Latest News in the category AI
A news aggregator from various RSS feeds, like technology, gaming, development and general news sites.
Multiple secondaries for Azure SQL Database failover groups (Public Preview)
Azure SQL Database failover groups are a business continuity capability that helps you manage geo-replication and coordinated failover of one or more databases from a primary Azure SQL logical server to a secondary logical server in another region. A key benefit is automatic endpoint redirection: your application can keep using the same listener endpoints, and connections are routed to the current primary after a geo-failover. Unt...
7 hours ago
Robbyant Open Sources LingBot World: a Real Time World Model for Interactive Simulation and Embodied AI
Robbyant, the embodied AI unit inside Ant Group, has open sourced LingBot-World, a large scale world model that turns video generation into an interactive simulator for embodied agents, autonomous driving and games. The system is designed to render controllable environments with high visual fidelity, strong dynamics and long temporal horizons, while staying responsive enough for […] The post
15 hours ago
Title Plan Update - January 30, 2026
📁January 30, 2026 - Title Plan Now Available Access the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at
30/01/2026
AI2 Releases SERA, Soft Verified Coding Agents Built with Supervised Training Only for Practical Repository Level Automation Workflows
Allen Institute for AI (AI2) Researchers introduce SERA, Soft Verified Efficient Repository Agents, as a coding agent family that aims to match much larger closed systems using only supervised training and synthetic trajectories. What is SERA? SERA is the first release in AI2’s Open Coding Agents series. The flagship model, SERA-32B, is built on the […] The post
30/01/2026
A Coding Implementation to Training, Optimizing, Evaluating, and Interpreting Knowledge Graph Embeddings with PyKEEN
In this tutorial, we walk through an end-to-end, advanced workflow for knowledge graph embeddings using PyKEEN, actively exploring how modern embedding models are trained, evaluated, optimized, and interpreted in practice. We start by understanding the structure of a real knowledge graph dataset, then systematically train and compare multiple embedding models, tune their hyperparameters, and analyze […] The post
30/01/2026
February update: What's new in Security for Partners
Navigate to News and Announcements, Incentives and Offers, Skilling and Events, Go-To-Market,
30/01/2026
Architecting Trust: A NIST-Based Security Governance Framework for AI Agents
Architecting Trust: A NIST-Based Security Governance Framework for AI Agents The "Agentic Era" has arrived. We are moving from chatbots that simply talk to agents that act—triggering APIs, querying databases, and managing their own long-term memory. But with this agency comes unprecedented risk. How do we ensure these autonomous entities remain secure, compliant, and predictable? In this post, Umesh Nagdev and Abhi Singh, showcase a Security Governanc...
30/01/2026
Azure Local LENS workbook—deep insights at scale, in minutes
Azure Local at scale needs fleet-level visibility As Azure Local deployments grow from a handful of instances to hundreds (or even thousands), the operational questions change. You’re no longer troubleshooting a single environment—you’re looking for patterns across your entire fleet: Which sites are trending with a specific health issue? Where are workload deployments increasing over time, do we have enough capacity available? Wh...
30/01/2026
SQL + AI: Get ready for a fun new experience, launching next week!
The SQL community is leveling up! We’re launching a lightweight, beginner friendly SQL + AI contest designed to spark awareness of SQL Server 2025’s new AI capabilities—from connecting to an AI model, to generating embeddings, to exploring what’s possible when natural language intelligence meets your database.&n...
30/01/2026
Multiple secondaries for failover groups is now in public preview
Failover groups for Azure SQL Database is a business continuity solution that lets you manage the replication and failover of databases to another Azure SQL logical server. With failover groups, you get automatic endpoint redirection, so you don't have to change the connection string for your application after a geo-failover—connections are automatically routed to the current primary. Until now, Azure SQL failover groups have only supported one secondary. We're excited to a...
