams, many are re-evaluating how users securely access applications and data. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) has become a common starting point for these conversations, but for many teams, understanding where to begin can feel unclear. This article provides a practical foundation for teams learning about SASE for the first time. It explains what SASE is, why it emerged, how it differs from Secu...
30/04/2026
Designed for Surface Accessories for Frontline Work
Frontline scenarios often involve Surface devices that are shared across shifts, used in physically demanding settings, or deployed across multiple locations. In these situations, accessories play a critical role in shaping how devices are configured for day‑to‑day use and how well they perform within the environments in which they are used.
30/04/2026
Prompt flow is being retired
What you need to know Prompt flow in Microsoft Foundry and Azure Machine Learning will be retired on 20 April 2027. As part of this change, Microsoft recommends moving to Microsoft Agent Framework, which provides a production-ready foundation for b...
30/04/2026
What’s new in Microsoft Sentinel: April 2026
Welcome to the April 2026 edition of What's new in Microsoft Sentinel. April brings a broad set of updates, with RSAC 2026 announcements rolling out alongside new features. Hi...
30/04/2026
Work IQ API Public Preview: Build Copilot Powered Agents with A2A
Today, the Work IQ API is available in public preview, expanding access to the same underlying intelligence capabilities used by Microsoft 365 Copilot for developers and partners. Work IQ gives developers programmatic access to Copilot so you can build agents and apps that use Copilot’s grounding, context, and reasoning without wiring raw data or permissions. In this public preview, that access is exposed in three formats—Agent‑to‑Agent (A2A) for agent collaboration, Model Context Prot...
30/04/2026
Accelerating the Flow of Learning
By Vince Frankson, Authentica Solutions | Guest Post via the Microsoft Education Blog Education technology leaders are not short on vision; they are short on time. They know exactly what their Microsoft 365 environment is capable of. What they deserve are better tools, smarter automation, and a partner that shows up ready to serve. At Authentica Solutions, we pride ourselves on our culture of servant leadership, not just as a slogan, but as our guiding principle. Our mission is ...
30/04/2026
Microsoft named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Document Management
AI is raising the bar for document management. It’s no longer enough to store and share files— content needs to be governed, structured, and connected to the way teams actually work so AI can reason over it responsibly and help people move from information to action. That’s why we’re excited to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Document Management, ...
30/04/2026
Dynamically remove apps from managed Windows 11 devices
You can now use policy to remove select pre-installed Microsoft Store apps on devices running Windows 11, version 25H2 or version 24H2. We've also made a significant update to this policy: a dynamic app removal list. This feature lets you remove any preinstalled MSIX/APPX app by referencing its Package Family Name (PFN). What's the benefit? Fewer unwanted apps, simpler provisioning, and a more tailored desktop for your users. Just use a standard, poli...
30/04/2026
Building Futures Through Community: Creating Pathways into Tech
For the team behind Experts Live Denmark - organized by the Microsoft MVP & RD community in Denmark - this belief has shaped how they think about community: not just as a place to share knowledge, but as a space to open doors into the industry. That thinking is what led to the collaboration with ReDI School of Digital Integration Den...
30/04/2026
Partner Blog | Driving channel velocity in an AI-first world: Microsoft Marketplace at Channel Partners Conference
With an audience deeply focused on differentiation, scale, and customer value, the conference highlighted how cloud, AI, and modern commerce models are redefining the partner opportunity. Microsoft Marketplace participated as a Platinum sponsor, reflecting the central role the channel plays as customers move AI from experimentation into production.Connor O’Reilly, Channel Sales Manager, Devicie
30/04/2026
Prefix-scoped access for User Delegation SAS is now generally available for Azure Blob Storage
We would like to share that prefix-scoped access for User Delegation SAS for Azure Blob Storage is generally available in all Azure regions. SAS tokens for Blob Storage have historically supported two levels of scope: container and individual blob. With this release, you can now scope access to a prefix or virtual directory within a container, granting access to all blobs beneath the path. This is especially valuable for applications that organi...
30/04/2026
Announcing Microsoft Drivers 5.13.1 for PHP for SQL Server
Announcing Microsoft Drivers 5.13.1 for PHP for SQL Server We have released Microsoft Drivers 5.13.1 for PHP for SQL Server (sqlsrv and pdo_sqlsrv). This patch release addresses several important bug fixes, including a security fix for access token handling in pooled connections and multiple stability improvements. Bug Fixes Access token identity leaking across pooled connections ...
30/04/2026
EDR coexistence by design: A practical starting point to Defender
A common assumption is that side by side deployment exists only as a short bridge to replacement.Running Defender alongside an existing prevention platform allows organizations to:Using Defender Endpoint capabilities in a side‑by‑side model:
30/04/2026
What’s new in Microsoft Intune – April
April's Intune updates focus on three areas administrators have consistently asked us to improve: fresher device data, streamlined identity foundations across platforms, and simpler management for non-traditional endpoints. This month includes advancements in Windows app inventory, Linux single sign-on (SSO), and expanded enrollment and control for Apple devices. Higher‑frequency app inve...
30/04/2026
From content to conversation: Learning that adapts in real time
Explore how agentic systems can create learning experiences that are as responsive as a teacher, as patient as a mentor, and as available as the moment curiosity strikes. Monica Arés builds learning systems at the intersection of emerging technology and human capability, from platform-based learning at Amazon to the first immersive learning ecosystem at Meta, and now agentic learning at Microsoft. She focuses on designing systems that don’t just deliver information but a...
30/04/2026
Speed where it matters: How Microsoft Intune helps IT prioritize time-sensitive actions
By: Albert Cabello Serrano | Principal Product Manager - Microsoft Intune A closer look at how Intune delivers updates to devices and the investments we’re making to help important changes move faster and more predictably. A common concern we hear from IT admins is, “How quickly will this change actually reach my device?” In many cases, the answer is much faster than expected. Today, 90% of policy updates, app deployments, and device ac...
30/04/2026
A Coding Implementation on Pyright Type Checking Covering Generics, Protocols, Strict Mode, Type Narrowing, and Modern Python Typing
A Coding Implementation on Pyright Type Checking Covering Generics, Protocols, Strict Mode, Type Narrowing, and Modern Python Typing The post A Coding Implementation on Pyright Type Checking Covering Generics, Protocols, Strict Mode, Type Narrowing, and Modern Python Typing appeared first on
30/04/2026
What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot | April 2026
Welcome to the May 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. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new this month: User capabilities:
30/04/2026
Teacher Appreciation Week: Create expressions of gratitude with Copilot
Teacher Appreciation Week is a great moment to recognize the educators who made a difference this year, but it can be hard to move beyond the standard thank you note and gift. With Microsoft Copilot, you can turn specific moments from the school year into a thoughtful message, present, or creative project that are personal and heartfelt. Below are a few ways parents and students can use Copilot to reflect, organize their ideas, and express gratitude during Teacher Appreciation Week.
30/04/2026
Troubleshooting TPM Certificate: How to Fix the "Missing Stored Keyset" Error
Understanding the "Missing Stored Keyset" Error The "missing stored keyset" error typically appears when an application or service cannot find a necessary key within the system's Key Storage Provider (KSP). This can result from...
30/04/2026
Potential Consequences of Using Postgres as a Job Queue
Introduction At small scale, using Postgres as a job queue is totally fine, and I’d even say it’s the right call. Fewer moving parts, one less system to manage, ACID guarantees on your jobs. What’s not to love?
30/04/2026
Introducing Post-Stream Refinement: Higher-Accuracy Real-Time Transcription
Real-time speech recognition has always been defined by a fundamental trade-off: speed versus accuracy. Applications that need instant, streaming transcription — live captions, voice agents, real-time dictation — have historically had to accept that their fastest results wouldn't always be their most accurate. Conversely, the most accurate transcription approaches required processing full audio segments offline, making them unsuitable for real-time scenarios. Toda...
30/04/2026
Voice Live API now supports WebRTC (Preview)
We are thrilled to announce that Voice Live API now supports WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) connection, enabling low‑latency, real‑time voice interactions directly from web and mobile clients. Why WebRTC is required in real-time voice agent building WebRTC enables real‑time, bi‑directional audio and video streaming directly in the browser without plu...
30/04/2026
SharePoint Showcase: AI-Forward Content Creation & Curation for the Modern Intranet
More than 2,700 Microsoft 365 customers joined us at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando to learn what’s new across Microsoft 365. In one of our sessions, AI‑Forward Content Creation & Curation for the Modern Intranet, we shared how SharePoint is evolving from a place where employees find information, to a platform that helps teams create and keep it curr...
30/04/2026
What's New in Microsoft Teams | April 2026
Our team just wrapped up the M365 Community Conference in Orlando, FL, and it was an incredible way to close out April! Our teams were energized by connecting with, listening to, and sharing what’s new with many of you: the builders, innovators and icons of intelligent work. Thank you to everyone who attended, and we can’t wait to see even more of you at next year’s conference! As for this month’s Teams updates, we remain focused on bringing you features that can make collaboration mor...
30/04/2026
You can’t govern what you can’t see: Closing the identity visibility gap for apps
Effective identity governance often starts with a simple question: who has access? Today, I am happy to introduce account discovery with Microsoft Entra ID Governance, a new capa...
30/04/2026
Public Preview: Managed Identity support for graphical session recording
Overview Azure Bastion provides secure RDP and SSH access to Azure virtual machines directly via the Azure portal or via the native SSH/RDP client already installed on your local computer. Today, we are introducing public preview for managed identity support for session recording, giving administrators a seamless, identity-based way to authenticate Bastion when writing recordings to a designated storage account. Why...
30/04/2026
Spend less time hunting for meeting issues with the Best Practice Configurations dashboard in Teams
https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoftteams/best-practice-dashboard The dashboard is built to help admins monitor meeting-related best practices across the environment. It highlights common causes of meeting quality, such as correct ports and protocols being used, outdated Te...
30/04/2026
Word: Legal Agent in Frontier
The Legal Agent flags non-conforming provisions and recommends edits to align with internal standards and approved language from your playbook.The Legal Agent runs within Microsoft 365 security, compliance, and governance controls your organization already uses for legal documents and standards.Early customer feedback shows strong interest in how the Legal Agent supports legal workflows in Word.
30/04/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: April 30, 2026
Learn about 155 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
30/04/2026
VDI, Teams, and what’s changing in 2026: VBSS becomes VMSS, and eCDN lands in the core license
Audience: Mission Critical customers running Microsoft Teams on virtualized desktop platforms (Citrix, AVD, Windows 365, VMware/Omnissa Horizon). TL;DR: Two Teams...
30/04/2026
🚀 From Drift to Diagnosis: AI‑Powered Root Cause Analysis for Azure Infrastructure
🌍 A Real-World Scenario During a recent production deployment of an enterprise AI platform, everything looked perfectly aligned from an infrastructure perspective: ✅ Infrastructure deployed via IaC (Terraform)✅ Private endpoints enforced✅ Public access disabled for all AI services A few hours later, an alert triggered. ❗ The Azure OpenAI endpoint was publicly accessible. This was unexpected — and risky. 🔍 What the team did next <...
30/04/2026
IBM Releases Two Granite Speech 4.1 2B Models: Autoregressive ASR with Translation and Non-Autoregressive Editing for Fast Inference
IBM Releases Granite Speech 4.1 2B and Its Non-Autoregressive Twin — Compact ASR Models Built for Enterprise The post IBM Releases Two Granite Speech 4.1 2B Models: Autoregressive ASR with Translation and Non-Autoregressive Editing for Fast Inference appeared first on
30/04/2026
🖼️Streamline Image Generation Workflow in Foundry Toolkit
Integrating image generation into a production AI application has historically meant juggling multiple surfaces — browsing models in the Foundry portal, setting up deployments via the Azure CLI, testing prompts in a separate tool, then stitching together API credentials before writing a single line of app code. That context-switching adds friction at exactly the moment you want to be experimenting. With this release, the full image generation workflow — discover, deploy, prompt, iterat...
30/04/2026
Fixing Broken Markdown in AI Translation: Hardening a Production Pipeline
By Minseok Song and Hiroshi Yoshioka (Microsoft MVPs) TL;DR Recent community feedback, especially from Japanese translations, revealed that many translation failures were not semantic, but structural. Through detailed issue reports and discussions, we identified recurring patterns such as broken links, malformed code fences, inconsistent list structures, and CJK-specific formatting issues. &nbs...
30/04/2026
From ServiceNow to Self-Healing Infrastructure: A Multi-Repo Azure AI Platform
Quick — what version of infrastructure is running in your production subscription right now?Production had a broken NSG rule.We run Azure AI infrastructure across multiple markets.
30/04/2026
Cursor Introduces a TypeScript SDK for Building Programmatic Coding Agents With Sandboxed Cloud VMs, Subagents, Hooks, and Token-Based Pricing
Cursor Launches TypeScript SDK to Let Developers Build and Deploy Programmatic Coding Agents The post Cursor Introduces a TypeScript SDK for Building Programmatic Coding Agents With Sandboxed Cloud VMs, Subagents, Hooks, and Token-Based Pricing appeared first on
30/04/2026
Running Diffusion Models at Scale on AKS
Diffusion workloads are simple at prototype scale and unforgiving in production. A single demo can run on one GPU-backed VM, but a real platform has to handle bursty demand, long-running jobs, model artifact distribution, secure public access, rollout safety, and hardware-level observability. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a strong fit when the requirement is not just to run a model, but to operate a repeatable platform for GPU inference. The reusable pattern is straightforward: kee...
30/04/2026
Hardening OpenClaw on AKS: Mitigating Container Escapes with Kata microVM Isolation
What is OpenClaw, and what security challenges does it pose with container escapes? OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent designed for power users and developers to automate tasks, such as managing emails, files, and scheduling via chat apps like WhatsApp or Telegram. While OpenClaw functions as a powerful autonomous assistant, its runtime model creates a massive security paradox: to be truly useful, the agent requires broad permissions to your filesy...
30/04/2026
Azure SRE Agent for Azure Monitor Alerts: Reduce Alert Fatigue, Investigate What Matters
The Alert Problem Organizations running Azure Monitor tend to land in one of two situations: Alert fatigue has set in. Alert rules tend to grow over time — a CPU threshold from two years ago, a health probe check from a migration, a disk alert from an outage that never got cleaned up. These rules fire regularly, most auto-resolve, and nobody investigates them. But buried in that noise are rea...
30/04/2026
Updates to Teamwork Deployment specialization: View new name and requirements
Starting April 29, 2026, Microsoft is renaming the Teamwork Deployment specialization as the Secure AI Productivity specialization to reflect the increased focus on the secure foundations required for successful AI adoption.Additionally, the performance, skilling, and Solutions Partner designation requirements will be updated to better align with foundational workloads from Microsoft 365 E3 and the realities of modern AI adoption.Additionally, partners will be required to hold both the Modern Work designation and the Security designation to earn the Secure AI Productivity specialization.
29/04/2026
Partner Blog | Frontier Transformation starts here: Save the date for MCAPS Start for Partners
Customers are moving toward Frontier Transformation, and they are looking to Microsoft partners to turn AI from isolated experimentation into a repeatable operating capability embedded into how work gets done.MCAPS Start for Partners is built to give you early clarity on what Microsoft will prioritize in FY27 so you can translate strategy into execution.Save the date to join us virtually on Wednesday, July 22, 2026, to align on what is changing, what is net-new, and where Microsoft will focus.
29/04/2026
April update: What’s New in Azure for Partners
Explore AI-powered migration and modernization at the Microsoft Azure Summit: Migrate and Modernize with Agentic AI event. Back by popular demand, this event will take place on April 23, 2026. AI + Data Go Big is Microsoft’s unified, end‑to‑end GTM motion to win the AI and Data Platform by empowering customers to unlock AI value through an AI‑ready data foundation. Support customers with AI transformation—especially where data readiness is a blocker—while benefiting from Microsoft’s most comprehensive offers to accelerate wins. If you are a partner with the Analytics on Azure specialization, take the opportunity to learn more and become a Fabric Featured Partner to stand out as customers modernize their data estates.
29/04/2026
Plugin Marketplace for Azure SRE Agent: Build Once, Install Anywhere
This is the key distinction: a plugin doesn't just tell the agent what your policies are — it gives the agent tools to query your internal systems and apply those policies with real data.Every SRE Agent in the org can discover it and install it with one click — no need for each team to manually recreate skills and configure connectors.Three teams have contributed plugins to the company's internal marketplace:
29/04/2026
Enterprise Security Assessment: A Strategic Lens for Mission Critical Environments
Understanding Enterprise Security at ScaleThe Enterprise Security Assessment (ESA) helps organizations understand their security posture across Azure, Microsoft 365, and hybrid environments from a true enterprise perspective.An Enterprise Security Assessment is typically delivered as a focused engagement designed to establish an enterprise‑wide view of security posture.
29/04/2026
The Microsoft 365 Copilot Frontier Program: What Executives and IT Leaders Actually Need to Know
What Is the Microsoft 365 Copilot Frontier Program?Frontier is Microsoft's early access program that gives organizations access to the newest AI-powered Copilot capabilities before they reach general availability (GA).The Microsoft 365 Copilot Frontier program is a strategic option for enterprise organizations that want to shape the future of AI productivity tools, not just consume them.
29/04/2026
Turn AI Potential into Real Impact—One Day Is All It Takes
The Microsoft Global Agent‑a‑thon is your opportunity to move from AI interest to real, usable solutions in one day, with guidance and support that continues well beyond the event.Through the Agent‑a‑thon, nonprofits can:The Agent‑a‑thon is designed to support you before, during, and after the event.
29/04/2026
Top 10 KV Cache Compression Techniques for LLM Inference: Reducing Memory Overhead Across Eviction, Quantization, and Low-Rank Methods
Top 10 KV Cache Compression Techniques for LLM Inference: Reducing Memory Overhead Across Eviction, Quantization, and Low-Rank MethodsThe post Top 10 KV Cache Compression Techniques for LLM Inference: Reducing Memory Overhead Across Eviction, Quantization, and Low-Rank Methods appeared first on MarkTechPost.
29/04/2026
Use Data Wrangler to Streamline Your Microsoft Sentinel data lake Notebook Development
One of the many exciting features of the Microsoft Sentinel data lake is a built-in advanced analytics engine, powered by
29/04/2026
Operating AI Agents on Azure: Observability with Azure AI Foundry
Azure AI Foundry is Microsoft’s enterprise platform for building, deploying, and operating AI applications and intelligent agents as first‑class Azure workloads.Microsoft Agent Framework is an Azure‑native framework designed to build and operate intelligent agents directly within Azure AI Foundry.The OpenAI Agent SDK provides low‑level control for building custom agent runtimes.
29/04/2026
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
Instead of counting premium requests, every Copilot plan will include a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, with the option for paid plans to purchase additional usage.Usage will be calculated based on token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens, using the listed API rates for each model.This change aligns Copilot pricing with actual usage and is an important step toward a sustainable, reliable Copilot business and experience for all users.Learn more here and access partner resources here.
29/04/2026
Use multiple phone numbers in a unified Teams experience with Teams Phone user multi-line
We’re excited to announce general availability of Microsoft Teams Phone user multi-line, which lets admins assign up to 10 phone numbers to a single Teams Phone user.Teams Phone user multi-line helps streamline that experience by enabling a Teams user to make and receive calls for multiple phone numbers within one unified Teams experience.The result: less overhead for admins and a cleaner calling experience for users who need to handle more than one business calling number in Teams.
29/04/2026
Automate agent evaluation with the Evaluation APIs
Now, these same evaluation capabilities can be used programmatically through Power Platform REST API and your connectors.Here’s how you can use these Evaluation APIs to automate agent evaluation as part of your development and release workflows.Below are the core Evaluation API endpoints available today, starting with how to retrieve test sets and trigger evaluation runs programmatically.
29/04/2026
Opt-In Windows Server 2025 Feature Update from the WS 2022 and WS 2019 Settings Dialog
This capability allows customers who want to in-place upgrade their servers to Windows Server 2025 to upgrade using the Windows Update service, and without the need for Windows Server 2025 physical media.Plan on a gradual roll-out of Windows Server 2025 across your server estate, starting with the least critical servers.Steps for Installing the Windows Server 2025 Feature Update on Windows Server 2022 Server Core using SCONFIG
29/04/2026
Microsoft 365 Backup granular restore now generally available!
Data recovery shouldn’t feel like an all-or-nothing decision. Until now, Microsoft 365 Backup allowed you to recover OneDrive accounts and SharePoint sites. We’re excited to announce granular browse and restore for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, giving IT teams a more selective way to recover individual files and folders when something goes wrong, while leaving the rest of your environment untouched.With these enhancements, Microsoft 365 Backup provides IT teams with greater flexibility to back up and restore files, folders, accounts, and sites—helping streamline recovery timelines while maintaining security and control. (Learn more about restoration expectations.)Image: Select files and folders to restore in the Microsoft 365 admin center
29/04/2026
Get started with the New Relic MCP server in Azure SRE Agent
Overview The New Relic MCP server is a cloud-hosted bridge between your New Relic account and Azure SRE Agent. Once configured, it enables real-time interaction with your observability data—APM traces, distributed traces, logs, metrics, alerts, incidents, dashboards, and entities—through natural language. All actions respect your existing New Relic role and capability assignments. The server uses Streamable HTTP transport with a single Api-Key hea...
29/04/2026
Qwen Team Releases FlashQLA: a High-Performance Linear Attention Kernel Library That Achieves Up to 3× Speedup on NVIDIA Hopper GPUs
The QwenLM team has released FlashQLA, a new kernel library that dramatically accelerates the forward and backward passes of Gated Delta Network (GDN) Chunked Prefill, targeting both large-scale pretraining and edge-side agentic inference scenarios.The post Qwen Team Releases FlashQLA: a High-Performance Linear Attention Kernel Library That Achieves Up to 3× Speedup on NVIDIA Hopper GPUs appeared first on MarkTechPost.
29/04/2026
Copilot in OneNote now understands more of your notes
Copilot in OneNote now understands images, tables, and moreCopilot in OneNote can now better understand your notes beyond typed text—including note tags, images, and tables—to deliver more accurate responses to your queries with the additional context.Simply ask Copilot questions about your OneNote page, which can include note tags, images, tables, inked notes and more.
29/04/2026
Building an Enterprise-Grade SQL Platform on Kubernetes using Crossplane and Azure PostgreSQL
Build a Kubernetes-native SQL platform using Crossplane-based database operator to provision Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server.The composition creates multiple PrivateDNSCNAMERecord resources for read and write endpoint abstraction.The composition reads user intent from the composite spec—regions, CIDR ranges, DNS settings, database sizing, retention, and admin secret references—and translates that into Azure resources including a resource group, private DNS zone, regional VNets and subnets, bidirectional peering, a primary Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server, a cross-region replica, and private DNS CNAME records for read/write abstraction.
29/04/2026
Operations Context for AI | Ontology in Fabric IQ
Generate a full business ontology from an existing Power BI semantic model, map entities and relationships, and embed real-time operational signals alongside business rules that live inside the ontology with the data and its meaning. From there, trace cascading operational impacts across your business through the relationship graph, stand up Operations Agents in natural language with Teams-based actions, and connect the same ontology as a knowledge source in Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry. Fabric IQ introduces a semantic foundation that unifies models and data through an ontology.
29/04/2026
Step by Step Guide to Build a Complete PII Detection and Redaction Pipeline with OpenAI Privacy Filter
In this tutorial, we build a complete, production-style pipeline for detecting and redacting personally identifiable information using the OpenAI Privacy Filter.We begin by setting up the environment and loading a token classification model that identifies multiple categories of sensitive data, including names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, and secrets.We then design helper functions to […]
29/04/2026
Design predictable AI performance to scale selling through Microsoft Marketplace
Trade-offs in AI performance: latency, quality and cost This post is part of a series on building and publishing well-architected AI apps and agents in Microsoft Marketplace. The series focuses on AI apps and agents that are architected, hosted, and operated on Azure, with guidance aligned to building and selling solutions through Microsoft Marketplace.While unpredictable token usage and orchestration steps can quickly escalate infrastructure costs in AI-powered systems, design choices can prevent runaway expenses without compromising the quality of responses.
29/04/2026
Azure Monitor Service Level Indicators (SLI)
Today, we are excited to introduce Service Level Indicators (SLI) and Service Level Objectives (SLO) in Azure Monitor a step forward in helping teams measure how customers are experiencing their applications.SLI: A quantitative measure of how well an application or service is performing from the customer’s point of view.Azure Monitor SLI brings service health management directly into the Azure platform.
29/04/2026
Granular email content access with unified RBAC – now the default for new Defender tenants
Email investigations are a key part of detecting and responding to phishing and malware. As security workflows continue to evolve, there is an increasing need to align email content visibility more closely with specific roles and scenarios, such as Tier‑1 analysis or specialized workflows like user‑reported phishing triage. Today we’re announcing additional “read-only” controls for more granular email access in Microsoft Defender and that starting on May 30th, 2026, unified ...
29/04/2026
CloudThat: How the gamified CloudAttack app is transforming AI skilling
Microsoft Training Services Partner CloudThat, an award-winning global leader in training and consulting, recognized this challenge and set out to reimagine how people build cloud and AI skills.The result is CloudAttack, a proprietary generative AI–powered gamified learning platform that’s making skill-building more interactive, enjoyable, and measurable.CloudThat’s answer to these challenges is CloudAttack, an app rooted in AI technology and gamification teaching methodology.
29/04/2026
How to Manage RC4 Hardening – Definitive Guide
This article is a technical continuation of the RC4 deprecation / Kerberos hardening work I covered in my previous article last month.If you already went through the “why” (risk of RC4, what changes Microsoft is rolling out, and the high-level migration approach), the goal here is to get hands-on and precise: what exactly changes across the three rollout phases, which registry keys and AD attributes drive KDC behavior, what you should expect to see in security logs, and how to turn those signals into concrete remediation steps.How to manage Kerberos KDC usage of RC4 for service account ticket issuance changes related to CVE-2026-20833 How to manage Kerberos KDC usage of RC4 for service account ticket issuance changes related to CVE-2026-20833 - Microsoft Support
29/04/2026
Get more out of Microsoft Clipchamp with these little‑known features
Stay on brand with Brand kitsWith Brand kits in Clipchamp, individual users or Microsoft 365 administrators can create curated, organization-wide sets of logos, brand colors, and fonts in one place to ensure consistent use, and then apply them across videos with just a few clicks.Share your thoughts in the comments.
29/04/2026
Hands-on Session: From idea to interactive lesson with Microsoft Learning Zone
Join us on Tuesday, May 12th at 8:00 AM Pacific for a hands-on professional development session introducing Learning Zone - a new app that helps you create interactive, classroom-ready lessons in minutes.You can follow along using your own Microsoft 365 Education account.✅ Building your first interactive lesson: Create your first interactive lesson (in minutes!)
29/04/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: April 29, 2026
Learn about 201 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.365SAMPulse: 365SAMPulse is a lightweight SaaS tool for small to midsize organizations that provides clear visibility into Microsoft 365 usage, licensing, and adoption.It analyzes and converts forms, PL/SQL logic, and triggers into responsive web interfaces and secure back-end services using modern frameworks.
29/04/2026
Migrating Splunk Logs to Azure Application Insights on VMs
Since your apps already write logs to files, we can replace Splunk forwarders with Azure Monitor Agent (AMA).Step 2.1 – Install Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) on VMs3. Integrate log4net with Application Insights:
29/04/2026
AG-UI: The Future of Agent-Driven User Interfaces
Introducing AG-UI (Agent–User Interface) — a unified protocol that finally standardizes how agents talk to frontends.It enables streaming, declarative UI generation, state synchronization, and human-in-the-loop workflows out of the box.AG-UI is the missing piece that bridges backend intelligence with real-time, interactive user experiences.
29/04/2026
General availability of Default Ruleset (DRS) 2.2 for Web Application Firewall
Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) continues to evolve to meet these demands and now supports Default Rule Set (DRS) 2.2 across both Azure Front Door and Azure Application Gateway.The latest recommended Azure WAF ruleset, based on OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS) 3.3.4., DRS 2.2 combines OWASP CRS protections with Microsoft-authored rules developed with the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team, delivering broader coverage, updated signatures, reduced false positives, and a more modern security baseline for your internet-facing applications.DRS 2.2 is based on the OWASP Core Rule Set 3.3.4, delivering improvements in rule accuracy and new protections for common web vulnerabilities.
29/04/2026
Solutions for document-centric business processes - Portal Systems - 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 Patrick Carl from Portal Systems AG join Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft to showcase different features and capabilities they've built for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint using SharePoint Framework (SPFx).Portal Systems AG is an independent software manufacturer specializing in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and software solutions based on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.
29/04/2026
Meta FAIR Releases NeuralSet: A Python Package for Neuro-AI That Supports fMRI, M/EEG, Spikes, and HuggingFace Embeddings
Introducing NeuralSet: Meta's Simple, Fast, and Scalable Python Package That Bridges Neuroscience and AI The post Meta FAIR Releases NeuralSet: A Python Package for Neuro-AI That Supports fMRI, M/EEG, Spikes, and HuggingFace Embeddings appeared first on MarkTechPost.
29/04/2026
smol-audio: A Colab-Friendly Notebook Collection for Fine-Tuning Whisper, Parakeet, Voxtral, Granite Speech, and Audio Flamingo 3
smol-audio Is the Audio AI Cookbook Practitioners Have Been Waiting For The post smol-audio: A Colab-Friendly Notebook Collection for Fine-Tuning Whisper, Parakeet, Voxtral, Granite Speech, and Audio Flamingo 3 appeared first on MarkTechPost.
29/04/2026
A Coding Implementation on Document Parsing Benchmarking with LlamaIndex ParseBench Using Python, Hugging Face, and Evaluation Metrics
In this tutorial, we explore how to use the ParseBench dataset to evaluate document parsing systems in a structured, practical way.We begin by loading the dataset directly from Hugging Face, inspecting its multiple dimensions, such as text, tables, charts, and layout, and transforming it into a unified dataframe for deeper analysis.The post A Coding Implementation on Document Parsing Benchmarking with LlamaIndex ParseBench Using Python, Hugging Face, and Evaluation Metrics appeared first on MarkTechPost.
29/04/2026
Making Sense of Azure AI Foundry IQ
This post explores those boundaries and grounds them in concrete, enterprise‑relevant scenarios, before showing how Foundry IQ can be implemented directly via Azure AI Search APIs and SDKs.Azure AI Foundry IQ is a managed knowledge layer built on Azure AI Search.It allows you to define a knowledge base that spans multiple content sources such as SharePoint, Azure Blob Storage, OneLake, existing Azure AI Search indexes, and selected external sources and expose them through a single, permission‑aware endpoint.
29/04/2026
Building an Enterprise Knowledge Copilot with Foundry IQ and Agentic Retrieval on Azure AI
This article walks through building a knowledge copilot that unifies that data behind a single conversational interface — using Microsoft's Foundry IQ knowledge bases and the agentic retrieval engine in Azure AI Search.It provides a unified knowledge layer for agents — a single endpoint that replaces per-project RAG pipelines with a reusable, topic-centric knowledge base that any number of agents can consume.Create a knowledge base in Azure AI Search
29/04/2026
Poolside AI Introduces Laguna XS.2 and M.1: Agentic Coding Models Reaching 68.2% and 72.5% on SWE-bench Verified
Poolside Releases Laguna XS.2 and M.1: Open-Weight Agentic Coding Models Built for Long-Horizon Tasks The post Poolside AI Introduces Laguna XS.2 and M.1: Agentic Coding Models Reaching 68.2% and 72.5% on SWE-bench Verified appeared first on MarkTechPost.
29/04/2026
How to Build Traceable and Evaluated LLM Workflows Using Promptflow, Prompty, and OpenAI
In this tutorial, we build a complete, production-style LLM workflow using Promptflow within a Colab environment.We begin by setting up a reliable keyring backend to avoid OS dependency issues and securely configure our OpenAI connection.The post How to Build Traceable and Evaluated LLM Workflows Using Promptflow, Prompty, and OpenAI appeared first on MarkTechPost.
29/04/2026
Transforming Video Content into Structured SOPs Using Graph-based RAG
Converting that knowledge into structured documentation like Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) is often manual and time-consuming.Enter Graph-based RAG (GraphRAG)GraphRAG extends traditional RAG by building a knowledge graph instead of treating content as disconnected chunks.
29/04/2026
Flexible Cooling for AI Growth: How Zonal Architecture Supports Diverse Hardware Needs
Microsoft is pioneering zonal cooling in its next-generation AI datacenters, enabling flexible, performant, efficient, and sustainable thermal management for diverse workloads.Zonal cooling is a facility design that introduces multiple independent water loops, each supplying coolant at different temperatures.Microsoft is building facility-level zonal cooling in the next generation of its AI datacenters going live in 2028 and beyond, while exploring the other three approaches in the lab. Facility-level zonal cooling is expected to reduce PUEs by up to 10%.
29/04/2026
OpenAI Releases Privacy Filter: A 1.5B-Parameter Open-Source PII Redaction Model with 50M Active Parameters
OpenAI's Privacy Filter Is a 1.5B-Parameter PII Detector Built on a Distilled Decoder — And It Runs in Your Browser The post OpenAI Releases Privacy Filter: A 1.5B-Parameter Open-Source PII Redaction Model with 50M Active Parameters appeared first on MarkTechPost.
28/04/2026
Announcing SQL Server Management Studio 22.5.2
Today we released a smaller SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) update, version 22.5.2, to address a few issues related to GitHub Copilot and SQL Projects. As always, we recommend that users update to the latest release when it’s available, as it’s the generally available and supported release. You can view the release notes for more details related to the fixes, and with both SQL Projects and copilot, we continue to monitor customer feedback and add functionality with each release. If you’re using either feature, we appreciate you trying out what’s new and reporting any issues or requests on the feedback site.With this release there’s an important change for GitHub Copilot in SSMS that I want to call out. We have disabled completions by default.why did you disable completions by default?
28/04/2026
APIM Circuit Breaker com Azure OpenAI
APIM Circuit Breaker com Azure OpenAI Visão Geral Ao consumir modelos do Azure OpenAI em produção, depender de um único endpoint representa um risco real. Basta uma instância ficar indisponível ou atingir limites de throttling para que toda a aplicação seja impactada. Neste artigo, construímos uma arquitetura resiliente utilizando o Azure API Management (APIM)&nb...
28/04/2026
Deploying DNS Private Resolvers and Private DNS Zones for Azure AI Supported Services
DNS Private resolvers are regional, which means if you have Azure EAST US and WEST US 2 regions, you need to create DNS Private resolvers in both regions linked to Private DNS Zones, you can adopt centralized or distributed DNS Private resolvers, I will discuss both options later in this articlePsPing, a tool from Sysinternals, is highly effective for verifying network connectivity from on-premises environments to Azure resources on specific ports.By using PsPing, you can test and confirm that the necessary ports are open and accessible, which is crucial for troubleshooting connectivity issues and ensuring smooth communication between your on-premises infrastructure and Azure-hosted resources.
28/04/2026
What's New in Excel (April 2026)
Welcome to the April 2026 update.In broader Microsoft 365 news, Copilot's Agentic capabilities are now generally available, and Copilot Cowork, which is an agentic AI capability that acts like a digital teammate—turning your goals into multi-step plans and helping execute tasks across apps (email, meetings, documents, workflows) with user oversight, is available via the Frontier program. For Excel, new Edit with Copilot capabilities include the Chat/Edit switcher, step-by-step reasoning with plan mode, understanding changes made by Copilot, and the ability to use the power of Python directly from Copilot, as well as new OpenAI GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 models.Many of these features are the result of your feedback.
28/04/2026
Join us at Microsoft 365 Copilot Live Expo and Discovery event in Huntsville, AL!
The Microsoft US Federal Customer Success Unit (CSU) wants to help you change that with an event designed to break that cycle — before it starts.Microsoft 365 Copilot LIVE Expo and DiscoveryMay 19–21, 2026 The Summit at Redstone |The Copilot LIVE Expo, part of the MILE (Microsoft Immersive Learning Experience) program, throws all of that out and offers something different.
28/04/2026
Building Intelligent Apps With Azure
With artificial intelligence (AI) becoming part of everyday tools, organizations of all sizes are looking for ways to build smarter, more helpful apps. Microsoft Azure makes this easier by giving teams the tools and training they need to learn, experiment, and create with confidence.Azure supports teams with hands‑on learning, expert guidance, and built‑in responsible AI tools through frameworks like Microsoft Responsible AI, helping teams build safely and confidently.Azure provides tools and best practices to help teams:
28/04/2026
Proactive Reliability Series — Article 1: Fault Types in Azure
Welcome to the Proactive Reliability Series — a collection of articles dedicated to raising awareness about the importance of designing, implementing, and operating reliable solutions in Azure. Each article will focus on a specific area of reliability engineering: from identifying critical flows and setting reliability targets, to designing for redundancy, testing strategies, and di...
28/04/2026
HashiCorp Vault Integration with Terraform — Secure Secret Management
To mitigate these risks, organizations can integrate HashiCorp Vault with Terraform to securely store and retrieve secrets dynamically during infrastructure provisioning.This blog demonstrates the Vault-Terraform integration using a real-world example:Enable Azure AD authentication method:
28/04/2026
Architecting Cost-Aware LLM Workloads with Model Router in Microsoft Foundry
The 2025-11-18 release adds tool-use support, enabling Model Router inside the Foundry Agent Service.If you’re standardizing on the Microsoft Foundry SDK rather than the OpenAI Python SDK, the Responses API offers an equivalent path.Because Model Router can dispatch to either chat or reasoning (o-series) models, parameter behavior shifts based on the actual model picked.
28/04/2026
Query plan regressions got you down? Here's how can Automatic Plan Correction turns it around.
It is part of the Automatic Tuning family and has been quietly doing its job since SQL Server 2017, detecting query plan regressions and automatically forcing a previously known good plan to restore performance.With SQL Server 2022 CU4 and continuing into SQL Server 2025, we have made significant improvements to the statistical model that APC uses for regression detection.APC supports two statistical models for determining whether a query plan has regressed.
28/04/2026
Partner Blog | Strengthen partner operations with platform updates
For Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners, that experience depends on the operational readiness behind the scenes: secure access, resilient APIs, accurate billing and reconciliation, and subscription lifecycle flows that set the right expectations. This quarterly operational briefing is designed to give your technical teams a clear, actionable view of the latest platform, security, and API updates so you can protect revenue continuity, reduce operational friction, and stay ahead of enforcement milestones.It also highlights where platform readiness can unlock new growth opportunities, especially for partners investing in advanced workloads and specializations.
28/04/2026
Partner Blog | Veeam
As hybrid learning environments become more complex and cloud adoption accelerates, IT teams need a unified approach to protect data across both on‑premises systems and virtual infrastructure.Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Veeam is a long-standing Microsoft partner that delivers data protection and recovery solutions to help organizations protect data across hybrid environments.That focus is why Batterjee Medical College (BMC)—a rapidly expanding private medical college in Saudi Arabia—partnered with Veeam to strengthen their data resilience strategy and ensure continuity as their operations, hybrid learning environment, and regional footprint continue to grow.
28/04/2026
From Late Nights to Global Impact: Ariane Djeupang’s Microsoft MVP Journey
Ariane is a project manager and machine learning engineer based in Cameroon - and a leader across multiple open-source communities.The moment she became a Microsoft MVPAfter she was nominated and completed the application, she was welcomed into the Microsoft MVP community - one of only four MVPs in Cameroon, and the first (and currently only) woman MVP in the country.
28/04/2026
OrganAIze - What Happens When You Let AI Agents Organize Themselves?
Goal: Create a comprehensive report on quantum computingWithout guardrails, a self-spawning system could create infinite agents and burn through your API budget in seconds.It's to explore the boundary of what's possible when you trust the model with orchestration decisions and focus your engineering effort on safety, cost control, and observability instead.
28/04/2026
How Microsoft 1ES uses agentic AI to take on security and compliance at scale
Within Microsoft’s One Engineering System (1ES) organization, teams build and maintain the internal engineering systems that product groups across the company rely on to ship and secure their services.But this is exactly the kind of challenge AI was made for: high-speed, high-scale evaluation and judgment calls, coached by human expertise.Frontier models like GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 can now reason about context, intent, and tradeoffs not just generate code.
28/04/2026
Public Preview: User-initiated provisioning for Windows 365 Reserve
Launched in December 2025, Windows 365 Reserve is a business continuity solution that helps restore employee access when their primary device becomes unavailable by providing a Cloud PC when it’s needed most.Today, we’re announcing the public preview of user‑initiated provisioning for Windows 365 Reserve.This capability was teased at Microsoft Ignite and is now available in public preview!
28/04/2026
Microsoft Defender: New Advanced hunting enhancements
We’ve made several enhancements across the experience to expand limits and better support large-scale investigations so analysts can query, explore, and act on more data with fewer constraints.We have heard your feedback on the need for larger data sets and are excited to announce that the results limitation in advanced hunting has been raised from 30,000 to 100,000 records.In addition to the above enhancements, we are delighted to introduce the ability to save KQL functions directly from the advanced hunting page into your log analytics workspace.
28/04/2026
AI at every career stage (start, grow, lead)
Learn practical ways to build confidence early on, scale your impact midcareer, and strengthen strategy and coaching as you lead.In the final post in this series on AI for business users, Microsoft Senior Learning Manager Ashley Masters Hall shares insights on how AI skills can help you grow your confidence and impact, along with your career.In the second, AI prompting tips & tricks for everyday tasks, we look at simple approaches that help non-technical roles work smarter.
28/04/2026
Improve Marketplace outcomes with AI-powered listing recommendations in App Advisor
What stands out to me now, however, is how much that experience has become more streamlined and actionable. App Advisor is one of the clearest demonstrations of Microsoft’s commitment to helping software development companies succeed, and in many ways, it represents the pinnacle of that evolution. With App Advisor—and now AI-powered marketplace listing recommendations—we’re able to continuously improve how we show up in Marketplace without introducing risk or guesswork. We have more control and clarity than we have ever had before.In the Teams App Store, especially, visibility translates directly into installs, usage signals, and ultimately sales conversations.
28/04/2026
Update host keys to use SFTP on Azure Blob Storage
Update host keys to use SFTP on Azure Blob StorageFAQs to Host keys for SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) support for Azure Blob StorageHow to list all your storage accounts with SFTP enabled
28/04/2026
Aligning SAP application servers with the HANA primary zone on Azure (Public Preview) — Part 1
This post introduces a new Pacemaker resource agent for SAP on Azure deployments, that helps automate the Active/Passive application-server alignment.Azure SAP Zone Resource Agent is a Pacemaker resource agent that aligns SAP application server VMs with the current HANA primary VM.Think of Azure SAP Zone Alignment Resource Agent as an orchestration layer that sits alongside your existing Pacemaker-managed HANA high availability setup:
28/04/2026
Azure SAP Zone Resource Agent (Public Preview) — Technical Deep Dive (Part 2)
The azure-sap-zone resource agent is a Pacemaker resource agent designed to manage the alignment of SAP application Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) with the primary HANA Azure VM.This agent ensures that SAP application servers are started in the same Azure availability zone as the HANA primary VM to maintain high availability and optimal performance.With the information in this post, you should have what you need to evaluate the Azure SAP Zone Resource Agent in your environment - from setting up the managed identity and permissions, to installing the agent, configuring the cluster, and troubleshooting common issues.
28/04/2026
Securing Your AI Agents Before They Ship: Red Teaming with Microsoft PyRIT
Securing Your AI Agents Before They Ship: Red Teaming with Microsoft PyRITPyRIT is Microsoft's open-source answer: an automation framework battle-tested on 100+ products including Copilot.Why AI red teaming is fundamentally different from traditional security testing
28/04/2026
Foundry Agent Service + Microsoft Agent Framework Explained
So to solve for this, today we’ll get hands-on with the Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, a platform which lets you bring in your own agents using your preferred tools and host them with built-in enterprise controls, measurability, and discoverability, and the powerful open-source Microsoft Agent Framework that’s uniquely designed to make it easier to build both single and multi-agentic workloads with orchestration.And joining me to demonstrate all this is resident developer expert, Jeff Hollan.Work IQ, Foundry IQ, and Fabric IQ.
28/04/2026
Preeminent Technologies and Codemod offer transactable partner solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like Preeminent Technologies and Codemod deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace.SpaceBeacon: SB Flights & Hotels from Preeminent Technologies (doing business as SpaceBeacon) is a service of the SpaceBeacon AI-powered travel platform.SB Flights & Hotels lets you book your trip via voice commands.
28/04/2026
Project Pavilion Presence at KubeCon EU 2026
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 took place from 23 to 26 March at RAI Amsterdam, and it was a strong one.Microsoft was there throughout, and once again supported a range of open source projects in the Project Pavilion.Microsoft's products and services are built on and alongside many of the technologies represented in the pavilion, and the health of these communities matters to us directly.
28/04/2026
Istio‑Based Weighted Traffic Management on AKS for Enterprise Workloads
This article demonstrates how to implement weighted load balancing from AKS workloads to backend AKS internal services using Istio—addressing a key limitation in native Azure load balancing services.This section presents two common deployment use cases that apply the same Istio traffic‑management pattern—weighted routing with cookie‑based session affinity—but differ in where backend workloads run.This section walks through the production‑ready Istio configuration used to implement weighted traffic routing with cookie‑based session affinity.
28/04/2026
Troubleshooting SQL MI Failover Group Creation in Hub–Spoke Network with Centralized Firewall
Failover groups for Azure SQL Managed Instance provide a managed way to replicate all user databases from a primary managed instance to a secondary managed instance in another region, with stable listener endpoints that remain constant across geo-failovers.The root cause turned out to be network path behaviour in a hub–spoke environment with centralized firewalling—specifically around required ports, routing, and traffic handling.During deployment, Failover Group creation failed (or remained stuck), and the system did not progress to seeding/replication from the primary to the secondary instance.
28/04/2026
Top 10 Physical AI Models Powering Real-World Robots in 2026
The gap between language model capabilities and robotic deployment has been narrowing considerably over the past 18 months.A new class of foundation models — purpose-built not for text generation but for physical action — is now running on real hardware across factories, warehouses, and research labs.The post Top 10 Physical AI Models Powering Real-World Robots in 2026 appeared first on MarkTechPost.
28/04/2026
Deploying Azure Redis Enterprise with Geo-Replication Using Terraform
This post walks through a production‑proven pattern for running stateful services across Azure regions using Terraform.We’ll cover a primary–replica Redis architecture, regional isolation with Key Vault and networking, and a clean Terraform parameterization strategy that scales from development to production without duplication.That’s where Terraform + Azure Managed Redis geo‑replication shines.
28/04/2026
The Future of Agentic AI: Inside Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0
On April 3, 2026, Microsoft marked a major milestone with the General Availability (GA) release of Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0, a production‑ready, open‑source framework for building agents and multi‑agent workflows in.NET and Python.According to the official announcement, Microsoft Agent Framework is an open‑source SDK and runtime for building AI agents and multi‑agent workflows with strong enterprise foundations.Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 distinguishes itself by focusing on "Enterprise Readiness" and "Interoperability."
28/04/2026
Extracting and Auditing Azure DevOps Permissions at Scale with PowerShell
The blog post introduces ADO Permissions Output, an open-source PowerShell toolset that extracts Azure DevOps security permissions across 30+ security namespaces, resolves cryptic tokens and GUIDs into human-readable names, and produces structured JSON and CSV output suitable for auditing, compliance, and import into Power BI.This toolset bridges the gap between the raw security APIs and actionable audit output, resolving cryptic tokens into readable names, surfacing effective and inherited permissions, and detecting stale or ghost group members through Entra group expansion.The tool is open source, requires only PowerShell 7 and a PAT, and is designed for unattended pipeline execution with output committed back to the repository for version-tracked audit history.
28/04/2026
Azure SQL Database BACPAC Export Stuck with Private Link and Resource Locks
When you enable the Use private link option during import or export, the service automatically creates temporary, service-managed private endpoints to securely connect the Azure SQL Database to the target Storage Account.You must manually approve the private endpoint for both the Azure SQL logical server and the Azure Blob storage account in separate steps.Azure SQL Import/Export using Private Link (Microsoft Learn) Import or Export a Database Using Private Link - Azure SQL Database |
28/04/2026
Why Does Azure App Service Return HTTP 404?
When an application deployed to Azure App Service suddenly starts returning HTTP 404 – Not Found, it can be confusing —especially when: In this article, I’ll walk through real-world reasons why Azure App Service can return HTTP 404 errors, based on production issues, support cases, and community discussions.An HTTP 404 response from Azure App Service means:
28/04/2026
How to Build a Lightweight Vision-Language-Action-Inspired Embodied Agent with Latent World Modeling and Model Predictive Control
In this tutorial, we build an embodied simulation vision agent that learns to perceive, plan, predict, and replan directly from pixel observations.We create a fully NumPy-rendered grid world in which the agent observes RGB frames rather than symbolic state variables, enabling us to simulate a simplified Vision-Language-Action-style pipeline.We train a lightweight world model […]
28/04/2026
Meet Talkie-1930: A 13B Open-Weight LLM Trained on Pre-1931 English Text for Historical Reasoning and Generalization Research
What if a language model had never heard of the internet, smartphones, or even World War II?That’s not a hypothetical — it’s exactly what a team of researchers led by Nick Levine, David Duvenaud, and Alec Radford has built.They call it talkie, and it may be the most historically disciplined large language model […]
28/04/2026
Introducing AI Skill Assessment in Azure API Center
As AI skills become central to enterprise automation and intelligent workflows, ensuring their quality, safety, and discoverability at scale is a growing challenge. Today, we're excited to announce skills assessment in Azure API Center — a built-in, automated quality scoring system powered by the LLM-as-a-judge technique. This capability enables organizations to continuously evaluate AI skills against defined quality standards, giving platform administrators governance...
27/04/2026
From co-sell ready to co-sell active: How to drive Microsoft seller engagement
About the author: Trunal Bhanse, CEO, Clazar, brings significant experience as a leader and an innovator across Airbnb and Confluent. At the latter, Trunal led a pioneering team of engineers scaling cloud marketplaces and billing infrastructures. Having witnessed the complexity first-hand, he launched Clazar to democratize cloud marketplace access for businesses.
27/04/2026
Protect your estate: Reassess your Windows update policies
A new Windows Autopatch report that reflects updated recommendations on patch compliance is rolling out soon to your tenant. Keeping devices up to date has never been more critical for security. As noted in a recent post AI-powered defense for an AI-accelerated threat landscape
27/04/2026
So, You’ve disabled Windows Hello for Business, but the User can still Sign-in using a PIN
Hi, it’s Brent from the Windows Directory Services team. I recently worked a case concerning a user who had the Windows Hello for Business (“WHfB”) policy disabled, but the user could still sign-in to the computer using their PIN. As you may have guessed, the Windows admin team of the Active Directory domain for this user wanted to know how this could be and how they could remove this sign-in option from the user.
27/04/2026
Bring Your Own Model to Foundry Agent Service Is Now Generally Available
Enterprise teams building AI agents often need to route model requests through their own infrastructure — whether for compliance, governance, or other controls provided by gateways. Today, we are excited to announce general availability of the Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) for Foundry Agent Service feature, letting you connect prompt agents to models hosted behind Azure API Management or any third-party AI model gateway. This means you can build agents in Foundry while k...
27/04/2026
Design predictable usage-based billing for AI apps and agents selling in Microsoft Marketplace
Design predictable usage‑based billing for AI apps and agents selling on Microsoft Marketplace Compared to traditional software, pricing and billing feel harder because of the range of AI functionality. They reason, they infer, call tools, process data, all, to complete tasks on the customer’s behalf. If you’re building an AI app or agent to sell in Microsoft Marketplace, usage‑based billing needs to be designed with care, instrumented with intention, and expl...
27/04/2026
Deprecating Legacy TLS and Endpoints for POP and IMAP in Exchange Online
Security on the internet continues to evolve, and older cryptographic protocols no longer provide the protections required for today’s threat landscape. As part of our ongoing work to help customers keep their email environments secure, we’re taking another step in modernizing Exchange Online connectivity. What’s changing We’re planning to fully deprecate support for legacy TLS versions (TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1) for POP3 and IMAP4 connecti...
27/04/2026
Build a Reinforcement Learning Powered Agent that Learns to Retrieve Relevant Long-Term Memories for Accurate LLM Question Answering
In this tutorial, we build a Reinforcement Learning–driven agent that learns how to retrieve relevant memories from a long-term memory bank. We start by constructing a synthetic memory dataset and generating queries that require the agent to recall specific information. Using OpenAI embeddings, we convert both memories and queries into vector representations, enabling similarity signals […] The post
27/04/2026
Copilot in Outlook: New agentic experiences for email and calendar
Outlook used to be where you worked. Starting today, it's where Copilot works for you. Until now, Copilot in Outlook helped with the task in front of you: drafting an email, catching up on a long thread, or finding a time to meet. Useful, but not the hardest part. The real work is everything around it: the follow-ups that slip, the messages that need attention, and the schedule changes that pile up before the day even starts. That’s what’s changing today. Copilot in Outlook is n...
27/04/2026
OpenMOSS Releases MOSS-Audio: An Open-Source Foundation Model for Speech, Sound, Music, and Time-Aware Audio Reasoning
The model unifies speech, environmental sound, music, and temporal reasoning into a single architecture — and outperforms every open-source model tested on general audio benchmarks, including systems more than four times its size. The post OpenMOSS Releases MOSS-Audio: An Open-Source Foundation Model for Speech, Sound, Mus...
27/04/2026
Announcing Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 7.0.1
We are pleased to announce the release of Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 7.0.1, the first servicing update to the 7.0 line. This patch addresses several compatibility fixes reported by the community after the 7.0.0 GA release. Install or update from NuGet: dotnet add package Microsoft.Data.SqlClient --version 7.0.1 Full release notes:
27/04/2026
Explore curated Microsoft Partner Skilling Journeys
Partners like you understand that skilling isn't optional—it's foundational for success in an AI-first market. Keeping up with evolving technologies and capabilities will better position you with the skills needed to succeed in an ever-changing market.
27/04/2026
Assess Secure Boot status with Microsoft Defender
Understanding the Secure Boot certificate challenge Secure Boot is a foundational security feature that validates the integrity of your device's boot process, ensuring only trusted software can run during system startup. This protection has been quietly defending enterprise devices since 2012, but the original 2011 certificates that enable this trust are approaching their expiration date. When certificates expire in June 2026, devices that haven't transitioned...
27/04/2026
New eligible workloads for the Solutions Partner designation for Business Applications
The pathway to attaining and renewing the Solutions Partner designation for Business Applications has been widened thanks to the addition of two new eligible workloads: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Copilot Studio. Contact Center has been added across both performance and customer success metrics, while Copilot Studio has been added to performance.
27/04/2026
New Local Management Group for ALZ & Updated Sovereign Policies for SLZ
Following on from months of working alongside customers, partners, and our internal product groups, we have now made two updates to the Azure landing zone (ALZ) and the Sovereign landing zone (SLZ), that I’d like to walk you through in this post: A new dedicated ‘Local’ Management Group added beneath the Landing Zones Management Group – applies to both ALZ & SLZ A refresh of the sove...
27/04/2026
Azure Local expands to sovereign-scale infrastructure with disaggregated deployments
As organizations accelerate digital transformation across datacenters, sovereign environments, and edge locations, infrastructure architectures must evolve to meet new operational and regulatory demands. The first feature update of Azure Local in CY 2026 (version 2604) marks a significant step forward—expanding Azure Local as a platform for sovereign private cloud infrastructure, introducing larger scale, disaggregated deployment architectures, expanded storage ecosyst...
27/04/2026
Available today: GPT-5.5 Thinking and ChatGPT Images 2.0 in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Today, we’re expanding what Microsoft 365 Copilot can do with GPT-5.5 Thinking and ChatGPT Images 2.0 bringing stronger support for deeper analysis, multi-step work, and visual creation. GPT-5.5 Thinking is now available in Copilot Studio early release cycle environments as GPT-5.5 Reasoning and is rolling out across Microsoft 365 Copilot in Copilot Chat, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Chat...
27/04/2026
Unlocking hard data estates: How Cloudera on Microsoft Marketplace brings AI to regulated industries
In this guest blog post, Alex Wagman, Global Cloud Alliance Manager at Cloudera, considers the data challenges of regulated industries and how Cloudera enables governed hybrid data and AI. There’s a frustrating paradox facing chief information officers and data leaders in regulated industries today: The data with the most business value — customer records, transactions, operational intelligence — is often the data that’s least accessible for AI initiatives. <...
27/04/2026
Meta AI Releases Sapiens2: A High-Resolution Human-Centric Vision Model for Pose, Segmentation, Normals, Pointmap, and Albedo
Meta Reality Labs releases a new foundation model family for human-centric vision that pushes pose estimation, segmentation, and 3D geometry to new state-of-the-art levels — all from a single backbone. The post Meta AI Releases Sapiens2: A High-Resolution Human-Centric Vision Model for Pose, Segmentation, Normals, Po...
27/04/2026
Build AI RAG Apps with LangChain, Azure DocumentDB and Microsoft Foundry: Step-by-Step Guide
Scenario Imagine you are building your company’s RAG chat application using Microsoft Foundry - Azure OpenAI and orchestrating the flow with LangChain. The chat experience works, but now it needs to be grounded in your company’s data. You generate embeddings and want to store and query them without adding another ...
27/04/2026
From Portal Edits to GitOps : Deploying Azure API Management Configuration with APIOps
Introduction Modern enterprise platforms are increasingly built around APIs, and Azure API Management (APIM) sits at the heart of these systems as the control plane for enforcing policies, managing access, and routing traffic. While APIM provides a powerful interface through the Azure portal, many organisations initially manage APIs manually. Over time, this approach introduces systemic challenges such as configuration drift across environments, lack of traceability, a...
27/04/2026
Rethinking Data Modeling: How GitHub Copilot Is Changing the Way We Design Systems
There is a point in every engineer’s journey where data modeling stops feeling intuitive. What starts as a clean schema becomes harder to reason about. Relationships blur. Query paths multiply. Small changes ripple across different steps. This is where data modeling reveals its real challenge: not just storing data but preserving clarity as systems scale. And this is where GitHub Copilot became a practical accelerator for us. WHEN DATA MODELS STOP SCALING W...
27/04/2026
Azure AI Foundry vs Traditional ML Pipelines: What’s Different and Why It Matters
The Traditional ML Pipeline: What It Was Built For Traditional ML pipelines typically look like this: Data ingestion and preparation Model training (often batch‑oriented) Model validation and versioning Deployment via APIs or batch jobs Monitoring focused on accuracy and drift This approach worked well for: Predictive models (forecasting, classification) Periodic retraining cycles Isolated u...
27/04/2026
How to Troubleshoot Azure Functions Service Bus Trigger Issues
Table of Contents Overview Understanding How the Service Bus Trigger Works Message Processing Flow Key Concepts
27/04/2026
The LoRA Assumption That Breaks in Production
LoRA is widely used for fine-tuning large models because it’s efficient, but it quietly assumes that all updates to a model are similar. In reality, they’re not. When you fine-tune for style (like tone, format, or persona), the changes are simple and concentrated in just a few dimensions — which LoRA handles well with low-rank […] The post The LoRA Assumption That Breaks in Production...
27/04/2026
How to Build a Fully Searchable AI Knowledge Base with OpenKB, OpenRouter, and Llama
In this tutorial, we explore how to build and query a local knowledge base with OpenKB using a free, open model via OpenRouter. We securely retrieve the API key with getpass, set up the environment without hardcoding secrets, and initialize a structured, wiki-style knowledge base from scratch. As we move through the workflow, we add […] The post Ho...
27/04/2026
How to Build Smarter Multilingual Text Wrapping with BudouX Through Parsing, HTML Rendering, Model Introspection, and Toy Training
In this tutorial, we explore how we use BudouX to bring intelligent, phrase-aware line breaking to languages where whitespace is not naturally present, such as Japanese, Chinese, and Thai. We begin by setting up the library and working with its default parsers to understand how raw text is segmented into meaningful chunks. We then move […] The post
26/04/2026
Microsoft’s New In‑House AI Models (MAI‑Transcribe, MAI‑Voice, MAI‑Image)
What Are the New MAI Models? MAI‑Transcribe‑1 (Speech‑to‑Text) MAI‑Transcribe‑1 is Microsoft’s first‑generation in‑house speech recognition model. It supports 25 languages and is optimized for real‑world, noisy enterprise audio, such as meetings and call centers. Key highlights Enterprise‑grade transcription accuracy Designed for multilingual and accented speech<...
26/04/2026
Top 7 Benchmarks That Actually Matter for Agentic Reasoning in Large Language Models
As AI agents move from research demos to production deployments, one question has become impossible to ignore: how do you actually know if an agent is good? Perplexity scores and MMLU leaderboard numbers tell you very little about whether a model can navigate a real website, resolve a GitHub issue, or reliably handle a customer […] The post Top 7...
26/04/2026
Dev Containers for .NET in VS Code: A Beginner‑Friendly Guide That Actually Works
What Dev Containers are really about At a high level, Dev Containers let you use a Docker container as your development environment inside VS Code. But the real idea is not “Docker for development”. The real idea is this: Move all environment complexity out of your laptop and into version‑controlled configuration. With Dev Containers: Your laptop becomes just a VS Code client Your tools, SDKs, runtimes, and dependencies live...
26/04/2026
RAG Without Vectors: How PageIndex Retrieves by Reasoning
Retrieval is where most RAG systems quietly break. Traditional pipelines rely on vector similarity—embedding queries and document chunks into the same space and fetching the “closest” matches. But similarity is a weak proxy for what we actually need: relevance grounded in reasoning. In long, professional documents—like financial reports, research papers, or legal texts—the right answer […] The post
26/04/2026
A Coding Tutorial on Datashader on Rendering Massive Datasets with High-Performance Python Visual Analytics
In this tutorial, we explore Datashader, a powerful, high-performance visualization library for rendering massive datasets that quickly overwhelm traditional plotting tools. We work through its full rendering pipeline in Google Colab, starting from dense point clouds and reduction-based aggregations to categorical rendering, line visualizations, raster data, quadmesh grids, compositing, and dashboard-style analytical views. As we […] The post
26/04/2026
Azure Key Vault Auto‑Rotation Practicle Guide
If you’ve ever been called into a Severity-1 issue because a certificate expired at midnight, you already understand why credential rotation matters. Keys, secrets, and certificates sit quietly in the background and when they expire, applications go dark, trust breaks, and teams scramble. This is where Azure Key Vault auto‑rotation stops being a "nice‑to‑have" security feature and becomes a foundational operational capability. Based on the C...
26/04/2026
xAI Launches grok-voice-think-fast-1.0: Topping τ-voice Bench at 67.3%, Outperforming Gemini, GPT Realtime, and More
The new flagship voice model outperforms Gemini, GPT Realtime, and its own predecessor across retail, airline, and telecom workflows The post xAI Launches grok-voice-think-fast-1.0: Topping τ-voice Bench at 67.3%, Outperforming Gemini, GPT Realtime, and More appeared first on Ma...
25/04/2026
A Coding Implementation on kvcached for Elastic KV Cache Memory, Bursty LLM Serving, and Multi-Model GPU Sharing
In this tutorial, we explore kvcached, a dynamic KV-cache implementation on top of vLLM, to understand how dynamic KV-cache allocation transforms GPU memory usage for large language models. We begin by setting up the environment and deploying lightweight Qwen2.5 models through an OpenAI-compatible API, ensuring a realistic inference workflow. We then design controlled experiments where […] The post
25/04/2026
How ACR Artifact Cache Handles Multi-Arch Images: What Gets Cached and When Webhooks Fire
By Johnson Shi (Senior Product Manager), Toddy Mladenov (Principal PM Manager), Luis Dieguez (Principal SWE Manager),
25/04/2026
How can you stay competitive and relevant in an AI-Driven World?
Global Cloud & AI Community | Microsoft Tech Community | April 2026 | 12 min read A candid conversation for cloud & AI professionals, learners, and curious minds navigating the most transformative shift in the history of technology.Let's be honest with each other for a moment. Every week, a new AI tool drops. Every month, a new model breaks last month's benchmark. And somewhere in the back of your mind maybe while you're scrolling LinkedIn, o...
25/04/2026
Google DeepMind Introduces Vision Banana: An Instruction-Tuned Image Generator That Beats SAM 3 on Segmentation and Depth Anything V3 on Metric Depth Estimation
A new Google paper argues that image generation pretraining is to computer vision what GPT-style pretraining is to NLP — and the benchmark numbers back that up. The post Google DeepMind Introduces Vision Banana: An Instruction-Tuned Image Generator That Beats SAM 3 on Segmentati...
25/04/2026
Access fixes released in Version 2604 (Build 16.0.19929.20090)
Bug Name Issue Fixed Values display in the wrong control when using a form as a sublist When a form was used as a sublist (subdatasheet), field values could display in the wrong control, showing data in incorrect positions. Values now display in the correct cont...
25/04/2026
Meet GitNexus: An Open-Source MCP-Native Knowledge Graph Engine That Gives Claude Code and Cursor Full Codebase Structural Awareness
Abhigyan Patwari's GitNexus has quietly crossed 19,000 GitHub stars by solving a problem every AI-assisted developer has hit but rarely named — agents that edit code they don't actually understand. The post Meet GitNexus: An Open-Source MCP-Native Knowledge Graph Engine That Gives Claude Code and Cursor Fu...
25/04/2026
A Coding Implementation on Deepgram Python SDK for Transcription, Text-to-Speech, Async Audio Processing, and Text Intelligence
In this tutorial, we build an advanced hands-on workflow with the Deepgram Python SDK and explore how modern voice AI capabilities come together in a single Python environment. We set up authentication, connect both synchronous and asynchronous Deepgram clients, and work directly with real audio data to understand how the SDK handles transcription, speech generation, […] The post
25/04/2026
A Coding Implementation on Microsoft’s OpenMementos with Trace Structure Analysis, Context Compression, and Fine-Tuning Data Preparation
In this tutorial, we work with Microsoft’s OpenMementos dataset and explore how reasoning traces are structured through blocks and mementos in a practical, Colab-ready workflow. We stream the dataset efficiently, parse its special-token format, inspect how reasoning and summaries are organized, and measure the compression provided by the memento representation across different domains. As we […] The post
25/04/2026
Modernizing Industrial Safety and Inspection with AI-Driven Drone Automation
In large-scale manufacturing and infrastructure environments, maintaining structural integrity is a continuous operational challenge. Industrial facilities—from automotive plants to energy and infrastructure sites—depend on thousands of structural connection points such as bolts and fasteners to ensure safe and reliable operations. Over time, vibration, thermal cycling, and mechanical stress can cause these components to loosen or degrade. While drones have dramatically improved how in...
25/04/2026
Title Plan Update - April 24, 2026
📁April 24, 2026 - Title Plan Now Available Access the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at
24/04/2026
Unpacking Endpoint Management is back - and we’ve got a lot to talk about
If you’ve been missing real, candid conversations about endpoint management, good news! Unpacking Endpoint Management is officially back. This series is all about what actually works. No fluff, just practical tips, proven strategies, and honest discussions to help you optimize and simplify the way you manage and secure endpoints today (and prepare for what’s next). We’re bringing together people from across Microsoft Intune, Security, and Customer Experience engineering...
24/04/2026
Teams Customer Connect: Now available globally in 26 languages
We're excited to announce that Customer Connect web chat in Microsoft Teams (previously called Live Chat) is now available globally, supporting 26 languages and bringing seamless customer engagement to businesses worldwide. For small and medium-sized businesses, every customer interaction matters. Whether someone discovers your business through a Google search, a social media post, or a friend's recommendation, the moment they land on your website is critical. With Customer Connect in ...
24/04/2026
SAVE THE DATE! MCAPS for Partners is July 22, 2026!
MCAPS Start for Partners is around the corner. Join us on July 22 for this year’s MCAPS Start for Partners, where you’ll access actionable support for key initiatives from Frontier Transformation to co-sell execution. Keynotes and breakout sessions will focus on where demand is headed and reveal insights into Microsoft priority and investment areas—so that attendees can prepare to align their organizations accordingly. Stay tuned for regist...
24/04/2026
Microsoft’s perspective on agentic identity standards
For now, I’ll anchor on three broad areas of interest that are shaping how identity standards are evolving for agentic systems: bootstrapping of trust, delegation, and shared secrets.Perspective on agentic identity standards-P. Dingle, Director of Identity Standards
24/04/2026
Introducing New Frontline Innovations at Microsoft 365 Community Conference
We announced several exciting updates at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference this week: you can now scale Teams pilots to your broader frontline organization faster, fill open shifts automatically with smart scheduling, deliver official operational updates with the new Communicator App, and conduct site walkthroughs handsfree in Frontline Agent. Scale your frontline pilot with a guided deployment wizard Deploy and manage a consistent Microsoft T...
24/04/2026
DeepSeek AI Releases DeepSeek-V4: Compressed Sparse Attention and Heavily Compressed Attention Enable One-Million-Token Contexts
DeepSeek-AI has released a preview version of the DeepSeek-V4 series: two Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models built around one core challenge making one-million-token context windows practical and affordable at inference time. The series consists of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, with 1.6T total parameters and 49B activated per token, and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with 284B total parameters and 13B activated per token. […] The post
24/04/2026
Earn certifications and accelerate deal velocity at the Sales Certification Week event
Join a no-cost, three-day virtual Sales Certification Week event designed to help partner sellers build practical AI fluency, activate real-world use cases, and validate AI readiness by earning Microsoft credentials—without taking extended time away from selling. Sales Certification Week is part one of a two-part s...
24/04/2026
mssql-python 1.6: Unblocking Your Threads
The last two mssql-python releases shipped big features: Bulk Copy in 1.4 for high-throughput data loading, and
24/04/2026
mssql-django 1.7.1: Microsoft Fabric Support and Migration Fixes
We just shipped mssql-django 1.7.1 with two fixes that matter if you're running Django on Microsoft Fabric or using descending indexes in your migrations. JSONField Now Works on Microsoft Fabric SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric reports itself as EngineEdition 12, which our backend didn't previously recognize. The result: JSONField queries, hash functions, collation introspection, and test teardown all broke on Fab...
24/04/2026
Designing a Medallion Framework — A Decision Guide
Everyone draws the same picture: Bronze → Silver → Gold. Three boxes, three arrows. Done. What that picture hides is the dozen design decisions you have to make inside each box — and the ones you make at the boundaries between them. Get those right and onboarding the 200th table feels like onboarding the 2nd. Get them wrong and you’ll be rewriting the framework in 18 months.
24/04/2026
Enhancing Enterprise AI Deployments with Zero Trust Networking
Problem Statement Azure OpenAI is publicly accessible by default Azure OpenAI frequently asked questions | Microsoft Learn Any application with API access can call it from anywhere Violates: Enterprise security policies Zero Trust architecture
24/04/2026
Converse naturally across languages with consecutive interpretation
I am Harin Lee, a Principal Product Manager on the Microsoft Teams team.Keep two-language meetings flowing with consecutive interpretation in TeamsConsecutive interpretation is a new mode in Interpreter for Windows, Mac, and the web that helps participants collaborate more naturally in meetings with two spoken languages.
24/04/2026
Intent‑Aware Static Inspection for Agent and Skill Packages
When you review an agent or skill package, you’re effectively reviewing a compact behavior specification.By applying intent-aware static inspection with explicit thresholds, review effort was focused on higher-risk packages.YAML‑based agent and skill packages are not inherently risky; they are often chosen precisely because they enable simpler distribution and faster inference.
24/04/2026
Get ahead of agent sprawl: manage and govern AI agents at scale
Agents are a new type of identityEffective identity governance must therefore include automated lifecycle management to address agent sprawl.To learn more about Microsoft Entra Agent ID and how it empowers organizations to secure access for AI agents:
24/04/2026
Deploying an Agentic Service to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Delegated OBO Access
You've built an agentic service. It works. It uses the framework you chose — maybe LangChain, maybe Semantic Kernel, maybe the Microsoft Agent Framework, maybe something entirely your own. It talks to your LLM, calls your downstream APIs, and manages multi-turn conversations the way you designed it. Now someone asks: "Can we surface this in Microsoft 365 Copilot?" The obvious path is to rebuild the...
24/04/2026
When RAG Isn’t Enough: Moving from Retrieval to Relationship-Aware Systems in Enterprise AI:
The Problem In an enterprise AI scenario, the goal was to map structured feature data to relevant sections within large technical documents. At a glance, this appears to be a straightforward semantic matching problem. Initial results using semantic search were promising. However, as the system was used more extensively, certain issues became apparent: Inconsistent mappings across similar inputs Occasional matches to contextually unrelated...
24/04/2026
When Anthropic’s Managed Agents Meet Microsoft Hosted Agents
Let’s start from a real engineering pain point. In their engineering blog Managed Agents, Anthropic describes a sobering observation: while building the agent scaffolding (the “harness”) for Claude Sonnet 4.5, they noticed the model suffered from “context anxiety,” so they added context-reset logic into the ...
24/04/2026
Join our free livestream series on hosting agents in Microsoft Foundry
Join us for a new 3‑part livestream series where we deploy AI agents on Microsoft Foundry using Microsoft Agent Framework and LangChain/LangGraph, then level them up with tools, observability, and evals.Deploy Python agents to Foundry Hosted agents using the Azure Developer CLIHost your agents on Foundry: Microsoft Agent Framework
24/04/2026
Google DeepMind Introduces Decoupled DiLoCo: An Asynchronous Training Architecture Achieving 88% Goodput Under High Hardware Failure Rates
Training frontier AI models is, at its core, a coordination problem.When one chip fails or even slows down, the entire training run can stall.As models scale toward hundreds of billions of parameters, that fragility becomes increasingly untenable.
24/04/2026
Mend Releases AI Security Governance Framework: Covering Asset Inventory, Risk Tiering, AI Supply Chain Security, and Maturity Model
Mend.io's new framework gives engineering and security teams a practical playbook for governing AI systems before the next incident forces the conversation. The post Mend Releases AI Security Governance Framework: Covering Asset Inventory, Risk Tiering, AI Supply Chain Security, and Maturity Model appeared first on MarkTechPost.
24/04/2026
Mend.io Releases AI Security Governance Framework Covering Asset Inventory, Risk Tiering, AI Supply Chain Security, and Maturity Model
Mend.io's new framework gives engineering and security teams a practical playbook for governing AI systems before the next incident forces the conversation. The post Mend.io Releases AI Security Governance Framework Covering Asset Inventory, Risk Tiering, AI Supply Chain Security, and Maturity Model ap...
23/04/2026
Host a Microsoft Build //local host Event in Your City
In this session, we'll show how GitHub Copilot SDK lets you build an agent, embed it in an app, and take it with you across devices and into the cloud.This session shows how to run agentic workloads on a fast, AI native runtime on Azure Container Apps.In this demo‑rich session, we’ll show the latest innovations in SQL Database and Cosmos DB, then build an app on Azure HorizonDB, Azure’s new cloud‑native PostgreSQL service, to show how AI apps built directly in the database simplifies design and enables reasoning over operational data.
23/04/2026
Simplifying gMSA for Windows Containers on AKS: Open-Source Tooling Now Available
We’re excited to announce that the Windows Containers AKS gMSA tooling is now publicly available on our GitHub repo (Microsoft/Windows-Containers-AKS-gMSA):
23/04/2026
OpenAI Releases GPT-5.5, a Fully Retrained Agentic Model That Scores 82.7% on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and 84.9% on GDPval
The model targets the full stack of computer work — coding, research, data analysis, and software operation — without needing a human to supervise every stepThe post OpenAI Releases GPT-5.5, a Fully Retrained Agentic Model That Scores 82.7% on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and 84.9% on GDPval appeared first on MarkTechPost.
23/04/2026
Centralizing Enterprise API Access for Agent-Based Architectures
Problem Statement When building AI agents or automation solutions, calling enterprise APIs directly often means configuring individual HTTP actions within each agent for every API. While this works for simple scenarios, it quickly becomes repetitive and difficult to manage as complexity grows. The challenge becomes more pronounced when a single business domain exposes multiple APIs, or when the same APIs are consumed by multiple agents. This leads to duplicated configurations,...
23/04/2026
Automatic SSO Takeover in Azure AD B2C Custom Policies
<DisplayName>Azure Active Directory - SSO Control</DisplayName><!-- Override to surface a clear SSO-guidance message when local signup is blocked<!-- Step 10: Write new SSO user to directory if not already written -->
23/04/2026
Designing Outbound Connectivity for "Private Subnets" in Azure
With private subnets, outbound access is disabled by default.Azure NAT Gateway is a fully managed, zone‑resilient, outbound‑only SNAT service.It attaches at the subnet level and automatically handles all outbound flows from that subnet using one or more static public IP addresses or prefixes.
23/04/2026
A Coding Tutorial on OpenMythos on Recurrent-Depth Transformers with Depth Extrapolation, Adaptive Computation, and Mixture-of-Experts Routing
In this tutorial, we explore the implementation of OpenMythos, a theoretical reconstruction of the Claude Mythos architecture that enables deeper reasoning through iterative computation rather than increased parameter size. We build and analyze models using both GQA and MLA attention mechanisms, examine memory efficiency through KV-cache comparisons, and validate stability via the spectral properties of […] The post
23/04/2026
Modernizing DNS Security for Exchange Online Mail Flow
The Domain Name System (DNS) protocol is used by clients to find mail servers over the internet. DNS is unencrypted and unauthenticated by default, making it vulnerable to spoofing, tampering, and adversary‑in‑the‑middle attacks. As threat actors increasingly target the foundational layers of email delivery, modern DNS security protocols have become essential to protecting organizations. To address these gaps, Exchange Online has invested heavily in modern, standards‑based DNS ...
23/04/2026
GPT Capability in Understanding Coordinates: How GPT-5.4 Transforms Spatial Precision
Why I Ran This Experiment This work started not as a benchmarking exercise, but as a practical problem: I needed to automatically extract panel regions from PDF-format electrical Single-Line Diagram (SLD) drawings using OpenAI models . All experiments were conducted using OpenAI models in
23/04/2026
Enabling Agentic Data Governance with Hybrid Cloud Flexibility in Azure
He is a data governance officer at Contoso (a fictional but very representative enterprise). Mark’s day job is ensuring data governance and compliance across his company’s vast hybrid cloud estate – think around ~2 million data assets sprawled across 12+ datacenters on-premises and in different public clouds.Azure Function Endpoints
23/04/2026
Partner Blog | April skilling update: Preparing for what’s next
Move your customers from AI interest to execution by tapping into skilling opportunities designed to strengthen delivery readiness and sharpen sales execution. This month's skilling focus is about going beyond AI pilots to deliver real outcomes, securely and across teams. In May and June, Microsoft is delivering high-impact, in-person learning opportunities that can scale readiness across your broader team through role-based learning journeys, equipping you to drive AI-powe...
23/04/2026
Beyond the Playbook: Real-World Lessons from a Mission Critical Enterprise Security Assessment
The Enterprise Security Assessment (ESA) is a comprehensive, tenant-wide evaluation that helps to understand and improve the security posture across Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and hybrid environments.Unlike workload-focused assessments such as the Well-Architected Security Assessment (WASA), ESA offers a holistic, enterprise-level perspective, helping organizations align priorities across teams and platforms.When we introduced the Enterprise Security Assessment (ESA) to a large, mission-critical financial services customer, we followed the playbook: A streamlined assessment using Secure Scores, three Data Sets, minimal effort, and a quick readout.
23/04/2026
Register today for the Microsoft 365 Archive + Orchestry webinar
Join us for a live webinar on May 7, 9:00 am PDT, with Trent Green, Microsoft, and David Francoeur, Orchestry, to learn more about what file-level archiving does, how it works, and how to turn it into a scalable, automated strategy across your tenant.Optimizing storage costs with file-level archivingWe recently launched the public preview of file-level archiving, a new way to help reduce additional Microsoft 365 storage costs, without deleting content.
23/04/2026
High Expert Summit 2026 - United by Community, Cloud, and AI
The summit delivered two intense days of immersion, combining technical depth, strategic discussions, and meaningful connections. With more than 150 in-person participants, attendees were highly engaged and focused on advanced Azure and AI topics—making it one of the most impactful community Azure events in Brazil.Over two days, participants explored strategic and technical content covering Azure architecture, DevOps, Artificial Intelligence, innovation, career development, market trends, and the real challenges organizations face today.To find an MVP and learn more about the MVP Program visit the MVP Communities website and follow our updates on LinkedIn or #mvpbuzz.
23/04/2026
Tenant Configuration Management APIs are now generally available
In our previous post, we introduced Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance and how it helps organizations secure and manage multi-tenant environments at scale.Today, we’re excited to announce that the Tenant Configuration Management (TCM) APIs are now generally available, providing the foundation for managing configuration at scale with greater consistency and control.The TCM APIs are the underlying Microsoft Graph API that powers Tenant Governance’s configuration management capabilities.
23/04/2026
Microsoft 365 multi-agent workflow with Microsoft Agent Framework
The response contains insights from all four agents: destination recommendations, cost breakdown, curated activities, and a synthesized itinerary from the coordinator, in one API call.The repo includes a Dockerfile and an agent.yaml manifest, everything you need to deploy the workflow to Microsoft Foundry as a hosted agent.Once your workflow logic works as a hosted endpoint, you can expose it to end users in Teams, Copilot, or any Microsoft 365 surface.
23/04/2026
Automate Prior Authorization with AI Agents - Now Available as a Foundry Template
Prior authorization (PA) is one of the most expensive bottlenecks in U.S. healthcare.Today we’re making the Prior Authorization Multi-Agent Solution Accelerator available as a Microsoft Foundry template.Health plan payers can deploy a working, four-agent PA review pipeline to Azure using the Azure Developer CLI (“azd”) with a single command in supported environments, then customize it to their policies, workflows, and EHR environment.
23/04/2026
Integrate Marketplace commerce signals to enforce entitlements in AI apps
AI apps and agents increasingly operate with runtime autonomy, dynamic capability exposure, and on‑demand access to tools and resources.This post explains how Marketplace fulfillment and entitlement models differ by offer type—and what that means when you’re designing AI apps and agents that must respond correctly to subscription state, plan changes, and cancellations.This post is part of a series on building and publishing well-architected AI apps and agents in Microsoft Marketplace.
23/04/2026
The Unified SecOps Transition — Why It Is a Security Architecture Decision, Not Just a Portal Change
Microsoft will retire the standalone Azure Sentinel portal on March 31, 2027.It is the platform foundation for a fundamentally different SOC operating model — one built on a 2-tier data architecture, graph-based investigation, and AI agents that can hunt, enrich, and respond at machine speed.The USX transition creates a structured progression for all partner types — from professional services that build trust and surface findings, to managed security services that deliver ongoing value.
23/04/2026
From Oversharing to Enforcement: A Practical Guide to AI Data Security with Microsoft Purview
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)DSPM consolidates insights from Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Insider Risk Management, Information Protection, and Data Security Investigations into a single view for monitoring data risks, policy coverage, and posture trends.Now also in Public Preview, DSPM extends coverage to third-party SaaS and IaaS platforms such as Google Cloud Platform, Snowflake, and Databricks, and integrates with partner solutions including Cyera, BigID, and OneTrust for comprehensive risk insights.
23/04/2026
SharePoint Automatic Version History Cleanup (Intelligent Versioning)
What is SharePoint Automatic Version History Cleanup? SharePoint Automatic Version History Cleanup is a feature in Microsoft 365 (SharePoint Online and OneDrive) that
23/04/2026
Detectando Anomalias de Custo no Azure com FinOps Hub + SRE Agent
Introdução Um dos maiores desafios em ambientes cloud é manter a visibilidade sobre os custos. Picos inesperados podem passar despercebidos por dias e quando chegam na fatura, já é tarde demais. Neste artigo, vou mostrar como configurei uma análise automática diária de anomalias de custo usando o Azure SRE Agent, conectado ao FinOps Hub (Azure Data Explorer), com notificação automática no Microsoft Teams<...
23/04/2026
Uso de contextos no Entra ID
Com a crescente necessidade de segurança adaptativa, o Microsoft Entra ID oferece recursos avançados para aplicar políticas dinâmicas de acesso.É exatamente isso que os contextos de autenticação do Microsoft Entra ID resolvem.Neste artigo vou detalhar todo o processo, desde a habilitação do Continuous Access Evaluation (CAE), passando pela configuração dos contextos e das políticas de acesso condicional no portal do Entra ID, até a integração prática com uma aplicação .NET dividida em frontend web e API de backend.
23/04/2026
Building AI Agents with Local Small Language Models
The idea of building your own AI agent used to feel like something only big tech companies could pull off.
23/04/2026
Azure Monitor Pipeline: A Modern Approach to Telemetry Ingestion at Scale
As environments grow—across regions, clouds, and on‑premises sites—traditional log forwarding architectures struggle with scale, reliability, cost, and security.Azure Monitor Pipeline, now generally available, addresses these challenges by rethinking how telemetry enters Azure Monitor.Azure Monitor Pipeline introduces a centralized telemetry ingestion layer that sits between sources and Azure Monitor.
23/04/2026
How AI Agents Are Turning Threat Intelligence Into Validated Detections
Traditional benchmarks test whether models can recall MITRE ATT&CK techniques or classify threat actor tactics, but they miss the harder question—can an agent translate raw threat intelligence into production-ready detection rules that find real attacks?microsoftMicrosoft Research has addressed this gap with CTI-REALM (Cyber Threat Intelligence Real World Evaluation and LLM Benchmarking), an open-source benchmark that evaluates AI agents on end-to-end detection engineering workflows.Released in March 2026, CTI-REALM measures whether agents can read threat intelligence reports, explore telemetry schemas, iteratively refine KQL queries, and produce validated Sigma rules and KQL detection logic—exactly the workflow security analysts follow when building detections for platforms like Microsoft Sentinel.microsoft
23/04/2026
New MRCA Diagnostic: Teams Meeting Add-in For Classic Outlook
Teams Support team has added a new diagnostic to the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer — the Teams Meeting Add-in For Classic Outlook diagnostic.The Teams Meeting button is missing from the Outlook ribbonMicrosoft Teams Support
23/04/2026
New MRCA Diagnostic: Guest Invite to Teams
We're excited to share a new test now available in the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer — the Guest Invite to Team diagnostic.This new diagnostic is designed to help admins quickly identify exactly where the configuration has gone wrong.Manage guest access in Microsoft 365 Groups
23/04/2026
How to recover Azure SQL Managed Instance access when the admin SQL login is disabled
We have received support cases where customers lose administrative access to Azure SQL Managed Instance because the SQL login(s) are disabled, or because the login is no longer a member of the sysadmin fixed server role.In this article, we explore one possible way to recover access in this scenario by using a Microsoft Entra administrator.One possible recovery method is to configure, or reconfigure, a Microsoft Entra administrator for the managed instance and use that path to regain administrative access.
23/04/2026
Google Cloud AI Research Introduces ReasoningBank: A Memory Framework that Distills Reasoning Strategies from Agent Successes and Failures
A new memory framework from Google Cloud AI Research and UIUC gives LLM agents the ability to distill generalizable reasoning strategies from both successful and failed experiences — and combines that with test-time scaling to create agents that genuinely improve over time.The post Google Cloud AI Research Introduces ReasoningBank: A Memory Framework that Distills Reasoning Strategies from Agent Successes and Failures appeared first on MarkTechPost.
23/04/2026
AI Agent Race Finland 2026 – finalistit on julkistettu!
Vuoden 2026 AI Agent Race Finland - finalistit ovat: Helsingin kaupunki rakensi “Ohjeapuri”-AI‑agentin, joka muuttaa viralliset ohjeet nopeasti luonnollisella kielellä saataviksi vastauksiksi 40 000 työntekijälle.Kilpailun voittaja julkistetaan 28.4.2026 Microsoft AI Tour - tapahtuman "Yhdessä kohti älykkäämpiä ratkaisuja" -lavalla.
23/04/2026
Stop Experimenting, Start Building: AI Apps & Agents Dev Days Has You Covered
What Is AI Apps & Agents Dev Days?AI Apps & Agents Dev Days is a monthly technical series from Microsoft Reactor, delivered in partnership with Microsoft and NVIDIA.You’ll learn how to use services like Azure Container Apps to host resilient AI workloads, how Foundry IQ fits into agent architectures as a trusted knowledge source, and how to make architectural decisions that balance performance, cost, and scalability.
23/04/2026
Entra ID Login via Azure Bastion Fails After VM Recreation
An Entra ID user attempts to sign in to a Windows VM through Azure BastionThis blog walks through a real-world troubleshooting journey that exposes a non-obvious Entra ID device registration issue, explains the root cause, and provides a clean resolution.When a Windows VM is joined to Microsoft Entra ID, a device object is created in Entra ID, keyed to the VM’s Windows hostname.
23/04/2026
Xiaomi Releases MiMo-V2.5-Pro and MiMo-V2.5: Matching Frontier Model Benchmarks at Significantly Lower Token Cost
Xiaomi's MiMo team just dropped two new models that push open-source agentic AI closer to frontier territory than ever before. The post Xiaomi Releases MiMo-V2.5-Pro and MiMo-V2.5: Matching Frontier Model Benchmarks at Significantly Lower Token Cost appeared first on MarkTechPost.
23/04/2026
How to Design a Production-Grade CAMEL Multi-Agent System with Planning, Tool Use, Self-Consistency, and Critique-Driven Refinement
In this tutorial, we implement an advanced agentic AI system using the CAMEL framework, orchestrating multiple specialized agents to collaboratively solve a complex task. We design a structured multi-agent pipeline consisting of a planner, researcher, writer, critic, and rewriter, each with clearly defined responsibilities and schema-constrained outputs. We integrate tool usage, self-consistency sampling, structured validation […] The post
22/04/2026
Microsoft Marketplace 101: Insights from high performing software development company sellers
Microsoft Marketplace is probably the one topic that can give 'AI' a run for its money in terms of the number of mentions on LinkedIn, on cloud hyperscaler blogs, and in Partner Ecosystem presentations. But ask the average SaaS seller what a marketplace is, and you’ll probably get a different answer every time. That’s because marketplaces have become more than jus...
22/04/2026
Alibaba Qwen Team Releases Qwen3.6-27B: A Dense Open-Weight Model Outperforming 397B MoE on Agentic Coding Benchmarks
Alibaba’s Qwen Team has released Qwen3.6-27B, the first dense open-weight model in the Qwen3.6 family — and arguably the most capable 27-billion-parameter model available today for coding agents. It brings substantial improvements in agentic coding, a novel Thinking Preservation mechanism, and a hybrid architecture that blends Gated DeltaNet linear attention with traditional self-attention — all […] The post
22/04/2026
A Detailed Implementation on Equinox with JAX Native Modules, Filtered Transforms, Stateful Layers, and End-to-End Training Workflows
In this tutorial, we explore Equinox, a lightweight and elegant neural network library built on JAX, and show how to use it. We begin by understanding how eqx.Module treats models as PyTrees, which makes parameter handling, transformation, and serialization feel simple and explicit. As we move forward, we work through static fields, filtered transformations such […] The post
22/04/2026
Private subnets by default in Azure Virtual Networks: What changed and how to use NAT Gateway
Azure is evolving to better support secure‑by‑default cloud architectures. Starting with API version 2025‑...
22/04/2026
The flat-subscription problem
A real design review: management groups, policies, break-glass accounts, and the five things I'd tweak before going to production. Here's what I see at most startups when they first show up on Azure: one subscription, one Global Admin, everything in the same resource group, and everyone's an Owner. That works when you have three engineers and one environment. It stops working around the time you have a production workload, a dev environment, shared infrastructure, and a...
22/04/2026
AI-Powered Downtime Investigation for Azure VMs: Automating Root Cause Analysis
Co-authors: Jie Su, Abhinav Dua, Mukthar Ahmed, Dhruv Joshi In a previous post, we shared how Azure Automated VM Recovery works to minimize virtual machine downtime through a three-stage approach: Detection, Diagnosis, and Mitigation. This post goes one layer deeper int...
22/04/2026
Azure SQL (LTR): You Don’t Need to Copy LTR Backups Across Regions to Restore Them
Summary Customers sometimes attempt to copy Azure SQL Long-Term Retention (LTR) backups across regions using Copy-AzSqlDatabaseLongTermRetentionBackup, only to hit the error: LongTermRetentionMigrationRequestNotSupportedLTR backup migration copy feature is not supported on subscription This blog clarifies why this happens, when LTR backu...
22/04/2026
As vulnerability discovery moves at AI speed, keeping current is foundational to reduce exposure
Note: There’s a known issue with the Microsoft 365 Apps card on the dashboard that we’re actively working to address. Recent advances in automation and AI are accelerating vulnerability discovery and shortening the window between disclosure and exploitation. As Microsoft outlined in our recent Security blog, this shift raises the bar for how quickly organizations ne...
22/04/2026
News to Know – Volume 3, Edition 4, April 2026
This month’s newsletter brings you the latest updates, insights, and learnings to help you turn employee listening into action with Viva Glint & Pulse. As organizations continue to navigate AI-driven change, we’re focused on helping you measure what matters, understand impact, and sustain momentum across your employee experience strategy—with practical updates to support you every step of the way. New on your Viva Glint platfo...
22/04/2026
From Demo to Production: Building Microsoft Foundry Hosted Agents with .NET
The Gap Between a Demo and a Production Agent Let's be honest. Getting an AI agent to work in a demo takes an afternoon. Getting it to work reliably in production, tested, containerised, deployed, observable, and maintainable by a team. is a different problem entirely. Most tutorials stop at the point where the agent prints a response in a terminal. They don't show you how to structure your code, cover your tools with tests, wire up CI, or deploy to a managed run...
22/04/2026
Azure Data Sync: Fixing “Cannot find the user ‘DataSync_executor’” When Creating a New Sync Group
Summary When creating a new Azure SQL Data Sync group, customers may encounter the following error during setup—even when no active sync groups exist: “Failed to perform data sync operation: Cannot find the user 'DataSync_executor', because it does not exist or you do not have permission.” This failure typically occurs during certificate and symmetric key creation as Azure attempts to grant permissions to...
22/04/2026
The Microsoft Azure Infra Summit 2026 Schedule Is Live.
Hello Folks, I promised the full agenda would drop soon. Today’s the day. The schedule is locked in, the approved sessions are on the board, and I want to walk you through what three days of deep-technical, engineering-led Azure content looks like. A quick refresher before we get into the content: this event is free, it’s virtual, and it’s built by engineering for engineering. Most sessions are at the L300–L400 ...
22/04/2026
Next Leap to Harness Engineering: JiuwenClaw Pioneers ‘Coordination Engineering’
How to make multiple agents work together like an elite team — autonomously dividing tasks, communicating efficiently, and collaborating seamlessly? The openJiuwen community released the latest version of JiuwenClaw, which adds support for AgentTeam — a multi-agent collaborative capability. It proposes that the next leap beyond Harness Engineering is Coordination Engineering. In in-depth tests, this team […] The post
22/04/2026
Azure VNet Data Gateway for Secure Power BI & Power Platform Access in Enterprises
What Is a VNet data gateway? The VNet data gateway is a Microsoft‑managed gateway service that runs inside a delegated subnet of an Azure Virtual Network. It allows supported Microsoft cloud services—such as Power BI, Power Platform dataflows, and Microsoft Fabric workloads—to securely connect to data source...
22/04/2026
Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness and resiliency with SharePoint and M365 Backup/Archive
As AI becomes embedded in everyday work, governance shifts from being a back‑office function to a strategic enabler. Organizations that succeed with Copilot and agents aren’t just moving fast (70% of early Copilot users said they were more productive) – they are prepared, resilient, and deliberate in balancing AI-dr...
22/04/2026
Three tiers of Agentic AI - and when to use none of them
Every enterprise has an AI agent. Almost none of them work in production. Walk into any enterprise technology review right now and you will find the same thing. Pilots running. Demos recorded. Steering committees impressed. And somewhere in the background, a quiet acknowledgment that the thing does not actually work at scale yet. OutSystems surveyed nearly 1,900 global IT leaders and found that 96% of organizations are already running AI agents in some capacity. Yet only one i...
22/04/2026
Declutter and Defend: Reducing promotional mail noise with Microsoft Defender
Enterprise inboxes are overwhelmed with graymail — legitimate, bulk email like newsletters, vendor promotions, and product updates that isn't malicious but buries the messages that matter. When high volumes of these mails land in the inbox, it crowds out priority communications and can dull security vigilance. Employees conditioned to ignore repetitive emails may miss signs of a real threat. It also creates recurring work for admins and security teams who must continuously tu...
22/04/2026
Now generally available: License usage insights in Microsoft Entra
Organizations rely on Microsoft Entra to secure access in an ever‑changing identity threat landscape without sacrificing workforce productivity. As organizations adopt advanced identity and access capabilities, IT admins often ask for greater transparency into how those capabilities are being used, particularly around licensing. Today, I’m excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft Entra license usage insights: a redesigned experience in...
22/04/2026
Introducing Kimi K2.6 in Microsoft Foundry
We’re excited to welcome Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.6 to Microsoft Foundry expanding the platform’s growing catalog of open and frontier models designed for real-world, production-grade AI systems. Kimi K2.6 represents a new class of
22/04/2026
Your Azure VM went down and nobody knew why. Here's how to fix that.
If you've ever had a production VM go unhealthy on Azure and found yourself scrambling to figure out what happened, you're not alone. I work with startups running production workloads on Azure, and this is one of the most common patterns I see: something goes wrong, the team opens a support ticket, and then everyone waits for a root cause while the CTO asks "how do we make sure we know about this before our customers do next time?" The good news: Azure already gives you the tools to an...
22/04/2026
Bringing transparency to AI-generated content with watermarks in Microsoft 365
As AI becomes part of everyday work, it’s more important than ever to clearly indicate when content has been generated or altered using AI. To help support transparency and responsible use, Microsoft 365 now includes watermarking options for AI‑generated content, giving organizations and individuals clearer signals about AI involvement while maintaining flexibility and control. Whether you’re an IT admin, an information worker, or a consumer using Microsoft 365 at home, here’s what you...
22/04/2026
Reimagining Cancer R&D with Agentic AI Using GigaTIME in Microsoft Discovery
@Alberto Santamaria-Pang, Principal AI Data Scientist, Industry Solutions Engineering HealthcareAdjunct Faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine@Alexander Mehmet Ersoy, Dir. Industry Advisory, Healthcare & Life Sciences 1. Introduction: From Images to i...
22/04/2026
Empowering.Cloud Community Update – April 2026
The latest Microsoft Teams and Microsoft365 expert community briefings, podcasts and upcoming community events. Expert Briefings: Enterprise Voice Infrastructure Options On-Prem. Private Cloud and Cloud-Native with Ribbon and AWS https://empowering.cloud/enterprise-voice-infrastru...
22/04/2026
Introducing the Microsoft Sentinel Training Lab. Hands-On Security Operations in Minutes
A huge thanks to Paul Kew - this lab wouldn't have been possible without his contributions. Security operations is one of those things that’s hard to learn from slides alone. You need to feel what it’s like to triage a multi-stage incident, tune a noisy detection rule, or trace an attacker pivoting from an endpoint to the cloud. That’s exactly why we built the Microsoft Sentinel Training Lab. What Is It? The
22/04/2026
Connection Scaling in Elastic Clusters
As your applications grow, you need to manage database connections carefully to keep performance predictable and reliable. Azure Database for PostgreSQL Elastic Clusters, powered by Citus, support horizontal scaling by distributing data and queries across multiple nodes. This raises a key question: how do connections behave as you add more clients, grow the cluster, or upgrade node specifications? ...
22/04/2026
When cloud apps become a weak link: How FortiAppSec Cloud in Microsoft Marketplace bridges the gap
In this guest blog post, Srija Reddy Allam, Cloud Security/DevOps Architect, Fortinet, discusses the increase of attacks targeted at web applications and APIs and how FortiAppSec Cloud in Microsoft Marketplace provides a layer of adaptive security to address the challenge. Picture this: A global e-commerce company is gearing up for its biggest holiday sale of the year. Their storefront and application programming interfaces (APIs) are hosted on Microsoft Azure, t...
22/04/2026
Extracting BOMs from Electrical Drawings with AI: Azure OpenAI GPT-5.4 + Azure Document Intelligence
The Problem Electrical engineering drawings — especially single-line diagrams (SLDs) — are notoriously hard to parse programmatically. They combine dense symbols, small text, and complex geometric structures, all varying in style across documents and vendors. Figure 1. A typical electrical single-line diagram. A single page contains multiple panel regions (HV, TR, LV, GCP), each with dozens of ...
22/04/2026
Train, Serve, and Deploy a Scikit-learn Model with FastAPI
FastAPI has become one of the most popular ways to serve machine learning models because it is lightweight, fast, and easy to use.
22/04/2026
Building an Auditable Security Layer for Agentic AI
Most agent failures do not look like breaches. They look like a normal chat, a normal answer, and a normal tool call. Until the next morning, when a single question collapses the whole story: who authorized that action. You think you deployed an agent. In reality, you deployed an unbounded automation pipeline that happens to speak English. I’m
22/04/2026
Photon Releases Spectrum: An Open-Source TypeScript Framework that Deploys AI Agents Directly to iMessage, WhatsApp, and Telegram
For all the progress made in AI agent development over the past few years, one fundamental problem has remained largely unsolved: most people never actually interact with agents. They live behind developer dashboards, inside specialized apps that users are asked to download, and within chat interfaces that the majority of the world’s population will never […] The post
22/04/2026
NFS Permission Denied in Azure App Service on Linux: What It Means and What to Do
If your Azure App Service on Linux uses an Azure Files NFS share, you may sometimes see errors like Permission denied or Errno 13 when your app tries to write to the mounted path. Azure Files supports NFS for Linux and Unix workloads, and NFS uses Unix-style numeric ownership and permissions (UID/GID), which can behave differently from SMB-based file sharing.