30/01/2026
Education: A year in review with AI-powered learning tools
Hi Insiders! Our mission continues to focus on promoting equitable and successful learning outcomes for all students. Last year, we made updates to our products and services to further impact our goal, whether it was providing new AI experiences for educators and students to spark their curiosity and master crucial skills or enhancing accessibility and security features for a safe and inclusive school environment. Let’s look back at some of 2025’s biggest achievements with Micro...
30/01/2026
What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot | January 2026
Welcome to the January 2026 edition of What's New in Microsoft 365 Copilot! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements to keep Microsoft 365 admins up to date with Copilot features that help your users be more productive and efficient in the apps they use every day. This month we have a special announcement to share: we’ve refreshed the Microsoft 365 Roadmap to make it easier...
30/01/2026
Conditional Access for Canvas Apps with Entra
In today's Power Platform landscape, administrators have a tough task securing the ever-increasing inventory of Canvas Apps across their tenant. Canvas apps often connect to sensitive data, run on a variety of devices, and serve diverse groups of users. That is why Conditional Access has become one of the most powerful tools in an admin’s toolkit, giving you fine grained control over how, where, and under what conditions users can access your apps.
30/01/2026
Export and import for Azure SQL database with a sequence
A few scenarios where sequencing is useful: Generating Unique Identifiers: When you need a unique sequential number for each new row (e.g., order numbers, invoice numbers). Unlike identity columns, sequences can be shared across multiple tables. Custom Auto-Increment Logic: When auto-increment needs to be independent of a specific table. When multiple tables need to use the same numbering ...
30/01/2026
Microsoft Unveils Maia 200, An FP4 and FP8 Optimized AI Inference Accelerator for Azure Datacenters
Maia 200 is Microsoft’s new in house AI accelerator designed for inference in Azure datacenters. It targets the cost of token generation for large language models and other reasoning workloads by combining narrow precision compute, a dense on chip memory hierarchy and an Ethernet based scale up fabric. Why Microsoft built a dedicated inference chip? […] The post
30/01/2026
DeepSeek AI Releases DeepSeek-OCR 2 with Causal Visual Flow Encoder for Layout Aware Document Understanding
DeepSeek AI released DeepSeek-OCR 2, an open source document OCR and understanding system that restructures its vision encoder to read pages in a causal order that is closer to how humans scan complex documents. The key component is DeepEncoder V2, a language model style transformer that converts a 2D page into a 1D sequence of […] The post
30/01/2026
Splitting single-tenant Microsoft Defender XDR Sentinel logs in multiple company scenarios
Introduction Let’s consider a scenario in which a parent holding company – Contoso Group – owns two different companies – Contoso Beverages and Contoso Food – and uses a single, shared, multi-domain Entra ID tenant for all the Contoso Group companies. Contoso Group is licensing Entra ID P2 and Microsoft Defender XDR, but each company runs its own Security Operations Center, with its own SIEM (Microsoft Sentinel). While it is trivial to segregate resource logs that are s...
30/01/2026
A Coding Deep Dive into Differentiable Computer Vision with Kornia Using Geometry Optimization, LoFTR Matching, and GPU Augmentations
We implement an advanced, end-to-end Kornia tutorial and demonstrate how modern, differentiable computer vision can be built entirely in PyTorch. We start by constructing GPU-accelerated, synchronized augmentation pipelines for images, masks, and keypoints, then move into differentiable geometry by optimizing a homography directly through gradient descent. We also show how learned feature matching with LoFTR […] The post
30/01/2026
Minimum Usage in Azure App Testing
Load testing is most effective when it closely mirrors real-world usage and when test infrastructure is used efficiently. We recently launched AI-assisted load test authoring which enables mirroring real-world usage. Today, we are taking another step for the efficient use of test infrastructure. Behind every load test run, there is dedicate...
30/01/2026
Introduction to Copilot Role Stories
AI is becoming a core part of how people across every industry get work done. From marketers creating content faster, to clinicians improving patient care, to insurance teams automating claims and authorizations, Microsoft Copilot and AI Agents are helping people focus on what matters most. In Role Stories we walk through real-world scenarios in specific industries and job roles that show how Copilot boosts productivity, reduces manual work, and helps teams deliver bet...
30/01/2026
Unlocking the power of Partner Center reporting: Why these insights matter for Marketplace success
For publishers in the Microsoft commercial marketplace, having the right data at the right time is essential. Understanding how customers engage with your offers, how revenue flows through billing and payout cycles, and how subscriptions or usage evolve over time directly influences your go‑to‑market decisions, financial planning, and customer management strategies. During a recent Microsoft webinar focused on Partner Center reporting,
30/01/2026
🦞 Deploy MoltBot to Azure Container Apps: Your 24/7 AI Assistant in 30 Minutes
🚀 The Quick Version: Create a Discord bot, clone the repo, run azd up, invite bot to server, start chatting. Total time: ~25 minutes. Total cost: ~$40-60/month. Why Azure Container Apps over other options? ✅ Managed Identity - No credentials in config files ✅ Built-in Secrets - API keys never exposed in logs ✅ Automatic HTTPS - Fre...
30/01/2026
Ant Group Releases LingBot-VLA, A Vision Language Action Foundation Model For Real World Robot Manipulation
How do you build a single vision language action model that can control many different dual arm robots in the real world? LingBot-VLA is Ant Group Robbyant’s new Vision Language Action foundation model that targets practical robot manipulation in the real world. It is trained on about 20,000 hours of teleoperated bimanual data collected from 9 […] The post
30/01/2026
Announcing the Microsoft 365 Community Conference 2026
Your front row seat to the future of intelligent work The Microsoft 365 Community Conference is back April 21–23, 2026, at Loews Sapphire Falls and Loews Royal Pacific Resort in Orlando, Florida. This year’s theme — a beacon for builders, innovators, and icons of intelligent work — reflects the momentum across Microsoft 365 and Copilot as we enter a new era of AI‑powered productivity. Across three days, attendees will...
29/01/2026
🌍✨ We’re Now Accepting Applications for MGCI Regional Leaders!
The Microsoft Global Community Initiative (MGCI) is now accepting applications for our next cohort of Regional Leaders - volunteer community champions who help shape, support, and amplify Microsoft technical communities worldwide. 💡 Why Become a MGCI Regional Leader?
29/01/2026
Advancing Windows security: Disabling NTLM by default
Windows is moving toward a more secure authentication model by phasing out New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM) in favor of stronger, Kerberos‑based alternatives. Let’s look at enhanced auditing and upcoming tools to help prepare your organization for disabling NTLM by default. The evolution of Windows authentication
29/01/2026
Discover why to build AI apps and agents with Microsoft and sell through Marketplace
Customer demand for AI is accelerating fast. And your company's AI app or agent should be there to meet it. In this fiscal year, Microsoft has already seen 2x growth in customers purchasing AI products through Microsoft Marketplace, while also being the largest catalog of AI apps and agents in the industry.
29/01/2026
Interested in Being a Guest on the Microsoft Security Podcast at RSA?
Going to RSA? We’re recording short, 15-minute Microsoft Security podcast conversations live at the conference- focused on real-world practitioner experience. No pitches, no slides, no marketing. Just an honest conversation about what you’re seeing, what’s changed, and what you’d tell a peer. If you’re doing the work and want to share your perspective, we’d love to hear from you. Take the survey to let us know you a...
29/01/2026
Supporting ChatGPT on PostgreSQL in Azure
Affan Dar, Vice President of Engineering, PostgreSQL at Microsoft Adam Prout, Partner Architect, PostgreSQL at Microsoft Panagiotis (Panos) Antonopoulos, Distinguished Engineer, PostgreSQL at Microsoft Th...
29/01/2026
Excel as a Literate Computation Surface for AI
[This article was originally published by Sumit Chauhan on LinkedIn.] AI systems perform robust computation, but their outputs are typically dissociated from the structure of the computation itself. Answers are delivered as fluent summaries, scripts, or static artifacts. Explanations may accompa...