22/04/2026
If You're Building AI on Azure, ECS 2026 is Where You Need to Be
Let me be direct: there's a lot of noise in the conference calendar. Generic cloud events. Vendor showcases dressed up as technical content. Sessions that look great on paper but leave you with nothing you can actually ship on Monday. ECS 2026 isn't that. As someone who will be on stage at Cologne this May, I can tell you the
22/04/2026
General Availability Refresh: Mirroring Azure Database for PostgreSQL in Microsoft Fabric
Introduction We are excited to announce the General Availability Refresh of Mirroring Azure Database for PostgreSQL in Microsoft Fabric. This update introduces several new capabilities designed to reduce friction, improve transparency, and increase trust in PostgreSQL data for analytics and AI workloads. Database professionals, DBAs, and developers can now leverage a more robust, flexible, and transparent solution for integrating PostgreSQL data in Microsoft Fabric. Mirroring ...
22/04/2026
Getting Started with the SUSE Multi-Linux Manager MCP Server and GitHub Copilot
Enterprise Linux environments are heterogeneous. That's not a problem statement - it's just the truth. SUSE, Ubuntu, RHEL, and their downstream variants coexist in every data center I've seen, and increasingly across Azure subscriptions too. AI assistants like GitHub Copilot can already connect to these machines, run commands, troubleshoot issues, apply patches one box at a time. But if you're managing a fleet of hundreds or thousands of systems across distributi...
22/04/2026
Data Migration - From SQL MI to SQL DB migration
Overview In this post, I’ll show you how to perform a data migration from Azure SQL Managed Instance (SQL MI) to Azure SQL Database (SQL DB) using a combination of schema + security migration steps and Azure Data Factory (ADF) for moving the data. In an earlier post (
22/04/2026
OpenAI Open-Sources Euphony: A Browser-Based Visualization Tool for Harmony Chat Data and Codex Session Logs
Debugging an AI agent that runs for dozens of steps: reading files, calling APIs, writing code, and revising its own output, is not like debugging a regular function.There is no single stack trace to read.The post OpenAI Open-Sources Euphony: A Browser-Based Visualization Tool for Harmony Chat Data and Codex Session Logs appeared first on MarkTechPost.
22/04/2026
The Network That Outlived Him: How MVP Min-gyu Ju's Community Keeps His Legacy Alive
By guest blogger YoungWook Kim In the Microsoft MVP community, technology is more than just a tool; it is a bridge that connects people. The late Min-gyu Ju—founder of Recursive Soft and a preeminent expert in the IoT field—was a master at building these bridges with both strength and warmth. He looked beyond cold hardware and li...
22/04/2026
Hugging Face Releases ml-intern: An Open-Source AI Agent that Automates the LLM Post-Training Workflow
Hugging Face has released ml-intern, an open-source AI agent designed to automate end-to-end post-training workflows for large language models (LLMs). Built on the company’s smolagents framework, the tool can autonomously perform literature review, dataset discovery, training script execution, and iterative evaluation — tasks that typically require significant manual effort from ML researchers and engineers. What […] The post
22/04/2026
A Coding Implementation to Build a Conditional Bayesian Hyperparameter Optimization Pipeline with Hyperopt, TPE, and Early Stopping
In this tutorial, we implement an advanced Bayesian hyperparameter optimization workflow using Hyperopt and the Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) algorithm. We construct a conditional search space that dynamically switches between different model families, demonstrating how Hyperopt handles hierarchical and structured parameter graphs. We build a production-grade objective function using cross-validation inside a scikit-learn pipeline, enabling […] The post
22/04/2026
A Practical Look at Device Analytics and Risk Signals with Microsoft Intune
As organizations increasingly rely on laptops, mobile devices, and cloud‑connected applications, visibility into device health, configuration, and security posture is critical. Performance degradation, outdated configurations, and elevated device risk can negatively affect productivity and increase exposure to security threats. Microsoft provides an integrated set of services—Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint—that support modern devi...
21/04/2026
Ingest at Scale, Securely — Azure Monitor pipeline Is Now Generally Available
Today, we're thrilled to announce the general availability of Azure Monitor pipeline — a telemetry pipeline built for secure, high-scale ingestion across any environment. But the best way to understand what makes it powerful isn't to start with features. It's to start with the problems that kept showing up, over and over, in our conversations with customers. So, let's dig in... Chances are, this sounds a lot like your environment...
21/04/2026
Introducing OpenAI's GPT-image-2 in Microsoft Foundry
Take a small design team running a global social campaign. They have the creative vision to produce localized imagery for every market, but not the resources to reshoot, reformat, or outsource that scale. Every asset needs to fit a different platform, a different dimension, a different cultural context, and they all need to ship at the same time. This is where flexible image generation comes in handy. OpenAI's GPT-image-2 is now generally available and rolling out toda...
21/04/2026
Turn upcoming Microsoft 365 pricing and packaging updates into renewal wins
Microsoft 365 pricing and packaging updates take effect July 1, 2026, with expanded security and management capabilities coming this year. Now is the perfect time to accelerate renewals, upsell to Microsoft 365 E3 or E5, and lock in pricing for Copilot Business bundles.
21/04/2026
Discover new ways to innovate—read the State of the Partner Ecosystem blog
The AI industry has rapidly moved from experimentation to production, and Microsoft partners play a critical role in helping organizations deploy AI responsibly and at scale. Today’s customers expect secure, governed, outcome-driven solutions from their providers. To support the partner ecosystem, Microsoft invests in offerings like incentives, skilling, and go-to-market resources,
21/04/2026
Focus on the Teams Phone calls that matter most with Copilot call delegation
Incoming calls don’t wait for a break in your day. Whether you’re leading a meeting or juggling back-to-back commitments, every new call creates the same dilemma: answer and risk losing momentum, or ignore it and risk missing something important. We're excited to announce that Microsoft 365 Copilot can now help answer your incoming Teams calls and schedule follow-up appointments on your behalf. This experience helps users focus on engaging with the calls that matter most and is availab...
21/04/2026
Introducing the New Microsoft Security Community Home!
We are excited to introduce the new home of the Microsoft Security Community! At aka.ms/securitycommunity, you can explore upcoming events, access technical content, and find new ways to connect with Microsoft experts and peers across the security ecosystem. The Microsoft Security Community Home is designed to help you: Discover live and on-deman...
21/04/2026
High Availability Testing
What is High Availability Testing? High Availability Testing ensures that your application remains accessible and functional even when components fail. It validates: Redundancy mechanisms (e.g., Availability Zones, Load Balancers) Failover processes (automatic/manual) Recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) System behavior under partial outages In Azure, HA testing often involves se...
21/04/2026
Safeguarding Sensitive Data in Microsoft 365 Copilot Interactions: DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot is redefining how organizations work, bringing the power of generative AI directly into our secure productivity tools. As Copilot adoption accelerates, we’ve heard that you want more control over how your sensitive data can be used in interactions with Copilot. At Ignite 2025, Microsoft announced a major enhancement: Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention for Microsoft 365 Copilot to safeguard Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat prompts, now entering ...
21/04/2026
Partner Case Study | DEFEND
Modern cloud adoption can empower organizations to deliver services efficiently, safeguard sensitive information, and withstand an increasingly complex threat landscape. Yet for public‑sector agencies, where budgets are tightly controlled and compliance obligations are high, embracing the cloud can be challenging. Maintaining security, transparency, and cost efficiency is a delicate balance: the need to move forward with modernization while proving every investment is justified and resilient....
21/04/2026
Google Introduces Simula: A Reasoning-First Framework for Generating Controllable, Scalable Synthetic Datasets Across Specialized AI Domains
Training powerful AI models depends on one resource that is quietly running out: specialized data. While the internet provided a seemingly infinite supply of text and images to train today’s generalist models, the next wave of AI breakthroughs — in cybersecurity, legal reasoning, healthcare, and other niche domains — requires data that simply doesn’t exist […] The post
21/04/2026
Announcing public preview of redundant TCP support for RDP Multipath for Azure Virtual Desktop
Reliable connectivity is essential for ensuring consistent productivity in Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) environments. Network variability—whether due to packet loss, NAT misconfiguration, UDP‑restricted networks, or restrictive enterprise network policies—continues to be one of the most common causes of session interruptions across enterprise virtual desktop deployments. To improve connection resiliency across a broader set of network conditions, we’re excited to introduce redun...
21/04/2026
New Microsoft Certified: AI Agent Builder Associate Certification
Building agents for real-world workflows takes more than prompts. Show you are ready to design and manage secure, enterprise‑ready agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio with Exam AB-620 (beta). As organizations shift from early AI experiments to deploying agents in real business workflows, the need for builders who can create dependable, production‑ready agents is growing quickly. Teams are looking for professionals who know how to move beyond demos and build agents that are re...
21/04/2026
Strengthening Identity Resilience: A Deep Dive into Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery
In the modern security landscape, we often say that "Identity is the new perimeter." We spend significant resources on Conditional Access, Phishing-Resistant MFA, and Identity Protection to keep the "bad guys" out. But what happens when the threat is already inside, or when a legitimate administrative action goes sideways? If our identity data the "brain" of our Microsoft 365 and Azure ecosystem is corrupted or maliciously altered, usr entire security posture collapses. Today, we’re ex...
21/04/2026
Innovations in OneDrive for collaboration, intelligence, and control
Agentic AI for files in SharePoint document librariesReview PDFs with Copilot in OneDrive and SharePoint for the webWe introduced a refreshed OneDrive sync experience on macOS, with a redesigned activity center and updated system dialogs that feel native on Mac. Built with technologies like SwiftUI, it aligns with modern macOS Liquid Glass design language and provides a cleaner, more responsive way to check sync status, recent activity, and issues that need attention.
21/04/2026
Introducing Markdown support in SharePoint and OneDrive
As AI moves from answering questions to carrying out real work, teams need a reliable way to store, manage, and refine the instructions and context that guide how AI operates. Markdown files are increasingly becoming that foundation, acting as durable AI artifacts that capture rules, preferences, and repeatable processes. Today, we’re introducing native Markdown support in SharePoint and OneDrive, now rolling out to general availability across both consumer and commercial audiences. As...
21/04/2026
AI Skills Are Now in Public Preview: Teaching AI in SharePoint What to Know and How to Act
In March, we shared our vision for AI in SharePoint: We’re transforming how teams build solutions, publish content, and organize information using AI. With AI in SharePoint, you start with intent, describe it in natural language, and move directly to working solutions that reflect how your business actually operates. It is a multi...
21/04/2026
Design tenant linking to scale selling on Microsoft Marketplace
Designing tenant linking and Open Authorization (OAuth) directly shapes how customers onboard, grant trust, and operate your AI app or agent through Microsoft Marketplace.This post explains how to design scalable, review‑ready identity patterns that support secure activation, clear authorization boundaries, and enterprise trust from day one.In Microsoft Marketplace, tenant linking and OAuth consent are not background implementation details.
21/04/2026
How Microsoft Planner helped build the Maia 200 AI Accelerator
Maia 200 is Microsoft’s second-generation first-party AI accelerator built to support large-scale AI inference workloads in Azure. As Maia 200 moved from pre‑silicon design toward deployment, work across multiple engineering organizations was managed within a single program responsible for bringing the accelerator into Azure. At its peak, that effort tracked over 700 active tasks spanning silicon, software, and datacenters...
21/04/2026
Customer review: TestMu AI HyperExecute is a game changer
TestMu AI HyperExecute, a solution published to Microsoft Marketplace, is an end-to-end smart test orchestration tool built on Microsoft Azure Functions and Azure App Services and integrated with Microsoft Teams, Azure Pipelines, GitH...
21/04/2026
Claim your IQ Series: Foundry IQ badge
The IQ Series kicked off with three Foundry IQ episodes, each paired with a hands-on cookbook. If you've worked through all three or you're planning to, there's now a digital badge waiting for you to claim! What the badge represents The IQ Series: Foundry IQ badge recognizes developers who've completed the full Foundry IQ curriculum end-to-end: not just watched the episodes, but deployed the Azure resources, run every notebook, and built working knowledge base...
21/04/2026
AI Agent Memory Explained in 3 Levels of Difficulty
A stateless AI agent has no memory of previous calls.
21/04/2026
Fix failover group creation errors with TDE CMK on Azure SQL Managed Instance
Overview We have received several support cases where customers encounter the error shown below when attempting to create a failover group for Azure SQL Managed Instance. In this article, we explore one of the possible causes of this error. Creating instance failover group failed. An unexpected error occured while processing the request. Tracking ID: 'XYZ' <...
21/04/2026
VS Code Agents Insiders: The AI-First Editor Built for Developers and Students
There is a new application on the block, and it is not just VS Code with a plugin. https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_115#_visual-studio-code-agents-previewis a dedicated, standalone editor application purpose-built for working with AI agents. Where regular VS Code treats the editor as the primary surface and adds AI on top, VS Code Agents flips that rel...
21/04/2026
Leveraging Azure Resource Graph Queries for Azure Redis Configuration
Azure Resource Graph Explorer offers a faster and more scalable alternative by enabling customers to query Redis configurations directly using Kusto Query Language (KQL).All queries in this document use the Resources table, filter on Redis resource types, and retrieve configuration properties from the Redis resource schema.Explanation:This query reviews authentication and access security settings for Azure Cache for Redis (OSS tiers).
21/04/2026
A Coding Implementation on Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B Covering Multimodal Inference, Thinking Control, Tool Calling, MoE Routing, RAG, and Session Persistence
In this tutorial, we build an end-to-end implementation around Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B and explore how a modern multimodal MoE model can be used in practical workflows. We begin by setting up the environment, loading the model adaptively based on available GPU memory, and creating a reusable chat framework that supports both standard responses and explicit thinking […] The post
21/04/2026
Leveraging Azure Resource Graph Queries for Azure Storage Configuration
Scenario Many times, we receive requests for a quick and reliable way to check which Azure Storage features are enabled across subscriptions—such as SFTP, Hierarchical Namespace (HNS), or default access tiers. For such scenarios, customers can use PowerShell, Azure CLI, or REST APIs; however, these approaches can be time‑consuming due to module setup, frequent updates, and script maintenance. Azure Resource Graph Explorer provides a faster and simpler alternative by allowing customer...
21/04/2026
How to Troubleshoot Azure Functions Host Startup Issue
Overview Azure Functions is a powerful serverless compute service that enables you to run event-driven code without managing infrastructure. When you deploy a Function App, the Azure Functions host is the runtime process responsible for discovering your functions, loading extensions and bindings, connecting to storage, and starting trigger listeners. A host startup issue oc...
21/04/2026
How to take copy only backups with SQL Managed Instance.
In Azure SQL Managed Instance, copy-only backups cannot be created for databases encrypted with service-managed Transparent Data Encryption (The default choice for all newly provisioned SQL MI).In this article, I will explain how to prepare your Azure SQL Managed Instance (SQL MI) to take copy-only backups to Azure Blob Storage by using Managed Identity together with customer-managed encryption keys.Finally, create a SQL credential that maps the Azure Blob Storage container to SQL MI’s managed identity.
21/04/2026
From Playwright Automation to Agent Driven Testing (GHCP in Action)
What Is Agent-Driven Testing? Agent-driven testing represents a revolutionary shift from traditional, hardcoded test automation to intelligent, adaptive testing powered by AI agents. Unlike conventional Playwright tests that rely on static selectors and predefined workflows, agent-driven testing leverages GitHub Copilot (GHCP) agents with Model Context Protocol (MCP) to dynamically analyze web pages, discove...
21/04/2026
Moonshot AI Releases Kimi K2.6 with Long-Horizon Coding, Agent Swarm Scaling to 300 Sub-Agents and 4,000 Coordinated Steps
Moonshot AI, the Chinese AI lab behind the Kimi assistant, today open-sourced Kimi K2.6 — a native multimodal agentic model that pushes the boundaries of what an AI system can do when left to run autonomously on hard software engineering problems. The release targets practical deployment scenarios: long-running coding agents, front-end generation from natural language, […] The post
21/04/2026
Service Bus SBMP Retirement: What BizTalk Server 2020 Customers Need to Know
On September 30, 2026, the Azure Service Bus team will retire support for the Service Bus Messaging Protocol (SBMP).To help customers maintain continuity while planning their transition to Azure Logic Apps, we’ve released a BizTalk Server 2020 hotfix that adds support for Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) in the adapter.The hotfix will be available for BizTalk Server 2020 CU6 and CU7.
21/04/2026
A Coding Implementation on Microsoft’s Phi-4-Mini for Quantized Inference Reasoning Tool Use RAG and LoRA Fine-Tuning
In this tutorial, we build a pipeline on Phi-4-mini to explore how a compact yet highly capable language model can handle a full range of modern LLM workflows within a single notebook. We begin by setting up a stable environment, loading Microsoft’s Phi-4-mini-instruct in efficient 4-bit quantization, and then move step by step through streaming […] The post
21/04/2026
Planner Agent brings work management directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot
Work rarely lives in one place. Your priorities may be spread across personal tasks, shared plans, email follow-ups, meeting notes, and chats. Planner Agent can help bring that work together in Microsoft 365 Copilot, so you can see what needs attention, take action, and keep projects moving without constantly switching between apps. Planner Agent is currently available in Microsoft 365 Copilot through Frontier and can be added from the All agents menu once enabled by you...
20/04/2026
Announcing Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode Public Preview 2!
Download Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode Public Preview 2 here. Provide feedback on Public Preview 2 on our GitHub page. At Microsoft Ignite 2025
20/04/2026
Troubleshoot with OpenTelemetry in Azure Monitor - Public Preview
OpenTelemetry is fast becoming the industry standard for modern telemetry collection and ingestion pipelines. With Azure Monitor’s new OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) support, you can ship logs, metrics, and traces from wherever you run workloads to analyze and act on your observability data in one place. What’s in the preview Direct OTLP ingestion into Azure Monitor for logs, metrics, and traces. Automated onboarding for AKS work...
20/04/2026
Secure, Keyless Application Access with Managed Identities - Now GA in Azure Files SMB
As enterprises modernize applications and strengthen their security posture, identity is central to how applications access shared storage. Traditional identity models relying on account keys, stored credentials, or domain‑joined infrastructure add operational overhead and introduce security risks such as credential leakage, lack of identity attribution, and excessive privilege if shared keys are compromised. Today, we are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of Managed I...
20/04/2026
Detecting Plain‑Text Password Exposure Using Custom Regex in Microsoft Purview
Microsoft Purview helps organizations identify and protect sensitive information using Sensitive Information Types (SITs).This post walks through how to extend password detection using a custom regex pattern — allowing you to identify strong passwords stored in plain text and respond before exposure turns into an incident.By combining length validation, complexity enforcement, and contextual keyword proximity, Microsoft Purview enables precise and scalable password detection, helping organizations identify and protect sensitive credentials before they are misused.
20/04/2026
Effective, engaging events in communities and storylines
Whether you’re running a company-wide broadcast, a training session, a Reddit-style “ask me anything” (AMA) or an in-person gathering, Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams help you host and manage more effective and engaging events. Events have always been central to employee communications. Viva Engage and events play a critical role in building trust, encouraging authenticity, and listening at scale. From highly produced hybrid all-hands to asynchron...
20/04/2026
Change Optics Report released into Public Preview to showcase messages impacted by future changes
Change Management is an important part of managing the improvements we make to our service that may sometimes disrupt our customers. The key is empowering customers to identify if they have messages that will be affected when we announce changes to the service. To that end, we’d like to announce the Public Preview for the Change Optics Report. It will be the central location for finding messages that could be affected by future changes to the service. As we improve or identify issues i...
20/04/2026
What’s new in AI Skills Navigator: April 2026
Learn about recent improvements to playlists, skilling sessions, partner discovery, and credentials, based on what learners and team leaders told us they need to build skills with confidence. Priya Vaidyanathan is a Director of Product Management at Microsoft, where she leads the product management teams that are building AI Skills Navigator.
20/04/2026
Breaking the Shackles of Legacy Portals: Power Pages as Enterprise SaaS
It's time to stop building "Portals" and start deploying Enterprise SaaS. For years, enterprise teams building web portals have been shackled by rigid Dynamics 365 schemas and heavy, template-driven UIs. Traditional Power Apps Portals required developers to follow the portal's...
20/04/2026
Veeam and Celebal Technologies offer transactable partner solutions in Azure Marketplace
Microsoft partners like Veeam and Celebal Technologies deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Azure Marketplace. Learn about these offers below: Veea...
20/04/2026
Troubleshooting Microsoft Foundry Accessing On‑Premises APIs Over Private Networking
Audience: Azure solution architects, network engineers, and AI practitioners deploying Microsoft Foundry in enterprise, network‑isolated environments. Scenario: Foundry Agent Service must call an on‑premises (or privately hosted) API over VPN or ExpressRoute using on‑premises corporate DNS...
20/04/2026
Getting Started with Zero-Shot Text Classification
Zero-shot text classification is a way to label text without first training a classifier on your own task-specific dataset.
20/04/2026
Simplify On-prem File share Migration to Azure: Discover & assess suitability using Azure Migrate
Migrating on‑premises file servers to the cloud is a complex infrastructure transformation—not just a data move. Many organizations lack the visibility needed to decide whether to rehost or modernize file shares spread across Windows and Linux servers. Azure Migrate now extends its discovery and assessment capabilities to SMB and NFS file shares, enabling a data‑driven appro...
20/04/2026
Prompt Engineering for Spec-Driven Development with SpecKit
Introduction Charlotte Yeo, UCL MEng Computer Science https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlotte-yeo-627476294/ Supervisors: Janaina Mourao-Miranda (UCL) and Lee Stott (Microsoft). For my final-year MEng project at UCL, I investigated how to get the best results out of SpecKit, a spec-driven AI developmen...
20/04/2026
Dynamic Data Masking – What it is, What it isn’t, and How to use it effectively
In this post, we’ll explain the core purpose of Dynamic Data Masking (to ease application development), how it works, and its proper use cases – as well as its limitations. If you’re considering using Dynamic Data Masking or reviewing your data security strategy, this information will help you make informed decisions. What Dynamic Data Masking is designed for
20/04/2026
OpenAI Scales Trusted Access for Cyber Defense With GPT-5.4-Cyber: a Fine-Tuned Model Built for Verified Security Defenders
OpenAI is moving from a limited pilot to broad deployment of its Trusted Access for Cyber program, introducing GPT-5.4-Cyber — a variant of GPT-5.4 fine-tuned to be cyber-permissive — for thousands of vetted defenders. The post OpenAI Scales Trusted Access for Cyber Defense With GPT-5.4-Cyber: a Fine-Tuned Model Bu...
20/04/2026
Building an Enterprise HR Chatbot with Multi-Strategy RAG and Live Agent Handoff on Azure
HR teams deal with thousands of employee questions every day — policy lookups, leave balances, case escalations, and sensitive topics like harassment or misconduct. AI chatbots can handle the routine stuff and free up HR advisors for the hard cases. But most chatbot projects get stuck at basic Q&A. They can't handle multi-country policies, employee slang, or smooth handoffs to a real person. This post covers how we built Eva, a production HR chatbot using Micr...
20/04/2026
Moonshot AI and Tsinghua Researchers Propose PrfaaS: A Cross-Datacenter KVCache Architecture that Rethinks How LLMs are Served at Scale
For years, the way large language models handle inference has been stuck inside a box — literally. The high-bandwidth RDMA networks that make modern LLM serving work have confined both prefill and decode to the same datacenter, sometimes even the same rack. A team of researchers at Moonshot AI and Tsinghua University is making the […] The post
20/04/2026
Modernizing Digital Health Record Governance with Microsoft Entra Identity Governance
The digital transformation of healthcare continues to accelerate. Clinicians expect near-instant access to Electronic Health Records (EHRs), clinical workflows increasingly span cloud and on-premises systems, and regulatory pressures around identity, access, and auditability have never been higher. For healthcare security and IT leaders, one challenge consistently rises to the top: ensuring the right clinicians have the right access to EHR systems—no more, no less—throughout their life...
19/04/2026
Meet OpenMythos: An Open-Source PyTorch Reconstruction of Claude Mythos Where 770M Parameters Match a 1.3B Transformer
Anthropic has never published a technical paper on Claude Mythos. That has not stopped the research community from theorizing. A new open-source project called OpenMythos, released on GitHub by Kye Gomez, attempts something ambitious: a first-principles theoretical reconstruction of what the Claude Mythos architecture might actually be, built entirely in PyTorch and grounded in peer-reviewed […] The post
19/04/2026
How TabPFN Leverages In-Context Learning to Achieve Superior Accuracy on Tabular Datasets Compared to Random Forest and CatBoost
Tabular data—structured information stored in rows and columns—is at the heart of most real-world machine learning problems, from healthcare records to financial transactions. Over the years, models based on decision trees, such as Random Forest, XGBoost, and CatBoost, have become the default choice for these tasks. Their strength lies in handling mixed data types, capturing […] The post
19/04/2026
Network Connectivity Check APIs for Logic App Standard
Introduction When your Logic App Standard is integrated with a Virtual Network (VNET), you can use these APIs to troubleshoot connectivity issues to downstream resources like SQL databases, Storage Accounts, Service Bus, Key Vault, and more. The checks run directly from the worker hosting your Logic App, so the results reflect the actual network path your workflows use. API Overview
19/04/2026
A Coding Implementation to Build an AI-Powered File Type Detection and Security Analysis Pipeline with Magika and OpenAI
In this tutorial, we build a workflow that combines Magika’s deep-learning-based file type detection with OpenAI’s language intelligence to create a practical and insightful analysis pipeline. We begin by setting up the required libraries, securely connecting to the OpenAI API, and initializing Magika to classify files directly from raw bytes rather than relying on filenames […] The post
19/04/2026
AKS App Routing's Next Chapter: Gateway API with Istio
If you've been following my previous posts on the Ingress NGINX retirement, you'll know the story so far. The community Ingress NGINX project was retired in March 2026, and Microsoft's extended support for the NGINX-based App Routing add-on runs until November 2026. I've covered
19/04/2026
Step by Step Guide to Ontology and Plan for Financial Service
What We Will Build In this guide, we will construct a complete Fabric IQ solution that accomplishes the following: First, a Lakehouse that ingests publicly available data including bank financials, P2P lending statistics, borrower demographics, and licensing information. Second, a Semantic Model that defines the analytical layer with proper dimensions, measures, and relationships. Third, an Ontology that elevates these tables ...
19/04/2026
Azure Virtual Desktop in the Perth Azure Extended Zone: A Real‑World Production Deployment
Introduction Perth is one of the most geographically isolated major cities globally. For performance‑sensitive, graphics‑heavy engineering workloads, user experience can degrade significantly when desktops are hosted far from the user. For workloads such as subsurface modelling and GPU‑intensive analysis, reducing latency is critical not just for user experience but also for productivity. This makes Perth an ideal candidate for Azure Extended Zone deployments, where compute re...
19/04/2026
NVIDIA Releases Ising: the First Open Quantum AI Model Family for Hybrid Quantum-Classical Systems
Quantum computing has spent years living in the future tense. Hardware has improved, research has compounded, and venture dollars have followed — but the gap between a quantum processor running in a lab and one running a real-world application remains stubbornly wide. NVIDIA moved to close that gap with the launch of NVIDIA Ising, the […] The post NVIDIA Releases Ising: the First Open Quantum AI Model Family...
19/04/2026
xAI Launches Standalone Grok Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech APIs, Targeting Enterprise Voice Developers
Elon Musk’s AI company xAI has launched two standalone audio APIs — a Speech-to-Text (STT) API and a Text-to-Speech (TTS) API — both built on the same infrastructure that powers Grok Voice on mobile apps, Tesla vehicles, and Starlink customer support. The release moves xAI squarely into the competitive speech API market currently occupied by […] The post
19/04/2026
A Coding Tutorial for Running PrismML Bonsai 1-Bit LLM on CUDA with GGUF, Benchmarking, Chat, JSON, and RAG
In this tutorial, we implement how to run the Bonsai 1-bit large language model efficiently using GPU acceleration and PrismML’s optimized GGUF deployment stack. We set up the environment, install the required dependencies, and download the prebuilt llama.cpp binaries, and load the Bonsai-1.7B model for fast inference on CUDA. As we progress, we examine how […] The post
19/04/2026
A Coding Guide for Property-Based Testing Using Hypothesis with Stateful, Differential, and Metamorphic Test Design
In this tutorial, we explore property-based testing using Hypothesis and build a rigorous testing pipeline that goes far beyond traditional unit testing. We implement invariants, differential testing, metamorphic testing, targeted exploration, and stateful testing to validate both functional correctness and behavioral guarantees of our systems. Instead of manually crafting edge cases, we let Hypothesis generate […] The post
18/04/2026
Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.7: A Major Upgrade for Agentic Coding, High-Resolution Vision, and Long-Horizon Autonomous Tasks
Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4.7, it’s latest frontier model and a direct successor to Claude Opus 4.6. The release is positioned as a focused improvement rather than a full generational leap, but the gains it delivers are substantial in the areas that matter most to developers building real-world AI-powered applications: agentic software engineering, multimodal […] The post
18/04/2026
Microsoft Fabric Operations Agent Step by Step Walkthrough
Fabric Capacity and Workspace You need a Microsoft Fabric workspace backed by a paid capacity. Trial capacities are not supported for Operations Agent. Your capacity must be provisioned in a supported region. As of April 2026, Operations Agent is available in all Microsoft Fabric regions except South Central US and East US. If your capacity is outside the US or EU, you will also need to enable cross geo processing and storage for AI through the tenant settings. Your workspace ...
18/04/2026
Google AI Releases Auto-Diagnose: An Large Language Model LLM-Based System to Diagnose Integration Test Failures at Scale
If you have ever stared at thousands of lines of integration test logs wondering which of the sixteen log files actually contains your bug, you are not alone — and Google now has data to prove it. A team of Google researchers introduced Auto-Diagnose, an LLM-powered tool that automatically reads the failure logs from a […] The post
18/04/2026
MCP Demystified: Tools vs Resources vs Prompts Explained Simply
Introduction When developers start working with Model Context Protocol (MCP), one of the most confusing parts is understanding the difference between MCP Tools, Resources, and Prompts. All three are important components in modern AI application development, but they serve completely different purposes. In real-world AI systems like chatbots, AI agents, and cop...
18/04/2026
A End-to-End Coding Guide to Running OpenAI GPT-OSS Open-Weight Models with Advanced Inference Workflows
In this tutorial, we explore how to run OpenAI’s open-weight GPT-OSS models in Google Colab with a strong focus on their technical behavior, deployment requirements, and practical inference workflows. We begin by setting up the exact dependencies needed for Transformers-based execution, verifying GPU availability, and loading openai/gpt-oss-20b with the correct configuration using native MXFP4 quantization, […] The post
18/04/2026
Deploy scalable ring‑fenced Purview operations with Administrative Units
Administrative Units (AUs) provide a native way to solve this by enabling ring‑fenced operations—allowing teams to operate independently within clearly defined boundaries, while preserving central oversight.This post focuses on the why behind using Administrative Units in Microsoft Purview, with a particular emphasis on scalable, ring‑fenced operations.We’ll walk through three reference architectures that illustrate how Administrative Units support real‑world operating models—without requiring multiple tenants or separate DLP platforms.
18/04/2026
Teams SMB at Microsoft 365 Community Conference
We are looking forward to meeting SMBs and SMB partners attending the Microsoft 365 Community Conference next week. 📅 Learn more about the conference and register today. We have a wonderful lineup of Teams SMB-focused events: 🎤
17/04/2026
Top 19 AI Red Teaming Tools (2026): Secure Your ML Models
As Generative AI matures, so do the threats against it. AI Red Teaming has evolved from a niche security practice into a regulatory requirement. Our 2026 guide breaks down the top 19 tools—including Mindgard, Garak, and Microsoft’s PyRIT—to help security teams identify vulnerabilities like data leakage and bias before they reach production. The post Top 19 AI Red Teaming Tools (2026): Secure Your ML Models ...
17/04/2026
Autonomous AKS Incident Response with Azure SRE Agent: From Alert to Verified Recovery in Minutes
When a Sev1 alert fires on an AKS cluster, detection is rarely the hard part. The hard part is what comes next: proving what broke, why it broke, and fixing it without widening the blast radius, all under time pressure, often at 2 a.m. Azure SRE Agent is designed to close that gap. It connects Azure-native observability, AKS diagnostics, and engineering workflows into a single incident-response loop that can investigate, remediate, verify, and follow up, without waiting for a human to ...
17/04/2026
A Coding Guide to Build a Production-Grade Background Task Processing System Using Huey with SQLite, Scheduling, Retries, Pipelines, and Concurrency Control
In this tutorial, we explore how to build a fully functional background task processing system using Huey directly, without relying on Redis. We configure a SQLite-backed Huey instance, start a real consumer in the notebook, and implement advanced task patterns, including retries, priorities, scheduling, pipelines, locking, and monitoring via signals. As we move step by […] The post
17/04/2026
Event Guide - European Collab Cloud & Biz Apps Summit - Cologne, Germany
Microsoft at the European Collaboration Summit 2026- Cologne, Germany | Micros...
17/04/2026
Resource Guide: Making Physical AI Practical for Real‑World Industrial Operations
Microsoft’s adaptive cloud approach enables organizations to turn operational technology (OT) data into intelligent actions, autonomously, without requiring everything to live in the cloud by unifying cloud-to-edge management plane, data plane, and intelligence platform. At the center of this approach are key foundational technologies:&nbs...
17/04/2026
Title Plan Update - April 17, 2026
📁April 17, 2026 - Title Plan Now Available Access the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at
17/04/2026
Copilot agents are scaling faster than most organizations expected
Copilot agents are easy to pilot. Across organizations, teams are building agents to automate tasks, surface insights, and streamline everyday work. Early results are positive—and encouraging. One agent leads to another. Interest spreads. Adoption grows. Then a different question starts to surface: What happens when Copilot agents move beyond experiments and start to scale across the organization? That’s where things are getting more complicated.
17/04/2026
Coming soon: the 2026 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards
It's almost that time of year again: the Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards are quickly approaching. These awards recognize the exceptional work partners deliver across solution areas, industries, and regions. And they celebrate the many ways our partners are driving Frontier Transformation––turning AI ambition into high-impact business outcomes for customers. Winning an award is a meaningful achievement that highlights the ...
17/04/2026
Maintaining Azure Public IP Inventory by Retrieving Exact Deleted Public IP Using Activity Logs
However, when a Public IP address is deleted, the corresponding delete operation in Azure Activity Logs includes only the Resource ID of the Public IP — not the actual IP address that was assigned to the resource.This blog presents a production‑ready implementation approach that enables organisations to reliably capture and retain the assigned Public IP address of Azure Public IP resources — even after they are deleted — using Azure Activity Log alerts, Azure Automation, and a persistent resource mapping cache.This alert rule will detect Public IP lifecycle events and trigger the associated Action Group for downstream runbook execution.
17/04/2026
The Complete Guide to Inference Caching in LLMs
Calling a large language model API at scale is expensive and slow.
17/04/2026
Interim guidance for Egypt DST changes 2026
On April 24, 2026, Egypt will be observing DST changes. Earlier this month, Microsoft has identified an issue that affects Daylight Saving Time (DST) in Egypt between April 24 and April 30, 2026, inclusive of both dates. Calendar events and meeting times in Egypt will appear off by one hour for only certain Windows versions for the above-mentioned period. ...
17/04/2026
⚡Foundry Toolkit for VS Code: A Deep Dive on GA
As we shared in the announcement, Microsoft Foundry Toolkit for Visual Studio Code is now generally available. In this deep dive, we walk through everything that’s in the GA release — from the rebrand and extension consolidation, to model experimentation, agent development, evaluations, and on-device AI for scientists and engineers pushing the boundaries of edge hardware. Whether you’...
17/04/2026
🏆 Agents League Winner Spotlight – Reasoning Agents Track
Agents League was designed to showcase what agentic AI can look like when developers move beyond single‑prompt interactions and start building systems that plan, reason, verify, and collaborate. Across three competitive tracks—Creative Apps, Reasoning Agents, and Enterprise Agents—participants had two weeks to design and ship real AI agents using productio...
17/04/2026
Qwen Team Open-Sources Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: A Sparse MoE Vision-Language Model with 3B Active Parameters and Agentic Coding Capabilities
Qwen Team Open-Sources Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: A Sparse MoE Vision-Language Model with 3B Active Parameters and Agentic Coding Capabilities The post Qwen Team Open-Sources Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: A Sparse MoE Vision-Language Model with 3B Active Parameters and Agentic Coding Capabilities appeared first on
17/04/2026
Upcoming April 2026 Microsoft 365 Champion Community Call
Join our next community call on MApril 28, 2026, where we'll learn more about what's new with People Skills and the Skills Agent. Reminder: Our community calls are in the Teams webinar format, so you must register to receive the link to join. The join link will be sent to you in email with your webinar registration confirmation. https://aka.ms/M3...
17/04/2026
New in Azure SRE Agent: Log Analytics and Application Insights Connectors
Azure SRE Agent now supports Log Analytics and Application Insights as log providers, backed by the Azure MCP Server. Connect your workspaces and App Insights resources, and the agent can query them directly during investigations. Why This Matters Log A...
17/04/2026
Event-Driven IaC Operations with Azure SRE Agent: Terraform Drift Detection via HTTP Triggers
What Happens After terraform plan Finds Drift? If your team is like most, the answer looks something like this: A nightly terraform plan runs and finds 3 drifted resources A notification lands in Slack or Teams Someone files a ticket During the next sprint, an engineer opens 4 browser tabs — Terraform state, Azure Portal, A...
17/04/2026
Introducing the plugin marketplace for Azure API Center
Today, we're excited to announce the public preview of the plugin marketplace endpoint for Azure API Center. This new capability makes it easier than ever for developers to discover and install AI plugins — including MCP servers and skills — directly from the tools they already use, like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI. The problem we're solving As AI plugins and MCP servers become core parts of the developer workflow, teams have struggled with a ...
17/04/2026
OpenAI Launches GPT-Rosalind: Its First Life Sciences AI Model Built to Accelerate Drug Discovery and Genomics Research
OpenAI has officially entered the specialized science race with GPT-Rosalind, a frontier reasoning model designed to slash the 10-15 year timeline of drug discovery through advanced biochemistry and genomic analysis. The post OpenAI Launches GPT-Rosalind: Its First Life Sciences AI Model Built to Accelerate Drug Discovery and Genomics Research appeared first on
17/04/2026
Introducing Control Over Driver Update Acceptance (DUA) Creation on Shared Driver Submissions
As part of Microsoft’s commitment to improving Windows quality through more predictable and reliable update delivery, we are introducing a new capability that will give submission owners control over Driver Update Acceptance (DUA) creation on shared submissions. This opt-in, per-sharing-shipping-label control will allow submission owners to explicitly block receivers from creating DUA submissions on shared content — providing greater flexibility and control over driver distribution. Receivers...
16/04/2026
Building Transformer-Based NQS for Frustrated Spin Systems with NetKet
Learn how to combine Transformer architectures with Quantum Physics using NetKet and JAX. This guide walks through building a research-grade VMC pipeline to solve the frustrated J1-J2 Heisenberg spin chain with Neural Quantum States. The post Building Transformer-Based NQS for Frustrated Spin Systems with NetKet appeared first on MarkTechPost.
16/04/2026
Act now: Unlock cloud security growth to drive stronger customer outcomes
When it comes to accelerating migration and modernization, security is no longer an add‑on for customers—it’s a baseline expectation. By embedding security earlier, you can deliver a built-in security approach, making it possible to drive more seamless adoption and stronger customer outcomes from day one. <...
16/04/2026
Introducing the Container Network Insights Agent for AKS: Now in Public Preview
We are thrilled to announce public preview of Container Network Insights Agent - Agentic AI network troubleshooting for your workloads running in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
16/04/2026
Cumulative Update #4 for SQL Server 2025 RTM
The 4th 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: CU4 KB Article: https://learn.micro...
16/04/2026
Microsoft Foundry Toolkit for VS Code is Now Generally Available
We are thrilled to announce that the Microsoft Foundry Toolkit for VS Code, formerly AI Toolkit, is now Generally Available (GA)! From first model prompt to production‑grade AI agents, Foundry Toolkit lets you build, debug, and ship AI end to end without ever leaving VS Code. Same Product. New Name. You may know this ex...
16/04/2026
New Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Apps and Agents Developer Associate
Ready to move from prototypes to production? Demonstrate your readiness to deliver scalable, real‑world AI apps and agents using Azure services and Microsoft Foundry with the new Exam AI‑103 (beta). As AI changes how work is done across many industries and roles, organizations are rapidly moving AI apps and agents from experimentation into operational use. These shifts create opportunities for software developers who can build generative AI app...
16/04/2026
Available today: Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7 in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Today we're expanding model choice in Microsoft 365 Copilot with the addition of Anthropic's latest model—Claude Opus 4.7—now available in Copilot Cowork (Frontier) and Copilot Studio early release cycle environments, and rolling out to Copilot in Excel. Opus 4.7 is des...
16/04/2026
Designing a reliable environment strategy for Microsoft Marketplace AI apps and agents
Technical guidance for software companies Delivering an AI app or agent through Microsoft Marketplace requires more than strong model performance or a well‑designed user flow. Once your solution is published, both you and your customers must be able to update, test, validate, and promote changes without compromising production stability. A structured environment strategy—Dev, Stage, and Production—is the architectural mechanism that makes this possible. This p...
16/04/2026
Explaining what GitHub Copilot Modernization can (and cannot do)
If you don’t know, GitHub Copilot Modernization is the new agentic tool that supports you to modernize older applications.GitHub Copilot modernization handles two big categories: upgrading .NET projects to newer versions and migrating .NET apps to Azure.Here's what the upgrade workflow handles in Visual Studio:
16/04/2026
Turn upcoming virtualization licensing changes into a growth opportunity
Seize the market shift driven by recent virtualization licensing changes by accelerating the move from Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA)-based licensing to a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) model. Although these changes won't take full effect until 2027, planning now gives you more time to evaluate the right transition path, protect customer relationships, and build stronger long-term business relationships. By removing legacy cost constraints, you can drive growth across Azure-native, hybrid, and AI-ready solutions. The Microsoft Datacenter Optimization (DCO) initiative empowers you to move beyond legacy SPLA-based operations and build a stronger business so you can protect margins, modernize customer environments, and grow new revenue. Learn more by checking out the Microsoft Hybrid Cloud Partners Podcast (or watching below) and visiting the DCO page.
16/04/2026
Claude Opus 4.7 is available on Microsoft Foundry
Anthropic continues to push the frontier of AI for real-world, production work with its new model Claude Opus 4.7. Opus 4.7 is Anthropic’s most advanced generally available model. Teams building on Azure can access Claude Opus 4.7 through Microsoft Foundry , today.For organizations already building with Claude Opus 4.6, Opus 4.7 represents a powerful upgrade bringing stronger instruction following, better vision and office outputs, and improved memory capabilities to enable enhanced performance across complex, multi-step workflows..Microsoft Foundry is Microsoft's unified platform for building, deploying, and governing AI applications at scale.
16/04/2026
Bringing AI to the Factory Floor with Foundry Local - Now in Public Preview on Azure Local
Foundry Local exposes standard REST and OpenAI‑compatible APIs, enabling IT and AI teams to deploy and operate local AI workloads using familiar, cloud‑aligned patterns across edge and on‑prem environments.AKS on Azure Local as the deployment target, so Foundry Local runs as a containerized workload managed by Kubernetes - the same operational model you use for any other workload on the clusterThe Helm chart gives you full control over the deployment manifest.
16/04/2026
New Microsoft Certified: Azure AI App and Agent Developer Associate
Ready to move from prototypes to production? Demonstrate your readiness to deliver scalable, real‑world AI apps and agents using Azure services and Microsoft Foundry with the new Exam AI‑103 (beta). As AI changes how work is done across many industries and roles, organizations are rapidly moving AI apps and agents from experimentation into operational use. These shifts create opportunities for software developers who can build generative AI app...
16/04/2026
App attach in Azure Virtual Desktop now supports Windows Server 2025 and Windows Server 2022
Managing applications in virtualized desktop and server environments has traditionally required IT teams to bake apps directly into base images, driving image sprawl, slower updates, and higher operational overhead. App attach in Azure Virtual Desktop changes that model by enabling applications to be delivered dynamically to user sessions, without installing them on the session host. Since we ann...
16/04/2026
Celebrating Camille Pepper’s volunteer leadership this National Volunteer Month
Behind every act of volunteering is a story of heart, hope, and unseen effort. This National Volunteer Month, we’re proud to spotlight Camille Pepper, volunteer CEO of Everything Suarve (ESuarve) — an organization transforming the lives of young people who have grown up surrou...
16/04/2026
Making Physical AI Practical for Real-World Industrial Operations: Part 1
We’ve all read the headlines, but are companies really implementing AI with success, and at scale in manufacturing? The answer is yes - by replicating proven operational practices through simple, but highly practical AI implementations that help improve operational efficiency. For many years I helped industrial customers complete manual data analysis of root causes, lean black-belt style, using pareto charts and continuous improvement cycles to get results. Doing so required practical ...
16/04/2026
Making Physical AI Practical for Real-World Industrial Operations: Part 2
In my previous blog, I talked about how we collaborate with great partners such as Sight Machine, Litmus, Mesh Systems, Siemens, Rockwell, Schneider Electric, and others to deliver end to end value for the practical application of AI in manufacturing environments. These partners, along with forward-thinking customers like Chevron,
16/04/2026
Celebrating MVP Authors: The Books (and People) Helping the Community Level Up
At MVP Summit 2026, we put a special spotlight on MVP authors, community leaders who turn hard-won experience into practical, trustworthy resources. Their books don’t just share information; they help people everywhere build skills, solve real problems, and grow confidence with Microsoft technologies. A dedicated MVP Authors discussion was held, complemented by a “Book Nook” experience in the Community Hub, where authors were invited to bring copies of their books to share with attende...
16/04/2026
SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc Overview
Table of Contents What is Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server? Connecting SQL Server to Azure Arc (4-step onboarding) Your SQL Server is Now in Azure (unified management) SQL Best Practices Assessment Monitoring and Governance Troubleshooting Guide Azure Arc Demo What You Can Learn from This Article This article walks you through the end-t...
16/04/2026
Modernizing Change Management for Microsoft 365 Customers
Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! I’m Jim Barber, a Principal PM Manager on the Microsoft 365 Change Management team. I'm excited to share with you our first step in modernizing the change management release and communication processes for Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 is constantly evolving, making it challenging for IT admins to keep up with continuous service change. This is especially true with AI-driven innovations accelerating beyond the pace that traditional change management processes...
16/04/2026
Cegeka, Infinitera, and Fortinet offer transactable partner solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like Cegeka, Infinitera, and Fortinet deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace.Cegeka Quality Impact Recall Agent: Built for regulated industries and the manufacturing sector, this agent from Cegeka analyzes complaints, supplier issues, or failed quality orders, then launches a coordinated recall workflow inside Microsoft Dynamics 365.Defend against known and zero-day threats with machine learning-enhanced web app and API protection.
16/04/2026
Advancing Firmware Security: Fleet Visibility and New Capabilities in Firmware Analysis
When we announced general availability of firmware analysis enabled by Azure Arc last October, our goal was clear: help organizations gain deep visibility into the security of the firmware that powers their IoT, OT, and network devices.Leading into the Hannover Messe (HMI) 2026 conference, we’re excited to share the next wave of firmware analysis capabilities, delivering enhancements that help customers connect firmware risk to real-world fleet impact, prioritize vulnerabilities more effectively, scale to larger and more complex firmware images, and expand security analysis for UEFI-based platforms.We’re excited to announce a new preview integration between firmware analysis enabled by Azure Arc and Azure Device Registry, bringing fleet-level visibility of IoT and OT devices directly into the firmware analysis experience.
16/04/2026
Python Decorators for Production Machine Learning Engineering
You've probably written a decorator or two in your Python career.
16/04/2026
Understanding action_id discrepancies in Azure SQL Database Audit Logs (BCM vs AL / CR / DR)
Overview While working with Azure SQL Database auditing in enterprise environments, you may encounter an inconsistency in how the action_id field is captured across different PaaS SQL servers. In one such scenario, a customer observed: PaaS Server action_id observed for similar DDL statements
16/04/2026
UCSD and Together AI Research Introduces Parcae: A Stable Architecture for Looped Language Models That Achieves the Quality of a Transformer Twice the Size
The dominant recipe for building better language models has not changed much since the Chinchilla era: spend more FLOPs, add more parameters, train on more tokens.But as inference deployments consume an ever-growing share of compute and model deployments push toward the edge, researchers are increasingly asking a harder question — can you scale quality […]The post UCSD and Together AI Research Introduces Parcae: A Stable Architecture for Looped Language Models That Achieves the Quality of a Transformer Twice the Size appeared first on MarkTechPost.
16/04/2026
Announcing One‑Command Backup Configuration for AKS with Azure Backup
Running production workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is becoming the norm for platform teams building cloud‑native applications at scale.Today, we’re excited to introduce an alternate simplified CLI‑based experience that allows customers to configure backups for AKS using Azure Backup with a single command.With this new experience, customers can now enable full‑cluster backup for AKS using a single CLI command:
16/04/2026
Building a modern digital workplace on Microsoft 365 - WebVine - SharePoint Partner Showcase
We are excited to share a new episode on our partner showcase series focused on SharePoint in Microsoft 365.WebVine is a Microsoft partner specializing in modern intranets, information management and digital workplace solutions built on Microsoft 365.Injio Docs is WebVine’s controlled document management solution built on Microsoft 365, designed to help organizations manage policies, procedures, and critical documents with confidence.
16/04/2026
Architecting Secure and Trustworthy AI Agents with Microsoft Foundry
Co-Authored by Avneesh Kaushik Why Trust Matters for AI Agents Unlike static ML models, AI agents call tools and APIs, retrieve enterprise data, generate dynamic outputs, and can act autonomously based on their planning. This introduces expanded risk surfaces: prompt injection, data exfiltration, over-privileged tool access, hallucinations, and undetected model drift. A trustworthy agent must be designed with defense-in-depth controls spanning p...
16/04/2026
Managing Multi‑Tenant Azure Resource with SRE Agent and Lighthouse
Azure SRE Agent is an AI‑powered reliability assistant that helps teams diagnose and resolve production issues faster while reducing operational toil. It analyzes logs, metrics, alerts, and deployment data to perform root cause analysis and recommend or execute mitigations with human approval. It’s capable of integrating with azure services across subscriptions and resourc...