29/01/2026
Tech for Good in Action: Accessibility, AI, and Expanding Our Community Impact
Accessibility is not a niche topic. It is a fundamental aspect of inclusive technology, and a shared responsibility for everyone who builds, teaches, and communicates about tech. This message was at the heart of a recent Global Skills session that brought together Microsoft MVPs and community leaders to explore how technology, AI, and communication can be used as powerful tools for social good.
29/01/2026
From SOP Overload to Simple Answers: Building Q&A Agents With SharePoint Online + Agent Builder
Turning SOPs Into Simple Q&A Agents is possibly one of the fastest wins for public‑sector teams. Take the SOPs and guidance you already have, upload them to SharePoint Online (what's that? they're already there? I know!). Then, create an agent using nothing but descriptive natural language. No code. No connectors. No fuss. (Disclaimer: these claims are the author's personal boasts, not all use cases or requirements will match this example and therefore these statements are no...
29/01/2026
Beyond the Chatbox: Generative UI, AG-UI, and the Stack Behind Agent-Driven Interfaces
Most AI applications still showcase the model as a chat box. That interface is simple, but it hides what agents are actually doing, such as planning steps, calling tools, and updating state. Generative UI is about letting the agent drive real interface elements, for example tables, charts, forms, and progress indicators, so the experience feels […] The post
29/01/2026
Azure NetApp Files Elastic ZRS service level - File Storage High Availability Made Easy
Table of Contents Abstract Introduction Why it matters How it works What are we enabling? <...
29/01/2026
Production-grade API Gateway patterns for Microsoft Foundry
Most startup teams start with the simplest thing that can work. One or two apps call Microsoft Foundry model endpoints directly, traffic is predictable, and “routing” is just a config value in the app. The gateway pattern becomes necessary when Foundry stops being “an integration” and becomes “a shared platform”. That shift shows up in a few reliable signals: You do not fully con...
29/01/2026
New content types supported in multi-tenant content distribution
Onboard new tenants and maintain a consistent security baseline We’re excited to announce a set of new content types that are now supported by the multi-tenant content distribution capability in the Defender portal: You can now distribute analytics rules, automation rules, workbooks, and alert tuning built in rules. What is content distribution? Content distribution is a powerful multi-tenant feature that enables scalable management of security content across tenants....
29/01/2026
SharePoint Showcase: Automation updates for smarter workflows & business processes
The way work gets done continues to evolve. Across organizations, everyday tasks are moving beyond manual handoffs toward intelligent, connected workflows where AI helps coordinate activity and people focus on outcomes. In this month’s SharePoint Showcase, we’re spotlighting updates that make business process automation simpler, more flexible, and more closely aligned where you work. Creating automation now lives right where work happens for SharePoint files, lists, and pages enabling ...
29/01/2026
Microsoft Graph User Configuration API (preview) - now available
We wanted to post a quick note that on the Microsoft 365 Developer Blog, a new post was published discussing availability of the preview of Microsoft Graph User Configuration API. This is important to all of our customers and partners utilizing Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online today. As we have mentioned previously, EWS in Exchange Online is
29/01/2026
UPDATE: New timeline for transitioning Sentinel experience to Defender portal
We’re sharing an important update to help Microsoft Sentinel customers and partners plan a smooth transition to the Microsoft Defender portal. In July 2025, we announced that Microsoft Sentinel SIEM customers would have to transition from the Azure portal experience to the Defender portal by July 1, 2026. Since then, we’ve seen a large percentage of our customers adopt the new experience, however, we’ve heard consistent feedback from customers and partners—particularly those managing S...
29/01/2026
Monday Masterclass Season 2 – Week 1: Beyond the Basics in Viva Engage
We hear repeatedly how valuable it is to have a space dedicated to practical guidance, real world examples, and direct access to product experts. Monday Masterclass Season 2 builds on the essentials while introducing capabilities that help organizations scale their employee communications and community strategy with confidence. This year’s program includes four live ...