16/04/2026
How to Build a Universal Long-Term Memory Layer for AI Agents Using Mem0 and OpenAI
In this tutorial, we build a universal long-term memory layer for AI agents using Mem0, OpenAI models, and ChromaDB.We design a system that can extract structured memories from natural conversations, store them semantically, retrieve them intelligently, and integrate them directly into personalized agent responses.We move beyond simple chat history and implement persistent, user-scoped […]
16/04/2026
A Coding Implementation to Build Multi-Agent AI Systems with SmolAgents Using Code Execution, Tool Calling, and Dynamic Orchestration
In this tutorial, we build an advanced, production-ready agentic system using SmolAgents and demonstrate how modern, lightweight AI agents can reason, execute code, dynamically manage tools, and collaborate across multiple agents.We start by installing dependencies and configuring a powerful yet efficient LLM backend, and then progressively design custom tools, including mathematical utilities, memory storage, […]The post A Coding Implementation to Build Multi-Agent AI Systems with SmolAgents Using Code Execution, Tool Calling, and Dynamic Orchestration appeared first on MarkTechPost.
16/04/2026
Azure IoT Hub + Azure Device Registry (Preview Refresh): Device Trust and Management at Fleet Scale
Today, we’re expanding the preview with new capabilities to strengthen security, improve fleet management, and simplify development for connected devices.The April 2026 Preview for Azure IoT Hub and Azure Device Registry (ADR) deliver key features to further standardize device identity and enable policy‑driven management for certificates at scale.In your Azure Device Registry namespace, you can define the public key infrastructure (PKI) that manage your X.509 certificates and certificate authorities (CAs).
16/04/2026
Using an AI Agent to Troubleshoot and Fix Azure Function App Issues
If the process involves restarting the Function App container or restarting related settings, communication between the user and the agent may be interrupted, and you will need to use /resume.However, to demonstrate the agent’s capabilities, you can also allow it to fix the problem directly, provided that you have granted the corresponding permissions through SAMI.After each repair, we can even extract the experience from that case into a skill and store it in a Storage Account for future reuse.
16/04/2026
Microsoft Global Community Initiative Newsletter (April)
The Microsoft 365 Community Conference is where community comes together in person.To support nonprofits and small businesses in our ecosystem, we’re offering a grant program for free or discounted tickets to the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando (April 21–23).Thankfully, the Global AI Community tours with local events around the world, organized by the community for the community.
16/04/2026
Evolving the Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals Certification
The updated Microsoft Certification validates your knowledge of AI concepts and capabilities and your ability to implement AI solutions by using Azure and Microsoft Foundry.After June 30, 2026, to earn this Certification, you’ll need to pass Exam AI-901: Azure AI Fundamentals, currently in beta.The Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals Certification focuses on the practical skills needed to build modern AI apps and agents by using Foundry.
16/04/2026
Production Cutover in Cloud-Native Migrations
Migration to container orchestration platforms such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) typically involves:Even with these practices in place, runtime validation often reveals issues that are not directly related to deployment or application code.Cloud migration success is no longer determined solely by where applications are deployed, but by how effectively runtime dependencies are aligned during production cutover.
16/04/2026
Databricks Delta Sharing: Enabling Cost Efficient Cross Cloud Data Access
Delta sharing is an open protocol for secure data sharing that allows organizations to share live data stored in Delta Lake with external consumers—across cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud—while keeping the data in its original location.The diagram illustrates how Databricks Delta Sharing enables secure, real‑time data access across public clouds (Azure, AWS, GCP) without replicating data, helping reduce operational overhead and data‑egress costs.Databricks Delta Sharing enables organizations to provide secure, real‑time cross‑cloud data access without data duplication—helping reduce operational complexity and egress costs in multi‑cloud architectures.
16/04/2026
Announcing Log Monitor v2.2.0 Release Candidate
Log Monitor is an open-source tool that enables Windows containers to surface logs from multiple sources, Event Log, ETW providers, and log files, directly to the container's stdout, making them visible to container orchestrators like Kubernetes and Azure Container Apps.We've added a complete end-to-end example for running Log Monitor with IIS on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), including deployment manifests and step-by-step documentation.This release also includes a number of important bug fixes to the configuration file parser:
15/04/2026
Upcoming changes to driver metadata and publishing validations in Hardware Dev Center
We're making improvements to how the Windows Hardware Dev Center (HDC) handles driver OS compatibility.We are adding a new nullable string property, CeilingOSCode, to the per-PnP entries in the HardwareDriverMetadata asset (documented at Driver package metadata ).No resubmission is required, but if you want your existing packages to take advantage of the improved OS ceiling targeting, you should resubmit them after the rollout date.
15/04/2026
Guidance for Building Agents on the Microsoft Sentinel Platform
As a Senior Product Manager |Developer Architect on the App Assure team working to bring Microsoft Sentinel and Security Copilot solutions to market, I interact with many ISVs building agents on Microsoft Sentinel data lake for the first time. I’ve written this article to walk you through one possible approach for agent development – the process I use when building sample agents internally at Microsoft. If you have questions about this, or other methods for building your agent, App Assure offers guidance through our Sentinel Advisory Service.Throughout this post, I include screenshots and examples from Gigamon’s Security Posture Insight Agent.
15/04/2026
Exploring Agentic Uses Cases for Microsoft Sentinel
This blog will help you understand some common use cases for agent development that we’ve seen across our partner ecosystem.Microsoft Sentinel platform is a strong foundation for agentic experiences because it exposes a normalized security data layer, an investigation surface based on incidents and entities, and extensive automation capabilities.Read the full announcement here: Agentic Use Cases for Developers on the Microsoft Sentinel Platform
15/04/2026
RSAC 2026: New Sentinel Connectors Announcement
Microsoft Sentinel helps organizations detect, investigate, and respond to security threats across increasingly complex environments.With the rollout of the Microsoft Sentinel data lake in the fall, and the App Assure-backed Sentinel promise that supports it, customers now have access to long-term, cost-effective storage for security telemetry, creating a solid foundation for emerging Agentic AI experiences.These connectors bring diverse security signals together, enabling correlation at scale and delivering richer investigation context across the Sentinel platform.
15/04/2026
Announcing the Sentinel Advisory Service
As organizations move from legacy SIEM platforms to Sentinel, consistent access to high-quality third-party data remains essential, not only for detection and response, but increasingly for advanced analytics and AI-driven security experiences.With the introduction of Microsoft Sentinel data lake, customers and partners can now reason over security data cost-effectively and at greater scale.That’s why, as an extension of our Sentinel Promise, we’re excited to announce the Sentinel Advisory Service from App Assure.
15/04/2026
Debugging the future of work: Microsoft 365 Community Conference 2026
That’s exactly why we’re here to help you debug, refactor, and level up at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, happening April 21–23, 2026 in Orlando, FL.We've lined up hands-on sessions and interactive workshops to help you build intelligent, adaptable agents and solutions across the Microsoft ecosystem, and supercharge your Copilot journey.Create custom agents for your company in Microsoft 365 Copilot
15/04/2026
Dissecting LLM Container Cold-Start: Where the Time Actually Goes
We decomposed cold-start for two architecturally different engines – vLLM (Python/CUDA, heavy JIT compilation) and llama.cpp (C++, minimal runtime) – running Llama 3.1 8B on A100 GPUs.Why gzip hurts: model weights are incompressibleThe AIKit image is 8.7 GB uncompressed, 6.6 GB with gzip (a modest 0.76x ratio).
15/04/2026
Save the date for Agent 365 live AMA
Microsoft Agent 365--generally available May 1, 2026--is a control plane that empowers IT admins, Security Operations analysts, Identity and Network Security admins, and Data Security & Compliance admins to observe, govern, and secure all agents for their organization. We’ll demonstrate how to get started and answer your questions about licensing and functionality in this live 'Ask Microsoft Anything' with product and engineering team experts! Register for the Microsoft Tech Community using your email if you haven’t already.
15/04/2026
Simplified controls for managing external collaboration in Teams admin center
To make external collaboration setup in Microsoft Teams easier for your SMB, we have introduced a new overview page in Teams admin center that consolidates settings into a single view and have simplified how we describe the settings you can apply.From the new settings, you can select from pre-configured modes that quickly set smart defaults that are right for your business.Learn more about how you can use these settings, Unified external collab settings management
15/04/2026
Enforce Cost Limits on KQL Queries and Notebooks in the Microsoft Sentinel Data Lake
Today, we're excited to announce threshold enforcement for KQL queries and notebooks in the Microsoft Sentinel data lake.With this release, you can go beyond notifications and automatically block new queries and jobs when your configured usage limits are exceeded.When enforcement is turned on and a threshold is exceeded, Microsoft Sentinel blocks new queries, jobs, and notebook sessions with a clear "Limit exceeded" error.
15/04/2026
March 2026 Recap: Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Premium SSD v2 is now generally available for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server, delivering significant performance and cost-efficiency improvements for I/O‑intensive workloads.Azure Database for PostgreSQL Migration Service now supports EDB Extended Server as a migration source.We have rolled out two new blogs on PostgreSQL buffer cache analysis and PostgreSQL query rewriting and subqueries.
15/04/2026
When the shield becomes the sword: How misconfigured PAM bridges the tiering model
However, in Microsoft Incident Response – the Detection and Response Team (DART) engagements, we frequently encounter a paradox: the tool used to secure Tier 0 often becomes a quick path for threat actors to compromise it.A: PAM vendors are right that a well-configured session host with Credential Guard enabled, application control enforced, and remote management restricted is considerably harder to exploit than a stock Windows Server.By aligning your PAM deployment with the principles of Privileged Access Administration, treating session hosts and service accounts as the tier of the assets they manage, not the zone they physically sit in, you close the bridge before a threat actor finds it.
15/04/2026
New Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals Certification
The updated Microsoft Certification validates your knowledge of AI concepts and capabilities and your ability to implement AI solutions by using Azure and Microsoft Foundry.After June 30, 2026, to earn this Certification, you’ll need to pass Exam AI-901: Azure AI Fundamentals, currently in beta.The Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals Certification focuses on the practical skills needed to build modern AI apps and agents by using Foundry.
15/04/2026
A Technical Deep Dive into the Essential Stages of Modern Large Language Model Training, Alignment, and Deployment
Training a modern large language model (LLM) is not a single step but a carefully orchestrated pipeline that transforms raw data into a reliable, aligned, and deployable intelligent system.At its core lies pretraining, the foundational phase where models learn general language patterns, reasoning structures, and world knowledge from massive text corpora.The post A Technical Deep Dive into the Essential Stages of Modern Large Language Model Training, Alignment, and Deployment appeared first on MarkTechPost.
15/04/2026
Security Community Spotlight: Fabrício Assumpção
Meet Fabrício Assumpção, a Technical Specialist Architect for a Microsoft Security and Compliance Certified Partner, based in Brazil.Fabrício considers his involvement with the Microsoft Security Community defined by a dual approach: architectural innovation and technical enablement.As a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) since 2021, he has been dedicated to bridging the gap between theory and real-world implementation for security professionals globally.
15/04/2026
What’s new in Microsoft Entra – March 2026
From January through March 2026, Microsoft Entra introduced key updates to help organizations strengthen identity security, simplify governance, and improve user experience.Starting February 2026, Microsoft Authenticator introduced jailbreak/root detection for Microsoft Entra credentials in the Android app.Microsoft Entra Connect security update to block hard match for users with Microsoft Entra roles
15/04/2026
From fragmented sites to consistent governance: Azure Arc patterns for adaptive cloud strategy.
Azure Arc addresses this as an architectural control‑plane pattern: it extends Azure management to infrastructure and Kubernetes outside Azure by projecting them into Azure Resource Manager (ARM) so they can be governed using Azure-native primitives such as policy, RBAC, and monitoring.This article describes three architecture patterns that consistently emerge in manufacturing and edge scenarios.Each pattern addresses a distinct set of constraints—ranging from centralized governance across hybrid estates, to plant‑adjacent platforms, to fully disconnected environments—and illustrates how Azure services can be composed to support these realities in a scalable, well‑governed way.
15/04/2026
Cracking the Code to Secure Productivity: How to Work Smarter Without Compromising Security
This is the idea behind secure productivity: empowering employees to work the way they need to while data, identities, devices, and systems are protected seamlessly in the background.A modern secure productivity strategy relies on AI‑powered, intelligent security that adapts to real‑world behavior.Supports remote, hybrid, and AI‑enabled work
15/04/2026
Google AI Launches Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS: A New Benchmark in Expressive and Controllable AI Voice
Google has introduced Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS, a preview text-to-speech model focused on improving speech quality, expressive control, and multilingual generation.Unlike previous iterations that prioritized simple conversion, this release emphasizes natural-language audio tags, native support for more than 70 languages, and native multi-speaker dialogue.This release signals a shift from ‘black-box’ audio generation toward […]
15/04/2026
Migrating Frontline Mobile Devices: Understanding the reality of your estate
As new workflows, apps, locations, and teams get added over time, device estates expand quickly, making it harder to maintain consistency and visibility.This creates a gap between what teams think they have, how they expect devices to be used, and what happens in the field.Understand how devices are used in practice
15/04/2026
Gemma 4 on Azure Container Apps Serverless GPU
What if you could spin up a fully private AI coding agent — running on your own GPU, in your own Azure subscription — with a single command?One azd up, 15 minutes, and you have Google's Gemma 4 running on Azure Container Apps serverless GPU with an OpenAI-compatible API, protected by auth, and ready to power OpenCode as your terminal-based coding agent.Azure Container Apps serverless GPU gives you on-demand GPU compute without managing VMs, Kubernetes clusters, or GPU drivers.
15/04/2026
Enterprise Cybersecurity in the Age of AI: Why Legacy Security Is Failing as Attackers Move Faster
But with the rise of AI‑enabled attacks, that imbalance has widened dramatically.The result is a dangerous gap: highly adaptive attackers versus static, legacy defences.Below are some of the most common outdated security practices still widely used by enterprises today - and why they are no longer sufficient against modern, AI‑driven threats.
15/04/2026
Hunting Infostealers - Trusted Platform Abuse
In this part of the “Hunting Infostealers” series, we explore the growing abuse of trusted communication services and software ecosystems—including messaging platforms like WhatsApp and seemingly benign PDF converter tools—to propagate malware and deploy credential stealers such as Eternidade Stealer, lowering user suspicion and complicating detection.Throughout the blog, we map observed activity to Microsoft Defender XDR coverage and provide actionable guidance to help organizations detect, mitigate, and respond to infostealers.During the third week of November 2025, Microsoft Defender Experts (DEX) identified a WhatsApp platform abuse campaign that leverages a multi-stage infection chain and worm-like propagation techniques to distribute malware.
15/04/2026
Enabling fallback to internet for Azure Private DNS Zones in hybrid architectures
Azure Private Endpoint enables secure connectivity to Azure PaaS services such as: Azure Private DNS Zones are then used to resolve this Private Endpoint FQDN within the VNet.When a DNS resolver receives a negative response (NXDOMAIN), it sends no DNS response to the DNS client and the query fails.
15/04/2026
Get more from Power Query in Excel with these little-known capabilities
If you use Excel or Power BI to work with data, you’ve likely encountered Power Query - and may already rely on it regularly across desktop and web.Turning queries into reusable functionsHow to use a folder connector with a robust sample file transform
15/04/2026
Announcing “Period 2” for Skype for Business Server 2015/2019 Extended Security Update (ESU) Program
While both Skype for Business (SfB) Server 2015 and 2019 have been out of Support since October 2025, some of our customers who needed more time to finalize migrations to SfB Server Subscription Edition (SE) or to Teams opted to enroll into the Extended Security Update program.Customers who wish to enroll in the Period 2 program will have to re-purchase the ESU for the SfB servers they need to cover during Period 2.Microsoft Learn) for Skype for Business Server 2015 and 2019.
15/04/2026
Announcing Period 2 Exchange 2016/2019 Extended Security Update (ESU) program
While both Exchange 2016 and 2019 are out of support since October 2025, some of our customers who needed more time to finalize migrations to Exchange Subscription Edition (SE) have opted to enroll into the Extended Security Update program.That ESU program started in October 2025 and is ending in April 2026 (“Period 1”).Starting today, customers can contact their Microsoft account team to get information about and purchase additional Period 2 Extended Security Update (ESU) for their Exchange 2016 CU23 or Exchange 2019 CU14/CU15 servers.
15/04/2026
How Microsoft Foundry and Elastic Agent Builder in Microsoft Marketplace are shaping enterprise AI
In this guest blog post, Brian Bergholm, Principal Product Marketing Manager at Elastic, covers the evolution of agentic AI and how enterprises can leverage context engineering via Microsoft Foundry and Elastic Agent Builder in the Microsoft Marketplace to operationalize agentic systems at scale.This is where context engineering and agentic AI come together and where platforms like Elastic Agent Builder and Microsoft Foundry (formerly known as Azure AI Foundry) are shaping what enterprise AI looks like in practice.But prompt-centric AI doesn’t naturally scale well in the enterprise.
15/04/2026
Tutorial: Building AI Agents That Talk to Your Azure Database for MySQL
In this tutorial, you'll build a Python-based AI agent that connects to Azure Database for MySQL server and uses OpenAI's function calling to translate natural language questions into SQL queries, execute them, and return human-readable answers.The agent can explore your schema, answer business questions, and even self-correct when it writes invalid SQL.In this tutorial, you built a Python AI agent that connects to Azure Database for MySQL and answers natural language questions by auto-generating SQL - complete with self-correction and security guardrails.
15/04/2026
Copilot Studio User Group • Contact Booklist
This List Is Not An Official CSUG Policy Or A CSUG Guideline Nor Is It A CSUG Help Page This Is An Booklist Of CSUG Staff To Contact If You Ever Need Help Or Have A Question On The Copilot Studio User GroupGeneral Contact ListUhLukas - Community Support & Questions & Moderation Reports & Applications To Be A CSUG Staff Member // “ Copilot Studio User Group “ ( CSUG )
15/04/2026
Azure SQL Migration Starts in SSMS—All in One Flow
Migrate SQL Server Using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) provides a guided, end-to-end migration experience that works seamlessly for both Azure Arc–enabled and standalone SQL Server instances.In this blog, we’ll walk through how SSMS helps you assess, choose, and migrate your SQL Server workloads using the right Azure target and migration method.
15/04/2026
Netox on Microsoftin Security Partner of the Year 2025!
Yhteistyö käynnistyi pienestä Microsoft Autopilot ‑kokonaisuudesta ja on kasvanut vaiheittain kattamaan päätelaitteet, Microsoft 365 ‑ympäristön, tietoturvan ja jatkuvat IT-palvelut lähes 2 000 käyttäjälle.Tämä ajattelutapa, tiivis yhteistyö Microsoftin kanssa ja kyky tuoda uudet teknologiat, kuten Copilot, osaksi hallittua kokonaisuutta ovat keskeisiä syitä siihen, miksi Netox tunnetaan luotettavana Microsoft-kumppanina ja Partner of the Year ‑tason toimijana.Netox ei rakenna erillisiä, päälle liimattuja tietoturvaratkaisuja, vaan hyödyntää Microsoftin ekosysteemin mahdollisuuksia osana kokonaisuutta.
15/04/2026
Combining pgvector and Apache AGE - knowledge graph & semantic intelligence in a single engine
Inspired by GraphRAG and PostgreSQL Integration in Docker with Cypher Query and AI Agents, which demonstrated how Apache AGE brings Cypher based graph querying into PostgreSQL for GraphRAG pipelines.Two extensions pgvector for vector similarity search and Apache AGE extension for graph traversal bringing these capabilities natively into the database.The Azure PostgreSQL database ecosystem has quietly assembled the components for a unified semantic + structural analytics engine in form of extensions.
15/04/2026
A demonstration of Virtual Network TAP
Azure Virtual Network Terminal Access Point (VTAP), at the time of writing in April 2026 in public preview in select regions, copies network traffic from source Virtual Machines to a collector or traffic analytics tool, running as a Network Virtual Appliance (NVA).VTAP is an agentless, cloud-native traffic tap at the Azure network infrastructure level.it has no impact on the source VM's network performance and the source VM is unaware of the tap.
15/04/2026
Credential Exposure Risk & Response Workbook
Use the steps outlined in the Identify and Remediate Credentials article to get the right rules in place to start capturing credential data.This workbook transforms credential leakage detection into a measurable, executive-ready capability.To understand your licensing requirements and options for Microsoft Purview Information Protection, see the Information Protection sections from Microsoft 365 guidance for security & compliance and the related PDF download for feature-level licensing requirements.
15/04/2026
Google DeepMind Releases Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6: Bringing Enhanced Embodied Reasoning and Instrument Reading to Physical AI
Google DeepMind research team introduced Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, a significant upgrade to its embodied reasoning model designed to serve as the ‘cognitive brain’ of robots operating in real-world environments.The model specializes in reasoning capabilities critical for robotics, including visual and spatial understanding, task planning, and success detection — acting as the high-level reasoning model […]The post Google DeepMind Releases Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6: Bringing Enhanced Embodied Reasoning and Instrument Reading to Physical AI appeared first on MarkTechPost.
15/04/2026
Supercharge Your Dev Workflows with GitHub Copilot Custom Skills
That's exactly what GitHub Copilot Custom Skills enable.When you ask Copilot something that matches the skill's description, it loads the instructions and executes the workflow autonomously.Custom Skills turn your documented procedures into executable AI workflows.
15/04/2026
Google Launches ‘Skills’ in Chrome: Turning Reusable AI Prompts into One-Click Browser Workflows
Google just announced the release of Skills in Chrome, a new feature built into Gemini in Chrome that lets users save frequently used AI prompts as reusable, one-click workflows called Skills.The rollout begins April 14, 2026, targeting Mac, Windows, and ChromeOS users who have their Chrome language set to English-US.The post Google Launches ‘Skills’ in Chrome: Turning Reusable AI Prompts into One-Click Browser Workflows appeared first on MarkTechPost.
15/04/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2025 RTM CU3
The Security Update for SQL Server 2025 RTM CU3 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.Microsoft Update Catalog: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=5083245
15/04/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2025 RTM
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.Microsoft Update Catalog: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=5084814
15/04/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2022 RTM CU24
The Security Update for SQL Server 2022 RTM CU24 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.Microsoft Update Catalog: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=5083252
15/04/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2022 RTM
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.Microsoft Update Catalog: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=5084815
15/04/2026
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.Microsoft Update Catalog: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=5084816
15/04/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2019 RTM
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.Microsoft Update Catalog: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=5084817
15/04/2026
A Coding Implementation of Crawl4AI for Web Crawling, Markdown Generation, JavaScript Execution, and LLM-Based Structured Extraction
In this tutorial, we build a complete and practical Crawl4AI workflow and explore how modern web crawling goes far beyond simply downloading page HTML.We set up the full environment, configure browser behavior, and work through essential capabilities such as basic crawling, markdown generation, structured CSS-based extraction, JavaScript execution, session handling, screenshots, link analysis, concurrent […]The post A Coding Implementation of Crawl4AI for Web Crawling, Markdown Generation, JavaScript Execution, and LLM-Based Structured Extraction appeared first on MarkTechPost.
15/04/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2017 RTM
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.Latest Updates for Microsoft SQL Server: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/releases/download-and-install-latest-updates
15/04/2026
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.Latest Updates for Microsoft SQL Server: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/releases/download-and-install-latest-updates
15/04/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2016 SP3
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.Microsoft Update Catalog: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=5084821
15/04/2026
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.Latest Updates for Microsoft SQL Server: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/releases/download-and-install-latest-updates
15/04/2026
Data Security Posture Reports (Custom Workspace and Charts)
Microsoft Purview Posture Reports provide a clear, outcome‑based view of how effectively data protection controls, such as Sensitivity Labels and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, are working across Microsoft 365.Posture Reports transform complex telemetry from Audit logs, Activity Explorer, and policy enforcement into measurable, defensible insights that security, compliance, and business leaders can act on with confidence.Unlike the built‑in reports, custom reports are designed to be adaptable to different audiences and questions.
14/04/2026
Internet Information Services Learning Path
Internet Information Services (IIS) is the modular web server and application platform that first shipped as an optional add-on for Windows NT 3.51 in 1995, evolving from basic HTTP and FTP services into a full-featured web stack tightly integrated with Windows Server and Client operating systems. Today, IIS remains a core component of Windows Server and client editions, used to host legacy and modern web applications, APIs, and services in on-premises and hybrid environments alongside newer cloud-native options. The following training modules on Microsoft Learn provide you with a structured curriculum to learn how to manage and maintain Internet Information Services.Understand how to configure, administer, and validate an IIS installation on Windows Server.
14/04/2026
Building a Scalable IoT Platform for Facility Management with Azure Serverless Services
The platform follows a microservices architecture with six independently deployable services, all built on Azure Functions v4 with TypeScript.A comprehensive code review uncovered critical security and resilience issues across all services.This IoT platform demonstrates how Azure serverless services can be composed into a production-grade IoT solution that handles multi-provider telemetry ingestion, real-time rule evaluation, and automated notifications — all while maintaining fine-grained access control and template-driven extensibility.
14/04/2026
Ep 39 | How Microsoft Partners Win More Deals Through Collaboration, AI Strategy, and Trust
There’s a quiet shift happening in the Microsoft partner ecosystem—and it’s not just about AI.It’s about how partners work together.it’s a real example of how partner-to-partner collaboration turns conversations into revenue and relationships into long-term growth.
14/04/2026
AI is a Team Sport – Announcing our first wave of Guest Speakers at M365 Community Conference 2026
That is why at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando, Florida from April 21 to 23, 2026, we are bringing the spirit of collaboration to life in a whole new way by welcoming a dynamic lineup of guest voices from the worlds of professional sports, innovation strategy, and real-world AI adoption at scale.This year, we are proud to host legendary athletes Chasity Melvin and Kia Vaughn, alongside innovation thought leaders Dan Toma, Manjunatha Sivanna, Maral Taak, and Christopher Blakeley as they join Microsoft leaders on stage to explore how teamwork, leadership, experimentation, and trust are shaping the future of AI powered organizations.We’re excited to have him join the Director of Customer Advocacy for AI & Collaboration, Karuana Gatimu, in a fireside chat on real world adoption best practices at scale.
14/04/2026
Announcing SQL Server Management Studio 22.5
Welcome to April! In the northeast United States that means spring, holidays and observances, spring break trips, and unpredictable weather. Not to worry, the engineering teams for SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and GitHub Copilot in SSMS have continued to make steady progress, culminating in the release of SSMS 22.5 today.With the retirement of Azure Data Studio, the migrations team has been enhancing the migration experience in SSMS. The 22.5 release introduces a new Migration Page which serves as a starting point for all things related to migrations. When you right-click on an instance and select Migrate SQL Server, the page opens and you can initiate an assessment, provision a target server, migrate your data, or monitor an in-progress migration.GitHub Copilot in SSMS now supports interactions with the results pane, including the grid, messages, and execution plan.
14/04/2026
TinyFish AI Releases Full Web Infrastructure Platform for AI Agents: Search, Fetch, Browser, and Agent Under One API Key
AI agents struggle with tasks that require interacting with the live web — fetching a competitor’s pricing page, extracting structured data from a JavaScript-heavy dashboard, or automating a multi-step workflow on a real site.The tooling has been fragmented, requiring teams to stitch together separate providers for search, browser automation, and content retrieval.The post TinyFish AI Releases Full Web Infrastructure Platform for AI Agents: Search, Fetch, Browser, and Agent Under One API Key appeared first on MarkTechPost.
14/04/2026
Azure Arc Server Mar 2026 Forum Recap
During the March 2026 Azure Arc Server Forum, we discussed:New MECM (SCCM) connector supporting Cloud Native Server Management, sign up for Private Preview at aka.ms/arc-mecm/previewOur April 2026 forum will be held on Thursday, April 16 at 9:30 AM PST / 12:30 PM EST.
14/04/2026
Data Security Posture Reports
Microsoft Purview Posture Reports help organizations prove (not just assume) that their data security controls are working.We designed Posture Reports to give security, compliance, and business leaders a defensible, measurable view of data security posture, especially critical as organizations adopt Copilot and other AI tools.Why are our DLP "Device Posture" reports are not in the Posture Reports and only on the DLP Overview page?
14/04/2026
TinyFish Launches Full Web Infrastructure Platform for AI Agents — Search, Fetch, Browser, and Agent Under One API Key
AI agents struggle with tasks that require interacting with the live web — fetching a competitor’s pricing page, extracting structured data from a JavaScript-heavy dashboard, or automating a multi-step workflow on a real site.The tooling has been fragmented, requiring teams to stitch together separate providers for search, browser automation, and content retrieval.TinyFish, a […]
14/04/2026
Partner Blog | What's new for Microsoft partners: April 2026 edition
Your voice continues to shape how the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program evolves.Leading Frontier Firm transformation with Microsoft 365 E7: The partner opportunity On March 9, 2026, we introduced Microsoft 365 E7 and announced general availability of Microsoft 365 E7 and Microsoft Agent 365 on May 1, 2026.
14/04/2026
Running KQL queries on Microsoft Sentinel data lake using API
By running KQL (Kusto Query Language) queries on Microsoft Sentinel data lake through APIs, you can embed analytics directly into automation workflows, background services, and intelligent agents, without relying on manual query execution.In this post, we explore API based KQL query execution, review some of the scenarios where it delivers the most value, and what you need to get started.Why run KQL queries on Sentinel data lake via API?
14/04/2026
Qurious About Quantum?
Today on April 14th, 2026 we celebrate World Quantum Day!Lecture 5 covering "Trade‑offs on the Path to Utility Scale" was published this morning as part of World Quantum Day covering multiple challenges that must be overcome to achieve utility-scale quantum computing.Leave a comment below with the quantum topics you'd like to see covered next!
14/04/2026
Your Oracle Data Is Sitting Next to Microsoft AI. Are You Using It?
That gap — caused by Oracle sitting on-premises, in OCI, or in a different cloud — literally kills enterprise AI on Oracle workloads.NOTE: Based on the desired degree of customization and deployment flexibility, the six patterns described in this series may be realized using Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Copilot Studio, Microsoft Fabric, and associated services.Most enterprises will run Path 1 (Copilot Studio) for rapid Teams access, Path 2 or 3 (ORDS) for production, and Path 6 (Select AI Agent) for complex reasoning — all against the same Oracle database, same security model, same audit trail.
14/04/2026
Partner Case Study | Infosys
Infosys, a Microsoft partner for over 25 years, has long been a leader in these secure modernizations and cloud transformations.This experience and collaborative history are part of what made Infosys a 2025 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Azure – Secure Migration and Modernization.It’s also what made the company so successful when they were tapped to stabilize, modernize, and migrate the SIS for one of the largest districts in the country to Azure—creating one of the largest SIS cloud deployments for any US school district in the process.
14/04/2026
No Exchange Server Security Updates for April 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 until the end of this Exchange 2016 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 Exchange Server in April 2026, for customers with Exchange SE, or Exchange 2016 or 2019 ESU.
14/04/2026
No Skype for Business Server Security Updates for April 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 April 2026, for customers with SfB 2015/SfB 2019 ESU, or SfB SE.The Skype for Business Team
14/04/2026
Microsoft Sentinel data federation: Expand visibility while preserving governance
Microsoft Sentinel data federation now in public preview, is designed to meet customers where their data already lives, while preserving governance.Powered by Microsoft Fabric, customers can federate data from Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen 2, and Azure Databricks into Sentinel data lake—without copying or duplicating the data.Security teams can analyze data in place, unifying detections, investigations, and hunting across a broader digital estate, while data owners retain full ownership and policies remain intact.
14/04/2026
Gemma 4 now available in Microsoft Foundry
Today, we’re happy to announce that the Gemma 4 family, Google DeepMind’s newest model family, is now available in Microsoft Foundry via the Hugging Face collection.Azure customers can now discover, evaluate, and deploy Gemma 4 inside their Azure environment with the same policies they rely on for every other workload.Released by Google DeepMind on April 2, 2026, Gemma 4 is built from the same research foundation as Gemini 3 and packaged as open weights under an Apache 2.0 license.
14/04/2026
Research Drop: Tracking the Rise of Perceived AI Value at Work
The People Science team has conducted three cross-industry panel surveys on AI over the past two years (April 2024, July 2025, and November 2025), enabling us to look for signals of AI value trends over time.In our snapshots of AI-using managers and individual contributors, perceived value of AI has consistently risen across the three time periods, which is directional evidence that perceived value is rising as organizations move from experimentation toward more routine, integrated use.The more employees are exposed to, gaining familiarity with, and using AI at work, the more likely they are to perceive value of AI at an individual level.
14/04/2026
Introducing MAI-Image-2-Efficient: Faster, More Efficient Image Generation
Just last week, we celebrated a major milestone: the public preview launch of three new first-party Microsoft AI models in Microsoft Foundry: MAI-Image-2, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Transcribe-1.Together, they represent a comprehensive multimedia AI stack purpose-built for developers that spans image generation, natural speech synthesis, and enterprise-grade transcription across 25 languages.It’s up to 22% faster with 4x more efficiency compared to MAI-Image-2 when normalized by latency and GPU usage1. It also outpaces leading text-to-image models by 40% on average2.
14/04/2026
A new chapter for the Microsoft Student Ambassadors program, built for you
Join the reimagined Student Ambassadors program to learn and lead.By joining the Student Ambassadors program, you can learn to lead with AI in creative and responsible ways, so you can think bigger, build faster, and bring bold ideas to life.How to join the Student Ambassadors program
14/04/2026
Building Real-Time Speech Translation with AI Avatars with Azure Speech Services
We can use Azure Speech Translation and Avatar to address this: a speaker talks in one language, and listeners watch an AI avatar deliver the translated speech in their chosen language.In this blog, we will discuss a sample implementation that used Azure Speech, Translation and Avatar capabilities.📚 Ready to build your own real-time translation avatar application?
14/04/2026
Meet video recap: a new way to revisit key moments in Teams meetings
I am Anqi Chen, a Senior Product Manager on the Microsoft Teams team.Meet video recap: a new way to revisit key moments in Teams meetings To enable your Teams client for the Public Preview, IT administrators must enable Show preview features in their update policy.
14/04/2026
From Ignite Momentum to Build Readiness: How Communities Turn Announcements into Action
Through MVP-led initiatives, community leaders across the globe transformed Ignite announcements into local, hands-on learning experiences.Across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, MVPs and community organizers stepped up.These shared experiences are now shaping how local leaders prepare their communities for the next wave of announcements at Microsoft Build.
14/04/2026
Minecraft Education Lesson Plans in Teach: AI-powered lesson planning meets the world of Minecraft
Minecraft Education lesson plans are now generally available in Teach.Every generated Minecraft Education lesson plan includes:Minecraft Education lesson plans in Teach make it easier to create experiences by generating a complete, customized lesson from your topic and standards, with the Minecraft-specific materials, activities, and preparation guidance built in.
14/04/2026
Win Agent 365 Conversations with Facts, Not Assumptions
Many organizations still begin deployment planning without a complete readiness baseline: no trusted inventory of active agents, no clear governance ownership model, and no consolidated view of security controls.The challenge: limited agent inventory visibility, governance uncertainty, and security ambiguity.Agent 365 provides a control-plane model for managing agents at enterprise scale.
14/04/2026
W3C Web of Things (WoT) support in Azure IoT Operations
Azure IoT Operations is Microsoft’s edge platform for running IoT services on Kubernetes via Azure Arc.W3C Web of Things (WoT) standardizes machine-readable descriptions of an asset’s interface via a “Thing Model.”We’re announcing a key step toward open, model-driven interoperability in Azure IoT Operations: W3C Web of Things (WoT) is now a first-class modeling input for developer workflows, backed by the Azure IoT Operations SDKs and the code generation (codegen) v2 toolchain.
14/04/2026
Apply sensitivity labels with custom permissions in Office for the web
We’re excited to announce that support for applying sensitivity labels with user-defined permissions is now rolling out in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for the web.This feature enables organizations using sensitivity labels configured in the Microsoft Purview portal with encryption and user-defined permissions to apply these labels and manage permissions directly in the web versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.The licensing requirements for applying sensitivity labels with user-defined permissions in the Office web apps is that same as for using sensitivity labels that apply encryption in the Office desktop apps. For more information on licensing requirements, see Microsoft 365 licensing guidance for security & compliance.
14/04/2026
Continuity-of-care, clinically governed AI, and building on Microsoft Azure
In this installment of our Partner Spotlight series, we’re highlighting a partner building secure, scalable solutions on Microsoft Azure and delivering transactable offers on Microsoft Marketplace.I connected with Darren Booker, Founder and CEO of Tali Health, to learn how their clinically governed AI platform helps extend care beyond the clinic while keeping providers in control.[DB] Tali Health is a continuity-of-care platform that uses clinically governed AI to extend clinician-guided care beyond the walls of the clinic.
14/04/2026
Monitoring Azure SQL Data Sync Errors Using PowerShell
Azure SQL Data Sync is a powerful service that enables data synchronization between multiple databases across Azure SQL Database and on‑premises SQL Server environments.However, one of the most common operational challenges faced by support engineers and customers using Azure SQL Data Sync is:In this blog, we’ll walk through how to monitor Azure SQL Data Sync activity and detect synchronization errors using Azure PowerShell commands.
14/04/2026
F5, ProsperOps, and SoftGroup deliver transactable offers in Microsoft Marketplace.
Microsoft partners like F5, ProsperOps, and SoftGroup deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace.F5 NGINXaaS for Microsoft Azure: Unlock advanced programmability, streamlined automation, and robust application delivery services (ADC) with F5 NGINXaaS for Microsoft Azure.Built on Microsoft Azure, the platform automates regulatory data exchange, reporting, and validation for pharmaceutical manufacturers.
14/04/2026
Simplifying Image Classification with Azure AutoML for Images: A Practical Guide
Azure AutoML for Images is a game-changer in the computer vision space.It’s a feature within Azure Machine Learning that automatically builds high-quality vision models from your image data with minimal code.The repository includes a third notebook demonstrating how to export your trained model to ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) format for edge deployment.
14/04/2026
NVIDIA and the University of Maryland Researchers Released Audio Flamingo Next (AF-Next): A Super Powerful and Open Large Audio-Language Model
While image-language models have rapidly scaled toward real-world deployment, building open models that robustly reason over speech, environmental sounds, and music — especially at length — has remained quite hard.NVIDIA and the University of Maryland researchers are now taking a direct swing […]The post NVIDIA and the University of Maryland Researchers Released Audio Flamingo Next (AF-Next): A Super Powerful and Open Large Audio-Language Model appeared first on MarkTechPost.
14/04/2026
From CI/CD to Continuous AI: The Future of GitHub Automation
For over a decade, CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) has been the backbone of modern software engineering.This new paradigm is not just about automating pipelines—it’s about building self-improving, intelligent systems that can analyze, decide, and act with minimal human intervention.The Evolution: From CI to CI/CD to Continuous AI
14/04/2026
Google ADK Multi-Agent Pipeline Tutorial: Data Loading, Statistical Testing, Visualization, and Report Generation in Python
In this tutorial, we build an advanced data analysis pipeline using Google ADK and organize it as a practical multi-agent system for real analytical work.We set up the environment, configure secure API access, create a centralized data store, and define specialized tools for loading data, exploring datasets, running statistical tests, transforming tables, generating visualizations, […]The post Google ADK Multi-Agent Pipeline Tutorial: Data Loading, Statistical Testing, Visualization, and Report Generation in Python appeared first on MarkTechPost.
14/04/2026
Google AI Research Proposes Vantage: An LLM-Based Protocol for Measuring Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking
Standardized tests can tell you whether a student knows calculus or can parse a passage of text.These are the so-called durable skills — collaboration, creativity, […]The post Google AI Research Proposes Vantage: An LLM-Based Protocol for Measuring Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking appeared first on MarkTechPost.
14/04/2026
Microsoft Purview Referential Architecture Diagrams
The Microsoft Purview architecture diagrams provide a referential view of how data classification, sensitivity labeling, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Insider Risk operate across Microsoft 365 workloads.Rather than prescribing a single deployment model, the diagrams illustrate common architectural patterns used to protect sensitive data across endpoints, email, and collaboration services.This diagram illustrates how Microsoft Purview enforces DLP when users access managed applications from unmanaged devices or personal browsers. It highlights how organisations can reduce data exfiltration risk without blocking access entirely.
13/04/2026
Govern AI Agents on App Service with the Microsoft Agent Governance Toolkit
In December 2025, OWASP published the Top 10 for Agentic Applications — the first formal taxonomy of risks specific to autonomous AI agents, including goal hijacking, tool misuse, identity abuse, memory poisoning, and rogue agents.The Agent Governance Toolkit is an open-source project (MIT license) from Microsoft that brings runtime security governance to autonomous AI agents.With the Agent Governance Toolkit and Azure App Service, you can add production governance to your agents today.
13/04/2026
Quality and evaluation framework for successful AI apps and agents on Microsoft Marketplace
Why quality in AI is different — and why it matters for MarketplaceAI apps and agents that can demonstrate quality — with documented evaluation frameworks, defined release criteria, and evidence of ongoing measurement — are easier to evaluate, trust, and adopt.The next posts in this series explore what comes after the framework is in place: API resilience, performance optimization, and operational observability for AI apps and agents running in production environments.
13/04/2026
Now in Foundry: Microsoft Harrier and NVIDIA EGM-8B
Microsoft Research's harrier-oss-v1-0.6b from achieves state-of-the-art results on the Multilingual MTEB v2 embedding benchmark at 0.6B parameters through contrastive learning and knowledge distillation. NVIDIA's EGM-8B scores 91.4 average IoU on the RefCOCO visual grounding benchmark by training a small Vision Language Model (VLM) with reinforcement learning to match the output quality of much larger models.State-of-the-art on Multilingual MTEB v2 from Microsoft Research: harrier-oss-v1-0.6b is a new embedding model released by Microsoft Research, achieving a 69.0 score on the Multilingual MTEB v2 (Massive Text Embedding Benchmark) leaderboard—placing it at the top of its size class at release.
13/04/2026
How to Implement Tool Calling with Gemma 4 and Python
The open-weights model ecosystem shifted recently with the release of the
13/04/2026
Want to get more out of Microsoft Copilot Chat without adding another tool—or cost—to your stack?
Microsoft has released a free Copilot Chat learning pathway that helps users quickly build practical, everyday skills using Copilot Chat already built into Microsoft 365 apps.Even better, Copilot Chat is now available to users without a paid Microsoft 365 license, making this learning opportunity widely accessible.In under an hour, you’ll learn how to:
13/04/2026
Cascading Read Replicas Now Generally Available!
We’re excited to announce the General Availability of cascading read replicas in Azure Database for PostgreSQL.This capability allows you to create read replicas for your Azure Database for PostgreSQL instance not only from a primary server, but also from existing read replicas, enabling multi‑level replication chains.Cascading read replicas in Azure Database for PostgreSQL offer a scalable way to distribute your read traffic across the same and different regions, reducing the read workload on primary database.
13/04/2026
A Step-by-Step Coding Tutorial on NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo: Darcy Flow, FNOs, PINNs, Surrogate Models, and Inference Benchmarking
In this tutorial, we implement NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo on Colab and build a practical workflow for physics-informed machine learning.We start by setting up the environment, generating data for the 2D Darcy Flow problem, and visualizing the physical fields to clearly understand the learning task.The post A Step-by-Step Coding Tutorial on NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo: Darcy Flow, FNOs, PINNs, Surrogate Models, and Inference Benchmarking appeared first on MarkTechPost.
13/04/2026
Announcing Public Preview: Security Copilot’s Email Summary in Microsoft Defender
AI is rapidly reshaping both sides of the security landscape, and email remains one of the most common and complex entry points for attacks.Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of Security Copilot’s Email Summary capability, designed to bring those insights together and make email threat investigations faster, clearer, and more actionable.Email Summary brings AI-generated context directly into the Email Entity page, transforming fragmented detection data into a clear, natural-language explanation of what happened and why. Analysts can access it from the Security Copilot right-side pane, the same place where Copilot activity across Microsoft Defender is surfaced. Instead of navigating across multiple views to reconstruct the story, analysts can generate a summary that connects the signals and highlights what matters most.
13/04/2026
Why External Users Can’t Open Encrypted Attachments in Certain Conditions & How to Fix It Securely
When Conditional Access policies enforce MFA across all cloud apps and include external users, encrypted attachments may require additional considerations.A Conditional Access (CA) policy is configured to:When the two standard access conditions (cross‑tenant trust or guest presence) cannot be met , you can refine Conditional Access evaluation without weakening encryption.
13/04/2026
Copilot Chat in financial services: Is productivity moving faster than policy?
A new post on Microsoft 365 Accelerator is designed for that exact moment.How financial leaders are scaling Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat without increasing risk introduces a planning kit that shows financial services leaders how to scale Copilot Chat usage while keeping governance, audit readiness, and oversight intact.Instead of features, the kit is focused on the decisions and guardrails that help organizations move forward and use Copilot Chat with confidence.
13/04/2026
Only 6 months until Office LTSC 2021 end of support – are you ready?
That’s why it’s important to know that in just six months, on October 13, 2026, support will end for Office LTSC 2021 suites and standalone applications (see the full list of impacted products below).For small and medium businesses—and for enterprises that haven’t done so already—now is the time to start moving all remaining devices running Office LTSC 2021 to a supported version.For customers and devices that cannot—or cannot yet—move to the cloud, we recommend upgrading to the most recent supported on-premises version of Office for commercial customers, Office LTSC 2024. The Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) is designed for devices that can’t accept feature updates or connect to the internet. Office LTSC 2024 is available alongside new on-premises versions of Project and Visio.
13/04/2026
Azure Key Vault HSM Platform One Retirement: What Purview BYOK Customers Need to Know
As part of this evolution, the legacy HSM Platform One will be retired on September 15, 2028.BYOK configurations for Information Protection require that the tenant root key is stored in Azure Key Vault. In short, affected customers will need to migrate their BYOK key to a new Key Vault on the modern HSM platform and update their Purview configuration to reference it.
13/04/2026
How manufacturers can scale AI from pilot to production with Microsoft Marketplace
In a recent Microsoft Marketplace customer office hour, Microsoft explored what it takes to move AI initiatives in manufacturing beyond pilots—and how Microsoft Marketplace can help organizations scale AI in a governed, practical way.Why AI scaling is the biggest challenge in manufacturingThe real challenge is how to scale AI in a way that is sustainable, secure, and governed.
13/04/2026
Microsoft Marketplace Partner Digest | April 2026
Partner Center is now enforcing multifactor authentication (MFA) for all app + user API calls, with full enforcement as of April 1, 2026.Partners can now access a full library of Dragon Copilot training and go‑to‑market resources, including sales pitch decks, messaging and positioning guides, demo materials, FAQs, data sheets, infographics, and more—each with detailed descriptions to help teams understand how and when to use them.Additionally, Microsoft has announced a reduced list price for the Dragon Copilot per‑user license, effective May 1, 2026, across all current geographies.
13/04/2026
LTRDisplay Control - End-to-End Implementation and Usage Guide
LTRDisplay is a Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) control for model‑driven apps that helps users browse Long Term Retention (LTR) data in a familiar grid‑and‑form experience.Use your existing PAC workflow in the target environment.LTRDisplay provides a practical archive exploration interface for Dataverse model‑driven apps with a strong focus on:
13/04/2026
Strengthening Microsoft 365 and Copilot in Government Clouds with In-Product User Feedback
As organizations deploy Microsoft 365 apps and Copilot, tenant administrators need a way to understand how these experiences perform in real-world environments and pass that feedback on to Microsoft.In-Product Feedback enables IT leaders to capture end-user signals inside Microsoft 365 and Copilot while keeping controls aligned to their compliance posture.Feedback Options for Government Clouds
13/04/2026
Fixing “There is not enough space on the disk” during Azure Data Sync initial sync (On‑prem ➜ Azure)
When you run an initial (first-time) sync from an on‑premises SQL Server database to Azure SQL Database using SQL Data Sync, the local agent may fail with a disk-space error—even when the disk “looks” like it has free space.The reason is that the initial sync can generate large temporary files in the Windows TEMP location used by the Data Sync Agent.Option A — Move TEMP/TMP to a larger drive (recommended)
13/04/2026
Microsoft Global Agent-a-thon
AI isn’t something to experiment with someday—it’s a capability organizations across nonprofits, public sector, education, and business need now to reduce workload, improve services, and focus on what matters most.The Microsoft Global Agent‑a‑thon is a global, hands‑on experience where you don’t just learn about AI—you build real AI agents, receive guidance and support throughout your journey, and have the chance to showcase your solution on a global stage.Submit your AI agent for a chance to win a grand prize
13/04/2026
TeamsWork Ticketing as a Service on Microsoft Marketplace eases request management
TeamsWork’s Ticketing as a Service, an app published to Microsoft Marketplace, simplifies incident and service request management for internal and external teams.Available in over 15 languages, Ticketing as a Service integrates with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 for fast setup and easy access across platforms.Ticketing as a Service’s smart request management includes automated ticket routing, priority tracking, confidential tickets, and email integration.
13/04/2026
Structured Outputs vs. Function Calling: Which Should Your Agent Use?
Language models (LMs), at their core, are text-in and text-out systems.
13/04/2026
Connecting an ExpressRoute circuit to Megaport Virtual Edge
The Megaport Cloud Router (MCR) allows ExpressRoute customers to connect leased lines to their on-premise locations, and to connect other Cloud Providers.For advanced scenario's, Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) provides a platform to run fully configurable Network Virtual Appliances (NVAs) from a variety of vendors.In the Azure portal, create an ExpressRoute circuit with Standard Resiliency in a Peering location where Megaport is available.
13/04/2026
Migrate Data Ingestion from Data Collector to Log Ingestion
HTTP Data Collector API in Log Analytics workspaces is being deprecated, and will be totally out of support in September 2026.Data Collector actions in logic app using already created API connections (which uses workspace Id & Key) would still work against old custom log tables, however, newly created table will not be able to ingest data, although the connector would still succeed in logic app, but no data will be populated in newly created custom logs.In case new API connection is created for Data Collector action (using workspace Id & Key); these will fail with 403 - Forbidden action.Users should start using the Log Ingestion API to send data to custom tables, and this document will guide users on how to use Log Ingestion API in logic apps.
13/04/2026
An Implementation Guide to Building a DuckDB-Python Analytics Pipeline with SQL, DataFrames, Parquet, UDFs, and Performance Profiling
In this tutorial, we build a comprehensive, hands-on understanding of DuckDB-Python by working through its features directly in code on Colab.We start with the fundamentals of connection management and data generation, then move into real analytical workflows, including querying Pandas, Polars, and Arrow objects without manual loading, transforming results across multiple formats, and writing […]The post An Implementation Guide to Building a DuckDB-Python Analytics Pipeline with SQL, DataFrames, Parquet, UDFs, and Performance Profiling appeared first on MarkTechPost.