29/01/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: January 29, 2026
Learn about 227 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
29/01/2026
Exploring Traffic Manager Integration for External DNS
When you deploy externally accessible applications into Kubernetes, there is usually a requirement for creating some DNS records pointing to these applications, to allow your users to resolve them. Rather than manually creating these DNS records, there are tools that will do this work for you, one of which is External DNS. External DNS can watch your Kubernetes resource configuration for s...
29/01/2026
Building Interactive Agent UIs with AG-UI and Microsoft Agent Framework
Introduction Picture this: You've built an AI agent that analyzes financial data. A user uploads a quarterly report and asks: "What are the top three expense categories?" Behind the scenes, your agent parses the spreadsheet, aggregates thousands of rows, and generates visualizations. All in 20 seconds. But the user? They see a loading spinner. Nothing else. No "reading file" message, no "analyzin...
29/01/2026
Google DeepMind Unveils AlphaGenome: A Unified Sequence-to-Function Model Using Hybrid Transformers and U-Nets to Decode the Human Genome
Google DeepMind is expanding its biological toolkit beyond the world of protein folding. After the success of AlphaFold, the Google’s research team has introduced AlphaGenome. This is a unified deep learning model designed for sequence to function genomics. This represents a major shift in how we model the human genome. AlphaGenome does not treat DNA […] The post
29/01/2026
Azure PostgreSQL Lesson Learned #14: Hitting the Max Storage Limits Blocking Further Scale‑Up
Co‑authored with HaiderZ-MSFT Case Overview A customer attempted to increase storage for their Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server but was unable to exceed 32 TiB. Investigation confirmed that the server was deployed in a region where the maximum supported storage...
29/01/2026
Alibaba Introduces Qwen3-Max-Thinking, a Test Time Scaled Reasoning Model with Native Tool Use Powering Agentic Workloads
Qwen3-Max-Thinking is Alibaba’s new flagship reasoning model. It does not only scale parameters, it also changes how inference is done, with explicit control over thinking depth and built in tools for search, memory, and code execution. Model scale, data, and deployment Qwen3-Max-Thinking is a trillion-parameter MoE flagship LLM pretrained on 36T tokens and built on […] The post
29/01/2026
How to Design Self-Reflective Dual-Agent Governance Systems with Constitutional AI for Secure and Compliant Financial Operations
In this tutorial, we implement a dual-agent governance system that applies Constitutional AI principles to financial operations. We demonstrate how we separate execution and oversight by pairing a Worker Agent that performs financial actions with an Auditor Agent that enforces policy, safety, and compliance. By encoding governance rules directly into a formal constitution and combining […] The post
29/01/2026
Introducing Unit Test Agent Profiles for Logic Apps & Data Maps
I did some experimentation this week with GitHub Copilot custom agents and custom prompts. The result was a couple of agents to help with creation of unit tests for Logic Apps Standard workflows and data maps. These agent profiles are designed to keep test artifacts consistent and maintainable by separating discovery, specification, data generation, and implementation. Specifications serve as the single source of truth; generated code and data follow...
28/01/2026
From Ingress to Gateway API: A pragmatic path forward (and why it matters now)
If you operate Kubernetes at scale, you've felt it: "Ingress YAML sprawl", annotation archaeology, and the creeping sense that your edge configuration is one upstream change away from becoming fragile. Over the last couple of years, the Kubernetes networking community has been steadily moving toward a clearer, more expressive model for north-south traffic management: Gateway API. That shift has accelerated recently for a v...
28/01/2026
ICYMI | How Microsoft is empowering Frontier Transformation with Intelligence + Trust
At Microsoft Ignite in November, we introduced Frontier Transformation — a holistic reimagining of business aligning AI with human ambition to help organizations achieve their highest aspirations and growth potential. While AI Transformation centered on efficiency and productivity, Frontier Transformation challenges us to do more for humanity by democratizing intelligence to unlock creativity and innovation for or...