13/04/2026
Automating Arc-enabled SQL Server license type configuration with Azure Policy
Azure Arc enables customers to onboard SQL Server instances — hosted on Linux or Windows — into Azure, regardless of where they are hosted: on‑premises, in multicloud environments, or at the edge.Configuring the license type on each Arc-enabled SQL Server instance can be done manually in the Azure Portal, but for large scale operations, automation is essential.claestom/azure-arc-sa-workbook: Azure Workbook for monitoring Software Assurance compliance across Arc-enabled servers and SQL Server instances.
13/04/2026
Introducing Wildcard Roles in Azure Web PubSub: simpler, smarter permissions for real-time apps
It provides a fully managed service that enables real-time messaging over WebSocket.Now Azure Web PubSub is introducing a new capability that makes permission management simpler and more scalable: using wildcard pattern to define client permissions in groups.Azure Web PubSub allows you to add real-time capabilities to your app.
13/04/2026
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) — Custom Role Design for Troubleshooting Mode–Only Access
In customer environments, Security Operations (SOC) teams and Windows infrastructure teams frequently need to investigate endpoint issues in the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint portal—often under time pressure—while still preserving strong governance over who can change security controls.Because Troubleshooting Mode can enable temporary modification of Defender Antivirus settings even when devices are governed by organizational policies (for example, when policy protections are in place using Tamper protection settings), granting this capability broadly can introduce configuration drift, increase operational risk, and blur accountability.This document describes an approach to providing controlled access to Troubleshooting Mode on a scoped set of devices.
13/04/2026
MiniMax Releases MMX-CLI: A Command-Line Interface That Gives AI Agents Native Access to Image, Video, Speech, Music, Vision, and Search
MiniMax, the AI research company behind the MiniMax omni-modal model stack, has released MMX-CLI — Node.js-based command-line interface that exposes the MiniMax AI platform’s full suite of generative capabilities, both to human developers working in a terminal and to AI agents running in tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and OpenCode.What Problem Is MMX-CLI Solving?The post MiniMax Releases MMX-CLI: A Command-Line Interface That Gives AI Agents Native Access to Image, Video, Speech, Music, Vision, and Search appeared first on MarkTechPost.
13/04/2026
Passwordless AKS Secrets: Sync Azure Key Vault with ESO + Workload Identity
The solution uses a User-Assigned Managed Identity (UAMI) federated to a Kubernetes Service Account via AKS OIDC—then ESO uses that identity to read secrets from Key Vault and write them into Kubernetes as Opaque secrets.From AKS Rancher Secrets from Azure Key Vault using Workload Identity, you need:Key advantage: If Azure Key Vault secret names are created the same as Rancher Secrets, applications can keep using the same secret references with no code changes.
13/04/2026
A Hands-On Coding Tutorial for Microsoft VibeVoice Covering Speaker-Aware ASR, Real-Time TTS, and Speech-to-Speech Pipelines
In this tutorial, we explore Microsoft VibeVoice in Colab and build a complete hands-on workflow for both speech recognition and real-time speech synthesis.We set up the environment from scratch, install the required dependencies, verify support for the latest VibeVoice models, and then walk through advanced capabilities such as speaker-aware transcription, context-guided ASR, batch audio […]The post A Hands-On Coding Tutorial for Microsoft VibeVoice Covering Speaker-Aware ASR, Real-Time TTS, and Speech-to-Speech Pipelines appeared first on MarkTechPost.
13/04/2026
Meta AI and KAUST Researchers Propose Neural Computers That Fold Computation, Memory, and I/O Into One Learned Model
Researchers from Meta AI and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have introduced Neural Computers (NCs) — a proposed machine form in which a neural network itself acts as the running computer, rather than as a layer sitting on top of one.The research team presents both a theoretical framework and two […]The post Meta AI and KAUST Researchers Propose Neural Computers That Fold Computation, Memory, and I/O Into One Learned Model appeared first on MarkTechPost.
12/04/2026
A Coding Implementation of MolmoAct for Depth-Aware Spatial Reasoning, Visual Trajectory Tracing, and Robotic Action Prediction
In this tutorial, we walk through MolmoAct step by step and build a practical understanding of how action-reasoning models can reason in space from visual observations.We set up the environment, load the model, prepare multi-view image inputs, and explore how MolmoAct produces depth-aware reasoning, visual traces, and actionable robot outputs from natural language instructions.The post A Coding Implementation of MolmoAct for Depth-Aware Spatial Reasoning, Visual Trajectory Tracing, and Robotic Action Prediction appeared first on MarkTechPost.
12/04/2026
Customer Offerings: Hyper-V - Implementation, Migration, and Management
Brandon here, back once again to talk to you about a couple of new offerings that have just been released to assist our Unified customers with their on-premises virtualization needs!Moving from VMware to Hyper‑V is not simply a technical migration—it is an opportunity to modernize how infrastructure is managed and governed.With structured planning, guided execution, and a focus on operational readiness, organizations can transition with confidence to a virtualization platform built for today’s hybrid cloud realities and tomorrow’s growth.
12/04/2026
Customer Offerings: Azure Local - Implementation, Migration, and Management
Brandon here, back once again to talk to you about a couple of new offerings that have just been released to assist our Unified customers with their on-premises virtualization needs!Azure Local - Implementation, Migration, and ManagementMoving from VMware to Azure Local is not simply a technical migration—it is an opportunity to modernize how infrastructure is managed and governed.
12/04/2026
MiniMax Just Open Sourced MiniMax M2.7: A Self-Evolving Agent Model that Scores 56.22% on SWE-Pro and 57.0% on Terminal Bench 2
MiniMax has officially open-sourced MiniMax M2.7, making the model weights publicly available on Hugging Face.Originally announced on March 18, 2026, MiniMax M2.7 is the MiniMax’s most capable open-source model to date — and its first model to actively participate in its own development cycle, a meaningful shift in how large language models are built […]The post MiniMax Just Open Sourced MiniMax M2.7: A Self-Evolving Agent Model that Scores 56.22% on SWE-Pro and 57.0% on Terminal Bench 2 appeared first on MarkTechPost.
12/04/2026
Liquid AI Releases LFM2.5-VL-450M: a 450M-Parameter Vision-Language Model with Bounding Box Prediction, Multilingual Support, and Sub-250ms Edge Inference
Liquid AI just released LFM2.5-VL-450M, an updated version of its earlier LFM2-VL-450M vision-language model.The new release introduces bounding box prediction, improved instruction following, expanded multilingual understanding, and function calling support — all within a 450M-parameter footprint designed to run directly on edge hardware ranging from embedded AI modules like NVIDIA Jetson Orin, to mini-PC […]The post Liquid AI Releases LFM2.5-VL-450M: a 450M-Parameter Vision-Language Model with Bounding Box Prediction, Multilingual Support, and Sub-250ms Edge Inference appeared first on MarkTechPost.
12/04/2026
Researchers from MIT, NVIDIA, and Zhejiang University Propose TriAttention: A KV Cache Compression Method That Matches Full Attention at 2.5× Higher Throughput
Long-chain reasoning is one of the most compute-intensive tasks in modern large language models.Every one of those tokens must be stored in what is called the KV cache […]The post Researchers from MIT, NVIDIA, and Zhejiang University Propose TriAttention: A KV Cache Compression Method That Matches Full Attention at 2.5× Higher Throughput appeared first on MarkTechPost.
11/04/2026
How to Build a Secure Local-First Agent Runtime with OpenClaw Gateway, Skills, and Controlled Tool Execution
In this tutorial, we build and operate a fully local, schema-valid OpenClaw runtime.We configure the OpenClaw gateway with strict loopback binding, set up authenticated model access through environment variables, and define a secure execution environment using the built-in exec tool.We then create a structured custom skill that the OpenClaw agent can discover and […]
11/04/2026
How Knowledge Distillation Compresses Ensemble Intelligence into a Single Deployable AI Model
However, these ensembles are impractical in production due to latency constraints and operational complexity.Instead of discarding them, Knowledge Distillation offers a smarter approach: keep the ensemble as a teacher and train a smaller student […]The post How Knowledge Distillation Compresses Ensemble Intelligence into a Single Deployable AI Model appeared first on MarkTechPost.
11/04/2026
Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab Releases VimRAG: a Multimodal RAG Framework that Uses a Memory Graph to Navigate Massive Visual Contexts
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard technique for grounding large language models in external knowledge — but the moment you move beyond plain text and start mixing in images and videos, the whole approach starts to buckle.Visual data is token-heavy, semantically sparse relative to a specific query, and grows unwieldy fast during multi-step […]The post Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab Releases VimRAG: a Multimodal RAG Framework that Uses a Memory Graph to Navigate Massive Visual Contexts appeared first on MarkTechPost.
10/04/2026
A Coding Guide to Markerless 3D Human Kinematics with Pose2Sim, RTMPose, and OpenSim
In this tutorial, we build and run a complete Pose2Sim pipeline on Colab to understand how markerless 3D kinematics works in practice.We begin with environment setup, configure the project for Colab’s headless runtime, and then walk through calibration, 2D pose estimation, synchronization, person association, triangulation, filtering, marker augmentation, and OpenSim-based kinematics.The post A Coding Guide to Markerless 3D Human Kinematics with Pose2Sim, RTMPose, and OpenSim appeared first on MarkTechPost.
10/04/2026
mssql-python 1.5: Apache Arrow, sql_variant, and Native UUIDs
We're excited to announce the release of mssql-python 1.5.0, the latest version of Microsoft's official Python driver for SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and SQL databases in Fabric.This release delivers Apache Arrow fetch support for high-performance data workflows, first-class sql_variant and native UUID support, and a collection of important bug fixes.The new Arrow fetch API returns query results as native Apache Arrow structures, using the Arrow C Data Interface for zero-copy handoff directly from the C++ layer to Python.
10/04/2026
Help Shape the Future of Microsoft 365: Join Research Sessions at Microsoft 365 Community Conference
The Research sessions at Microsoft 365 Community Conference give attendees a rare, behind-the-scenes chance to collaborate directly with the Microsoft teams designing the products millions of people use every day.Participation in Research sessions is optional.Attendees of the research sessions must be registered attendees of the Microsoft 365 Community Conference.
10/04/2026
The AI-powered partner: Winning in the Microsoft ecosystem
At the same time, a seismic shift in how enterprise software is bought and sold is reshaping every go-to-market strategy.Cloud marketplaces are becoming the default procurement channel.This guide brings together the most critical insights from across the Microsoft partner landscape — the marketplace mistakes that cost software companies millions, the signals Microsoft sellers act on, the future of enterprise procurement, and the AI capabilities becoming table stakes for partner leaders who intend to win.
10/04/2026
NVIDIA Releases AITune: An Open-Source Inference Toolkit That Automatically Finds the Fastest Inference Backend for Any PyTorch Model
Deploying a deep learning model into production has always involved a painful gap between the model a researcher trains and the model that actually runs efficiently at scale.TensorRT exists, Torch-TensorRT exists, TorchAO exists — but wiring them together, deciding which backend to use for which layer, and validating that the tuned model still produces […]The post NVIDIA Releases AITune: An Open-Source Inference Toolkit That Automatically Finds the Fastest Inference Backend for Any PyTorch Model appeared first on MarkTechPost.
10/04/2026
Title Plan Update - April 10, 2026
📁April 10, 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.
10/04/2026
Introducing the 2026 Imagine Cup Top Launch Startup
As the Top Launch Startup, L-Guard Ltd. receives $50,000 USD along with continued visibility and support from Microsoft as they move their solution forward.The startup has built an AI- and IoT-powered system that monitors vehicle activity, detects crashes in real time, and automatically alerts nearby hospitals and emergency responders.By combining sensor data with machine learning models on Azure, L-Guard transforms real-time vehicle signals into actionable emergency intelligence.
10/04/2026
OneDrive Office Hours | April 2026
Get ready for April’s OneDrive Customer Office Hours!Special Topic: Markdown in OneDrive with Lesha Bhansali & Stephen Rice With built‑in support in OneDrive and SharePoint, you can open, read, and update Markdown files directly in your browser.
10/04/2026
April update: What’s new for partners in AI Business Solutions
Microsoft 365 E7 and Microsoft Agent 365 will be generally available as of May 1, 2026.Accelerate Microsoft 365 E7 adoption with three-year and annual offers.Register for the LevelUp CSP technical bootcamp: Building secure, cost-controlled agent solutions on May 5, 2026.
10/04/2026
FinOps Hub Privado: Implementação Manual em Ambientes Corporativos
O FinOps Hub é uma solução open source da Microsoft, parte do FinOps Toolkit, que fornece uma base escalável e extensível para análise, governança e otimização de custos em nuvem.Além de disponibilizar relatórios e dashboards prontos, o FinOps Hub expõe os dados de custos de forma estruturada por meio do Azure Data Explorer ou do Microsoft Fabric, possibilitando a criação de relatórios customizados no Power BI e o desenvolvimento de soluções internas sob medida, de acordo com as necessidades do negócio.Esse artigo visa orientar a implementação manual do acesso privado ao FinOps Hub após uma implementação pública, sem usar diretamente a opção de implementação privada oferecida pelo template.
10/04/2026
Service Mesh-Aware Request Tracing in AKS with Istio and Application Insights
In Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), teams often rely on Istio to manage service‑to‑service communication and Azure Application Insights for application‑level telemetry.This blog walks through a practical, production‑ready solution to enable Istio (Envoy) access logging in AKS and correlate those logs with Application Insights telemetry, allowing engineers to trace a request end‑to‑end for faster troubleshooting and deeper visibility.To standardize and repeat the setup across environments, wrap the configuration in a PowerShell script.
10/04/2026
Watch our video series: Getting started with the Copilot app
From meetings to momentum: Learn how to use Copilot at workCora shows you how Copilot can help you quickly catch up, prepare, and re‑orient yourself for the workday ahead.Learn how to use the Microsoft 365 Copilot app from Microsoft Support.
10/04/2026
How to Ingest Microsoft Intune Logs into Microsoft Sentinel
For many organizations using Microsoft Intune to manage devices, integrating Intune logs into Microsoft Sentinel is an essential for security operations (Incorporate the device into the SEIM).After configuring Intune to send diagnostic data to a Microsoft Sentinel Workspace, it’s crucial to verify that the Intune logs are successfully flowing into Microsoft Sentinel.To achieve this, you should set up detection rules that continuously analyze the Intune logs and automatically flag any risky or suspicious behavior.
10/04/2026
The Microsoft 365 Community Conference Experience Starts with Community
Women in Tech and Allies Lunch DiscussionJoin longtime community leaders and Microsoft experts as we celebrate 25 years of SharePoint.The Microsoft Global Community Initiative (MGCI) will be onsite all week connecting organizers, speakers, board members, and regional leaders from across our global tech communities.
10/04/2026
Securing multicloud (Azure, AWS & GCP) with Microsoft Defender for Cloud: Connector best practices
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) solution that helps secure these environments by providing unified visibility and protection for resources in AWS and GCP alongside Azure.Planning for multicloud security with Microsoft Defender for CloudAs customers adopt Microsoft Defender for Cloud in multicloud environments, Microsoft provides several resources to support planning, deployment, and scalable onboarding:
10/04/2026
PHP 8.5 is now available on Azure App Service for Linux
PHP 8.5 is now available on Azure App Service for Linux across all public regions.You can create a new PHP 8.5 app through the Azure portal, automate it with the Azure CLI, or deploy using ARM/Bicep templates.It also adds the pipe operator (|>) for cleaner, more readable code, along with broader improvements in syntax, performance, and type safety.
10/04/2026
A simpler way to deploy your code to Azure App Service for Linux
We’ve added a new deployment experience for Azure App Service for Linux that makes it easier to get your code running on your web app.To get started, go to the Kudu/SCM site for your app:You can now deploy your app by simply dragging and dropping a zip file containing your code.
10/04/2026
The "IQ Layer": Microsoft’s Blueprint for the Agentic Enterprise
The "IQ Layer": Microsoft’s Blueprint for the Agentic EnterpriseTo address this challenge, Microsoft introduced a new architectural model known as the IQ Layer.This framework establishes a structured intelligence layer across the enterprise, enabling AI systems to interpret work activity, enterprise data, and organizational knowledge.
10/04/2026
Agent Governance Toolkit: Architecture Deep Dive, Policy Engines, Trust, and SRE for AI Agents
Last week we announced the Agent Governance Toolkit on the Microsoft Open Source Blog, an open-source project that brings runtime security governance to autonomous AI agents.The Agent Governance Toolkit is designed to help address all 10 of these risks through deterministic policy enforcement, cryptographic identity, execution isolation, and reliability engineering patterns.The Agent Governance Toolkit is open source under the MIT license.
10/04/2026
Five AI Compute Architectures Every Engineer Should Know: CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, NPUs, and LPUs Compared
Modern AI is no longer powered by a single type of processor—it runs on a diverse ecosystem of specialized compute architectures, each making deliberate tradeoffs between flexibility, parallelism, and memory efficiency.While traditional systems relied heavily on CPUs, today’s AI workloads are distributed across GPUs for massive parallel computation, NPUs for efficient on-device inference, and […]The post Five AI Compute Architectures Every Engineer Should Know: CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, NPUs, and LPUs Compared appeared first on MarkTechPost.
10/04/2026
An End-to-End Coding Guide to NVIDIA KVPress for Long-Context LLM Inference, KV Cache Compression, and Memory-Efficient Generation
In this tutorial, we take a detailed, practical approach to exploring NVIDIA’s KVPress and understanding how it can make long-context language model inference more efficient.We begin by setting up the full environment, installing the required libraries, loading a compact Instruct model, and preparing a simple workflow that runs in Colab while still demonstrating the […]The post An End-to-End Coding Guide to NVIDIA KVPress for Long-Context LLM Inference, KV Cache Compression, and Memory-Efficient Generation appeared first on MarkTechPost.
10/04/2026
Azure IoT Operations 2603 is now available: Powering the next era of Physical AI
With the Azure IoT Operations 2603 (v1.3.38) release, Microsoft is delivering one of its most significant updates to date, strengthening the platform foundation required to build, deploy, and operate Physical AI systems at industrial scale.Azure IoT Operations makes it easier to build real‑time data pipelines at the edge without writing custom code.Azure IoT Operations 2603 introduces unified health status reporting across brokers, dataflows, assets, connectors, and endpoints, using consistent states and surfaced through both Kubernetes and Azure Resource Manager.
10/04/2026
Meta Superintelligence Lab Releases Muse Spark: A Multimodal Reasoning Model With Thought Compression and Parallel Agents
Meta Superintelligence Labs recently made a significant move by unveiling ‘Muse Spark’ — the first model in the Muse family.Muse Spark is a natively multimodal reasoning model with support for tool-use, visual chain of thought, and multi-agent orchestration.The post Meta Superintelligence Lab Releases Muse Spark: A Multimodal Reasoning Model With Thought Compression and Parallel Agents appeared first on MarkTechPost.
09/04/2026
Estimate Microsoft Sentinel Costs with Confidence Using the New Sentinel Cost Estimator
To make these conversations easier and budgets more predictable, Microsoft is introducing the new Sentinel Cost Estimator (public preview) for Microsoft customers and partners.Use the Sentinel Cost Estimator to:Try the Microsoft Sentinel Cost Estimator
09/04/2026
Getting Started with GitHub Copilot SDK
Launched in technical preview in January 2026 and entering public preview on April 2nd, 2026, the SDK gives you programmatic access to Copilot's agentic engine.It's the same runtime that powers the Copilot CLI — just exposed as a library you can import into your own code, in your language of choice.The SDK is a multi-language library — Python, TypeScript, Go, .NET, and Java — that lets your application talk directly to Copilot's agent runtime.
09/04/2026
Role Structures, Anti-Patterns, and the 10 Governance Principles
This post covers the patterns that work, the anti-patterns that don't, and the governance principles that every digital-native company should adopt before they're forced to adopt them after an incident.Azure's three permission planes aren't a problem to solve, they're a framework to leverage.For collision points and Managed Identity, read Part 2: Marketplace Governance and the Cross-Plane Bridge.
09/04/2026
Marketplace governance and the cross-plane bridge
This post covers the biggest collision point: Marketplace, where resource deployment meets financial authority.We'll also dig into Managed Identity (the one construct that genuinely bridges two planes), ABAC (advanced conditional governance within the resource plane), and the five-step Marketplace approval workflow every digital-native company should adopt.Marketplace is the most common collision point between Azure's permission planes.
09/04/2026
Migrating Azure Data Factory and Synapse Pipelines to Fabric Data Factory
Migrating data pipelines from Azure Data Factory (ADF) and Azure Synapse Pipelines to Microsoft Fabric Data Factory represents a significant modernization opportunity and a catalyst for accelerating AI innovation across the enterprise.This article outlines the key technical considerations for a successful migration from ADF/Synapse pipelines to Fabric Data Factory.In addition to Microsoft‑supported migration utilities, the Fabric Toolbox provides a set of open‑source tools designed to assist with migration planning, readiness analysis, and pipeline translation from ADF and Synapse to Fabric Data Factory.
09/04/2026
Governing AI apps and agents for Marketplace
This post is part of a series on building and publishing well-architected AI apps and agents on Microsoft Marketplace.Effective data governance for AI apps and agents requires clear structure:These expectations align with the governance and evidence requirements outlined in the Microsoft Responsible AI Standard v2 General Requirements.
09/04/2026
Claude + GPT | Multi-model intelligence in Copilot
Generate briefing documents, presentations, and Excel files from a single prompt with Copilot Cowork, pulling from your emails, calendar, and SharePoint through Work IQ — and fold in new tasks mid-run without stopping.Use Critique in Researcher to pair a generation model with a dedicated review model, applying source reliability and evidence grounding before the report lands.Copilot has options from Anthropic and OpenAI available directly from Microsoft 365.
09/04/2026
Advancing to Agentic AI with Azure NetApp Files VS Code Extension v1.2.0
The Azure NetApp Files VS Code Extension v1.2.0 introduces a major leap toward agentic, AI‑informed cloud operations with the debut of the agentic scanning of the volumes.We are excited to announce Azure NetApp Files VS Code Extension v1.2.0, marking a significant evolution in how we approach cloud storage management.The extension introduces a natural language chat interface through the @anf participant in GitHub Copilot Chat, allowing developers to manage Azure NetApp Files storage directly from VS Code using plain English commands — without leaving their editor.
09/04/2026
Monitor AI Agents on App Service with OpenTelemetry and the New Application Insights Agents View
Part 2 of 2: In Blog 1, we deployed a multi-agent travel planner on Azure App Service using the Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) 1.0 GA.Azure Application Insights now includes a dedicated Agents (Preview) blade that provides unified monitoring purpose-built for AI agents.With MAF 1.0 GA's built-in OpenTelemetry support and Application Insights' new Agents view, you get production-grade observability for AI agents with minimal code.
09/04/2026
Process Explorer v17.11
Process Explorer v17.11 This update to Process Explorer, an advanced process, DLL, and handle viewing utility, includes stability fixes.
09/04/2026
Build Multi-Agent AI Apps on Azure App Service with Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0
A couple of months ago, we published a three-part series showing how to build multi-agent AI systems on Azure App Service using preview packages from the Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) (formerly AutoGen / Semantic Kernel Agents).Since then, Microsoft Agent Framework has reached 1.0 GA — unifying AutoGen and Semantic Kernel into a single, production-ready agent platform.In the next post, we'll dive deep into how we instrumented these agents with OpenTelemetry and the new Agents (Preview) view in Application Insights — giving you full visibility into agent runs, token usage, tool calls, and model performance.
09/04/2026
Sovereignty in Azure Belgium Central: A Three-Layer Technical Deep Dive
In this post, we'll walk through sovereignty in Azure Belgium Central using three standardized technical layers.For containerized workloads, Azure Kubernetes Service supports confidential computing through confidential node pools.Before finalizing an architecture, confirm that the exact services and SKUs you plan to use are available in Azure Belgium Central (for example, specific confidential VM sizes, Azure Attestation, Managed HSM, and AKS node pool sizes) using the Azure products-by-region information.
09/04/2026
Hardening administrative actions: What IT pros need to know
While administrative action hardening improves security, it requires an adjustment in your strategy to clone Windows images.This workaround is the replacement for the known issue rollback (KIR)-based group policy setting.The only way to stop seeing this event is to migrate your environment to a supported state.
09/04/2026
Strengthen your research workflow with generative AI
As part of the latest Microsoft efforts to support graduate students, postdocs, and faculty aiming to use generative AI for research, we’re happy to share a new learning resource, The Academic Researcher's Guide to Generative AI. In this guide, we bring together recent insights and practical frameworks for considering generative AI as a research instrument.This new guide provides research-aligned approaches to prompting in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, along with frameworks for prompt development, testing, and documentation.
09/04/2026
Security Review for Microsoft Edge version 147
We have reviewed the new settings in Microsoft Edge version 147 and determined that there are no additional security settings that require enforcement.Version 147 introduced the Control the availability of the XSLT feature policy (XSLTEnabled).This policy exists to support enterprise testing and transition scenarios while the Chromium project works toward deprecating and removing XSLT support from the browser due to security concerns associated with this legacy feature.
09/04/2026
Apptitude Solutions, Jones Software, and Teamflect deliver transactable Microsoft Marketplace offers
Microsoft partners like Apptitude Solutions, Jones Software, and Teamflect deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace.MineCost 365: MineCost 365 by Apptitude is a purpose‑built costing automation solution for mining and exploration companies.Delivered natively in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, it replaces spreadsheets and manual reconciliations with a fully automated, mining‑specific engine to standardize costing across exploration, feasibility, development, and production.
09/04/2026
Auditing FIDO2 authentication for Windows Sign-in
With this post, I would like to show how FIDO2 security key authentication for Windows sign‑in can be audited on client devices.Audit each use of a FIDO2 security key on a Windows client deviceThe techniques outlined in this document show how to identify individual FIDO2 credentials, track PIN verification attempts, and conclusively determine which user authenticated to a Windows device using a security key.
09/04/2026
Building an End-to-End MLOps Pipeline: From Training to Managed Endpoints on Azure
When your pipeline YAML lives in the same repo as your training code, always use checkout: self.All endpoint and deployment configuration is done inline via az ml CLI parameters — no separate YAML config files needed: The scikit-learn version in your scoring environment must match the version used during training.
09/04/2026
Enterprise UAMI Design in Azure: Trust Boundaries and Blast Radius
User Assigned Managed Identity (UAMI) in particular offers flexibility that allows identity reuse across multiple compute resources such as:Unlike System Assigned Managed Identity, a UAMI exists independently of the compute resource lifecycle and can be attached to multiple services across:User Assigned Managed Identity offers significant advantages for secretless authentication in Azure environments.
09/04/2026
Sigmoid vs ReLU Activation Functions: The Inference Cost of Losing Geometric Context
A deep neural network can be understood as a geometric system, where each layer reshapes the input space to form increasingly complex decision boundaries.For this to work effectively, layers must preserve meaningful spatial information — particularly how far a data point lies from these boundaries — since this distance enables deeper layers to build […]The post Sigmoid vs ReLU Activation Functions: The Inference Cost of Losing Geometric Context appeared first on MarkTechPost.
09/04/2026
Understanding Agentic Function-Calling with Multi-Modal Data Access
What if, instead of writing bespoke endpoints, you gave an AI model tools — the ability to query SQL and read files — and let the model decide how to combine them based on the user's natural language question?The iterative tool-use loop is the engine of an agentic system.Understanding the LLM's decision-making process helps you design better tools and prompts.
09/04/2026
A Coding Guide to Build Advanced Document Intelligence Pipelines with Google LangExtract, OpenAI Models, Structured Extraction, and Interactive Visualization
In this tutorial, we explore how to use Google’s LangExtract library to transform unstructured text into structured, machine-readable information.We begin by installing the required dependencies and securely configuring our OpenAI API key to leverage powerful language models for extraction tasks.Also, we will build a reusable extraction pipeline that enables us to process a […]
09/04/2026
Deploying to Azure Web App from Azure DevOps Using UAMI
On an existing Azure Web App, enable Diagnostic Settings and configure it to retain certain types of logs, such as Access Audit Logs.These logs will be discussed in the final section of this article.Go to Azure DevOps → Project Settings → Service Connections, and create a new ARM (Azure Resource Manager) connection.Assuming the following deployment template is used in the pipeline, you will notice that additional steps appear in the deployment process compared to traditional service principal–based authentication.
09/04/2026
Google AI Research Introduces PaperOrchestra: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated AI Research Paper Writing
Writing a research paper is brutal.For many fresh researchers, that translation work is where papers go to die.The post Google AI Research Introduces PaperOrchestra: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated AI Research Paper Writing appeared first on MarkTechPost.
09/04/2026
Designing Reliable Health Check Endpoints for IIS Behind Azure Application Gateway
This typically happens when health probes fail, causing Azure Application Gateway to mark backend instances as Unhealthy and stop routing traffic to them.Azure Application Gateway periodically sends health probes to backend IIS instances.A reliable health check endpoint is not optional when running IIS behind Azure Application Gateway—it is a core part of application availability.
08/04/2026
A Comprehensive Implementation Guide to ModelScope for Model Search, Inference, Fine-Tuning, Evaluation, and Export
In this tutorial, we explore ModelScope through a practical, end-to-end workflow that runs smoothly on Colab.We begin by setting up the environment, verifying dependencies, and confirming GPU availability so we can work with the framework reliably from the start.The post A Comprehensive Implementation Guide to ModelScope for Model Search, Inference, Fine-Tuning, Evaluation, and Export appeared first on MarkTechPost.
08/04/2026
Bringing GigaTIME to Microsoft Foundry: Unlocking Tumor Microenvironment Insights with Multimodal AI
In healthcare, one of the biggest challenges is translating routinely available data into deeper biological insight at scale.GigaTIME is now available in Microsoft Foundry, bringing advanced multimodal capabilities to healthcare and life sciences.Developed in collaboration with Providence and the University of Washington, GigaTIME enables analysis of tumor microenvironments across diverse cancer types, helping accelerate discovery and improve understanding of disease biology.
08/04/2026
Meet OSGym: A New OS Infrastructure Framework That Manages 1,000+ Replicas at $0.23/Day for Computer Use Agent Research
Training AI agents that can actually use a computer — opening apps, clicking buttons, browsing the web, writing code — is one of the hardest infrastructure problems in modern AI.You need to spin up hundreds, potentially thousands, of full operating […]The post Meet OSGym: A New OS Infrastructure Framework That Manages 1,000+ Replicas at $0.23/Day for Computer Use Agent Research appeared first on MarkTechPost.
08/04/2026
Ep 38 | The New Growth Engine for Microsoft Partners: Business Central, AI, and P2P Collaboration
The Microsoft Partner Ecosystem Is Entering a New Growth PhaseIn the latest episode of IAMCP Profiles in Partnership, “How Microsoft Partners Can Grow Faster with Business Central, AI, and P2P Collaboration,” hear insights from longtime Microsoft MVP and industry leader Rick McCutcheon as he sits down with Anthony Carrano and Rudy Rodriquez to discuss how these shifts are unfolding and what partners should be doing to stay competitive.The SMB and mid-market segments are experiencing a surge in ERP modernization.
08/04/2026
Announcing Preview WDK with VS2026
We're excited to announce a preview release of the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) that, for the first time, is compatible with Visual Studio 2026 (18.4 and later).This preview WDK is the first release to support Visual Studio 2026.Install the Windows SDK MSI.
08/04/2026
Enabling AI-Driven Enterprise Intelligence Using SAP and Microsoft 3-IQ Layers
In most enterprise architectures, SAP operational data remains logically separated from analytical platforms and collaboration ecosystems such as Microsoft 365.The integration of SAP Business Data Cloud with Microsoft Fabric introduces a unified data access model in which SAP business data products can be exposed directly into Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake environment through bi‑directional, zero‑copy sharing.SAP Business Data Cloud Connect integrates SAP datasets directly into OneLake without requiring traditional ETL‑driven staging layers.
08/04/2026
What's new in Foundry Labs - April 2026
Today, we're sharing a roundup of recent additions to Foundry Labs — from speech and vision to multimodal AI that's redefining what's possible at the edge.Recently, we released 3 models from Microsoft AI (MAI) that are exclusively available to builders in Foundry in public preview:Developed by Microsoft Research, VibeVoice ASR is a unified speech-to-text model that transcribes up to 60 minutes of continuous audio in a single pass — no manual chunking, no stitching, no context loss.
08/04/2026
MGDC for SharePoint FAQ: How to Run a PoC without Pulling Your Entire Tenant
When getting started with SharePoint data in Microsoft Graph Data Connect (MGDC) for SharePoint, many teams want to validate scenarios - such as reporting or analytics before committing to a full production deployment.Fortunately, MGDC for SharePoint provides multiple ways to run low‑cost experiments or proof‑of‑concept (POC) deployments using partial or scoped datasets.Use an existing development or test tenant (or create a new trial tenant) to enable MGDC and run initial experiments.
08/04/2026
Build and Host MCP Apps on Azure App Service
If you've been following the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem, you've probably heard about the MCP Apps spec — the first official MCP extension that lets your tools return rich, interactive UIs that render directly inside AI chat clients like Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, VS Code Copilot, Goose, and Postman.And here's the best part: you can host them on Azure App Service.MCP Apps extend the Model Context Protocol by combining tools (the functions your AI client can call) with UI resources (the interactive interfaces that display the results).
08/04/2026
April update: What’s new in Security for partners
By providing a unified view of AI assets and risk signals across Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview, partners can lead AI security assessments, governance planning, and remediation services without customers needing to buy new tools.Unlock new attach and renewal revenue: Microsoft Defender Suite for Business Premium and Microsoft Purview Suite for Business Premium are now available as attach SKUs for Microsoft 365 Business Premium and fully integrated into the Security Business Case Builder (BCB).Strengthen data security for Copilot at lower cost: Microsoft Purview Suite for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers is now available at 50% off, so enterprise organizations can reduce costs and strengthen data security through June 30, 2026.
08/04/2026
Fast cloud migration, measurable ROI: Forrester Total Economic Impact study of Azure VMware Solution
Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is built for this moment: a Microsoft-managed service verified by VMware that enables running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) workloads (vSphere, NSX-T, vSAN, HCX) on dedicated Azure infrastructure.To help leaders quantify the potential value of this approach, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct The Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) of Microsoft Azure VMware Solution (March 2026).The study models the financial impact over three years and risk-adjusts results.
08/04/2026
Copilot in Word: New Capabilities for Document Workflows
Today, we are introducing new Copilot in Word capabilities for legal, finance, and compliance professionals doing high stakes, and detail intensive work.These features are grounded in Work IQ, the intelligence layer that personalizes Microsoft 365 Copilot to you and your organization, so responses reflect your content, context, and priorities. With Copilot in Word, changes are visible by default, and now it is easy to turn track changes on from Copilot, so edits are always transparent, auditable, and granular.
08/04/2026
Hello, World - Welcome to the Copilot Studio Blog!
Today marks the launch of the Copilot Studio Tech Community Blog, a space for the builders and admins shaping the agent era in the real world.Microsoft Copilot Studio is Microsoft’s platform for building and governing AI agents across the enterprise, from prototyping to production.Here’s a look at three of the biggest updates that have shipped recently.
08/04/2026
Your Frontier Transformation Starts at the Door with SharePoint at M365 Community Conference 2026
The Microsoft 365 Community Conference is back in Orlando, April 21–23, 2026, and it’s once again the place to learn, connect, and go deep on what’s next for Microsoft 365.The Microsoft 365 Community Conference is an opportunity to build on that momentum, learn what’s new in SharePoint, go deeper on the latest innovations, and connect with the community helping shape its future.That’s why for this year’s Microsoft 365 Community Conference, we’re focusing on the evolution of Microsoft SharePoint, along with the real-world impact communities developed with SharePoint have on modern workspaces.
08/04/2026
Migrating ADF & Synapse to Fabric Data Factory: Key Considerations for a Successful Implementation
Migrating data pipelines from Azure Data Factory (ADF) and Azure Synapse Pipelines to Microsoft Fabric Data Factory represents a significant modernization opportunity and a catalyst for accelerating AI innovation across the enterprise.This article outlines the key technical considerations for a successful migration from ADF/Synapse pipelines to Fabric Data Factory.Microsoft Fabric Data Factory is positioned as “the next generation of Azure Data Factory, built to handle complex data integration challenges with a simpler, more powerful approach.”
08/04/2026
Microsoft ODBC Driver 18.6.2 for SQL
The Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL provides native connectivity from Windows, Linux, and macOS applications to SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Microsoft Fabric.Version 18.6.2 improves the handling of output and input/output vector parameters when using prepared statements.Architecture detection and packaging have been improved for Alpine Linux environments, making it easier to deploy the driver in lightweight, container-based workloads that use Alpine as a base image.
08/04/2026
Introducing the new Windows 365 monitoring and reporting platform — now in Public Preview
We are excited to announce the new Windows 365 monitoring and reporting platform is now available in Public Preview!The new Windows 365 monitoring and reporting platform is a unified reporting experience built into the Microsoft Intune admin center, now available in public preview.It consolidates Cloud PC health, performance, and configuration data into integrated dashboards, consolidating information from many locations in Intune, to a central location to monitor end-to-end configuration, detect problem, and troubleshoot.
08/04/2026
Introducing the 2026 Imagine Cup World Finalists
From that group, three startups now move forward to the Imagine Cup World Championship.The startup has built a recovery marketplace paired with an Azure-powered AI agent that provides 24/7 triage and real-time movement feedback.The World Championship winners will be announced at Microsoft Build on June 2nd.
08/04/2026
Carrying World Stray Animal Day Forward Through Technology‑Driven Action
World Stray Animal Day shined a light on the countless animals living without safety, care, or a place to call home.Two organizations, Dierenopvang Amsterdam (DOA) in the Netherlands and Dyrenes Beskyttelse in Denmark, demonstrate how technology can strengthen this mission and help teams reach more animals in need.Dierenopvang Amsterdam: More Time for Care
08/04/2026
Unlock real-time intelligence with Azure Managed Redis
Azure Managed Redis is a fully-managed, enterprise-grade, in-memory data platform powered by Redis Enterprise and operated by Microsoft.It combines sub-millisecond performance, high availability, and advanced capabilities such as vector similarity search and multimodal data support.In this post, we’ll explore four key industry use cases for Azure Managed Redis—starting with building AI agents on modern agent frameworks.
08/04/2026
Hunting Infostealers - Python Stealers
In this next part of the “Hunting Infostealers” series, we’ll cover Python information stealers.One of the most notable Python-based infostealers seen in 2025 was PXA Stealer.Throughout the blog, we map observed activity to Microsoft Defender XDR coverage and provide actionable guidance to help organizations detect, mitigate, and respond to infostealers operating without borders.
08/04/2026
OneDrive at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference 2026
The Microsoft 365 Community Conference is the ultimate Microsoft 365 community event—and the perfect place to expand your skills and knowledge in Microsoft 365 and Copilot.Microsoft 365 Community Conference | April 21 – 23, 2026 Orlando, FL OneDrive at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference
08/04/2026
Troubleshooting Azure SQL Data Sync Failure: SQL Error 8106 During Bulk Insert
In this post, we’ll walk through a real-world troubleshooting scenario involving a Data Sync failure caused by a schema inconsistency related to an IDENTITY column, and how it was mitigated.A synchronization operation began failing for a specific table within an Azure SQL Data Sync group.To prevent identity-related sync failures in Azure SQL Data Sync:
08/04/2026
Grok 4.2 is now available in Microsoft Foundry
Grok 4.2 from xAI is now available in Microsoft Foundry.Grok 4.2 is a general-purpose large language model in the Grok 4.x family, designed for reasoning-intensive and real-world problem-solving tasks.Microsoft Foundry enables teams to explore models like Grok 4.2 within a governed environment designed for evaluation and production deployment.
08/04/2026
Classic LTI App Retirements, Preview of OneDrive LTI Migration Tool for Canvas
As part of this evolution, several classic Microsoft LTI apps will be retired in September 2026.Canvas LMS Customers: We are excited to announce that the Microsoft OneDrive LTI Migration Tool for Canvas is now available in Preview!This tool helps institutions using Canvas LMS migrate OneDrive content links from the classic Microsoft OneDrive LTI app to the new Microsoft 365 LTI app — preserving existing file links in courses so educators and students experience a seamless transition.Deploy Microsoft 365 LTI with the OneDrive app enabled and guide educators to use the new Microsoft 365 LTI (Microsoft Education menus) to create file links or embeds in course content.
08/04/2026
Quokka, Relativity, and Belinda CZ offer transactable partner solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Quokka Q-scout for Microsoft Sentinel: Q-scout from Quokka, formerly known as Kryptowire, integrates with Microsoft Sentinel to give security teams unified visibility into the risks of mobile apps installed across Microsoft Intune-managed devices.App inventories are automatically ingested from Intune and analyzed with Quokka’s proprietary, defense-grade engines to identify security, privacy, and compliance threats and risks.RelativityOne: RelativityOne from Relativity ODA LLC serves as an AI-powered system of record for legal data challenges.
08/04/2026
Build Your AI Agent in 5 Minutes with AI Toolkit for VS Code
AI Toolkit for VS Code turns agent development into something anyone can do — whether you're a seasoned developer who wants full code control, or someone who's never touched an AI framework and just wants to see something work.From the Create Agent View, choose "Create in Code with Full Control."Everything is in VS Code.
08/04/2026
Z.AI Introduces GLM-5.1: An Open-Weight 754B Agentic Model That Achieves SOTA on SWE-Bench Pro and Sustains 8-Hour Autonomous Execution
Z.AI, the AI platform developed by the team behind the GLM model family, has released GLM-5.1 — its next-generation flagship model developed specifically for agentic engineering.Unlike models optimized for clean, single-turn benchmarks, GLM-5.1 is built for agentic tasks, with significantly stronger coding capabilities than its predecessor, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on SWE-Bench Pro while […]The post Z.AI Introduces GLM-5.1: An Open-Weight 754B Agentic Model That Achieves SOTA on SWE-Bench Pro and Sustains 8-Hour Autonomous Execution appeared first on MarkTechPost.
08/04/2026
AZD for Beginners: A Practical Introduction to Azure Developer CLI
If you are learning how to get an application from your machine into Azure without stitching together every deployment step by hand, Azure Developer CLI, usually shortened to azd, is one of the most useful tools to understand early.The Azure Developer CLI documentation on Microsoft Learn, azd is an open-source tool designed to accelerate the path from a local development environment to Azure.Azure Developer CLI, azd, is application-focused.
08/04/2026
Simplify Azure Arc Server Onboarding with Ansible and the New Onboarding Role
We’ve introduced a new Azure Arc onboarding role designed specifically for automated scenarios like Ansible playbooks.The new onboarding role removes the need to assign broader Azure roles just to connect servers to Azure Arc.Check out the Arc onboarding role, part of the Azure collection in Ansible Galaxy:
08/04/2026
Tekoälystä tekoihin – asiakkaan liiketoimintaa ymmärtäen
Attendolla hoitajat tekevät hoivatyöhön liittyvät kirjaukset työn lomassa puheen avulla, ja tekoäly jäsentää tiedon suoraan rakenteiseen muotoon.Yhdessä kehitetty ratkaisu tukee kuluttaja- ja asiakaspalvelua lajittelemalla automaattisesti saapuvat yhteydenotot, hakemalla ja rikastamalla tarvittavat tiedot järjestelmiin sekä tuottamalla valmiin vastausehdotuksen käsittelijän käyttöön organisaation linjauksia noudattaen.Efima edistää suurten ja keskisuurten yritysten kestävää kasvua tehostamalla asiakkaidensa liiketoiminta- ja talousprosesseja ja luomalla niille kilpailuetua tekoälyn ja datan innovatiivisella hyödyntämisellä.
08/04/2026
Driving AI‑Powered Healthcare: A Data & AI Webinar and Workshop Series
Across these sessions, you’ll learn how healthcare organizations are using Microsoft Fabric, advanced analytics, and AI to unify fragmented data, modernize analytics, and enable intelligent, scalable solutions, from enterprise reporting to AI‑powered use cases.Learn how Power BI enables enterprise BI consolidation, consistent metrics, and secure, scalable analytics that support both operational reporting and emerging AI use cases.Discover how life science & MedTech manufacturers use Microsoft Fabric to integrate operational, quality, and enterprise data and apply AI‑powered analytics for smarter, faster manufacturing decisions.
08/04/2026
How to Combine Google Search, Google Maps, and Custom Functions in a Single Gemini API Call With Context Circulation, Parallel Tool IDs, and Multi-Step Agentic Chains
In this tutorial, we explore the latest Gemini API tooling updates Google announced in March 2026, specifically the ability to combine built-in tools like Google Search and Google Maps with custom function calls in a single API request.We walk through five hands-on demos that progressively build on each other, starting with the core tool […]The post How to Combine Google Search, Google Maps, and Custom Functions in a Single Gemini API Call With Context Circulation, Parallel Tool IDs, and Multi-Step Agentic Chains appeared first on MarkTechPost.
08/04/2026
How to Deploy Open WebUI with Secure OpenAI API Integration, Public Tunneling, and Browser-Based Chat Access
In this tutorial, we build a complete Open WebUI setup in Colab, in a practical, hands-on way, using Python.We begin by installing the required dependencies, then securely provide our OpenAI API key through terminal-based secret input so that sensitive credentials are not exposed directly in the notebook.The post How to Deploy Open WebUI with Secure OpenAI API Integration, Public Tunneling, and Browser-Based Chat Access appeared first on MarkTechPost.
08/04/2026
3 Ways to Get More from Azure SRE Agent
The mechanism for this is your **incident response plan**.Instead of relying on a default handler that routes everything, create a targeted response plan with filters that match the incidents you want the agent to investigate.Go to Response plan configuration and create a new incident response plan.
07/04/2026
Join us at Microsoft Azure Infra Summit 2026 for deep technical Azure infrastructure content
Microsoft Azure Infra Summit 2026 is a free, engineering-led virtual event created for IT professionals, platform engineers, SREs, and infrastructure teams who want to go deeper on how Azure really works in production.It will take place May 19-21, 202.I hope you will join us for Microsoft Azure Infra Summit 2026, happening May 19-21, 2026.
07/04/2026
Registration Open: Community-Led Purview Lightning Talks
The Microsoft Security Community proudly presents Purview Lightning Talks;The Day Offboarding Exposed Infinite Retention - Nikki Chapple nikkichapple A practical demo on safely removing sensitivity labels at scale from SharePoint libraries.
07/04/2026
Azure Monitor in Azure SRE Agent: Autonomous Alert Investigation and Intelligent Merging
The agent picks up alerts as they fire, investigates autonomously, and remediates when it can — all without waiting for a human to get involved.In this blog, we'll walk through the full Azure Monitor experience in SRE Agent with a live AKS + Redis scenario — how alerts get picked up, what the agent does with them, how merging handles the noise, and why one often-overlooked setting (auto-resolve) makes a bigger difference than you'd expect.Turn auto-resolve OFF when you want repeated firings from the same alert rule to stay in a single investigation thread until the alert is explicitly resolved or closed in Azure Monitor.
07/04/2026
Create historical reports using Azure Log analytics and Microsoft Intune diagnostic data
In this post, you’ll walk through the steps to create a 30-day device compliance trend report.In the Microsoft Intune admin center, navigate to Reports > Diagnostic settings, and add a new Diagnostic setting policy to send data to a Log analytics workspace.You’ve now seen end-to-end how to turn Intune diagnostic data into a 30-day device compliance trend report with diagnostic data and Log analytics.
07/04/2026
Microsoft Intune announces Android Enterprise management support for Android XR
Microsoft Intune now supports the Android XR platform, including management of the Samsung Galaxy XR headset, which is built on Android XR platform.This means that IT admins can begin evaluating and deploying Android XR devices using familiar Intune management capabilities, building on the Android Enterprise security foundation they already have.Android XR devices will be managed in Intune as specialty devices, consistent with other immersive and purpose-built form factors.
07/04/2026
Premium SSD v2 Is Now Generally Available for Azure Database for PostgreSQL
We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of Premium SSD v2 for Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server.With Premium SSD v2, you can achieve up to 4× higher IOPS, significantly lower latency, and better price-performance for I/O-intensive PostgreSQL workloads.Moderate concurrency (8 clients)Premium SSD v2 delivered approximately 154% higher throughput (Transactions Per Second) than Premium SSD (1,813 TPS vs. 715 TPS), while average latency decreased by about 60% (from ~11.1 ms to ~4.4 ms).
07/04/2026
Partner Case Study | SCvation
Founded in 2015, SCvation GmbH specializes in business intelligence solutions, including expertly crafted visuals for Microsoft Power BI.Seeking to increase traffic and sales for its solutions on Microsoft Marketplace, a worldwide marketplace for line-of-business solutions, SCvation utilized Microsoft Marketplace Rewards.Since using Marketplace Rewards, SCvation has grown the number of licenses sold for its product from a few hundred to over a thousand, for an increase of 25 percent in a few months.
07/04/2026
Authorization and Governance for AI Agents: Runtime Authorization Beyond Identity at Scale
Microsoft Entra Agent Identity enables organizations to govern and manage AI agent identities in Copilot Studio, improving visibility and identity-level control. However, as enterprises deploy multiple autonomous AI agents, identity and OAuth permissions alone cannot answer a more critical question:This post introduces a reusable Authorization Fabric—combining a Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) and Policy Decision Point (PDP)—implemented as a Microsoft Entra‑protected endpoint using Azure Functions/App Service authentication. Every AI agent (Copilot Studio or AI Foundry/Semantic Kernel) calls this fabric before tool execution, receiving a deterministic runtime decision:This Authorization Fabric functions as a shared enterprise control plane, decoupling authorization logic from individual agents and enforcing policies consistently across all autonomous execution paths.
07/04/2026
MVP Champ Spotlight- Uros Babic
My journey to becoming a Microsoft MVP was long, intentional, and deeply tied to real-world security work across SIEM & XDR and Cloud Security.One project I’m particularly proud of involved helping organizations transition from fragmented security tooling to a unified security operations model built around Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender XDR, and Microsoft Security Copilot.I’m also proud to share that I successfully completed the Microsoft Connected Security Program 2025, earning five Microsoft Black Belt badges across key security domains and MVP categories SIEM/XDR and Cloud Security:
07/04/2026
Lenovo scales AI adoption worldwide with Copilot Chat training
Discover how Lenovo helped 30,000 employees build practical AI skills with scenario‑driven training to streamline daily tasks, strengthen communication, and achieve meaningful, measurable outcomes.Listed by Forbes as the world’s largest PC company, Lenovo is taking AI out of the abstract and delivering its power to people around the world through a full-stack portfolio of AI-enabled devices, infrastructure, and software.The company did this by deploying Copilot Chat to its global workforce of over 75,000 employees.
07/04/2026
Scale knowledge sharing with AI community agents in Viva Engage
Scale knowledge sharing with AI community agents in Viva EngageAI-powered community agents are your new built-in subject matter experts to help communities scale knowledge, speed up answers, and reduce repetitive work for admins.Add and configure the agent in your community
07/04/2026
Latest enhancements for Copilot security, management, and analytics
We are excited to share that we have updated and expanded the deployment blueprint to address Oversharing into the Secure and Govern Microsoft 365 Copilot foundational deployment guidance!Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Microsoft 365 Copilot to safeguard prompts helps organizations prevent sensitive information from being used in Copilot prompts.We are also expanding Microsoft Purview DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat to safeguard web searches containing sensitive data.
07/04/2026
Handling Race Conditions in Multi-Agent Orchestration
If you've ever watched two agents confidently write to the same resource at the same time and produce something that makes zero sense, you already know what a race condition feels like in practice.
07/04/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: April 7, 2026
Learn about 104 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 Co-Manufacturing: Acumens Co-Manufacturing streamlines inventory tracking and production in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.The app manages manufacturing orders, lot restrictions, and production tracking, enhancing efficiency and productivity.
07/04/2026
Monthly news - April 2026
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.We are now including news related to Defender for Cloud in the Defender portal.Expanding User reporting in Teams to include Calls: Users can reported completed or missed one-to-one Microsoft Teams calls from the call history as malicious (scam) or non malicious (non-scam) to the specified reporting mailbox, or Microsoft and the reporting mailbox via user reported settings.
07/04/2026
My MVP Story: Closing Technology Gaps Through Community: Diana Calizaya’s Journey
A milestone moment: Diana holding her Microsoft MVP Award, a recognition of technical excellence, community leadership, and the power of growing together.Motivated by this gap, Diana began fostering local communities for girls and women in tech.Today, Diana’s work brings together technology, education, and artificial intelligence in a very tangible way.
07/04/2026
Discover and assess File Shares for migration to Azure Files with Azure Migrate
That is why we are excited to announce that Azure Migrate now supports discovery and assessment of SMB and NFS file shares hosted on Windows and Linux servers, giving you a complete, data-driven picture of your file share estate and a clear path to Azure Files.Deploy the Azure Migrate appliance in your on-premises environment if you have not already.Start leveraging file share discovery and assessment in Azure Migrate today and migrate to Azure Files with confidence.
07/04/2026
Why Data Platforms Must Become Intelligence Platforms for AI Agents to Work
Why fragmented enterprise data blocks effective AI agentsTo produce a trustworthy answer, an AI agent needs: (1) **data access** to reach relevant sources, (2) **semantic context** to understand what the data _means_ (business definitions, relationships, hierarchies), and (3) **trust signals** like lineage, permissions, and freshness metadata.The following example shows how an Azure AI Foundry agent registers a Fabric Data Agent as a tool and uses it to answer a business question.
07/04/2026
Meta AI Releases EUPE: A Compact Vision Encoder Family Under 100M Parameters That Rivals Specialist Models Across Image Understanding, Dense Prediction, and VLM Tasks
Running powerful AI on your smartphone isn’t just a hardware problem — it’s a model architecture problem.Most state-of-the-art vision encoders are enormous, and when you trim them down to fit on an edge device, they lose the capabilities that made them useful in the first place.The post Meta AI Releases EUPE: A Compact Vision Encoder Family Under 100M Parameters That Rivals Specialist Models Across Image Understanding, Dense Prediction, and VLM Tasks appeared first on MarkTechPost.
07/04/2026
Agentic IIS Migration to Managed Instance on Azure App Service
Managed Instance on Azure App Service changes this equation entirely.And the IIS Migration MCP Server makes migration guided, intelligent, and safe — with AI agents that know what to ask, what to check, and what to generate at every step.Managed Instance on App Service is Azure's answer to applications that need OS-level customization beyond what standard App Service provides.
06/04/2026
An Implementation Guide to Running NVIDIA Transformer Engine with Mixed Precision, FP8 Checks, Benchmarking, and Fallback Execution
In this tutorial, we implement an advanced, practical implementation of the NVIDIA Transformer Engine in Python, focusing on how mixed-precision acceleration can be explored in a realistic deep learning workflow.We set up the environment, verify GPU and CUDA readiness, attempt to install the required Transformer Engine components, and handle compatibility issues gracefully so that […]The post An Implementation Guide to Running NVIDIA Transformer Engine with Mixed Precision, FP8 Checks, Benchmarking, and Fallback Execution appeared first on MarkTechPost.
06/04/2026
Modern Azure Resilience with Mark Russinovich
These map to reliability, resiliency, and recoverability, which together guide how workloads should be designed on Azure.This post extends foundational guidance with practical multi‑region design decisions, including when to use availability zones, paired regions, and non‑paired regions to meet business continuity goals. Using non-paired regions or a mix of paired and non-paired regions allows customers to design high availability and disaster recovery architectures that are driven by business, compliance, and application requirements rather than fixed regional relationships. This enables customers to optimize data residency, regulatory boundaries, latency to specific user populations, and provide differentiated recovery objectives across their workloads. This approach can also reduce exposure to rare but high-impact platform-level events by avoiding tightly coupled regional behaviors.
06/04/2026
Introducing the New Microsoft Sentinel Logstash Output Plugin (Public Preview!)
Microsoft Sentinel has long supported a Logstash output plugin, enabling customers to send data directly into Sentinel as part of their existing pipelines.The original plugin was implemented in Ruby, and while it has served its purpose, it no longer meets Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative (SFI) standards and has limited engineering support.To address both security and sustainability, we have rebuilt the plugin from the ground up in Java, a language that is more secure, better supported across Microsoft, and aligned with long-term platform investments.
06/04/2026
New information literacy features in Search Progress now generally available
Today, we’re excited to share that these features are generally available for all educators using Search Progress through Assignments in Teams for Education and the Microsoft 365 LTI®.Watch our Elevate Signature Series session, “Show Me Your Thinking,” where Dr. Geri Gillespy and I discuss future ready skills along with Search Progress setup, the full educator-to-student workflow, and how these skills connect to global assessment frameworks like PISA 2029.The OECD recently published a first draft of the PISA 2029 Media and Artificial Intelligence Literacy (MAIL) assessment framework — a new assessment that will measure 15-year-olds’ ability to critically evaluate digital and AI-generated content across all participating countries.
06/04/2026
Designing AI guardrails for apps and agents in Marketplace
This post is part of a series on building and publishing well-architected AI apps and agents on Microsoft Marketplace.The OWASP GenAI Top 10 provides a practical framework for reasoning about AI‑specific risks that are not fully addressed by traditional application security models.OWASP GenAI Top 10 helps identify where AI systems are vulnerable, but guardrails are what make those risks enforceable in practice.
06/04/2026
Azure SQL is Deprecating the “No Minimum TLS” (MinTLS None) Configuration
Over the past year, Azure has retired TLS 1.0 and 1.1 for all Azure databases, due to known security vulnerabilities in these older protocols.With legacy TLS versions being deprecated, TLS 1.2 will become the secure default minimum TLS version for new Azure SQL DB and MI configurations and for all client-server connections, rendering the MinTLS = None setting obsolete.In summary, after July 15, 2026, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance will require all client connections to use TLS 1.2 or higher and unencrypted connections will be denied.
06/04/2026
Announcing Public Preview for Essential Machine Management
We’re excited to announce the public preview of Essential Machine Management experience within Compute Infrastructure Hub—a new entry point in Azure that streamlines onboarding for machines at scale and enables basic management capabilities.Essential Machine Management is a centralized onboarding experience that helps customers enroll their machines into a set of selected cloud-native management services from Azure in a simple, scalable way,Using Essential Machine Management, you can quickly onboard machines to multiple Azure management capabilities, including:
06/04/2026
Work with Copilot as a co‑creator directly in Word for iPhone
I’m excited to introduce a new feature that allows you to co-create Word documents with Microsoft 365 Copilot on your iPhone.Work with Copilot as a co-creator directly in Word for iPhoneThis feature is available to all Word for iOS users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
06/04/2026
Nonprofits Are Shaping What Comes Next
At the Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit, nonprofit leaders and technologists came together to learn from one another during a time of rapid change.As shared in the original Microsoft for Nonprofits post, the strongest takeaway wasn’t that anyone has all the answers—it was that progress now depends on trust, partnership, and continuous learning as AI reshapes how work gets done across missions and communities.Through purposeful leadership, trusted partnerships, and responsible technology adoption, nonprofits are defining what comes next for their missions and the communities they serve.
06/04/2026
Now in Foundry: Cohere Transcribe, Nanbeige 4.1-3B, and Octen Embedding
This week's Model Mondays edition spans three distinct layers of the AI application stack: Cohere's cohere-transcribe, a 2B Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model that ranks first on the Open ASR Leaderboard across 14 languages;Together, these three models illustrate how developers can build full AI pipelines—from audio ingestion to language reasoning to semantic retrieval—entirely with open-source models deployed through Microsoft Foundry.Vertical domain coverage across legal, finance, healthcare, and code: Octen-Embedding-0.6B was trained with explicit coverage of domain-specific retrieval scenarios—legal document matching, financial report Q&A, clinical dialogue retrieval, and code search including SQL.
06/04/2026
Turn Enterprise Knowledge into Answers with Copilot Studio and Azure AI Search
As an experienced AI Cloud Solution Architect working in Greater China Region (GCR), I’ve seen one emerging pattern that delivers quick wins for some of my customers: combining Microsoft Copilot Studio with an existing Azure AI Search index.This guide shows exactly how to connect Copilot Studio to an Azure AI Search index that is already live, so your copilot can answer confidently using your enterprise documents.In short, your Azure AI Search endpoint and admin key are ready, and the index already contains chunked content with embeddings.
06/04/2026
How hotpatch updates help keep Windows secure by design
Windows hotpatch updates allow you to adopt a secure-by-design and secure-by-default approach to keeping Windows 11 protected and productive.With the May 2026 security update, Windows Autopatch will enable hotpatch updates by default at the tenant level to help organizations get secure quicker.Enrolling in hotpatch updates automatically aligns your devices with Microsoft security best practices.
06/04/2026
Configuring Compute in Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode
Configuring Compute when onboarding Hyper-V (compute) systems to Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode (vMode) through the Add resource wizard is as simple as counting to four.On the Compute page, you’re configuring Hyper-V settings for your system.Additionally, if you elected to use storage already provisioned for the system, and you added one or multiple standalone hosts on the “Getting started” screen, the dropdown menu will contain all local drives that appear on all the standalone systems.
06/04/2026
A modernized comments experience for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on iPhone
A modernized comments experience for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on iPhone The updated Comments pane experience improves the clarity and usability of mobile commenting by making comment threads easier to find, read, and act on.The new Comments experience in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for iOS is rolling out to iPhone users running Version 2.106 (Build 26022013).
06/04/2026
Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter - April 2026
The post shows how to revoke an API connection’s OAuth tokens programmatically in Logic Apps, without using the portal.This article shows how to implement or migrate the classic BizTalk Server Aggregator pattern to Azure Logic Apps Standard using a production-ready template available in the Azure portal.Stephen W Thomas shows how to expose Azure Logic Apps (Standard) as MCP servers so AI agents can safely reuse existing enterprise workflows.
06/04/2026
Using App Advisor to build, publish, and grow in Microsoft Marketplace
In a recent partner office hour webinar, experts walked through how to build, publish, and optimize Marketplace offers using App Advisor, complete with a live demo of the platform in action.App Advisor is a self-service, end-to-end guidance experience designed to help you build, publish, and grow high-performing marketplace offers, all with tailored, actionable recommendations based on your specific scenario.In this article, we break down how App Advisor supports every stage of your offer journey and how you can use it to drive better outcomes faster.
06/04/2026
Azure Red Hat OpenShift: Managed Identity and Workload Identity now generally available
Azure Red Hat OpenShift now supports managed identities and workload identities as a generally available capability, so you can run OpenShift clusters and applications on Azure without long-lived service principal credentials.With GA support for managed identities and workload identities, Azure Red Hat OpenShift uses short‑lived credentials and least‑privilege access to help organizations strengthen their security posture.To adopt managed identity, you deploy a new ARO cluster with managed identities enabled and migrate workloads to it.
06/04/2026
Viva Engage Explained: Search
Search in Viva Engage has two stages: suggestions as you type and full search results.People results appear in both the instant suggestions dropdown and the People tab on the search results page.The Viva Engage search team is continuously improving the search experience.
06/04/2026
Friends Don’t Let Friends Run Loops Sequentially
By applying parallel processing.So, what is parallel processing?In simple terms, it’s the ability to perform multiple tasks at the same time instead of one after another.But here’s the interesting part: while requests are sent from a single machine, they are handled on the Azure side by a distributed system capable of processing multiple requests in parallel.
06/04/2026
RouteSavvy, CAST, and CIS offer transactable partner solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
RouteSavvy API PLUS significantly reduces labor and fuel costs with robust features such as customizable route planning, time window management, and detailed driving instructions — all accessible via an easy-to-use REST API.CAST Highlight helps executives and architects quickly assess and prioritize legacy applications for migration to Microsoft Azure.CIS Hardened Images on Microsoft Windows 11 Enterprise Multi-Session - Gen 2: Center for Internet Security (CIS) provides pre-configured, pre-hardened virtual images for Microsoft Azure, updated monthly based on Microsoft Patch Tuesday releases.
06/04/2026
How to design DORA-compliant customer communication for digital resilience in the EU
In this guest blog post from Microsoft Marketplace partner Messageflow, Julia Matuszewska, AI & Technical Content Writer, Vercom, discusses how Vercom MessageFlow can aid financial institutions to reduce risk, better prepare for audits, and increase compliance by aligning with international regulations and best practices.Digital customer communication is core to how financial institutions operate.Since January 2025, the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has changed how these systems are viewed.
06/04/2026
Tracking Every Token: Granular Cost and Usage Metrics for Microsoft Foundry Agents
This post walks through a solution that answers that question by combining three Azure services Microsoft AI Foundry, Azure API Management (APIM), and Application Insights into an observable, metered AI gateway with granular token-level telemetry including custom dates greater than a month for deeper analysis.Foundry’s built-in monitoring and cost views are ultimately powered by telemetry stored in Application Insights, and the out-of-the-box dashboards don’t always provide the exact per-request/per-caller token breakdown or the custom aggregations/joins teams may want for bespoke dashboards (for example, breaking down tokens by APIM subscription, product, tenant, user, route, or agent step).OpenTelemetry + Application Insights provides a battle-tested telemetry pipeline that scales from a single notebook to production workloads.
06/04/2026
From Fragmentation to Resilience: Why Next Gen “Whole of State” Is Future of Pub Sec Cybersecurity
That is why Microsoft is focused on a Next Gen Whole of State approach: a state-wide, coordinated model that brings together cyber defense, risk management, and workforce development into a unified strategy—designed for scale, resilience, and trust.A Next Gen Whole of State program is designed to address these challenges holistically.It is a state-wide shared services model that improves efficiency, strengthens critical infrastructure defense, and accelerates AI and cyber talent development—while respecting the autonomy of individual agencies.
06/04/2026
RightNow AI Releases AutoKernel: An Open-Source Framework that Applies an Autonomous Agent Loop to GPU Kernel Optimization for Arbitrary PyTorch Models
Researchers from RightNow AI want to automate it entirely.The RightNow AI research team has released AutoKernel, an open-source framework that applies an autonomous LLM agent loop to GPU kernel optimization for arbitrary PyTorch models.The approach is straightforward: give […]
06/04/2026
Private DNS and Hub–Spoke Networking for Enterprise AI Workloads on Azure
During a recent production deployment of a private, enterprise-grade AI workload on Azure, several issues surfaced that initially appeared to be platform or service instability.Closer analysis revealed the real cause: gaps in network and DNS design.This post shares a real-world technical walkthrough of the problem, root causes, resolution steps, and key lessons that now form a reusable blueprint for running AI workloads reliably in private Azure environments.
06/04/2026
Azure SQL Audit Columns missing? Understanding AzureDiagnostics 500-Column Limit and Spill
This is one of the more silent and confusing behaviors of the AzureDiagnostics table in Azure Monitor Log Analytics, and it doesn't just affect one specific column — it can affect any column, including commonly queried ones like data_sensitivity_information_s, deadlock_xml_s, query_hash_s, error_message_s, and others.Here's a real-world example from a customer case involving Azure SQL audit logs and data sensitivity classification.Because of this design, the AzureDiagnostics table enforces a hard limit of 500 columns per workspace.
06/04/2026
Building MCP servers with Entra ID and pre-authorized clients
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) gives AI agents a standard way to call external tools, but things get more complicated when those tools need to know who the user is.In this post, I’ll show how to build an MCP server with the Python FastMCP package that authenticates users with Microsoft Entra ID when they connect from a pre-authorized client such as VS Code."""Add a new expense to Cosmos DB."""
06/04/2026
Building Cost-Aware Azure Infrastructure Pipelines: Estimate Costs Before You Deploy
Step 2: Map Resources to Pricing with the Retail Prices API"""Query the Azure Retail Prices API for a Linux VM's pay-as-you-go hourly rate."""By integrating cost estimation into your pull request workflow, you give every developer on the team visibility into the financial impact of their changes — before a single resource is deployed.
06/04/2026
Meet MaxToki: The AI That Predicts How Your Cells Age — and What to Do About It
Most foundation models in biology have a fundamental blind spot: they see cells as frozen snapshots.Give a model a single-cell transcriptome — a readout of which genes are active in a cell at a given moment — and it can tell you a lot about what that cell is doing right now.The post Meet MaxToki: The AI That Predicts How Your Cells Age — and What to Do About It appeared first on MarkTechPost.
05/04/2026
How to Build a Netflix VOID Video Object Removal and Inpainting Pipeline with CogVideoX, Custom Prompting, and End-to-End Sample Inference
In this tutorial, we build and run an advanced pipeline for Netflix’s VOID model.We set up the environment, install all required dependencies, clone the repository, download the official base model and VOID checkpoint, and prepare the sample inputs needed for video object removal.The post How to Build a Netflix VOID Video Object Removal and Inpainting Pipeline with CogVideoX, Custom Prompting, and End-to-End Sample Inference appeared first on MarkTechPost.
05/04/2026
Meet ‘AutoAgent’: The Open-Source Library That Lets an AI Engineer and Optimize Its Own Agent Harness Overnight
There’s a particular kind of tedium that every AI engineer knows intimately: the prompt-tuning loop.You write a system prompt, run your agent against a benchmark, read the failure traces, tweak the prompt, add a tool, rerun.The post Meet ‘AutoAgent’: The Open-Source Library That Lets an AI Engineer and Optimize Its Own Agent Harness Overnight appeared first on MarkTechPost.
05/04/2026
Inside the Creative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stack: Where Human Vision and Artificial Intelligence Meet to Design Future Fashion
Today, it can be conveyed through algorithms, neural networks, and machine learning.Artificial Intelligence is no longer at the dregs, but very much at the […]The post Inside the Creative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stack: Where Human Vision and Artificial Intelligence Meet to Design Future Fashion appeared first on MarkTechPost.
05/04/2026
How we build Azure SRE Agent with agentic workflows
The Challenge: Ops is critical but takes time from innovationRather than treating AI as a bolt-on tool, Microsoft embedded specialized agents across the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) to collaborate with developers, from planning through operations.Azure SRE Agent is one example of how agentic workflows can transform both product development and operations at scale.
05/04/2026
Vector Drift in Azure AI Search: Three Hidden Reasons Your RAG Accuracy Degrades After Deployment
What Is Vector Drift? Vector drift occurs when embeddings stored in a vector index no longer accurately represent the semantic intent of incoming queries. Because vector similarity search depends on relative semantic positioning, even small changes in models, data distribution, or preprocessing logic can significantly affect retrieval quality over time. Unlike schema drift or data corruption, vector drift is subtle: The syst...
04/04/2026
Netflix AI Team Just Open-Sourced VOID: an AI Model That Erases Objects From Videos — Physics and All
Video editing has always had a dirty secret: removing an object from footage is easy; making the scene look like it was never there is brutally hard. Take out a person holding a guitar, and you’re left with a floating instrument that defies gravity. Hollywood VFX teams spend weeks fixing exactly this kind of problem. […] The post
04/04/2026
How to Build Production-Ready Agentic Systems with Z.AI GLM-5 Using Thinking Mode, Tool Calling, Streaming, and Multi-Turn Workflows
In this tutorial, we explore the full capabilities of Z.AI’s GLM-5 model and build a complete understanding of how to use it for real-world, agentic applications. We start from the fundamentals by setting up the environment using the Z.AI SDK and its OpenAI-compatible interface, and then progressively move on to advanced features such as streaming […] The post
04/04/2026
Expanding Azure Arc SQL Migration with a New Target: SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines
Modernizing a SQL Server estate is rarely a single-step effort. It typically involves multiple phases, from discovery and assessment to migration and optimization, often spanning on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc simplifies this process by bringing all migration steps into a single, cohesive experience in the Azure portal. With the March 2026 release, this integrated experience is extended by adding SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines...
03/04/2026
Google DeepMind’s Research Lets an LLM Rewrite Its Own Game Theory Algorithms — And It Outperformed the Experts
Designing algorithms for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) in imperfect-information games — scenarios where players act sequentially and cannot see each other’s private information, like poker — has historically relied on manual iteration. Researchers identify weighting schemes, discounting rules, and equilibrium solvers through intuition and trial-and-error. Google DeepMind researchers proposes AlphaEvolve, an LLM-powered evolutionary coding agent […] The post
03/04/2026
Windows news you can use: March 2026
This month, our Windows team shared a candid update on how we're thinking about Windows quality, what's changing behind the scenes, and how your real-world feedback is shaping the platform. It's all in a post entitled Our commitment to Windows quality. Windows + Devices EVP Pavan Davuluri walks through how we identify issues, prioritize fixes, and how the Windows Insider commu...
03/04/2026
Introducing TSGen: Automated TSG Generation @ Scale – Built by AI
This post is a follow-up to the previous write-up at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azure-ai-foundry-blog/the-future-of-ai-autonomous-agents-for-identifying-the-root-cause-of-cloud-servi/4412494?previewMessage=true. If you haven’t read it yet, it provides the backgr...
03/04/2026
Run the latest Azure Arc agent with Automatic Agent Upgrade (Public Preview)
Customers managing large fleets of Azure Arc servers need a scalable way to ensure the Azure Arc agent stays up to date without manual intervention. Per server configuration does not scale, and gaps in upgrade coverage can lead to operational drift, missed features, and delayed security updates. To address this, we’re introducing two new options to help customers enable Automatic Agent Upgrade at scale: applied as a built-in Azure Policy and a new onboarding CLI flag. The built-...
03/04/2026
Secure HTTP‑Only AKS Ingress with Azure Front Door Premium, Firewall DNAT, and Private AGIC
Reference architecture and runbook (Part 1: HTTP-only) for Hub-Spoke networking with private Application Gateway (AGIC), Azure Firewall DNAT, and Azure Front Door Premium (WAF) 0. When and Why to Use This Architecture Series note: This document is Part 1 and uses HTTP to keep the focus on routing and control points. A follow-up Part 2 will extend the same architecture to HTTPS ...
03/04/2026
Title Plan Update - April 3, 2026
📁April 3, 2026 - Title Plan Now Available Access the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at
03/04/2026
From Discovery to Executive Presentation: Plan Your Migration with Azure Migrate in Hours
The migration planning bottleneck Every migration starts with the same question: what do we have, and where should it go? Getting from that question to a clear, executive-ready answer has traditionally taken weeks. You scan the environment, export spreadsheets, manually classify workloads, run assessments and business case for cost analysis and readiness, and then stitch everything together into a deck that's outdated by the time you present it. Azure Migrate now collapses tha...
03/04/2026
MSLE Newsletter - April 2026
Welcome to your quarterly update—here’s what’s new and how you can get involved! 🚀 In This Issue 📣 Mic...
03/04/2026
Course Retirement Announcements
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-4010: Extend Microsoft 365 Copilot with declarative agents by using Visual Studio Code
03/04/2026
Announcing general availability of Network Security Perimeter for Azure Service Bus
Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Network Security Perimeter (NSP) support for Azure Service Bus. Network Security Perimeter allows you to define a logical network boundary around your Service Bus namespaces and other Azure PaaS resources, restricting public network access and enabling secure communication between services within ...
03/04/2026
Demystifying On-Demand Capacity Reservations
About On-Demand Capacity Reservations Introducing the “parking garage” metaphor There are dozens of VM types available in Azure which span multiple generations of CPU across vendors and architectures. Within each Azure region are datacenters hosting pools of hardware which runs Azure services, such as virtual machines, of those types. As VMs are started and stopped by customers there is a constant ebb and flow of available capacity to run each type of VM within t...
03/04/2026
Build and Deploy a Microsoft Foundry Hosted Agent: A Hands-On Workshop
Agents are easy to demo, hard to ship. Most teams can put together a convincing prototype quickly. The harder part starts afterwards: shaping deterministic tools, validating behaviour with tests, building a CI path, packaging for deployment, and proving the experience through a user-facing interface. That is where many promising projects slow down. This workshop helps you close that gap without unnecessary friction. You get a guided path f...
03/04/2026
Connect to Azure SQL Database using a custom domain name with Microsoft Entra ID authentication
Many of us might prefer to connect to Azure SQL Server using a custom domain name (like devsqlserver.mycompany.com) rather than the default fully qualified domain name (devsqlserver.database.windows.net), often because of application-specific or compliance reasons. This article details how you can accomplish this when logging in with Microsoft Entra ID (for example, user@m...
03/04/2026
DevSecOps on AKS: Governance Gates That Actually Prevent Incidents
This article is for AKS platform/infra engineers, SREs, and security teams who want a practical, enforceable model for stopping common Kubernetes misconfigurations before they become incidents—without turning delivery into bureaucracy. Why incidents still happen after “adding security to the pipeline” Most teams do some of these: container image scanning secret scanning<...
03/04/2026
Azure SQL Managed Instance as an AI‑Enabled PaaS Platform
AI Capabilities Built into Azure SQL Managed Instance Azure SQL MI includes multiple intelligence layers by default: Intelligent Insights for anomaly detection Automatic tuning (recommend mode) Copilot‑assisted diagnostics Native vector data types for AI workloads These capabilities work together without requiring external services or agents. Why A...
03/04/2026
TII Releases Falcon Perception: A 0.6B-Parameter Early-Fusion Transformer for Open-Vocabulary Grounding and Segmentation from Natural Language Prompts
In the current landscape of computer vision, the standard operating procedure involves a modular ‘Lego-brick’ approach: a pre-trained vision encoder for feature extraction paired with a separate decoder for task prediction. While effective, this architectural separation complicates scaling and bottlenecks the interaction between language and vision. The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) research team is challenging […] The post
03/04/2026
AI‑Assisted Azure Infrastructure Validation and Drift Detection
Why Traditional Drift Detection Isn’t Enough Most teams already rely on: Terraform plan reviews Azure Policy compliance dashboards Azure Resource Graph queries Manual scripts and audits The problem isn’t missing data—it’s interpretation at scale. Validation outputs are: Verbose and noisy Spread across multiple tools Difficult to prioritize Dependent on human context
03/04/2026
Introducing Pacemaker HA Agent v2 for SQL Server on Linux (In Preview)
We are excited to introduce the next generation of High Availability (HA) Agent for SQL Server on Linux: Pacemaker HA Agent v2. This release is a major step forward, designed to reduce planned and unplanned failover times, compared to the previous agent, based on internal engineering improvements. Why Pacemaker Is Required for SQL Server HA on Linux For users new to Linux, it’s important to understand how high availability works on this platfor...
03/04/2026
Step by Step Guide to Build an End-to-End Model Optimization Pipeline with NVIDIA Model Optimizer Using FastNAS Pruning and Fine-Tuning
In this tutorial, we build a complete end-to-end pipeline using NVIDIA Model Optimizer to train, prune, and fine-tune a deep learning model directly in Google Colab. We start by setting up the environment and preparing the CIFAR-10 dataset, then define a ResNet architecture and train it to establish a strong baseline. From there, we apply […] The post
03/04/2026
🚀 General Availability of Private Application Gateway on Azure Application Gateway v2
🔍 What Is Private Application Gateway? Historically, Application Gateway v2 required a public IP address to communicate with the Azure control plane (GatewayManager). This requirement imposed several constraints: Mandatory public IP exposure Restricted Network Security Group (NSG) rules Limited route table flexibility No support for forced tunneling Private Application Gateway removes these limitations
03/04/2026
oBeaver — A Beaver That Runs LLMs on Your Machine 🦫
Hi there! I'm the creator of oBeaver. This project started from a pretty simple desire: I wanted to run large language models on my own computer. No data sent to the cloud. No API keys. No per-call charges. I'm guessing you've had the same thought. There are already great tools out there — Ollama being the most prominent. But in my day-to-day work, I spend a lot of time in the ONNX ecosystem — the cross-platform reach of ...
03/04/2026
Enterprise‑Scale Azure Subscription Vending Using Azure Verified Modules (AVM)
Why Subscription Vending Is Critical at Scale Azure subscriptions define the security, governance, and billing boundary for workloads. In large organizations, manual subscription creation often leads to: Inconsistent management group placement Delayed or missing policy enforcement Incorrect RBAC assignments Lack of cost controls Platform teams becoming a bottleneck Subscription vending st...
03/04/2026
Blue‑Green Strategy for Always‑On TCP Workloads on Azure Container Apps
Scenario: Always‑on workloads in Azure Container Apps continuously pull from a TCP source, process the stream, and push into Azure Managed Redis, which is then consumed by another always‑on Container Apps workload th...
03/04/2026
Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) for Azure AI Applications using Azure Machine Learning
Modern AI-powered applications running on Azure increasingly require flexibility in model choice. While managed model catalogs accelerate time to value, real-world enterprise applications often need to: Host open‑source or fine‑tuned models Deploy domain‑specific or regulated models inside a tenant boundary Maintain tight control over runtime environments and versions Integrate AI inference into existing application architectures This...
03/04/2026
MCP Apps on Azure Functions: Quick Start with TypeScript
Azure Functions makes hosting MCP apps simple: build locally, create a secure endpoint, and deploy fast with azd. What Are MCP Apps? MCP (Model Context Protocol) apps add new features to AI assistants and clients: MCP Tools: Remote functions that clients call to perform actions (for example, fetch data, update records, call APIs) MCP Resource...
03/04/2026
AKS cluster with AGIC hits the Azure Application Gateway backend pool limit (100)
I’m writing this article to document a real-world scaling issue we hit while exposing many applications from an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster using Application Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC). The problem is easy to miss because Kubernetes resources keep applying successfully, but the underlying Azure Application Gateway has a hard platform limit of 100 backend pools—so once your deployment pattern requires the 101st pool, AGIC can’t reconcile the gateway co...
03/04/2026
Access fixes released in Version 2603 (Build 19822.20114)
Here's a summary of bug fixes in the latest version of Access: Bug NameIssue FixedEdge Browser Control didn't navigate from code when inside a tab control
03/04/2026
Arcee AI Releases Trinity Large Thinking: An Apache 2.0 Open Reasoning Model for Long-Horizon Agents and Tool Use
The landscape of open-source artificial intelligence has shifted from purely generative models toward systems capable of complex, multi-step reasoning. While proprietary ‘reasoning’ models have dominated the conversation, Arcee AI has released Trinity Large Thinking. This release is an open-weight reasoning model distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, positioning it as a transparent alternative for developers […] The post
02/04/2026
Bug fixes in Microsoft Access - Version 2603 (Build 19822.20114)
Here's a summary of bug fixes in the latest version of Access: Bug Name Issue Fixed
02/04/2026
An update to the active flow billing model for Azure SRE Agent
Earlier today, we announced that Azure SRE Agent now supports multiple AI model providers, starting with Anthropic. To support multi-model choice, and make active usage costs easier to understand, we’re updating how active flow usage is measured. At a glance What’s changing
02/04/2026
Give your Foundry Agent Custom Tools with MCP Servers on Azure Functions
This blog post is for developers who have an MCP server deployed to Azure Functions and want to connect it to Microsoft Foundry agents. It walks through why you'd want to do this, the different authentication options available, and how to get your agent calling your MCP tools. Connect your MCP server on Azure Functions to Foundry Agent If you've been following along with this blog series, you know that Azure Functions is a great place to host remote MCP servers. You get scalab...
02/04/2026
Azure SRE Agent now supports multiple model providers, including Anthropic Claude
Today, Azure SRE Agent adds model provider selection—choose between Azure OpenAI and Anthropic to match the right AI provider to your incident workflow. SRE Agent has saved over 20,000 engineering hours by pulling together logs, deployments, and signals into a single investigation thread, turning scattered data into clearer mitigation steps. Customers like Ecolab have seen daily alerts drop by up to 75%. Choose your model provider: Azure OpenAI or Anthropic Azure SRE Agent has...
02/04/2026
Accelerate Agent Development: Hacks for Building with Microsoft Sentinel data lake
As a Senior Product Manager | Developer Architect on the App Assure team working to bring Microsoft Sentinel and Security Copilot solutions to market, I interact with many ISVs building agents on Microsoft Sentinel data lake for the first time. I’ve written this article to walk you through one possible approach for agent development – the&...
02/04/2026
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Customer Newsletter
Kubernetes gated deployment is now generally available for AKS automatic clusters.Blogs of the monthWe greatly value your input on the types of content that enhance your understanding of our security products.
02/04/2026
Microsoft Entra expands SCIM support with new SCIM 2.0 APIs for identity lifecycle operations
Modern organizations rely on a growing ecosystem of applications, platforms, and services to run their business. Managing users and groups consistently across these systems is essential for security and operational efficiency. Many teams rely on the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) standard to maintain predictable integrations, reduce custom provisioning work, and simplify lifecycle tasks across their environment. Microsoft Entra has long supported SCIM‑based provisio...
02/04/2026
Defeating the ‘Token Tax’: How Google Gemma 4, NVIDIA, and OpenClaw are Revolutionizing Local Agentic AI: From RTX Desktops to DGX Spark
Run Google’s latest omni-capable open models faster on NVIDIA RTX AI PCs, from NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, GeForce RTX desktops to the new DGX Spark, to build personalized, always-on AI assistants like OpenClaw without paying a massive “token tax” for every action. The landscape of modern AI is shifting rapidly. We are moving away from […] The post
02/04/2026
Securing AI apps and agents on Microsoft Marketplace
Why security must be designed in—not validated later AI apps and agents expand the security surface beyond that of traditional applications. Prompt inputs, agent reasoning, tool execution, and downstream integrations introduce opportunities for misuse or unintended behavior when security assumptions are implicit. These risks surface quickly in production environments where AI systems interact with real users and data. Deferring security decisions until late in...
02/04/2026
Model Upgrade and Migration Strategy for Microsoft Foundry
Model upgrades in Microsoft Foundry are not a one‑time platform operation, they are an ongoing application lifecycle discipline. Microsoft documentation makes this explicit: models evolve continuously, older versions are eventually retired, and customers are expected to evaluate, migrate, and validate applications ahead of retirement deadlines. In addition, Microsoft clearly separates model versioning from API versioning, which means a safe upgrade strategy must vali...
02/04/2026
Handling Unique Constraint Conflicts in Logical Replication
Authors: Ashutosh Sharma, Senior Software Engineer, and Gauri Kasar, Product Manager Logical replication can keep your PostgreSQL environments in sync, helping replicate selected tables with minimal impact on the primary workload. But what happens when your subscriber hits a duplicate key error and replication grinds to a halt? If you’ve seen a
02/04/2026
Why I’m telling my team to stop asking permission and start building
Alfredo Ramirez is Vice President of Revenue Strategy at Microsoft, where his team runs sales planning, performance management, and commercial transformation across the Microsoft global sales organization. Many of the most impactful tools my team uses today weren’t built by engineers. They were instead built by operations leads, program managers, planning analysts, and business process owners, people who had never written a line of code in their lives. And they bui...
02/04/2026
Windows 365 + Intune Advanced Endpoint Management Capabilities: Better Together
Overview Windows 365 and Microsoft Intune form a tightly integrated solution for modern endpoint management. With Windows 365 delivering secure Cloud PCs (full Windows desktops hosted in the Microsoft cloud) and Intune’s recently extended advanced endpoint management capabilities, organizations can manage Cloud PCs and physical devices side-by-side in...
02/04/2026
Continuing our momentum: Expanding Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities across U.S. Government clouds
In December we announced the availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot for customers in GCC‑High—an important milesto...
02/04/2026
Announcing Windows 365 connector for Microsoft Power Platform and Azure Logic Apps (Public Preview)
We are excited to announce the Public Preview of the Windows 365 connector for Power Platform and Azure Logic Apps! With prebuilt actions and triggers for Windows 365 built on top of Graph, IT and operations teams can: Use Power Automate and Azure Logic Apps to build Cloud PC workflows, such as sending emails to users when Cloud PCs are provisioned Use Copilot Studio to build agents to provide guided responses to common questions based on configured knowledge sour...
02/04/2026
How Do We Know AI Isn’t Lying? The Art of Evaluating LLMs in RAG Systems
🔍 1. Why Evaluating LLM Responses is Hard In classical programming, correctness is binary. InputExpectedResult2 + 24✔ Correct2 + 25<...
02/04/2026
Better contrast checking for slides in PowerPoint
Hi, Insiders! I’m Shireen Salma, a Product Manager on the Office Accessibility team. Today, I’m excited to share an update to Accessibility Assistant in PowerPoint for Windows that improves how we detect color contrast issues—especially when text appears on transparent backgrounds. This enhancement helps to ensure that contrast checks reflect what you can actually see, particularly in slides that use images, gradients, or layered design elements. Better contrast checking for slides in...
02/04/2026
Part 3: DSPM for AI: Governing Data Risk in an Agent‑Driven Enterprise
Why Agent Security Alone Is Not Enough? Foundry‑level controls are designed to prevent unsafe behavior and bound autonomy at runtime. But even the strongest preventive controls cannot answer key governance questions on their own: Where is sensitive data being used in AI prompts and responses? Which agents are interacting with high‑risk data—and how often? Are agents oversharing, drifting from expected behavior, or creating comp...
02/04/2026
Part 2: Securing AI Agents with Azure AI Foundry: From Abuse Patterns to Lifecycle Controls
Every agent abuse pattern we’ve explored points to a specific control gap, not a theoretical flaw. Across all patterns, one theme consistently emerges: agents behave logically according to how they are configured. When failures occur, it’s rarely because the model “got it wrong”—it’s because the surrounding system granted too much freedom, trust, or persistence without adequate guardrails. This is exactly the problem Azure AI Foundry is designed to address. Rath...
02/04/2026
Part 1: Understanding Agent Abuse Patterns: Designing Secure AI Agents from Day One
What Is Agent Abuse? Agent abuse is not about “bad models” or simple prompt hacking. It’s about how autonomy, tools, memory, identity, and data access interact—and how those interactions can be exploited when security and governance are not built in from the start. When does it occur? Agent abuse occurs when an AI agent operates outside its intended boundaries and: Deviates from its defined behavior or business inten...
02/04/2026
Introducing MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2 in Microsoft Foundry
Another Step Towards a Complete AI Platform Since inception, our goal with Microsoft Foundry has been to deliver the most complete AI and app agent factory; giving developers access to the latest frontier models, tools, infrastructure, security, and reliability to confidently build and scale their AI solutions. Today, we're taking another step towards that vision by announcing the public preview of three...
02/04/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: April 2, 2026
Learn about 130 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
02/04/2026
Microsoft AI Tour Helsinki – Digital 28.4.2026
Tekoäly ei ole enää kokeilu – se on keskeinen osa asiakkaidemme liiketoimintastrategiaa. Microsoft AI Tour Helsinki – Digital tuo 28.4.2026 yhteen liiketoiminnan ja teknologian asiantuntijat keskustelemaan siitä, miten generatiivinen AI ja agenttivetoiset ratkaisut muuttavat tapaa rakentaa sovelluksia, automatisoida prosesseja ja tuottaa mitattavaa asiakasarvoa. Tervetuloa seuraamaan maksutonta suoraa lähetystä Helsingin Veikkaus Arenalta klo 9.15–16.30. Tämä tapahtuma on suunnattu eri...
02/04/2026
VS Code Custom Agents: AI-Powered Terraform Security Scanning in the IDE
GitHub Copilot is already a powerful coding assistant, but out of the box it knows nothing specific about your project's conventions, security requirements, or operational processes. Custom agents change that. They let you define specialized AI assistants that live inside your repository, carry deep domain expertise, and behave consistently for every developer on your team. This blog explains what VS Code custom agents are, what they can do, and how to build...
02/04/2026
Build a Fully Offline AI App with Foundry Local and CAG
A hands-on guide to building an on-device AI support agent using Context-Augmented Generation, JavaScript, and Foundry Local. You have probably heard the AI pitch: "just call our API." But what happens when your application needs to work without an internet connection? Perhaps your users are field engineers standing next to a pipeline in the middle of nowhere, or your organisation has strict data privacy requirements, or you simply want to build something tha...
02/04/2026
One Script to Export All Azure SQL Whitelisted Public IPs Within Your Subscription
Recently, I worked on an interesting customer case where they had a requirement to export all the IP addresses that are whitelisted on the Azure SQL Servers within their subscription. Below is the script that helped customer to export all server-level (public) firewall rules (whitelisted IP ranges) for every Azure SQL logical server in a subscription into a single CSV file. Set-AzContext -SubscriptionId "sub_ID" # Ensure context exists $context = Get-AzContext if...
02/04/2026
IBM Releases Granite 4.0 3B Vision: A New Vision Language Model for Enterprise Grade Document Data Extraction
IBM has announced the release of Granite 4.0 3B Vision, a vision-language model (VLM) engineered specifically for enterprise-grade document data extraction.Departing from the monolithic approach of larger multimodal models, the 4.0 Vision release is architected as a specialized adapter designed to bring high-fidelity visual reasoning to the Granite 4.0 Micro language backbone.This release […]
02/04/2026
How to Build Production Ready AgentScope Workflows with ReAct Agents, Custom Tools, Multi-Agent Debate, Structured Output and Concurrent Pipelines
In this tutorial, we build a complete AgentScope workflow from the ground up and run everything in Colab. We start by wiring OpenAI through AgentScope and validating a basic model call to understand how messages and responses are handled. From there, we define custom tool functions, register them in a toolkit, and inspect the auto-generated […] The post
02/04/2026
SQL Server Integration Services Projects 2022+ GA
We're pleased to announce the General Availability release of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Projects 2022+, bringing full support for SQL Server 2025 and Visual Studio 2026. With this release, SSIS Projects now supports target server versions from SQL Server 2017 through SQL Server 2025 and works with both Visual Studio 2022 and V...
02/04/2026
Z.ai Launches GLM-5V-Turbo: A Native Multimodal Vision Coding Model Optimized for OpenClaw and High-Capacity Agentic Engineering Workflows Everywhere
In the field of vision-language models (VLMs), the ability to bridge the gap between visual perception and logical code execution has traditionally faced a performance trade-off.Many models excel at describing an image but struggle to translate that visual information into the rigorous syntax required for software engineering.Zhipu AI’s (Z.ai) GLM-5V-Turbo is a vision […]
01/04/2026
Announcing Private Preview: Deploy Ansible Playbooks using Azure Policy via Machine Configuration
By extending Azure’s control plane beyond the cloud, Azure Arc enables organizations to unify governance, compliance, security and management of servers across on‑premises, edge, and multicloud environments using a consistent set of Azure tools and policies.Building on this mission, we’re excited to announce the private preview of deploying Ansible playbooks through Azure Policy using Machine Configuration, bringing Ansible‑driven automation into Azure Arc’s policy‑based governance model for Azure and Arc‑enabled Linux machines.This new capability enables you to orchestrate Ansible playbook execution directly from Azure Policy (via Machine Configuration) without requiring an Ansible control node, while benefiting from built‑in compliance reporting and remediation.
01/04/2026
Announcing AWS with Azure SRE Agent: Cross-Cloud Investigation using the brand new AWS DevOps Agent
Overview Connect Azure SRE Agent to AWS services using the official AWS MCP server. Query AWS documentation, execute any of the 15,000+ AWS APIs, run operational workflows, and kick off incident investigations through AWS DevOps Agent, which is ...
01/04/2026
Ep 37 | How Microsoft Partners Can Maximize Valuation in 2026: Insights from Tim Mueller
In the latest episode of "Profiles and Partnership," hosts Anthony Carrano and Rudy Rodriguez sit down with
01/04/2026
Improving Sales Communication with AI – Turning Execution into Clearer, Stronger Conversations
Learn how to refine messaging, tighten positioning, and adjust outreach based on real feedback.How to use AI to refine outreach messagingDesigned for sales leaders, advisors, consultants, and IAMCP members — as well as non-members looking to improve practical AI-supported sales communication.
01/04/2026
Microsoft Partnership Multiplier Series for ISVs (SDCs) with Juhi Saha
Eighty percent of Azure Marketplace listings never generate meaningful revenue - this session reveals why and shows you how to be in the winning twenty percent.We'll move beyond basic listings to explore the monetization hierarchy: when contact-me offers work versus when transactability becomes essential, how private offers unlock enterprise opportunities, and advanced strategies like MACC consumption programs.You'll learn the pricing models that convert versus those that create friction, discover what truly drives marketplace visibility and field seller recommendations, and understand the co-marketing tactics that actually work.
01/04/2026
A third-party connector integrating Claude with Microsoft Sentinel is now available
Today, we’re sharing how Sentinel can securely support a third-party AI assistant like Claude through a new integration approach using Sentinel’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, while continuing to rely on Microsoft Entra ID for enterprise grade authentication and access control. This approach uses Microsoft Sentinel with Entra ID to let third-party AI tools access Sentinel data securely.Sentinel customers can explore security data using natural language to assist investigations, while preserving strict tenant isolation and access controls, without managing app registrations or shared secrets. AI third-party assistants like Claude can access Sentinel through Microsoft’s existing security infrastructure.Use the Microsoft Sentinel MCP connector in ChatGPT or Claude CodeUse the Microsoft Sentinel MCP connector in ChatGPT or Claude - Microsoft Security |
01/04/2026
Unlocking AI-Ready Unstructured Data at Scale with Komprise and Azure
Azure’s cloud-based storage platform enables organizations to right-size their environments through elastic scaling and Microsoft’s global economies of scale.Most enterprises operate in hybrid environments, balancing on-premises systems with cloud storage. Komprise and Microsoft address this reality by enabling intelligent tiering of unstructured data across environments.Using Azure Blob Storage, organizations can transparently move cold and infrequently accessed data to lower-cost cloud tiers while keeping frequently accessed data close to applications and users.
01/04/2026
Board and executive meeting management - Pervasent - 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 Nicklas Pernblad (CTO) from Pervasent, join Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft to showcase how Pervasent has created really polished and advance solution for board and executive meeting management using SharePoint Framework (SPFx).Pervasent's SharePoint-based Board Papers and Teams-based Team Papers board solutions are deployed in an organization’s Microsoft 365 tenancy and leverage all the security and user management tools provided by Microsoft 365.
01/04/2026
DPDK 25.11 Performance on Azure for High-Speed Packet Workloads
Technologies such as the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) play a key role in meeting these expectationsTo support customers running advanced network functions, we’ve released our latest performance report based on DPDK 25.11.The report provides a clear view of how DPDK performs on Microsoft-developed Azure Boost within Azure infrastructure, with detailed insights into packet processing across a range of scenarios, from small packet sizes to multi-core scaling.
01/04/2026
Microsoft Protection Plans now deliver more coverage
Microsoft Protection Plans now include unlimited mechanical breakdown coverage2 for the full duration of the plan.Previously, mechanical breakdowns and accidental damage claims were combined under a two‑claim limit.Microsoft Protection Plans5 now include battery degradation coverage.
01/04/2026
Sensitivity Labels Are Coming to Viva Engage Communities Here's What You Need to Know
Starting March 31, 2026 sensitivity labels will be available in Viva Engage community creation.Sensitivity labels for groups and sites have been supported in Teams, SharePoint, and M365 Groups for years.An Engage community's sensitivity label is shared with its linked M365 Group and SharePoint site.
01/04/2026
Partner Blog | Accelerating Oracle-to-PostgreSQL migrations: New tooling, proven patterns, and partner opportunities inspired by Apollo Hospitals
Enterprises around the world are rethinking their data strategy. Oracle remains foundational for many mission-critical applications, but licensing pressure, modernization priorities, and the need for faster innovation are driving customers to standardize on open-source databases. PostgreSQL continues to rise as a leading alternative: cloud-ready, enterprise-grade, and well suited for large, latency-sensitive workloads. For partners,...
01/04/2026
How to Build a Production-Ready Gemma 3 1B Instruct Generation AI Pipeline with Hugging Face Transformers, Chat Templates, and Colab Inference
In this tutorial, we build and run a Colab workflow for Gemma 3 1B Instruct using Hugging Face Transformers and HF Token, in a practical, reproducible, and easy-to-follow step-by-step manner. We begin by installing the required libraries, securely authenticating with our Hugging Face token, and loading the tokenizer and model onto the available device with […] The post
01/04/2026
How Goodwill Opens More Doors for Job Seekers with Barriers to Employment Using AI
Goodwill NYNJ’s mission has always been clear: help people with disabilities and other barriers to employment find meaningful work. But with resumes arriving in every format imaginable—and staff manually reformatting each one—the process often slowed down opportunities for qualified candidates. That changed when Goodwill partnered with Microsoft at Hack4Good. Together with GoodTemps, Microsoft, Redapt, and student technologists, they built Resume Builder
01/04/2026
Driving DevSecOps Standards: NIST’s Live Guidelines for Secure Software Development, Security, and Operations Practices
Microsoft appreciates the opportunity to participate in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) effort to evolve the Live Guidelines for Secure Software Development, Security, and Operations (DevSecOps) Practices, building on the original NIST SP 1800-44 publication. This living guidance reflects ongoing, collaborative work to document practical approaches for securing the software development lifecycle,...
01/04/2026
Imagine Cup 2026 Semifinalist: Builder Series Judges
With submissions closing on January 9, selected startups advance into the semifinals and step into this experience. From meeting their mentors to participating in build labs and pitch clinics, founders sharpen their product, their story, and their readiness for the global stage.
01/04/2026
Proactive Reliability Series — Article 1: Fault Types in Azure
Welcome to the Proactive Reliability Series — a collection of articles dedicated to raising awareness about the importance of designing, implementing, and operating reliable solutions in Azure. Each article will focus on a specific area of reliability engineering: from identifying critical flows and setting reliability targets, to designing for redundancy, testing strategies, and disaster rec...