28/01/2026
MBZUAI Releases K2 Think V2: A Fully Sovereign 70B Reasoning Model For Math, Code, And Science
Can a fully sovereign open reasoning model match state of the art systems when every part of its training pipeline is transparent. Researchers from Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) release K2 Think V2, a fully sovereign reasoning model designed to test how far open and fully documented pipelines can push long horizon […] The post
28/01/2026
Microsoft Sentinel and Dataverse Integration
Integrating Microsoft Sentinel with Microsoft Dataverse brings advanced, unified security monitoring to your Power Platform environments. Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)...
28/01/2026
Trust DigiCert Global Root G2 Certificate Authority to Avoid Exchange Online Email Disruption
To avoid mail flow disruption between your organization and Exchange Online, organizations that send or receive email to or from Exchange Online must ensure that their servers and clients trust the DigiCert Global Root G2 Certificate Authority and its subordinate CAs before April 30, 2026. You can find a comprehensive list of the root and subordinate certificate authority chain in the
28/01/2026
Automated Test Framework - Missing Tests in Test Explorer
Have your tests created using the Logic Apps Standard Automated Test Framework disappeared from the Test Explorer in VS Code all of a sudden? The answer is a mismatch between the MSTest versions used. A recent update in the C# DevKit extension changed the minimum requirements for the MSTest library - it now requires the minimum of 3.7.*. The project scaffolding created byt the Logic Apps Standard extension uses 3.0.2 The good news is that you can fix this by just changing packag...
28/01/2026
Announcing General Availability of RDP Shortpath Configuration via GPO and Microsoft Intune
We are pleased to announce the general availability (GA) of centralized RDP Shortpath configuration using Microsoft Intune and Group Policy (GPO). This update gives IT administrators a unified, policy-driven way to control which RDP Shortpath modes (Managed, Public/STUN, Public/TURN) are enabled across Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) session hosts and Windows 365 Cloud P...
28/01/2026
Your Data, Your Choices: Understanding Microsoft’s Privacy Commitments
Today, we celebrate National Data Privacy Day. At Microsoft, privacy is more than a legal requirement, it’s a foundation for customer trust and a core part of how products and services are built. As digital life expands and technologies like artificial intelligence play a bigger role in everyday tasks, we continue to invest deeply in privacy, transparency, and responsible innovation. Learn more about
28/01/2026
Upcoming Conditional Access change: Improved enforcement for policies with resource exclusions
In alignment with Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative, we are taking the following proactive security measures for defense-in-depth. Please review the changes and take any required actions to prepare. What is changing? Today
28/01/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: January 28, 2026
Learn about 180 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
28/01/2026
Microsoft-kumppaneiden menestystarinoita Suomessa käsittelevä blogipostaus-sarja käynnistyy!
Keväällä 2026 käynnistyy kumppanifoorumin blogisarja, jossa esitellään Microsoft-kumppaneiden menestystarinoita. Sarja alkaa Partner of the Year 2025 -voittajalla Vivictalla. Nostamme esiin voittajien tarinoita sekä konkreettisia esimerkkejä ratkaisuista ja innovaatioista, jotka tuottavat mitattavaa arvoa asiakkaille ja vahvistavat ekosysteemin kehitystä Suomessa. POTYA 2025 -voittajat edustavat suomalaisten kumppaneiden osaamista ja yhteistyön ...
28/01/2026
GitHub Copilot SDK and Hybrid AI in Practice: Automating README to PPT Transformation
Introduction In today's rapidly evolving AI landscape, developers often face a critical choice: should we use powerful cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) that require internet connectivity, or lightweight Small Language Models (SLMs) that run locally but have limited capabilities? The answer isn't either-or—it's hybrid models—combining the strengths of both to create AI solutions that are secure, efficient, and powerful. This article explores hybrid mode...