01/04/2026
Migrating Azure SQL Database Across Tenants Using Subscription Transfer
Moving an Azure subscription between Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) tenants is a common requirement during: Mergers and acquisitions Organizational restructuring Enterprise Agreement (EA) enrollment realignment Lighthouse or multi‑tenant operating model changes However, when that subscription hosts Azure SQL databases secured using Microsoft Entra ID authentication, the migration becomes identity‑depe...
01/04/2026
Announcing public preview of custom graphs in Microsoft Sentinel
Security attacks span identities, devices, resources, and activity, making it critical to understand how these elements connect to expose real risk. In November, we shared how Sentinel graph brings these signals together into a relationship-aware view to help
01/04/2026
Hunting Infostealers - macOS Threats
The “Hunting Infostealers” blog series covers the ever-evolving threat of infostealers. Infostealers have gone from simple credential theft to subscription-based threats (i.e., Malware-as-a-Service) driving modern cybercrime. Threat actors target sensitive information such as browser data, cookies, and session tokens that can later be used for account takeovers or to fuel data breaches, ransomware attacks, and supply chain attacks. In this blog series, Microsoft Defender Experts examine how m...
01/04/2026
From “Push the Patch” to “Prove the Patch”: Rethinking Windows Updating with Intune
For years, many of us have approached patching like we’re running a shipping dock: build the package, label the box, push it onto endpoints, and then chase down the ones that “didn’t get the memo.” SCCM (Configuration Manager) made that model powerful—deployments, collections, maintenance windows, retries, and all the knobs we learned to love. If you were like me, you built your entire understanding of software updates arou...
01/04/2026
A Recap of MVP Summit 2026
This year’s annual MVP Summit brought together several hundred Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and Regional Directors (RDs) in-person on the Microsoft Redmond campus and online to learn, connect, and share. MVP Summit 2026 delivered hundreds of technical sessions, Microsoft confidential previews of what’s coming next, and the chance for MVPs to provide direct feedback to the product groups building the tools communities rely on. Summit week blended deep technical content with plenty...
01/04/2026
Announcing GA: Advanced Resource Sets in Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog
The Microsoft Purview product team is constantly listening to customer feedback about the data governance challenges that slow teams down. One of the most persistent pain points — understanding the true shape of large-scale data lakes where thousands of files represent a single logical dataset — has driven a highly requested capability. We are pleased to announce that Advanced Resource Sets are now generally available for all Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog customers. <...
01/04/2026
Chaos Engineering vs. STAF for SAP: Resilience Validation vs. Functional Assurance
The short answer: STAF and Chaos Engineering serve different purposes and treating them as interchangeable can expose SAP production environments to unseen risk.Chaos Engineering for SAP and SAP Testing Automation Framework (STAF) help ensure mission-critical workloads remain robust.STAF focuses on automating high availability (HA) and configuration compliance testing for SAP clusters on Azure.
01/04/2026
Arrow x Microsoft Kumppaniarkkitehtiseminaari tulee 27.5.2026
Vuoden tärkein tekninen kumppanitapahtuma Arrow x Microsoft Kumppaniarkkitehtiseminaari 2026 kokoaa jälleen yhteen Microsoftin ja Arrow’n kumppanien tekniset päättäjät ja asiantuntijat – arkkitehdit, senior-kehittäjät ja tekniset konsultit – inspiroitumaan, oppimaan ja verkostoitumaan. Tapahtuma järjestetään 27.5.2026 klo 9.00–16.00 (aamiainen klo 8.15 alkaen) Hilton Kalastajatorpalla Helsingissä, ja se tarjoaa käytännönläheisen katsauksen tekoälyn, agenttien ja pilviratkaisujen uusimpiin keh...
01/04/2026
Microsoft 365 and Advanced Data Residency now available in Denmark
We are excited to announce that Microsoft 365 and the Microsoft 365 Advanced Data Residency add-on (ADR) are now available for commercial customers in our new cloud region in Denmark. Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo Capabilities for Denmark will be available soon. The Advanced Data Residency and Multi-Geo Capabilities add-ons offer customers provisioned in Denmark greater control over the location of their cloud data.
01/04/2026
Understanding and Monitoring Class 2 Transactions in Azure SQL Database
During a recent customer engagement, we investigated sustained transaction log growth in Azure SQL Database without obvious large user transactions. The customer was familiar with PostgreSQL diagnostics and wanted to understand how similar insights can be obtained in Azure SQL Database—especially around Class 2 (system) transactions. This post summarizes what we discussed, explains why Azure SQL behaves differently, and walks through <...
01/04/2026
How to revoke connection OAuth programmatically in Logic Apps
There are multiple ways to revoke the OAuth of an API Connection other than clicking on the Revoke button in the portal: For using the "Invoke an HTTP request": Get the connection name: Create a Logic App (Consumption), use a trigger of your liking, then add the “Invoke an HTTP request” A...
01/04/2026
Foundry Agents and Custom Engine Agents through the Corporate Firewall
When Foundry creates the Azure Bot for your published Agent, it Agent Blueprint and an Agent Identity.All calls to your Agent from Microsoft’s Bot Channel Adapters will have an ‘aud’ claim equal your Bot Client ID.When a Custom Engine Agent has something to say back, it doesn’t reply on the incoming HTTP connection.
01/04/2026
Azure Database Security Newsletter - April 2026
In this newsletter we highlight the importance of strong encryption for data security, and call out recent encryption, key management, and auditing enhancements designed to help you strengthen your security posture while simplifying operational management.Customer-Managed Keys in Fabric SQL DatabaseVersionless keys for Transparent Data Encryption in Azure SQL Database
01/04/2026
Hugging Face Releases TRL v1.0: A Unified Post-Training Stack for SFT, Reward Modeling, DPO, and GRPO Workflows
Hugging Face has officially released TRL (Transformer Reinforcement Learning) v1.0, marking a pivotal transition for the library from a research-oriented repository to a stable, production-ready framework. For AI professionals and developers, this release codifies the Post-Training pipeline—the essential sequence of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reward Modeling, and Alignment—into a unified, standardized API. In the early stages […] The post
01/04/2026
Agents League: Meet the Winners
Agents League brought together developers from around the world to build AI agents using Microsoft's developer tools. With 100+ submissions across three tracks, choosing winners was genuinely difficult. Today, we're proud to announce the category champions. 🎨 Creative Apps Winner: CodeSonify View project CodeSonify turns source code into music. As a genuinely thoug...
01/04/2026
Google AI Releases Veo 3.1 Lite: Giving Developers Low Cost High Speed Video Generation via The Gemini API
Google has announced the release of Veo 3.1 Lite, a new model tier within its generative video portfolio designed to address the primary bottleneck for production-scale deployments: pricing. While the generative video space has seen rapid progress in visual fidelity, the cost per second of generated content has remained high, often prohibitive for developers building […] The post
01/04/2026
Liquid AI Released LFM2.5-350M: A Compact 350M Parameter Model Trained on 28T Tokens with Scaled Reinforcement Learning
In the current landscape of generative AI, the ‘scaling laws’ have generally dictated that more parameters equal more intelligence. However, Liquid AI is challenging this convention with the release of LFM2.5-350M. This model is actually a technical case study in intelligence density with additional pre-training (from 10T to 28T tokens) and large-scale reinforcement learning The […] The post
01/04/2026
How to Add an Adaptive Card in Microsoft 365 Agent SDK
One of the most important UI capabilities is Adaptive Cards, which let your agent send structured, interactive content such as forms, inputs, buttons, and layouts.Adaptive Cards are sent in the Agent SDK using:Your bot is now fully capable of collecting structured user input using Adaptive Cards.
01/04/2026
Let's Create Our First Microsoft 365 Agent SDK using Python - For Single Tenant
I am using VS Code, so you don’t need to manually install Python on your system (unless you want to).Once done, your requirements.txt file will look like :You must expose your local bot over HTTPS.
01/04/2026
Resolving Weak SSL Ciphers in .NET Framework 4.5
Applications built on the .NET Framework 4.5 may fail to establish secure HTTPS connections or may default to outdated and insecure protocols.The most robust fix is to upgrade your application to .NET Framework 4.6, 4.7 or later, where TLS 1.2 is enabled by default.After installing the newer .NET Framework on your development or production environment, update your project’s target framework and recompile.
01/04/2026
Resolving MachineWithSameBiosIdAndFqdnAlreadyExists During Azure Migrate Mobility Agent Registration
While working on an Azure Migrate project, we encountered a failure during Mobility Agent registration with the error: <ErrorCode>MachineWithSameBiosIdAndFqdnAlreadyExists</ErrorCode> This error code is identified in C:\ProgramData\ASRSetupLogs\ASRUnifiedAgentConfigurator.log file on Source Server. This issue surfaced after a server was initially onboard...
01/04/2026
AWS to Azure Migration — From the Cloud Economics & FinOps Lens
“ROI fails when FinOps joins late.” That single pattern explains why many cloud migrations deliver technical success but financial disappointment. Workloads move. SLAs hold. Teams celebrate go‑live. Then the CFO asks: Where are the savings we modeled? In most cases, FinOps was engaged after architecture decisions were locked, licenses were double‑paid, and governance debt had already accumulated. This article frames AWS‑to‑Azure migration through a FinOps lens—not to...
01/04/2026
Windows 365 Frontline in shared mode now available in Brazil South, Italy North, and West Europe
We're pleased to announce that Windows 365 Frontline in shared mode continues its global expansion with availability in three new regions spanning Brazil and Europe.Beyond full desktop experiences, Windows 365 Frontline supports Cloud Apps delivery in shared mode.Remember: With ANC, the Azure virtual network's region determines where your Cloud PC is hosted.
31/03/2026
Partner Blog | March skilling update: The pathway to capability
March’s skilling update focuses on simplifying how you discover the right learning and progress through it with confidence. Our model is simple: discover the right pathway, then build capability through role-aligned learning, labs, and readiness experiences. This month, the Microsoft Partner Skilling Catalog is the discovery layer.LevelUp is where you go deeper with on-demand learning that supports certification prep, Project Ready execution, and pathways focused on small and medium-sized business (SMB) opportunities.
31/03/2026
Simplify troubleshooting at scale - Centralized Log Management for CycleCloud Workspace for Slurm
Training large AI models on hundreds or thousands of nodes introduces a critical operational challenge: when a distributed job fails, quickly identifying the root cause across scattered logs can become incredibly time-consuming.This is a turnkey, customizable log forwarding solution for CycleCloud Workspace for Slurm that centralizes all cluster logs into Azure Monitor Logs Analytic. The architecture uses Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) deployed on every VM and Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS) to stream logs defined by Data Collection Rules (DCR) to dedicated tables in a Log Analytics workspace where they can be queried from a single interface.The solution is purpose-built for CycleCloud Workspace for Slurm, but designed in a modular fashion to be easily extended for new data sources (i.e. new log formats) and processing (i.e. Data Collection Rules) to support log forwarding and analysis of other required logs.
31/03/2026
How Microsoft Marketplace and ecosystem partnerships are reshaping enterprise go-to-market
Author Juhi Saha is CEO at Partner1, a two-time Inc. Power Partner Award winner and an official Microsoft Partner Led Network. Partner1 helps B2B software and services companies maximize the value of their partner ecosystems and transform partnerships into scalable profit engines. Specializing in channel development and strategic alliances, Partner1 empowers organizations to unlock their partnership potential through expert guidance, partnership program design, and actionable growth strategies.Azure Managed Redis is a first-party Azure service that is becoming foundational for customers optimizing their data infrastructure for modern and agentic AI workloads.Eden and Datadog's autonomous migration service for Azure Managed Redis is now available on Microsoft Marketplace, making it easy for enterprises to get the most out of new Redis products.
31/03/2026
Agent Evaluation in Microsoft Copilot Studio is now generally available
As agents move into production, evaluations help take each build from experimentation to a reliable system. And they help answer the question that matters most in production: Can we trust this agent to behave correctly, consistently, and safely — every time? Manual testing simply can't scale to answer that question. Spot-checking responses one-by-one is slow, inconsistent, and not designed for agents that handle hundreds or thousands of interactions. Agent Evaluation in
31/03/2026
Agent Evaluation in Microsoft Copilot Studio is now generally available
Today, we are giving every maker a better way to assess agent behavior at scale—before launch and over the agent's lifecycle.Validate production readiness before launch and after every changeAgent Evaluation is built directly into Copilot Studio—there’s no separate tool to install and no integrations to configure.
31/03/2026
From Vulnerability Fatigue to Action: How SKF Operationalized MDVM with a Custom Dashboard
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations must proactively manage security risk and stay ahead of emerging threats to keep systems and data secure. However, many teams face “vulnerability fatigue”; remediation doesn’t get easier as environments grow, Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) increases, and Mean Time to Exploit continues to shrink. (References: CyberMindr, “Avera...
31/03/2026
How to Build and Evolve a Custom OpenAI Agent with A-Evolve Using Benchmarks, Skills, Memory, and Workspace Mutations
In this tutorial, we work directly with the A-Evolve framework in Colab and build a complete evolutionary agent pipeline from the ground up. We set up the repository, configure an OpenAI-powered agent, define a custom benchmark, and build our own evolution engine to see how A-Evolve actually improves an agent through iterative workspace mutations. Through […] The post
31/03/2026
The best backup is the one you never think about
Today is World Backup Day, and nobody is celebrating. That's the point. If backup is doing its job, you never think about it. My name is Gaia Carini and I've been a Product Manager on the OneDrive team for over a decade. A big part of my job has been making backup invisible. Your stuff should just be safe. New laptop, same everything I got a new personal laptop last month. I have over half a terabyte of files in my personal OneDrive. Years of tax returns, downloaded cop...
31/03/2026
The AI job boom continues: Build the skills that move business forward
Gretchen LaBelle: Copilot + Agents Learning Portfolio Manager, Global Skilling Tarek Saleh Eldin: Content Publishing Manager, Global Skilling In Part 1 of this series, The AI job boom is here. Are you ready to showcase your skills?, we ex...
31/03/2026
What’s new in Microsoft Intune – March
In a typical week, IT admins are enrolling devices, deploying apps, enforcing policies, and making a hundred small decisions that keep their organizations running. This month’s updates focus on improving the experience around daily actions, compliance visibility, and management capabilities for Apple devices and mobile apps. More ...
31/03/2026
What's New in Excel (March 2026)
Welcome to the March 2026 update. This month brings meaningful updates across Excel, including new Edit with Copilot capabilities powered by Work IQ context, expanded language support, and Claude Opus 4.6. You’ll also notice a refreshed Office Scripts UI designed to streamline your experience, along with a faster, more intuitive way to find your Excel files on the web. Excel for Windows, Mac, and web:- New Edit with Copilot capabilities- Offic...
31/03/2026
March skilling update: The pathway to capability
March’s skilling update focuses on simplifying how you discover the right learning and progress through it with confidence. Our model is simple: discover the right pathway, then build capability through role-aligned learning, labs, and readiness experiences. This month, the Microsoft Partner Skilling Catalog is the discovery layer.LevelUp is where you go deeper with on-demand learning that supports certification prep, Project Ready execution, and pathways focused on small and medium-sized business (SMB) opportunities.
31/03/2026
Continued Investment in Azure App Service
Azure App Service Premium v4 delivers higher performance and scalability on newer Azure infrastructure while preserving the fully managed PaaS experience developers rely on.Deployment workflows across Azure App Service continue to evolve, with ongoing improvements to GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, and platform tooling.Ready to build on Azure App Service?
31/03/2026
Low code solutions at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference
Ryan Cunningham, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Power Platform, will take the M365 Community Conference audience inside how work is being reimagined in the age of AI.Build your next app or AI agent with Power Platform and Copilot StudioExperience low-code solutions for yourself at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference.
31/03/2026
Partner Case study | TD SYNNEX
As a global Microsoft distributor, TD SYNNEX equips Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners and resellers with the tools, programs, and expertise they need to deliver solutions to market.In a channel where devices, cloud, and security are often sold in silos, TD SYNNEX focuses on the connective tissue—helping partners position Microsoft as an ecosystem.Partners face fragmented adoption—devices, cloud, and security aren’t connected
31/03/2026
Microsoft 365 Fundamentals certification is now retired
As part of our regular review of skilling and certification requirements, we have retired the Microsoft 365 Fundamentals certification, effective March 31, 2026. This change reflects our ongoing alignment with customer and market demand.
31/03/2026
Seamless Marketplace private offers: creation to customer use
Private offers are a core mechanism for bringing negotiated commercial terms into Microsoft Marketplace.They allow publishers and channel partners to offer negotiated pricing, flexible billing structures, and custom terms;Join us April 15 for Marketplace Partner Office Hours, where Microsoft Marketplace experts Stephanie Brice and Christine Brown walk through how to execute private offers end to end—from creation to customer purchase and activation—across direct and partner‑led selling models.
31/03/2026
A Microsoft FTE’s Reflections from MVP Summit 2026: Deep Insights & Connections
Last week, March 24 to 26, 2026, Microsoft headquarters in Redmond played host to the annual Microsoft MVP Summit.It is where real-world challenges meet engineering priorities, and where MVPs can share the voice of the user directly with the people building the future of technology at Microsoft.What truly defines the MVP Summit is the people.
31/03/2026
What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot | March 2026
Welcome to the March 2026 edition of What's new in Microsoft 365 Copilot!Audio recap in more languages for Copilot in TeamsMicrosoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat is expanding to safeguard web searches containing sensitive data.
31/03/2026
High Volume Email reaches General Availability in Exchange Online
As we discussed High Volume Email (HVE) several times since it was in Public Preview, I wanted to make you aware that Exchange Online HVE now reached General Availability (GA).The announcement was made on the Microsoft 365 Blog here:High Volume Email Is Now Available in Exchange Online
31/03/2026
Microsoft Foundry: Unlock Adaptive, Personalized Agents with User-Scoped Persistent Memory
Most AI agents today are knowledgeable — they ground responses in enterprise data sources and rely on short‑term, session‑based memory to maintain conversational coherence.in enterprise environments, it introduces legitimate concerns around privacy, data isolation, governance, and compliance — especially when multiple users interact with the same agent.In this post, I’ll walk through a practical design pattern for user‑scoped persistent memory, including a reference architecture and a deployable sample implementation that demonstrates how to apply this pattern in a real enterprise setting while preserving isolation, governance, and compliance.
31/03/2026
High Volume Email Is Now Available in Exchange Online
High Volume Email (HVE) is now generally available in Exchange Online, delivering a purpose‑built, tenant‑native way for applications and devices to send large volumes of internal email reliably, securely, and at scale without impacting user mailboxes or Exchange Online service health.Why High Volume Email (HVE)Exchange Online is optimized for person‑to‑person communication.
31/03/2026
How to integrate your product into Microsoft 365 Copilot
Additionally, the custom engine approach is ideal for ISVs that already have their own agents and want to integrate them into the Copilot UI, making it easier for customers to access and interact with these agents directly within the Microsoft 365 environment.According to Microsoft’s official publishing guidance, agents built with Copilot Studio can be published to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams and can be shared with individuals, groups, or made available through the organization’s catalog, depending on how availability is configured and how the tenant is governed.The official Microsoft 365 Copilot publishing documentation states that, today, only declarative agents built with Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit and custom engine agents built with the same toolchain support submission to the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace. - Publish Agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot - Microsoft 365 Copilot agents admin guide
31/03/2026
No code left behind: How AI streamlines Oracle-to-PostgreSQL migration
The new AI-assisted Oracle-to-PostgreSQL migration tool, available in public preview via the PostgreSQL extension for Visual Studio Code, brings automation, validation, and AI-powered migration assistance into a single, user-friendly interface.The AI-assisted Oracle to PostgreSQL migration tool dramatically simplifies moving off Oracle databases.Accessible through VS Code, the tool uses intelligent automation, powered by GitHub Copilot, to convert Oracle database schemas and PL/SQL code into PostgreSQL-compatible formats.
31/03/2026
Microsoft Purview Data Quality Thresholds: More Control, More Trust
A data quality threshold defines the minimum acceptable score for a rule to pass.Align quality scores with business riskUsers can define data quality thresholds at the data asset level to measure how suitable a dataset is for specific business use cases.
31/03/2026
What’s New in Microsoft Teams | March 2026
Copilot in Teams Phone live calls, powered by Microsoft 365 Copilot ChatThe Copilot experience in Teams Phone on desktop and mobile is fully powered by Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat for a more unified experience across Teams and the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.Huddly C1 is an AI-driven videobar designed to deliver intelligent video and audio in small and medium meeting rooms.
31/03/2026
SharePoint Showcase: How SharePoint uses AI to strengthen Work IQ’s data layer
This month’s Showcase offers four AI capabilities in SharePoint that help strengthen how Copilot and agents reason over enterprise knowledge.The SharePoint Admin Agent applies generative AI to SharePoint Advanced Management insights.Learn more: Create document library with AI - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 |
31/03/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: March 31, 2026
Learn about 126 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.Deploy the container image directly into your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster.AI-Driven Clinical Transcription: DataArt will implement its Clinical Session Transcription and Automated Medical Note Generation system, built using Microsoft AI technologies, so your psychologists and psychiatrists can effortlessly convert their therapy recordings into privacy-protected clinical notes.
31/03/2026
PostgreSQL Buffer Cache Analysis
At the heart of this memory usage lies shared_buffers—PostgreSQL’s primary buffer cache.In this post, we’ll walk you through a practical, data-driven approach to analyzing PostgreSQL buffer cache behavior using native statistics and the pg_buffercache extension.The pg_buffercache extension provides a real-time view into PostgreSQL’s shared buffers.
31/03/2026
The Durable Task Scheduler Consumption SKU is now Generally Available
Today, we're excited to announce that the Durable Task Scheduler Consumption SKU has reached General Availability.Developers can now run durable workflows and agents on Azure with pay-per-use pricing, no storage to manage, no capacity to plan, and no idle costs.In brief, the Durable Task Scheduler is a fully managed orchestration backend for durable execution on Azure, meaning your workflows and agent sessions can reliably resume and run to completion, even through process failures, restarts, and scaling events.
31/03/2026
Subscription Vending in Azure: An Implementation Overview
Subscription vending is a process that enables the creation of multiple Azure subscriptions using code, based on organizational segregation or workload-specific requirements.Subscription vending follows the concept of subscription democratization and applies it within the Azure Landing Zone (ALZ) model.Through subscription vending, multiple subscriptions can be deployed based on individual workload requirements
31/03/2026
Alibaba Qwen Team Releases Qwen3.5 Omni: A Native Multimodal Model for Text, Audio, Video, and Realtime Interaction
The landscape of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has shifted from experimental ‘wrappers’—where separate vision or audio encoders are stitched onto a text-based backbone—to native, end-to-end ‘omnimodal’ architectures.Alibaba Qwen team latest release, Qwen3.5-Omni, represents a significant milestone in this evolution.Designed as a direct competitor to flagship models like Gemini 3.1 Pro, the Qwen3.5-Omni […]
31/03/2026
VS Code Extension
Uses the VS Code Extension API to interact with the editor .generator-code – the VS Code extension generator.Install the VS Code Extension CLI: npm install -g vsce
31/03/2026
Powering Event Driven Payments with Stripe and Azure Event Grid
With the new Azure Event Grid destination for events from Stripe, developers can now route those events directly into Azure and build scalable, event-driven architectures without managing webhook infrastructure or custom brokers.Azure Event Grid acts as a fully managed event broker between Stripe and Azure services.Beyond operational workflows, Stripe events can also power real-time analytics scenarios using Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence.
31/03/2026
How Veris AI and Lume Security built a self-improving AI agent with Microsoft Foundry
We show how a high-fidelity simulation environment built by Veris AI on Microsoft Azure can expand production failures into families of realistic scenarios, generating enough targeted data to optimize agent behavior through automated context engineering and reinforcement learning, all while not regressing on any previous issue.Microsoft Foundry and Veris AI together provide Lume with a secure, repeatable control plane that makes model iteration, safety, and simulation-driven evaluation practical.Lume unifies an organization’s fragmented data sources into a security intelligence graph.
30/03/2026
Microsoft SAP Partner Community Call on Wednesday, March 25 | 8:00- 8:30 AM PST
Key HighlightsLearn how to unify SAP and non-SAP security detections in Microsoft Sentinel.Discover how to build repeatable services with typical Sentinel for SAP implementations completed in 2–4 weeks.Understand the pathway to managed SOC services that drive recurring revenue.
30/03/2026
Microsoft AI Releases Harrier-OSS-v1: A New Family of Multilingual Embedding Models Hitting SOTA on Multilingual MTEB v2
Microsoft has announced the release of Harrier-OSS-v1, a family of three multilingual text embedding models designed to provide high-quality semantic representations across a wide range of languages.The release includes three distinct scales: a 270M parameter model, a 0.6B model, and a 27B model.The Harrier-OSS-v1 models achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the Multilingual MTEB […]
30/03/2026
Accelerate connectors development using AI agent in Microsoft Sentinel
Today, we’re excited to announce the public preview of a Sentinel connector builder agent, via VS code extension, that helps developers build Microsoft Sentinel codeless connectors faster with low-code and AI-assisted prompts. This new capability brings guided workflows directly into the tooling developers already use, helping accelerate time to value as the Sentinel ecosystem continues to grow.The new Sentinel connector builder agent, using GitHub Copilot in the Sentinel VS code extension, brings more of the connector development lifecycle -- authoring, validation, testing, and deployment into a single, cohesive workflow.The Sentinel connector builder agent for Visual Studio Code is designed to help developers move from API documentation to a working codeless connector more efficiently.
30/03/2026
Production ready architectures for AI apps and agents on Marketplace
Why “production‑ready” architecture matters for Marketplace AI apps and agentsThis post focuses on the architectural principles and patterns required to meet those expectations.This post is part of a series on building and publishing well-architected AI apps and Agents on Microsoft Marketplace.
30/03/2026
Using AI Agents to Protect Services from Zero-Day Attacks
This approach helps detect suspicious activity that may indicate exploitation of unknown vulnerabilities by focusing on expected behavior.To enable this, an AI-assisted agent analyzes the application’s code, dependencies, and documentation to produce an “expected behavior” profile for a given service.By using an AI-assisted agent to derive an application’s expected behavior from its code, dependencies, and documentation, we can generate draft “good behavior” detections for human review, and pair approved rules with on-the-box, real-time monitoring to help surface potential anomalies outside those rules for analyst review.
30/03/2026
Public Preview: Ephemeral OS Disk with full caching for VM/VMSS
Today, we’re excited to announce the public preview of Ephemeral OS disk with full caching, a new feature designed to significantly enhance performance and reliability by utilizing local storage.This feature is ideal for IO-sensitive stateless workloads, as it eliminates dependency on remote storage by caching the entire OS image on local storage.With Ephemeral OS Disk with full caching, the entire OS disk image is cached on local storage, removing the dependency on remote storage for OS disk reads.
30/03/2026
Check This Out! (CTO!) Guide (March 2026)
Summary: Azure Storage Actions is a fully managed, serverless automation platform that simplifies large-scale data management in Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage.Summary: The article discusses how agentic tools, such as those in Azure Copilot and GitHub Copilot, transform cloud migration and modernization from one-time projects into ongoing, autonomous systems.Summary: The article outlines how to integrate ReFrame HPC, a flexible high-performance computing testing framework, with Azure Log Analytics for centralized performance monitoring across diverse clusters and environments.
30/03/2026
Replicating solutions to Azure: The business case, the incentives and how to get there fast
When should Azure be part of your cloud strategy and what does Microsoft offer to help you get there?Understanding when and how to replicate your solution to Azure and add it to your strategy is increasingly a GTM decision, not just an infrastructure one.Use the technical advisory included in your program to scope your replication with Microsoft.
30/03/2026
Migrating frontline mobile devices: A frontline-first approach to moving to Microsoft Intune
Why mobile frontline device migrations are differentThe operational impact of failure is higher on the frontline because frontline devices operate in very different environments to knowledge worker devices.This series will explore the areas that consistently shape successful frontline mobile migrations the steps, patterns, and design decisions that matter most in real frontline environments.
30/03/2026
Windows App Updates: Reliability, Productivity, and Security Improvements
As more organizations continue to explore Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop to support flexible work, expectations for reliability, performance, and cross‑platform consistency are rising.Windows App for Android became generally available in April of 2025, ensuring access to remote resources from Windows App across most major platforms.Starting March 27, 2026, the Remote Desktop client for Windows (MSI) and the web-based Remote Desktop client will no longer be supported in commercial clouds.
30/03/2026
Now in Foundry: NVIDIA Nemotron-3-Super-120B-A12B, IBM Granite-4.0-1b-Speech, and Sarvam-105B
This week's Model Mondays edition highlights three models now available in Hugging Face collection on Microsoft Foundry: NVIDIA's Nemotron-3-Super-120B-A12B, a hybrid Latent Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) model with 12B active parameters and context handling up to 1 million tokens;and Sarvam's Sarvam-105B, a 105B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 10.3B active parameters optimized for complex reasoning and 22 Indian languages, with comparable agentic performance compared to other larger proprietary models on web search and task-planning benchmarks.Models of the week
30/03/2026
Azure Speech – Neural HD Text to Speech: Recent Voice Updates
Neural HD Multi-Talker voices facilitate multi-speaker output within a unified voice family, thereby enhancing the efficiency of producing dynamic and immersive audio content without necessitating the management of numerous distinct voices.Neural HD Flash introduces a new class of HD voices optimized for speed and responsiveness, particularly beneficial for scenarios where low latency is essential.Starting in March 2026, Neural HD voices will be rolling out to even more locations!
30/03/2026
The moment AI skilling stopped being optional—and started being personal
AI Skills Navigator is designed for that reality.By combining structured paths with flexible ways to learn, and pairing AI support with human expertise, AI Skills Navigator helps individuals and teams build confidence, apply skills, and make progress together.AI Skills Navigator is designed to help people and teams build confidence, not by adding more noise, but by providing guidance that fits real work.
30/03/2026
Breached in 86 seconds: How AI Workloads Become Credential Dispensers
What makes AI inference pods uniquely valuable to attackers isn't just the managed identity, it's the credential density.A single compromised inference pod in a well-configured AKS cluster can surface: I presented this research live with Diwas Sedai at the Microsoft Defender Experts S.T.A.R. Forum Episode 7 on March 9 at 10AM ET. We walked through:
30/03/2026
File level archiving comes to Microsoft 365 Archive (public preview)
This new capability enables you to archive individual files moving them into a lower-cost, cold-storage tier in SharePoint.Microsoft 365 Archive helps improve Copilot results by removing archived files and sites from Copilot’s active index.File‑level archiving in Microsoft 365 Archive is now available in public preview for eligible Microsoft 365 tenants.
30/03/2026
Bidirectional Replication with pglogical on Azure Database for PostgreSQL - a VNET guide
This is a deep technical walkthrough for implementing bidirectional (active‑active) replication on private Azure Database for PostgreSQL Server using pglogical, with a strong emphasis on VNET‑injected architectures.It explains the underlying networking and execution model covering replication worker placement, DNS resolution paths, outbound connectivity, and conflict resolution mechanics to show why true private, server‑to‑server replication is only achievable with VNET injection and not with Private Endpoints.It also analyzes the operational and architectural trade‑offs needed to safely run geo distributed, multi write PostgreSQL workloads in production.
30/03/2026
Labeling Files is Worth It | Speed & Protection Benefits in Microsoft Purview
Matt McSpirit, Microsoft Mechanics expert, joins Jeremy Chapman to share how to turn scattered data into actionable security that moves as fast as your team and AI.Now to walk us through all of this, I’m joined by a Microsoft Mechanics expert, Matt McSpirit.In addition to your policy engines like DLP, it’s important to augment what you’re doing with unified data classification.
30/03/2026
How to Compute GPU Capacity for GPT Models (GPT‑4o and Later)
When deploying large language models like GPT‑4o, capacity planning is no longer about picking a GPU SKU.Instead, Azure abstracts GPU compute behind Provisioned Throughput Units (PTUs)—a model‑centric way to reason about GPU usage, throughput, and latency.This post explains how GPU capacity is computed for GPT‑4o‑class models, and how to translate your workload into the right number of PTUs.
30/03/2026
Configuring Noise Detection and Barge‑In with Azure Voice Live API
Azure Voice Live API addresses this by providing built‑in noise handling, server‑side Voice Activity Detection (VAD), and native barge‑in support—all configurable with a single session update.Voice Live performs server‑side speech detection on the incoming audio stream.Noise detection and barge‑in are configured using the session.update event, typically sent immediately after opening the Voice Live WebSocket session from client side such as ACA or Azure function.
30/03/2026
ProsperOps and Sensiple offer transactable partner solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like ProsperOps and Sensiple deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace.ProsperOps: FinOps and cloud engineering teams use ProsperOps to reduce cloud costs across Microsoft Azure compute and other resources by continuously analyzing usage and executing commitment optimizations.tryvium: An AI-powered contact center platform built on Microsoft Teams and powered by Microsoft Copilot, Sensiple tryvium helps businesses modernize engagement while maximizing investments in Microsoft 365.
30/03/2026
Introducing multi-model intelligence in Researcher
Today, Researcher—Microsoft 365 Copilot's deep research agent for work—takes a significant step forward.Designed to tackle complex research in the flow of work, Researcher now goes further with two new multi-model capabilities that raise the bar for accuracy, depth, and confidence: Critique and Council.Critique is a new multi model deep research system designed for complex research tasks.
30/03/2026
Implementing Intune RBAC and Scope Tags for Zero Trust and Least Privilege
In this guide, you’ll learn how to use Intune RBAC and Scope Tags to enforce least privilege, build clear management boundaries by region/agency/environment, and pair device compliance with Entra Conditional Access to strengthen a Zero Trust posture—plus a practical RACI approach so ownership stays clear as your environment grows.Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Intune allows organizations to delegate administrative permissions based on roles, responsibilities, and scope.Migrating Group Policy Objects from on-premises Active Directory to Microsoft Intune represents a critical transformation requiring clear ownership and phased execution.
30/03/2026
CI/CD as a Platform: Shipping Microservices and AI Agents with Reusable GitHub Actions Workflows
We introduce evaluation as a deployment gate — a reusable workflow that scores agent behavior before any deployment is allowed.We integrate with Microsoft Foundry for agent runtime and observability.This workflow builds the Docker image, tags it with the Git SHA, and pushes it to Azure Container Registry.
30/03/2026
Understanding Azure SQL Data Sync Firewall Requirements
Azure SQL Data Sync is commonly used to synchronize data between on‑premises SQL Server databases and Azure SQL Database.This blog explains why Azure SQL Data Sync requires firewall exceptions, what type of IP addresses may appear in audit logs, and how to approach this topic from a security and documentation standpoint—based on real troubleshooting discussions within the Azure SQL Data Sync ecosystem.A frequently reported issue occurs when the Azure SQL Data Sync Agent (installed on an on‑premises server) fails to save its configuration.
30/03/2026
Troubleshooting Azure SQL Data Sync Groups Stuck in Progressing State
Azure SQL Data Sync is commonly used to synchronize data across Azure SQL Databases and on‑premises SQL Server environments.While the service works well in many scenarios, customers may occasionally encounter a situation where a Sync Group remains stuck in a “Progressing” state and cannot be started, stopped, or refreshed.This blog walks through a real-world troubleshooting scenario, highlights the root cause, and outlines practical remediation steps based on actual support investigation and collaboration.
30/03/2026
Salesforce AI Research Releases VoiceAgentRAG: A Dual-Agent Memory Router that Cuts Voice RAG Retrieval Latency by 316x
In the world of voice AI, the difference between a helpful assistant and an awkward interaction is measured in milliseconds.While text-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems can afford a few seconds of ‘thinking’ time, voice agents must respond within a 200ms budget to maintain a natural conversational flow.The post Salesforce AI Research Releases VoiceAgentRAG: A Dual-Agent Memory Router that Cuts Voice RAG Retrieval Latency by 316x appeared first on MarkTechPost.
30/03/2026
Why Long-Term Retention (LTR) Backups Don’t Attach After a PITR Restore in Azure SQL Database
Customers sometimes expect that after performing a Point‑in‑Time Restore (PITR) and renaming the restored database back to its original name, existing Long‑Term Retention (LTR) backups will automatically appear and continue from where they left off.This article explains why LTR backups do not attach to restored databases, even if the database name is reused, and what customers should expect instead.However, in newer Azure SQL Database deployments, the LTR backups are not visible after the restore and rename process.
30/03/2026
From Toil to Trust: How Azure SRE Agent Is Redefining Cloud Operations
Azure SRE Agent is designed to help infrastructure and SRE teams meet this challenge by bringing AI‑assisted diagnostics and remediation directly into Azure operations.For infrastructure and SRE teams managing large Azure estates, Azure SRE Agent provides a single, agentic reliability layer that unifies observability, incident management, and delivery workflows into a governed, intent‑driven operating model.Reduced Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR): By integrating natively with Azure Monitor and Log Analytics, the agent performs deep, multi‑signal investigation and root‑cause analysis without manual query building or correlation.
30/03/2026
Building Your First Local RAG Application with Foundry Local
A developer's guide to building an offline, mobile-responsive AI support agent using Retrieval-Augmented Generation, the Foundry Local SDK, and JavaScript.Just a local language model, a local vector store, and your own documents, all accessible from a browser on any device.With Foundry Local, Node.js, and SQLite, you can create a fully offline, mobile-responsive AI agent that answers questions grounded in your own documents.
30/03/2026
Getting Started with Foundry Local: A Student Guide to the Microsoft Foundry Local Lab
If you want to start building AI applications on your own machine, the Microsoft Foundry Local Lab is one of the most useful places to begin.Foundry Local is a local runtime for downloading, managing, and serving AI models on your own hardware.Part 12: Building a Web UI for the Zava Creative Writer
30/03/2026
Gain Visibility into Cloud Browser Usage with Browser Activity Logs in Playwright Workspaces
Today, we're announcing a new feature to view the usage metrics for a browser session using the Browser Activity Logs in Playwright Workspaces.To address this, Browser Activity Logs in Playwright Workspaces provide a centralized view of every cloud browser session provisioned by Playwright Workspaces.In this post, we’ll walk through what Browser Activity Logs are, what insights they offer, and how you can access them from the Azure portal.
30/03/2026
Zero Trust for data: Make Microsoft Entra authentication for SQL your policy baseline
U.S. federal guidance has now formalized this shift: Executive Order 14028 calls for modernizing cybersecurity and accelerating Zero Trust adoption, and OMB Memorandum M-22-09 sets a federal Zero Trust strategy with specific objectives and timelines.Why database authentication is a first‑order Zero Trust controlMicrosoft Entra authentication enables users and applications to connect to SQL using enterprise identities, instead of usernames and passwords.
30/03/2026
Agent-Infra Releases AIO Sandbox: An All-in-One Runtime for AI Agents with Browser, Shell, Shared Filesystem, and MCP
In the development of autonomous agents, the technical bottleneck is shifting from model reasoning to the execution environment.While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code and multi-step plans, providing a functional and isolated environment for that code to run remains a significant infrastructure challenge.Agent-Infra’s Sandbox, an open-source project, addresses this by providing an […]
30/03/2026
How to Build Advanced Cybersecurity AI Agents with CAI Using Tools, Guardrails, Handoffs, and Multi-Agent Workflows
In this tutorial, we build and explore the CAI Cybersecurity AI Framework step by step in Colab using an OpenAI-compatible model.We begin by setting up the environment, securely loading the API key, and creating a base agent.We gradually move into more advanced capabilities such as custom function tools, multi-agent handoffs, agent orchestration, input […]
29/03/2026
Event Recap - Experts Live US - New York City
On October 10 2025, Microsoft’s Times Square office hosted Experts Live US in New York City, bringing together IT pros, developers, and community leaders for a full day of insights on Microsoft technologies, AI, and modern workplace strategies.Adam Harmetz’s Keynote: The Future of Content Management with AIAdam Harmetz, VP of PM for Collaborative Apps & Platforms at Microsoft, opened the event with a visionary keynote on modernizing SharePoint and driving the next decade of content management innovation through AI and agents.
29/03/2026
Meet A-Evolve: The PyTorch Moment For Agentic AI Systems Replacing Manual Tuning With Automated State Mutation And Self-Correction
A team of researchers associated with Amazon has released A-Evolve, a universal infrastructure designed to automate the development of autonomous AI agents.The framework aims to replace the ‘manual harness engineering’ that currently defines agent development with a systematic, automated evolution process.The project is being described as a potential ‘PyTorch moment’ for agentic AI.
29/03/2026
Chroma Releases Context-1: A 20B Agentic Search Model for Multi-Hop Retrieval, Context Management, and Scalable Synthetic Task Generation
In the current AI landscape, the ‘context window’ has become a blunt instrument.We’ve been told that if we simply expand the memory of a frontier model, the retrieval problem disappears.The post Chroma Releases Context-1: A 20B Agentic Search Model for Multi-Hop Retrieval, Context Management, and Scalable Synthetic Task Generation appeared first on MarkTechPost.
29/03/2026
Google-Agent vs Googlebot: Google Defines the Technical Boundary Between User Triggered AI Access and Search Crawling Systems Today
As Google integrates AI capabilities across its product suite, a new technical entity has surfaced in server logs: Google-Agent.For software devs, understanding this entity is critical for distinguishing between automated indexers and real-time, user-initiated requests.Unlike the autonomous crawlers that have defined the web for decades, Google-Agent operates under a different set of rules […]
29/03/2026
A Coding Guide to Exploring nanobot’s Full Agent Pipeline, from Wiring Up Tools and Memory to Skills, Subagents, and Cron Scheduling
In this tutorial, we take a deep dive into nanobot, the ultra-lightweight personal AI agent framework from HKUDS that packs full agent capabilities into roughly 4,000 lines of Python.Rather than simply installing and running it out of the box, we crack open the hood and manually recreate each of its core subsystems, the agent […]The post A Coding Guide to Exploring nanobot’s Full Agent Pipeline, from Wiring Up Tools and Memory to Skills, Subagents, and Cron Scheduling appeared first on MarkTechPost.
29/03/2026
Mistral AI Releases Voxtral TTS: A 4B Open-Weight Streaming Speech Model for Low-Latency Multilingual Voice Generation
Mistral AI has released Voxtral TTS, an open-weight text-to-speech model that marks the company’s first major move into audio generation.Following the release of its transcription and language models, Mistral is now providing the final ‘output layer’ of the audio stack, positioning itself as a direct competitor to proprietary voice APIs in the developer ecosystem.The post Mistral AI Releases Voxtral TTS: A 4B Open-Weight Streaming Speech Model for Low-Latency Multilingual Voice Generation appeared first on MarkTechPost.
28/03/2026
NVIDIA AI Unveils ProRL Agent: A Decoupled Rollout-as-a-Service Infrastructure for Reinforcement Learning of Multi-Turn LLM Agents at Scale
NVIDIA researchers introduced ProRL AGENT, a scalable infrastructure designed for reinforcement learning (RL) training of multi-turn LLM agents.By adopting a ‘Rollout-as-a-Service’ philosophy, the system decouples agentic rollout orchestration from the training loop.This architectural shift addresses the inherent resource conflicts between I/O-intensive environment interactions and GPU-intensive policy updates that currently bottleneck agent development.
28/03/2026
Autonomous Self-Healing for Azure VMware Solution Private Clouds
Azure VMware Solution operates a global fleet of production private clouds, each running a full VMware NSX and vCenter Server control plane.Azure VMware Solution Private Cloud Autonomous Self-Healing system is a closed-loop control architecture built to address this class of failure directly.Rohan Bhosle is a Principal Software Engineering Manager within Microsoft Azure with more than 19+ years of experience leading deeply technical work in hyperscale cloud networking, distributed control planes, and large-scale AI infrastructure.
27/03/2026
Title Plan Update - March 27, 2026
📁March 27, 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.
27/03/2026
Action required: Windows Kerberos hardening (RC4) may affect FSLogix profiles on SMB storage
Beginning with the April 2026 Windows cumulative update, Kerberos default behavior changes: when an Active Directory object’s encryption type is not explicitly set (null), Windows will default to AES-SHA1 instead of legacy defaults that often resulted in RC4.This may impact FSLogix customers (Azure Virtual Desktop and non-AVD) when FSLogix profile storage depends on SMB file shares integrated with Active Directory.April 2026: Enforcement Phase with manual rollback: Default Kerberos behavior changes so domain controllers use AES‑SHA1-only encryption for accounts without explicit encryption type settings, and Enforcement mode is enabled by default on Windows domain controllers.
27/03/2026
An Implementation of IWE’s Context Bridge as an AI-Powered Knowledge Graph with Agentic RAG, OpenAI Function Calling, and Graph Traversal
In this tutorial, we implement IWE: an open-source, Rust-powered personal knowledge management system that treats markdown notes as a navigable knowledge graph.We build a realistic developer knowledge base from scratch, wire up wiki-links and markdown links into a directed graph, and then walk through […]The post An Implementation of IWE’s Context Bridge as an AI-Powered Knowledge Graph with Agentic RAG, OpenAI Function Calling, and Graph Traversal appeared first on MarkTechPost.
27/03/2026
What AI Agents for Modernization Look Like in Practice
AI agents are helping teams unravel the modernization maze.GitHub Copilot modernization helps solve the problem of having to sort through several applications to modernize.GitHub Copilot modernization helps teams upgrade .NET projects and migrate them to Azure.
27/03/2026
openJiuwen Community Releases ‘JiuwenClaw’: A Self Evolving AI Agent for Task Management
Over the past year, AI agents have evolved from merely answering questions to attempting to get real tasks done.However, a significant bottleneck has emerged: while most agents may appear intelligent during a conversation, they often ‘drop the ball’ when it comes to executing real-world tasks.The post openJiuwen Community Releases ‘JiuwenClaw’: A Self Evolving AI Agent for Task Management appeared first on MarkTechPost.
27/03/2026
Explore updated performance requirements for the SMB Management specialization
Microsoft is updating performance criteria for the Small and Midsize Business (SMB) Management specialization to better align with how partners go to market.Starting March 27, 2026, we're reducing the monthly active user (MAU) growth requirement from 35% to 15% and increasing the deployment requirement from 10 to 15 deployments.The revised criteria, which are based on partner feedback, emphasize new customer deployments while maintaining a focus on overall performance.
27/03/2026
Explore curated Microsoft Partner Digital Skilling Journeys
Explore Microsoft Partner Digital Skilling Journeys (PDJs), curated presales, sales, and tech skilling experiences designed to enhance your knowledge aligned with partner strategic wins. First-time users may need to register—use your work email credentials to sign up. Curated journeys include: These journeys are tailored to your interests, needs, and role within your organization.Select the link relevant to the journey you're interested in, register today on the Skilling Hub using your organizational login, answer a few questions, and you'll receive tech and sales-ready skilling experiences customized to your interests and goals.
27/03/2026
Microsoft SharePoint Turns 25!
Today, it powers collaboration for organizations of all sizes and supports more than 1 billion users each year, with over 2 billion files uploaded and 2 million SharePoint sites created every day.As SharePoint turns 25, we’re taking a moment to look back at how far it’s come and share a preview of what’s ahead.From its earliest days as a portal and team collaboration product to today’s AI‑powered knowledge platform, SharePoint has evolved alongside the way we work.
27/03/2026
Shared Data and Collective Resolve Are Advancing ALS Research
That call helped spark the founding of Answer ALS, a nonprofit organization dedicated to understanding ALS at unprecedented depth.Today, that collaboration continues through Neuromine, the world’s largest ALS research hub, built in collaboration with Microsoft and powered by Microsoft Azure.Neuromine brings together anonymized biological and clinical data from more than 2,500 individuals who have chosen to share their information to accelerate progress.
27/03/2026
Crawl, Walk, Run: A Practitioner's Guide to AI Maturity in the SOC
Cloud Security Alliance research found that 38% of employees share confidential data with AI platforms without approval.The OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications (released December 2025) catalogs threats including agent goal hijacking, tool misuse, privilege abuse, memory poisoning, and cascading failures across multi-agent systems.Gartner projects that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027 due to unclear value or inadequate controls.
27/03/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: March 27, 2026
Learn about 282 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
27/03/2026
LlamaAgents Builder: From Prompt to Deployed AI Agent in Minutes
Creating an AI agent for tasks like analyzing and processing documents autonomously used to require hours of near-endless configuration, code orchestration, and deployment battles.
27/03/2026
Building the agentic future together at JDConf 2026
JDConf 2026 is just weeks away, and I’m excited to welcome Java developers, architects, and engineering leaders from around the world for two days of learning and connection.Now in its sixth year, JDConf has become a place where the Java community compares notes on their real-world production experience: patterns, tooling, and hard-earned lessons you can take back to your team, while we keep moving the Java systems that run businesses and services forward in the AI era.JDConf is built for community learning—free to attend, accessible worldwide, and designed for an interactive live experience in three time zones.
27/03/2026
Invoke SSIS Package Activity in Microsoft Fabric (Preview)
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) has been a cornerstone of enterprise data integration for decades, powering mission-critical ETL workloads across thousands of organizations worldwide.Now Invoke SSIS Package activity (Preview) in Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric, brings the power of your existing SSIS investments directly into Fabric's unified SaaS analytics platform.But the Invoke SSIS Package pipeline activity in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory changes this.
27/03/2026
Unit Testing Helm Charts with Terratest: A Pattern Guide for Type-Safe Validation
In this post, we'll walk through a better way: a render-and-assert approach to unit testing Helm charts using Terratest and Go.The result? Type-safe, automated tests that run locally in seconds with no cluster required.Through applying this approach across multiple charts, we've identified 16 test patterns that consistently catch real bugs.
27/03/2026
Building an Offline AI Interview Coach with Foundry Local, RAG, and SQLite
How to build a 100% offline, AI-powered interview preparation tool using Microsoft Foundry Local, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and nothing but JavaScript.Interview Doctor's web UI, a polished, dark-themed interface running entirely on your local machine.In this post, I'll walk you through how I built an interview prep tool as a fully offline JavaScript application using:
27/03/2026
Meta Releases TRIBE v2: A Brain Encoding Model That Predicts fMRI Responses Across Video, Audio, and Text Stimuli
Researchers typically map specific cognitive functions to isolated brain regions—like motion to area V5 or faces to the fusiform gyrus—using models tailored to narrow experimental paradigms.While this has provided deep insights, the resulting landscape is fragmented, lacking a unified framework to explain how the […]The post Meta Releases TRIBE v2: A Brain Encoding Model That Predicts fMRI Responses Across Video, Audio, and Text Stimuli appeared first on MarkTechPost.
27/03/2026
Google Releases Gemini 3.1 Flash Live: A Real-Time Multimodal Voice Model for Low-Latency Audio, Video, and Tool Use for AI Agents
Google has released Gemini 3.1 Flash Live in preview for developers through the Gemini Live API in Google AI Studio.This model targets low-latency, more natural, and more reliable real-time voice interactions, serving as Google’s ‘highest-quality audio and speech model to date.’ By natively processing multimodal streams, the release provides a technical foundation for building […]The post Google Releases Gemini 3.1 Flash Live: A Real-Time Multimodal Voice Model for Low-Latency Audio, Video, and Tool Use for AI Agents appeared first on MarkTechPost.
27/03/2026
Azure Maps Adds Support to Private Endpoints (Preview)
Today, we’re announcing the Public Preview of private endpoint support for Azure Maps, bringing enterprise-grade network isolation and data privacy to your location-aware applications.With Azure Private Link, your applications can connect to Azure Maps over a private IP inside your virtual network, keeping traffic on the Microsoft backbone network instead of the public internet.Creating a Private Endpoint for your Azure Maps account
27/03/2026
Women’s History Millennia in Action: Community, Courage, and Collective Power 💜✨
Our recent MGCI General Session was one of those moments that reminds you exactly why community matters.This wasn’t just a conversation about women in tech.This isn’t just Women’s History Month.It’s Women’s History Millennia.
27/03/2026
A Coding Implementation to Run Qwen3.5 Reasoning Models Distilled with Claude-Style Thinking Using GGUF and 4-Bit Quantization
In this tutorial, we work directly with Qwen3.5 models distilled with Claude-style reasoning and set up a Colab pipeline that lets us switch between a 27B GGUF variant and a lightweight 2B 4-bit version with a single flag.We start by validating GPU availability, then conditionally install either llama.cpp or transformers with bitsandbytes, depending on […]The post A Coding Implementation to Run Qwen3.5 Reasoning Models Distilled with Claude-Style Thinking Using GGUF and 4-Bit Quantization appeared first on MarkTechPost.
26/03/2026
From access to adoption: Unlock the power of Microsoft 365
That is why you are invited to join us at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, where you can connect with Microsoft leaders, product experts, and peers to drive adoption forward and deliver business results.Rolling out Microsoft 365 is only the beginning.Real success happens when people understand the value, adopt new ways of working, and feel confident using the tools every day.That’s why Adoption and Change Management sessions are a cornerstone of the Microsoft 365 Community Conference.At the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, adoption sessions go beyond theory.
26/03/2026
From Manual Vetting to Continuous Trust: Automating Publisher Screening with AI
Why publisher screening is suddenly a software supply chain problemAt Microsoft, Trust & Security Services runs automated publisher screening and continuous monitoring to help protect Microsoft-operated marketplaces and programs—as well as Microsoft more broadly—from fraudulent or compromised publishers.The approach we employ in Trust & Security Services is an automated, AI-driven system that evaluates trust at two points: during onboarding and after approval as new evidence emerges.
26/03/2026
Introducing Skills in Azure API Center
A Skill in Azure API Center is a reusable, registered capability that AI agents can discover and consume to extend their functionality.Think of skills as the building blocks of AI agent behavior, promoted into a governed inventory alongside your APIs, MCP servers, models, and agents.For teams managing skills in source control, API Center can integrate directly with a Git repository and synchronize skill information automatically.
26/03/2026
Secure AI Workloads in Azure: Join Our Next Azure Decoded Session on April 8th
In our next Azure Decoded session, we’ll focus on securing AI workloads in Azure with Microsoft Defender for Cloud.We’ll walk through where Microsoft Defender for Cloud fits into an end-to-end AI security strategy—and how discovery, posture management, and runtime protection work together to secure AI workloads built on Azure.The Microsoft Applied Skills credential, Secure AI Solutions in the Cloud, is a great next step after the Azure Decoded session.
26/03/2026
listent for macOS, ZoomIt, Sysmon, DebugView, NotMyFault, Procmon for Linux, and RAMMap
listent is a macOS command-line tool to discover and list code signing entitlements for executable binaries.This update to Sysmon, an advanced host security monitoring tool, improves the handling of the internal events queue, making the service more resilient to dropped events on high system load.Process Monitor for Linux, a convenient and efficient way for developers to trace the syscall activity on the system, updates to dependencies.
26/03/2026
PostgreSQL Query Rewriting and Subqueries
By rewriting queries in more optimizer‑friendly forms, we can drastically reduce the amount of data scanned, improve join efficiency, eliminate redundant operations, and enable PostgreSQL to choose faster, more scalable execution paths.The scenarios in this document demonstrate how simple transformations—such as replacing joins with semi‑joins, pre‑aggregating large tables, or converting correlated subqueries into set‑based joins—allow PostgreSQL to leverage more efficient physical operators and achieve significant performance gains.This document explains common PostgreSQL scenarios, where rewriting a query into a subquery (or rewriting a subquery into a different form) can significantly improve performance.
26/03/2026
Evolving Identity Security: How the Conditional Access Optimization Agent Helps You Adapt
With this latest set of enhancements, the Conditional Access Optimization Agent moves beyond static guidance to continuous, context-aware identity posture optimization.The agent now understands your organization’s business context, surfaces gaps that manual reviews miss, helps you act on insights safely, and proves the impact of your improvements—all as part of a new operating model for identity security.With context-aware policy recommendations, you can upload internal documentation directly to the agent.
26/03/2026
Copy dashboards from Dashboards with Grafana to Azure Managed Grafana
Azure Monitor Dashboards with Grafana provides an in‑portal Grafana experience optimized for Azure Monitor and managed Prometheus data.Customers can now copy dashboards from Dashboards with Grafana into Azure Managed Grafana directly from the Azure portal—without changing the original dashboard.Select “Copy to Managed Grafana” from your dashboard in Dashboards with Grafana.
26/03/2026
Windows 365 Frontline in shared mode expands to New Zealand North, Mexico Central, and Europe
We're excited to announce that Windows 365 Frontline in shared mode is now available in five new regions, expanding our global footprint and bringing Cloud PCs closer to organizations across Australasia, Central America and Europe.Starting today, customers can deploy Windows 365 Frontline shared mode Cloud PCs in:Remember: With ANC, the Azure virtual network's region determines where your Cloud PC is hosted.
26/03/2026
Four Best Practices for Leading Through AI Adoption
Microsoft refers to this broader shift as Frontier Transformation, where AI becomes a strategic priority and changes how intelligence operates inside the organization, not just which tools people use.Reframe: recognizing that AI is not just another tool rollout, but a shift in how work is structured, how decisions are made, and where intelligence shows up across the business.1. Reframing how to think about AI in the organization
26/03/2026
Advancing Windows driver security: Removing trust for the cross-signed driver program
This update will help protect our customers by ensuring that only kernel drivers that the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP) have passed and been signed can be loaded by default. To raise the bar for platform security, Microsoft will maintain an explicit allow list of reputable drivers signed by the cross-signed program. The allow list ensures a secure and compatible experience for a limited number of widely used, and reputable cross-signed drivers.This new kernel trust policy applies to systems running Windows 11 24H2, Windows 11 25H2, Windows 11 26H1, and Windows Server 2025 in the April 2026 Windows update.All future versions of Windows 11 and Windows Server will enforce the new kernel trust policy. This update continues a long sequence of changes Microsoft has taken over the years to reduce the attack surface on Windows and reinforces our commitment to safeguarding customers. Drivers are a critical part of the Windows ecosystem, and ensuring their integrity is essential to providing a secure and trustworthy environment.
26/03/2026
Announcing the Microsoft Copilot Connector v2 for Veeva Vault
Preview expected June 2026 This release represents the next evolution of Microsoft’s connector for Veeva Vault and introduces two foundational upgrades—incremental crawling for faster content refresh and tight integration with Veeva’s Direct Data API—plus a standardized Graph Connector Agent (GCA) model across all current and future Copilot connector applications.The Microsoft Copilot Connector v2 for Veeva Vault release is targeted for Q2 2026, with preview expected in June 2026 and general availability to follow validation and customer feedback.
26/03/2026
Assess Azure DDoS Protection Status Across Your Environment
The Check-DDoSProtection.ps1 script provides a full view of DDoS Protection status across your Azure environment.Explanation: The Application Gateway’s Public IP inherits protection from the VNET which has a DDoS Protection Plan attached.This guide covered how to use the Check-DDoSProtection.ps1 script to identify unprotected Public IP addresses, determine which DDoS SKU (Network Protection vs. IP Protection) is in use, verify diagnostic logging configuration, and assess risk levels across all subscriptions.
26/03/2026
Cohere AI Releases Cohere Transcribe: A SOTA Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Model Powering Enterprise Speech Intelligence
In the landscape of enterprise AI, the bridge between unstructured audio and actionable text has often been a bottleneck of proprietary APIs and complex cascaded pipelines.Today, Cohere—a company traditionally known for its text-generation and embedding models—has officially stepped into the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) market with the release of their latest model ‘Cohere Transcribe‘.The post Cohere AI Releases Cohere Transcribe: A SOTA Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Model Powering Enterprise Speech Intelligence appeared first on MarkTechPost.
26/03/2026
Vector Databases Explained in 3 Levels of Difficulty
Traditional databases answer a well-defined question: does the record matching these criteria exist?
26/03/2026
AI apps and agents: choosing your Marketplace offer type
Choosing your Marketplace offer type is one of the earliest—and most consequential—decisions you’ll make when preparing an AI app for Microsoft Marketplace.It defines the operating model of your AI app on Marketplace:This includes designing an architecture that aligns with your delivery model, establishing clear security and compliance boundaries, and preparing the operational foundations required to run, update, and scale your AI app or agent confidently in customer environments.
26/03/2026
Data Security Investigations in Microsoft Purview
Today we’re going to show you how the now generally available Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations, or DSI, dramatically accelerates that process using AI to read and analyze and connect the dots fast at massive scale.In DSI, that level of insight comes from hybrid vector search and generative AI working together.While Microsoft Purview DLP protects credentials in real time as files are created or shared, the Data Security Posture Agent powered by Security Copilot helps security teams identify and prioritize credential-related risks across scope data allocations.
26/03/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: March 26, 2026
Learn about 236 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.1-Degree Referral Intake for Home Health and Hospice: 1-Degree – Referral Intake automates referral processing by capturing, extracting, and integrating data into electronic health record (EHR) systems.Sales Oracle: Sales Oracle is an AI-powered price intelligence and sales forecasting tool that deploys natively into your Microsoft Azure environment.
26/03/2026
Copilot Notebooks: Enhancements to support creation, collaboration and learning
Create documents and presentations from your notebookCreate documents and presentations directly from your notebook with Word and PowerPoint agents that use references already in your workspace.Share Copilot Notebooks with individuals and groups
26/03/2026
Azure SQL Hyperscale: Understanding PITR Retention vs Azure Portal Restore UI
Customers using Azure SQL Database – Hyperscale may sometimes notice a discrepancy between the configured Point-in-Time Restore (PITR) retention period and what the Azure Portal displays as available restore points.And the restore UI may allow selecting dates earlier than the configured retention window without immediately showing an error.Azure SQL Hyperscale continues to provide robust, reliable backup and restore capabilities, even when the Azure Portal UI does not fully reflect the underlying state.
26/03/2026
Guardrails for Generative AI: Securing Developer Workflows
Generative AI is revolutionizing software development that accelerates delivery but introduces compliance and security risks if unchecked.Unchecked AI‑assisted development can lead to security vulnerabilities, data leakage, compliance violations, and ethical concerns.In this blog, we explore how to embed responsible AI guardrails directly into developer workflows using:
26/03/2026
Tencent AI Open Sources Covo-Audio: A 7B Speech Language Model and Inference Pipeline for Real-Time Audio Conversations and Reasoning
Tencent AI Lab has released Covo-Audio, a 7B-parameter end-to-end Large Audio Language Model (LALM).The model is designed to unify speech processing and language intelligence by directly processing continuous audio inputs and generating audio outputs within a single architecture.The post Tencent AI Open Sources Covo-Audio: A 7B Speech Language Model and Inference Pipeline for Real-Time Audio Conversations and Reasoning appeared first on MarkTechPost.
26/03/2026
Langchain Multi-Agent Systems with Microsoft Agent Framework and Hosted Agents
This post walks through how to combine LangChain with the Microsoft Agent Framework (azure-ai-agents) and deploy the result as a Microsoft Foundry Hosted Agent.We will build a multi-agent incident triage copilot that uses LangChain locally and seamlessly upgrades to cloud-hosted capabilities on Microsoft Foundry.Every agent should work locally with LangChain tools and on Foundry with the Microsoft Agent Framework.
26/03/2026
Build an Offline Hybrid RAG Stack with ONNX and Foundry Local
This sample shows a more practical pattern: combine lexical retrieval, ONNX based semantic embeddings, and a Foundry Local chat model so the assistant stays grounded, remains offline, and degrades cleanly when the semantic path is unavailable.This repository keeps the original lexical retrieval path, adds local ONNX embeddings for semantic search, and fuses both signals in a hybrid ranking mode.To run the sample, you need Node.js 20 or newer, Foundry Local, and a local ONNX embedding model.
26/03/2026
Announcing the winners of the SharePoint Hackathon 2026
We are excited to announce the winners of the SharePoint Hackathon 2026.SharePoint Hackathon was a two week long online event with 6 live streams.Most beautiful Intranet home page
26/03/2026
Shared Agent Context: How We Are Tackling Partner Agent Collaboration
The two agents talk to each other using protocols like MCP or directly via an API endpoint and come up with a remediation.Your cloud monitoring agent doesn't have access to your third-party observability stack.In this system the primary agent owns the full incident lifecycle: detection, triage, investigation, remediation, closure.
26/03/2026
How to Build a Vision-Guided Web AI Agent with MolmoWeb-4B Using Multimodal Reasoning and Action Prediction
In this tutorial, we explore MolmoWeb, Ai2’s open multimodal web agent that understands and interacts with websites directly from screenshots, without relying on HTML or DOM parsing.We set up the full environment in Colab, load the MolmoWeb-4B model with efficient 4-bit quantization, and build the exact prompting workflow that lets the model reason about […]The post How to Build a Vision-Guided Web AI Agent with MolmoWeb-4B Using Multimodal Reasoning and Action Prediction appeared first on MarkTechPost.
25/03/2026
"No-Ops" Kafka Experience: Why Event Hubs is Your Default Destination for Streaming on Azure
Event Hubs is the native, cloud-scale engine designed to be your default streaming destination.One-Click Archival: Use Event Hubs Capture to automatically batch and move streaming data into Azure Data Lake Storage for long-term cold storage or batch processing.Azure Event Hubs provides the reliability of a battle-tested cloud-native engine with the familiarity of the Apache Kafka® ecosystem.
25/03/2026
PowerPoint: Edit with Copilot, Brand Kit and Image Gen: Overview + demo- March 2026 M365 Champions Community call
Here’s a recap and top Q+A from our March M365 Champions monthly call of 2026, featuring PowerPoint: Edit with Copilot, Brand Kit and Image Gen with Anubhav Nigam and Khaleel Amarshi from the PowerPoint product team. Anubhav and Khaleel led the main sessions with a deep dive into what’s new in PowerPoint with Copilot, highlighting how presentation creation and editing are becoming significantly more intelligent and intuitive.Create and manage official Brand kits in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app - Microsoft Support
25/03/2026
Automate Data Security Triage & Posture | Agents in Microsoft Purview
Identify hidden passwords, API keys, and credentials buried in files with the Data Security Posture Agent credential scanning capability. Check it out.In the next few minutes, I’ll show you how to rapidly identify and reduce your data risks as information flows across more apps, agents, and workflows than ever using the power and speed of AI itself.So using the Data Security Triage Agent for Insider Risk saves time from manual investigations.
25/03/2026
AI apps and agents: choosing your Marketplace offer type
Choosing your Marketplace offer type is one of the earliest—and most consequential—decisions you’ll make when preparing an AI app for Microsoft Marketplace.It defines the operating model of your AI app on Marketplace:This includes designing an architecture that aligns with your delivery model, establishing clear security and compliance boundaries, and preparing the operational foundations required to run, update, and scale your AI app or agent confidently in customer environments.
25/03/2026
Preparing the Nonprofit Sector for the Next Era of Impact
As thousands of nonprofit leaders gather for Microsoft’s Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit, one theme is rising to the surface: nonprofits are ready to lead the next wave of AI transformation.To support this momentum, Microsoft is launching Elevate for Changemakers, a new initiative designed to help nonprofit professionals build the skills, confidence, and strategic capacity needed to guide responsible AI adoption.What Elevate for Changemakers Offers
25/03/2026
Redefining Database Maintenance after Migrating from Db2 on Mainframe to Azure SQL DB Hyperscale
Migrating from Db2 z/OS to Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is a major step toward modernizing your mainframe relational data infrastructure to Azure Data SQL managed relational database offering.In this post, to make migration easier we have provided the recommended mapping between Db2 zOS maintenance and Azure SQL DB Hyperscale maintenance tasks that shows:Automating Azure SQL DB index and statistics maintenance using Azure Automation : link
25/03/2026
Azure Managed Redis & Azure Databricks: Real-time Feature Serving for Low-Latency Decisions
Modern decisioning systems, fraud scoring, payments authorization, personalization, and step-up authentication, must return answers in tens of milliseconds while still reflecting the most recent behavior.This guide shows a pattern that keeps Azure Databricks as the primary system for building and maintaining features, while using Azure Managed Redis as the online speed layer that serves those features at memory speed for real-time scoring.The result is a shorter and more predictable critical path for your application: the Payment API (or any online service) reads features from Azure Managed Redis and calls a model endpoint;
25/03/2026
Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance: Secure and Manage Multi-Tenant Environments at Scale
Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance addresses this challenge by providing a centralized, risk-informed way to discover, govern, and continuously secure all related tenants—without relying on custom scripts or fragmented administrative models.From small tenant estates to large enterprises, Entra Tenant Governance enables least-privilege access, enforces configuration baselines, and maintains continuous visibility from a single control plane.Built on Microsoft’s own experience securing a large and complex tenant estate, Entra Tenant Governance is designed to make tenant relationships visible, governance enforceable, and security posture continuously verifiable—at scale.
25/03/2026
Microsoft 365 Copilot app learning series: Real‑world scenarios for your workday
That’s why we’re excited to introduce a new training video series designed to help you get started with the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, one step at a time.Run more focused meetings with Facilitator Agent in Microsoft TeamsLearn how to catch up with Microsoft 365 Copilot
25/03/2026
Advice for Startups: Build Without Waiting with Replit
For teams in the Microsoft Imagine Cup, that time matters.During the Builder Series, Horacio Lopez from Replit walked through how founders can move from idea to product faster, sharing a build approach centered on starting immediately and learning along the way.Early-stage founders often wait longer than they need to. They look for the right tools, the right language, or the right structure before taking action.
25/03/2026
Aspire on Azure App Service is now Generally Available
Today we are announcing General Availability of Aspire on Azure App Service, making it easier to take distributed applications from local development to a fully managed production environment on Azure App Service.With the Aspire.Hosting.Azure.AppService package, you can define your hosting environment in code and deploy to App Service using the same AppHost model you already use for orchestration.Aspire brings a code-first model for building, running, and deploying distributed applications, with AppHost as the place where services, dependencies, and topology are declared.
25/03/2026
5 Practical Techniques to Detect and Mitigate LLM Hallucinations Beyond Prompt Engineering
My friend who is a developer once asked an LLM to generate documentation for a payment API.
25/03/2026
Sulava – tekoälyä organisaatioiden arkeen rohkeus, uteliaisuus ja yhteistyö edellä
Sulava on tukenut muun muassa Copilot Adoption Service- ja Copilot Essentials -palveluillaan jo yli 2 400 organisaatiota ympäri maailmaa heidän matkallaan siinä, kuinka työelämä muuttuu, henkilöstö hyödyntää tekoälyä, kuinka tietoturvan ja tiedon suojauksen toimenpiteet varmistavat tekoälyn turvallisen käytön ja miten agentit muovaavat organisaatioita uudelleen.Sulavan kanssa tekoälyä eturintamassa hyödyntävien Frontier Firm -kärkiorganisaatioiden menestyksen taustalla on vahva johdon ymmärrys muutoksen laajuuteen, sen mahdollistaminen, rohkeus kokeilla uutta ja varmistaa henkilöstön osaaminen.Hyödyt näkyvät muun muassa tuottavuudessa, uusissa liiketoimintamahdollisuuksissa ja työn merkityksellisyydessä.
25/03/2026
🚀GitHub Copilot CLI: AI Assistance from the Command Line for Infrastructure Deployments
GitHub Copilot CLI is an AI-powered assistant that runs directly inside your terminal.Instead of manually writing commands, scripts, or debugging issues, you can simply describe what you want — and Copilot executes it.A POC for storage account with private endpoints:We simply enter a prompt to create the storage account; it will take all the details from its custom instructions file and generate a .sh file to execute the relevant cmds for the resource creation.
25/03/2026
Vibe Coding XR: Accelerating AI + XR prototyping with XR Blocks and Gemini
Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization
25/03/2026
NVIDIA AI Introduces PivotRL: A New AI Framework Achieving High Agentic Accuracy With 4x Fewer Rollout Turns Efficiently
Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) for long-horizon agentic tasks—such as software engineering, web browsing, and complex tool use—presents a persistent trade-off between computational efficiency and model generalization.While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is computationally inexpensive, it frequently suffers from out-of-domain (OOD) performance degradation and struggles to generalize beyond its training distribution.Conversely, end-to-end reinforcement learning (E2E […]
25/03/2026
Google Introduces TurboQuant: A New Compression Algorithm that Reduces LLM Key-Value Cache Memory by 6x and Delivers Up to 8x Speedup, All with Zero Accuracy Loss
The scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by memory communication overhead between High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and SRAM.Specifically, the Key-Value (KV) cache size scales with both model dimensions and context length, creating a significant bottleneck for long-context inference.Google research team has proposed TurboQuant, a data-oblivious quantization framework designed to achieve near-optimal […]
25/03/2026
Microsoft Foundry Labs: A Practical Fast Lane from Research to Real Developer Work
Microsoft Foundry Labs is a place to explore early-stage experiments and prototypes from Microsoft, with an explicit focus on research-driven innovation.The announcement adds the operating idea: Labs is a single access point for developers to experiment with new models from Microsoft, explore frameworks, and share feedback.It is a developer-facing exploration surface for projects that are still close to research: models, agent systems, UX ideas, and tool experiments.
25/03/2026
Vectorless Reasoning-Based RAG: A New Approach to Retrieval-Augmented Generation
A new paradigm called Vectorless Reasoning-Based RAG is emerging to address these challenges.One framework enabling this approach is PageIndex, an open-source document indexing system that organizes documents into a hierarchical tree structure and allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform reasoning-based retrieval over that structure.Implementing Vectorless RAG with Azure AI Foundry
25/03/2026
🚀 Securing Enterprise AI: From Red Teaming to Risk Cards and Azure Guardrails
AI is not just another application layer—it’s a new attack surface.👉 Red Teaming = intentionally trying to break your AI system using prompts🔷 Secure AI Reference Architecture
25/03/2026
Your guide to the Microsoft 365 Community Conference
Register now and save your spot for the chance to ask questions and share feedback with hundreds of Microsoft executives, engineers, and product leaders. By making your voice heard, your feedback will help shape the technologies ...
25/03/2026
Rack-Local Reads in Storage Spaces Direct Campus Cluster / Rack Aware Cluster
With Windows Server 2025, Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) expanded its resiliency capabilities with support for Campus Clusters, allowing Failover Cluster deployments to span racks, chassis, and even sites using explicit fault‑tolerance domains.Building on that foundation, Windows Server 2025 introduces Rack‑Local Reads, a new optimization that allows S2D to use the cluster topology during read selection, ensuring mirrored reads are served from the closest healthy copy whenever possible.By incorporating topology awareness into the read path, Rack‑Local Reads keep steady‑state read traffic local whenever a healthy copy is available.
25/03/2026
Hyperscale Azure SQL database shrink process- Tips & Tricks
The shrink operation was aborted because a page to be moved by shrink is in use by an active transaction on the primary replica or on one or more secondary replicas. Retry shrink later. The following best practices are recommended when performing shrink operations on large Azure SQL Database Hyperscale databases: Shrink for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is now generally available |
25/03/2026
Women are leading the future of intelligent work at Microsoft 365 Community Conference
At the Microsoft 365 Community Conference this April 21–23 in Orlando, we’re proud to spotlight a range of experiences created to support, connect, and celebrate women across the tech community—from leadership panels and networking opportunities to professional development sessions designed to help you grow your impact and your career.Join us for the Women in Tech & Allies Lunch on Wednesday, April 22 sponsored by AvePoint and explore Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Professional Development sessions throughout the week.Be sure to register for the conference so you can dive into all of these activations onsite!A big thank you to the women on the Microsoft 365 Community Conference Community Content Committee, Susan Hanley, Martina Grom who worked on the community session selection for the show.Women in Tech & Allies Lunch
24/03/2026
Children International: Turning time saved into lives changed
What happens when a nonprofit gives hours back to its people?Children International is using AI to reduce administrative work and reinvest that time into children, families, and communities.The impact is already clear — in Colombia, participation in educational programs rose from 33% to 95%.
24/03/2026
Paged Attention in Large Language Models LLMs
When running LLMs at scale, the real limitation is GPU memory rather than compute, mainly because each request requires a KV cache to store token-level data.In traditional setups, a large fixed memory block is reserved per request based on the maximum sequence length, which leads to significant unused space and limits concurrency.The post Paged Attention in Large Language Models LLMs appeared first on MarkTechPost.
24/03/2026
A Coding Implementation to Design Self-Evolving Skill Engine with OpenSpace for Skill Learning, Token Efficiency, and Collective Intelligence
In this tutorial, we explore OpenSpace, a self-evolving skill engine developed by HKUDS that makes AI agents smarter, more cost-efficient, and capable of learning from every task they perform.We walk through the complete lifecycle of OpenSpace: from installing and configuring an OpenAI model, to executing cold-start tasks where no prior skills exist, watching the […]The post A Coding Implementation to Design Self-Evolving Skill Engine with OpenSpace for Skill Learning, Token Efficiency, and Collective Intelligence appeared first on MarkTechPost.
24/03/2026
This AI Paper Introduces TinyLoRA, A 13-Parameter Fine-Tuning Method That Reaches 91.8 Percent GSM8K on Qwen2.5-7B
Researchers from FAIR at Meta, Cornell University, and Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can learn to reason using a remarkably small number of trained parameters.The research team introduces TinyLoRA, a parameterization that can scale down to a single trainable parameter under extreme sharing settings.The post This AI Paper Introduces TinyLoRA, A 13-Parameter Fine-Tuning Method That Reaches 91.8 Percent GSM8K on Qwen2.5-7B appeared first on MarkTechPost.
24/03/2026
HTTP Triggers in Azure SRE Agent: From Jira Ticket to Automated Investigation
HTTP Triggers make it easy to connect any of them to Azure SRE Agent—turning events from any platform into automated agent actions with a simple HTTP POST.In this blog, we'll demonstrate by connecting Jira to SRE Agent—so that every new incident ticket automatically triggers an investigation, and the agent posts its findings back to the Jira ticket when it's done.The Logic App automatically generates the visual workflow from the code — you'll see the Jira trigger ("When a new issue is created (V2)") connected to the HTTP action ("Call SRE Agent HTTP Trigger") as a two-step flow, with all the field mappings and authentication settings already configured
24/03/2026
Securing AI agents: The enterprise security playbook for the agentic era
The agent era is here — and most organizations are not readyThis post covers the specific attack vectors targeting AI agents today, why traditional security approaches fundamentally cannot keep up, and what a modern, proactive defense strategy actually looks like in practice.What is a prompt injection attack?
24/03/2026
Closing the Last Mile in Document AI: Improving Extraction Quality in Azure Content Understanding
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) promises to eliminate the manual work of reading, interpreting, and entering data from these documents.CU extends the document extraction capabilities of Azure Document Intelligence to unstructured and hybrid document types, as well as multimodal content including images, audio, and video.Azure Content Understanding is GA and available in Microsoft Foundry.
24/03/2026
Partner Case Study | DeepJudge
DeepJudge, a Microsoft partner, is helping legal teams bridge that gap with AI-powered search and workflow tools built on Microsoft Azure.DeepJudge specializes in enterprise search and agentic AI workflows tailored for legal professionals.Making internal knowledge accessible—and secure
24/03/2026
AI Is the Headline — but Readiness Is the Real Story for MSPs
That gap between AI ambition and operational reality is becoming one of the most important conversations MSPs can have today.AI doesn’t fail because of a lack of innovation.It fails because the fundamentals aren’t in place.AvePoint Elements acts as the MSP operating layer on top of Intune—helping partners standardize, automate, and manage Intune across multiple customer tenants from a single platform.
24/03/2026
Upcoming Breaking Changes to Modifying Sensitive Email Properties via Graph API
We are implementing a significant update in our service affecting applications that modify sensitive properties on non-draft email messages.To maintain the expected immutability of email messages during standard management operations, we will begin restricting applications from modifying sensitive message properties in non-draft messages unless they possess elevated permissions.Enforcement of the new restrictions in our service – blocking Graph API updates to sensitive email properties – will begin on 12/31/2026.
24/03/2026
Strengthen Identity Resilience: Recover with Confidence using Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery
While service resilience keeps Microsoft Entra available, Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery helps organizations recover when changes inside their environment introduce risk or disrupt users.Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery now available in Public PreviewScenario 1: Recovering from an erroneous Conditional Access change that locks out users
24/03/2026
External MFA in Microsoft Entra ID is now Generally Available
Now, with the GA of external multifactor authentication (external MFA)—previously known as external authentication methods—you can integrate trusted third-party MFA providers while continuing to rely on Microsoft Entra ID as your central identity control plane.Built on the OpenID Connect (OIDC) standard, external MFA allows you to integrate your preferred MFA provider into Microsoft Entra ID without sacrificing security or policy enforcement.Integrating external MFA with Conditional Access allows administrators to align authentication prompts with their organization’s security and business objectives by using sign-in frequency and session controls.
24/03/2026
Microsoft 365 Copilot Declarative Agents Are Getting Smarter with GPT‑5.2
We’re continuing to improve the intelligence behind Microsoft 365 Copilot Declarative Agents.As part of this effort, Declarative Agents are being updated to use GPT‑5.2, a newer large language model designed to deliver higher‑quality responses across complex agent scenarios.Note: This update is gradually rolling out to all the tenants worldwide.
24/03/2026
Incentive guidance and activation at your fingertips: Explore the new digital incentives guide
Now delivered through an online experience on the Microsoft partner website, the Microsoft Commercial Partner Incentives Guide gives you clear navigation, direct paths to engagement, and faster access to the most up-to-date guidance—all in one place.Explore the new digital incentives guide experience and share your feedback as we continue to evolve it.Explore the incentives guide
24/03/2026
When Azure Portal/CLI Can’t Delete an Azure SQL DB: Check the Database Name (Unsupported Characters)
A customer reported a General Purpose (Gen5, 2 vCores) Azure SQL Database that was incurring charges but could not be deleted using Azure Portal or Azure CLI. CLI output showed two entries, including one whose database name included a forward slash (example display: xxxx-xxx-sql/xxx-xxx-db).We advised the customer to delete the database using T‑SQL, enclosing the database name in square brackets (delimited identifier). The customer confirmed the database was successfully dropped using this approach.If an Azure SQL Database becomes “undeletable” through portal/CLI and the name contains unusual characters (like '<,>,*,%,&,:,\,/,?'), it may still be fully manageable from T‑SQL using delimited identifiers—and that can be the cleanest way to unblock deletion and stop unexpected costs.
24/03/2026
How to Get Database‑Wise Session Details in an Azure SQL Elastic Pool Using T‑SQL
When you run multiple databases inside an Azure SQL Database elastic pool, it’s common to hit questions like:The DMV sys.dm_elastic_pool_resource_stats returns usage for the elastic pool that contains the current database, including concurrent session utilization, and it can be queried from any user database in the same elastic pool. With the queries in this post, you can troubleshoot elastic pool session behavior without relying on the Azure portal:
24/03/2026
More standards are coming to the Teach Module and Teams for Education!
That is why we are continuing to expand the standards experience across Microsoft Education.We are excited to share a new wave of international standards coming to the standards experience in Teach and in Teams for Education.These standards will support experiences in the Teach module across Lesson Plans, Quizzes, and Rubrics, and they are also coming to Assignments in Teams for Education.
24/03/2026
Automating Azure OpenAI Cost Control Using Budgets, Action Groups, and Automation Runbooks
As organizations increasingly adopt Azure OpenAI for use cases such as generative AI, analytics, and experimentation, cost governance becomes a critical operational concern.This blog describes a practical, enterprise-ready automation pattern to control Azure OpenAI costs by combining Azure Budgets, Action Groups, and Azure Automation Runbooks.The solution automatically enforces cost limits by disabling Azure OpenAI API access when a budget threshold is breached, while still providing a controlled and auditable manual recovery process.
24/03/2026
hyOffice, Neo4j, and Standss offer transactable partner solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like hyOffice, Neo4j, and Standss deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace.Team Absence Pro: hyOffice's Team Absence Pro makes it easy to see who's off and when in Microsoft Teams.SendGuard now supports the Outlook mobile app for iOS and Android.
24/03/2026
Beyond the Vector Store: Building the Full Data Layer for AI Applications
If you look at the architecture diagram of almost any AI startup today, you will see a large language model (LLM) connected to a vector store.
24/03/2026
Synchronizing Azure Storage Across Isolated Private Endpoint Networks
In Azure repatriation programs, enterprises often need to migrate large volumes of blob data from a source Azure environment to a target Azure environment under strict security and network isolation constraints.A typical repatriation setup includes fully isolated source and target environments, each protected by private endpoints and independent DNS configurations.However, when both the source and destination storage accounts are protected by private endpoints and deployed in isolated virtual networks without shared DNS resolution or network connectivity, server‑side copy operations are not supported.
24/03/2026
News to Know – Volume 3, Edition 3, March 2026
Starting in March 2026, Viva Glint will use the Microsoft 365 admin center as the single control plane for Copilot access—consistent with other Microsoft Copilot experiences.AI Transformation & the Frontier Firm Playbook that highlights how Viva Glint and Viva Pulse and other tools can support becoming Frontier‑ready and sustaining value from AI investments.The Viva Customer Connection Program (VCCP) is now the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) program — a name that reflects the expanded scope and value of this community as employee experiences continue to evolve with Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot.
24/03/2026
CPU percentage vs SQL instance CPU percent: The Portal’s Favorite Misunderstanding
This metric shows CPU consumption toward the user workload limit of a database or an elastic pool, expressed as a percentage.Why you should care: If performance is slow and cpu_percent is high (especially near 100%), this is often the right place to look first for CPU pressure related to user workload.Now, the confusion is regarding – usually people interpret that since SQL Instance CPU is a combination of user + internal workload, it should always be higher than CPU percentage.
24/03/2026
Announcing Public Preview of Argo CD extension on AKS and Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters
We are excited to announce public preview of the Argo CD extension for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters.The Argo CD extension integrates with Microsoft Entra ID to provide a secure, enterprise-ready experience for:Argo CD extension management via the Azure Portal will be available in a few weeks.
24/03/2026
New Oracle Autonomous AI Database - Dedicated option on Oracle AI Database@Azure
Today, we're thrilled to announce the general availability of Oracle Autonomous AI Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure on Oracle AI Database@Azure, giving enterprises a new level of infrastructure exclusivity and operational control on Microsoft Azure.Oracle Autonomous AI Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure on Oracle AI Database@Azure gives organizations exclusive cloud resources for their databases — with greater control over maintenance windows, resource allocation, security boundaries, and lifecycle management policies, while Oracle continues to handle database administration.Crucially, Oracle Database@Azure allows Activision Blizzard to extend the value of its EBS data using Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, and Copilot Studio—transforming traditional ERP data into AI‑ready intelligence.
24/03/2026
Hosted Containers and AI Agent Solutions
This post walks through why containers and managed hosting platforms like Azure Container Apps are an ideal fit for multi-agent AI systems, what practical benefits they unlock, and how you can get started with minimal friction.That is all it takes to package a six-agent AI system with a web frontend, a FastAPI backend, Git support, and all Python dependencies into a portable, production-ready image.Choose Azure Container Apps when you need a custom frontend, custom orchestration logic, real-time streaming, server-side processing beyond prompt-response patterns, or when your agent system is part of a larger application with its own web server and API surface.
24/03/2026
Step-by-Step: Deploy the Architecture Review Agent Using AZD AI CLI
In our previous post, we introduced the Architecture Review Agent, an open-source tool built on Microsoft Foundry that automatically converts messy architectural notes into structured risk assessments and interactive Excalidraw diagrams.Here is how you can set up, invoke, and deploy your own Architecture Review Agent, and even publish it to Microsoft Teams, without needing a tenant admin.You can publish this agent directly to Microsoft Teams and M365 Copilot natively from the Foundry portal.
24/03/2026
Yann LeCun’s New LeWorldModel (LeWM) Research Targets JEPA Collapse in Pixel-Based Predictive World Modeling
World Models (WMs) are a central framework for developing agents that reason and plan in a compact latent space.However, training these models directly from pixel data often leads to ‘representation collapse,’ where the model produces redundant embeddings to trivially satisfy prediction objectives.The post Yann LeCun’s New LeWorldModel (LeWM) Research Targets JEPA Collapse in Pixel-Based Predictive World Modeling appeared first on MarkTechPost.
24/03/2026
Take Control of Every Message: Partial Failure Handling for Service Bus Triggers in Azure Functions
When you use Azure Functions with a Service Bus trigger in batch mode, your function receives multiple messages at once for efficient, high-throughput processing.With Service Bus message settlement actions in Azure Functions, you can:For teams evaluating Azure or migrating from AWS, here's how per-message settlement in Azure Functions compares to AWS Lambda's partial batch failure support for SQS:
24/03/2026
Meta AI’s New Hyperagents Don’t Just Solve Tasks—They Rewrite the Rules of How They Learn
The dream of recursive self-improvement in AI—where a system doesn’t just get better at a task, but gets better at learning—has long been the ‘holy grail’ of the field.That changed with the Darwin Gödel Machine (DGM), […]The post Meta AI’s New Hyperagents Don’t Just Solve Tasks—They Rewrite the Rules of How They Learn appeared first on MarkTechPost.
24/03/2026
Caution When Using a Database in Single User Mode
By setting a database to single-user mode in SQL Server, you can make it accessible to only one user. The log shipping restore job sets the database to single-user mode before performing the restore. The restore job tries to acquire an exclusive lock to perform the restore, but is blocked by the session waiting for the exclusive lock, resulting in a deadlock.
24/03/2026
Luma Labs Launches Uni-1: The Autoregressive Transformer Model that Reasons through Intentions Before Generating Images
In the field of generative AI media, the industry is transitioning from purely probabilistic pixel synthesis toward models capable of structural reasoning.Luma Labs has just released Uni-1, a foundational image model designed to address the ‘intent gap” inherent in standard diffusion pipelines.By implementing a reasoning phase prior to generation, Uni-1 shifts the workflow […]
24/03/2026
In Case You Missed It: Frontier Transformation and Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot Announcements
March brought a major set of Frontier Transformation and wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot announcements across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, and agents—all focused on helping people move faster from intent to action and helping organizations scale AI responsibly.If you missed any of the updates, here’s a quick recap of what’s new and why it matters.Edit with Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPointCopilot Chat in Outlook enables users to draft and refine emails, manage calendars and RSVPs, and use the Outlook email widget to take action directly from chat, streamlining everyday communication and scheduling tasks.
23/03/2026
Ep 36 | Why Public Policy Is Now a Growth Lever for Microsoft Partners
From data privacy and cybersecurity to AI regulation, broadband access, and energy infrastructure, public policy decisions are rapidly redefining how partners operate, how customers buy, and how innovation scales.The key message is clear: engaging with public policy is now a critical growth strategy for Microsoft partners, not a distant or background concern.Voices for Innovation: Policy Education Built for Partners
23/03/2026
How to Design a Production-Ready AI Agent That Automates Google Colab Workflows Using Colab-MCP, MCP Tools, FastMCP, and Kernel Execution
In this tutorial, we build an advanced, hands-on tutorial around Google’s newly released colab-mcp, an open-source MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets any AI agent programmatically control Google Colab notebooks and runtimes.Across five self-contained snippets, we go from first principles to production-ready patterns.The post How to Design a Production-Ready AI Agent That Automates Google Colab Workflows Using Colab-MCP, MCP Tools, FastMCP, and Kernel Execution appeared first on MarkTechPost.
23/03/2026
Get started with NeuBird Hawkeye MCP server in Azure SRE Agent
Integrate NeuBird Hawkeye MCP with Azure SRE AgentAzure SRE Agent now integrates with NeuBird Hawkeye via Model Context Protocol (MCP), so you can investigate incidents across all of your clouds and monitoring tools from a single conversation.With the new Hawkeye MCP server integration, Azure SRE Agent leverages Hawkeye's autonomous investigation capabilities through natural language conversation.
23/03/2026
Windows 365 available in US Gov Texas for Government Community Cloud customers
Today, we’re pleased to announce that Windows 365 is now available in the US Gov Texas region for customers in the United States (US) Government Community Cloud (GCC & GCC-High).This new regional availability helps US government organizations deploy Cloud PCs closer to users while meeting data residency, compliance, and performance requirements in an Azure Government environment.GCC customers can begin provisioning Windows 365 Cloud PCs in US Gov Texas today by selecting the region when creating or updating provisioning policies in Microsoft Intune.
23/03/2026
Announcing Multi‑Region Selection for Windows 365 in Government Community Cloud
Following our recent announcement of resiliency improvements with Microsoft Hosted Network (MHN), we’re pleased to share that Multi-Region Selection is now available for Windows 365 in our Government Community Cloud (GCC & GCC-High). This capability extends Microsoft’s service managed resiliency investments to US government customers, helping improve Cloud PC availability while maintaining the simplicity and security expected from a SaaS solution.Multi‑Region Selection allows Windows 365 to automatically distribute Cloud PCs across multiple Azure regions within the US Government region group, rather than provisioning all Cloud PCs in a single region.
23/03/2026
Azure Event Grid MQTT Broker: Enterprise-Grade Messaging for the Connected World
From startup-scale prototypes to workloads with up to 5M+ concurrent device connections — Event Grid MQTT Broker grows with your ambitions.Route MQTT messages and CloudEvents directly from Event Grid Namespaces to Fabric Eventstreams — enabling real-time analytics, storage, and visualization of IoT data without an Event Hub intermediary.The industrial MQTT standard runs natively on Event Grid MQTT Broker — bringing real-time factory floor intelligence to Azure analytics pipelines.
23/03/2026
Azure Sphere is updating its Certificate and Trusted Key Stores
Every production software image on the device – including the bootloader, the Linux kernel, the OS, and customer applications, as well as any capability file used to unlock development on, or field servicing of devices – is signed by the Azure Sphere Security Service (AS3), based on image signing keys held by Microsoft.The next update to the image signing certificate is targeted for March 30th.If you update and re-sign the application image you use in manufacturing, but you are using an old OS image with an old TKS, then that OS will not trust the application.
23/03/2026
Celebrating 30 Years of Microsoft Exchange
A lot has changed since the first release of Exchange Server 4.0 in 1996: protocols, platforms, scale, and even what “email” means in the modern workplace.To commemorate this milestone anniversary, we want to pause and reflect on how Exchange has shaped enterprise email as we know it today.That changed when, after nearly four years of development, Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0 – “the e-mail server with integrated groupware that makes it easy to communicate” – was released on April 2, 1996.
23/03/2026
Migrating Ant Builds to Maven with GitHub Copilot app modernization
Many legacy Java applications still rely on Apache Ant for building, packaging, and dependency management.Migrating from Ant to Maven improves maintainability, build reproducibility, IDE compatibility, and enables modern Java workflows such as dependency upgrades, framework updates, and containerization.GitHub Copilot app modernization accelerates this transition by analyzing an Ant‑based project, generating a migration plan, and applying transformations to produce a Maven‑based build aligned with modern Java tooling.
23/03/2026
Announcing Priority Processing in Microsoft Foundry for Performance-Sensitive AI Workloads
Today, we are announcing Priority Processing is now generally available in Microsoft Foundry, a new capability designed to help organizations run latency-sensitive AI workloads with greater performance consistency and pay-per-call spending flexibility.Priority Processing is designed to address these deployment challenges by prioritizing latency‑sensitive inference requests with pay-per-call flexible spending, enabling SLA‑backed performance for interactive AI workloads without requiring provisioned throughput commitments.Organizations including Adobe and Harvey are using Priority Processing in Microsoft Foundry to support latency-sensitive AI experiences while maintaining throughput for background workloads.
23/03/2026
Stand out with designations, specializations, and badges introduced in recent months
Showcase your proven success and differentiate your solutions by taking advantage of the latest Solutions Partner designations, specializations, and badges, added since Microsoft Ignite 2025.The Frontier Distributor designation recognizes Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) distributors that have advanced distribution capabilities across cloud, AI, and security. It defines the Microsoft standard for modern distribution and signals to indirect resellers that you go beyond transactions to accelerate growth and improve customer outcomes. Review the qualification criteria and assess your readiness by connecting with your Microsoft contact and reviewing your distributor capability score. Find out more here. Agentic DevOps with Microsoft Azure and GitHub specialization (updated)
23/03/2026
Join Us at MVP Summit: Helping SMBs thrive through Teams
The Microsoft MVP Summit is just around the corner, and we’re excited to invite Microsoft MVPs to a Teams SMB–focused conversation designed specifically for you on March 24th at 11 am PDT.Engage directly with the Microsoft Teams product team focused on SMB.Attending MVP Summit in person?
23/03/2026
Success with AI apps and agents on Marketplace: the end-to-end
Preparing an AI app or agent for Microsoft Marketplace requires solving a broader set of problems—ones that extend beyond the model and into architecture, security, compliance, operations, and commerce.It brings together the decisions and requirements needed to build AI apps and agents that are not only functional, but Marketplace‑ready from day one.This post is part of a series on building and publishing well-architected AI apps and Agents on Microsoft Marketplace.
23/03/2026
OneDrive Photos Restyle with AI-now rolling out on mobile and web
With AI Restyle in OneDrive, you can reimagine them in fresh new styles-right where your photos already live.AI Restyle on OneDrive MobileAI Restyle is rolling out on OneDrive for iOS, Android, and web for customers with a Microsoft 365 Premium subscription.
23/03/2026
Building Tech for Good Means Building Health Equity for Everyone
But there’s another kind of access that often gets overlooked: access to equitable, high‑quality health care.For people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD), that access is still far from guaranteed.Through free screenings, education, and large‑scale training of health professionals, they’re proving that inclusive health isn’t a niche initiative — it’s a blueprint for equity.
23/03/2026
Move from idea to a Marketplace-ready app faster with the Quick-Start Development Toolkit
Software companies building applications and agents for Microsoft often face the same early challenge: getting from idea to a working build to get to market fast. The Quick-Start Development Toolkit focuses on streamlining that initial process with deployable code templates, architecture guidance, and development workflows, so teams can move forward with confidence and clarity toward a Marketplace-ready application.While the toolkit focuses on accelerating the build stage, it is designed with the full Marketplace journey in mind. By following these development patterns, you can build apps and agents that align with the requirements for publishing and selling through Microsoft Marketplace.
23/03/2026
Code Optimizations for Azure App Service Now Available in VS Code
Today we shipped a feature in the Azure App Service extension for VS Code that answers both questions: Code Optimizations, powered by Application Insights profiler data and GitHub Copilot.The Azure App Service extension now adds a Code Optimizations node directly under your .NET web apps in the Azure Resources tree view.This node surfaces performance issues detected by the Application Insights profiler - things like excessive CPU or memory usage caused by specific functions in your code.
23/03/2026
What Changed in RC4 with the January 2026 Windows Update and Why it is Important
In this article, I will discuss what changed with the January 2026 Windows Update and why it is important to start auditing and remediate RC4 usage is your environment.Starting with the January 13, 2026, Windows security updates, Microsoft began the first official phase of hardening Kerberos authentication by reducing reliance on RC4 encryption.Microsoft tied the January changes to a Kerberos information disclosure vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-20833, using this security update as the entry point to begin the RC4 deprecation process.
23/03/2026
How to get blob Total Blob Count and Total Capacity with Blob Inventory
Table of Contents Approach Introduction to the Blob Inventory Service Steps to enable inventory report Support Documentation
23/03/2026
From Public Folders to SharePoint: A Modern Approach to Shared Contact Management
For years, public folders have been the go-to solution for sharing contacts across teams and organizations - whether for maintaining client lists, managing shared employee directories, or keeping vendor information organized. But as the way we collaborate has evolved, so has the need for a more modern, integrated approach to shared contact management. SharePoint now provides a powerful, fully connected alternative that brings your shared contacts into the heart of your Microsoft 365 ecosystem...
23/03/2026
The New People Directory Search Experience in Outlook: Smarter, Faster, and More Connected Than Ever
Managing contacts has always been central to how we work - but the way we work has changed dramatically. Today, we're excited to unveil a completely reimagined People experience in Outlook that makes finding, organizing, and connecting with your contacts faster and smarter than ever before. Whether you're reaching out to a colleague across the globe or managing your most important business relationships, the new People in Outlook is designed to get you there in seconds, not minutes. I...
23/03/2026
Configuring Storage for Hyper-V Hosts in vMode
Aaaaaaand we’re back! Today, we’ll walk through the next step of onboarding Hyper-V (compute) systems to Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode (vMode) and give you a sneak peek at what’s coming for storage profiles. If you’ve b...
23/03/2026
Customer review: Ambience Healthcare delivers accurate, compliant health clinic documentation
Ambience Healthcare’s Ambient AI for Health Systems, a solution platform published to the Microsoft Marketplace, accurately transcribes patient and clinician conversations and summarizes encounters into...
23/03/2026
GraphRAG and PostgreSQL integration in docker with Cypher query and AI agents (Version 2*)
This is update from previous blog (version 1): GraphRAG and...
23/03/2026
7 Steps to Mastering Memory in Agentic AI Systems
Memory is one of the most overlooked parts of agentic system design.
23/03/2026
Reliable blob processing using Azure Logic Apps: Recommended architecture
Understanding the Limitations of In-App Blob Triggers The Logic App Blob - In-App trigger
23/03/2026
Building real-world AI automation with Foundry Local and the Microsoft Agent Framework
A hands-on guide to building real-world AI automation with Foundry Local, the Microsoft Agent Framework, and PyBullet. No cloud subscription, no API keys, no internet required. Why Developers Should Care About Offline AI Imagine telli...
23/03/2026
Securing Azure AI Agents: Identity, Access Control, and Guardrails in Microsoft Foundry
As AI agents evolve from simple chatbots to autonomous systems that access enterprise data, call APIs, and orchestrate workflows, security becomes non negotiable. Unlike traditional applications, AI agents introduce new risks — such as prompt injection, over privileged access, unsafe tool invocation, and uncontrolled data exposure. Microsoft addresses these challenges with built in, enterprise grade security capabilities across Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Agent...