28/01/2026
Tencent Hunyuan Releases HPC-Ops: A High Performance LLM Inference Operator Library
Tencent Hunyuan has open sourced HPC-Ops, a production grade operator library for large language model inference architecture devices. HPC-Ops focuses on low level CUDA kernels for core operators such as Attention, Grouped GEMM, and Fused MoE, and exposes them through a compact-C and Python API for integration into existing inference stacks. HPC-Ops runs in large […] The post
28/01/2026
Conditional Access for Agent Identities in Microsoft Entra
AI agents are rapidly becoming part of everyday enterprise operations summarizing incidents, analyzing logs, orchestrating workflows, or even acting as digital colleagues. As organizations adopt these intelligent automations, securing them becomes just as important as securing human identities. Microsoft Entra introduces Agent Identities and extends Conditional Access to them but with very limited controls compared to traditional users and workload ide...
28/01/2026
What's New in Excel (January 2026)
Happy New Year, and welcome to the January 2026 update! We’re excited to share that Agent Mode in Excel is now generally available in Excel on Windows and is rolling out to Excel on Mac over the coming days. This month also brings the general availability of the full Power Query experience in Excel for the web. In addition, Windows Insider users can access new import functions and descriptive error cards, and Office Scripts now supports saving and emailing files as a PDF across all platforms<...
28/01/2026
Compliance Meets AI: DLP for Copilot Is Better Than Ever.
Last week we hosted Session 2 of our “Compliance Meets AI” series, and the focus couldn’t be more timely: Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Microsoft 365 Copilot. The conversation was practical, candid, and packed with real-world guidance for organizations navigating AI adoption responsibly. If you missed it, no worries we have you covered. You can view the recording below.
28/01/2026
Making AI Apps Enterprise-Ready with Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Foundry
Building AI apps is easy. Shipping them to production is not. Microsoft Foundry lets developers bring powerful AI apps and agents to production in days. But managing safety, security, and compliance for each one quickly becomes the real bottleneck. Every enterprise AI project hits the same wall: security reviews, data classification, audit trails, DLP policies, retention requirements. Teams spend months building custom logging pipelines and governance systems that never quite keep up w...
28/01/2026
Moonshot AI Releases Kimi K2.5: An Open Source Visual Agentic Intelligence Model with Native Swarm Execution
Moonshot AI has released Kimi K2.5 as an open source visual agentic intelligence model. It combines a large Mixture of Experts language backbone, a native vision encoder, and a parallel multi agent system called Agent Swarm. The model targets coding, multimodal reasoning, and deep web research with strong benchmark results on agentic, vision, and coding […] The post
27/01/2026
The Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode preview build has been updated!
At Ignite last year, we announced Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode (vMode), a purpose-built experience to help you easily manage on-premises Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization at scale – across multiple hosts and clusters – while effortlessly bridging your environment with Azure Arc for a true hyb...
27/01/2026
Announcing General Availability of Azure Da/Ea/Fasv7-series VMs based on AMD ‘Turin’ processors
Today, Microsoft is announcing the general availability of Azure’s new AMD based Virtual Machines (VMs) powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC™ (Turin) processors. These VMs include general-purpose (Dasv7, Dalsv7), memory-optimized (Easv7), and compute-optimized (Fasv7, Falsv7, Famsv7) series, available with or without local disks. Azure’s latest AMD based VMs offer faster CPU performance, greater scalability, and flexible configurations, making them the ideal choice for high perfor...
27/01/2026
SAP + Microsoft 365: A Unified AI Experience That Works Where You Work
Coauthors: Angel Zhu, Senior Product Manager, M365 Copilot Agent Ecosystem and Christoph Ruehle, Principal Product Manager, Joule/SAP Business AI at SAP We’ve all experienced it: you’re reviewing data, a message pings, an email comes in, and suddenly you’re juggling inboxes, chats, and screens just to finish one workflow. Those small interruptions feel routine — yet employees switch between apps over 1,200 times per day, adding up to weeks of lost productivity ea...
27/01/2026
Microsoft Hero: How Community Sparked a Global Movement
By guest blogger Saeid Dahl. Introduction There comes a moment when numbers stop being just metrics and start telling a story. After more than 160 live sessions over the past two years, thousands of hours of shared learning, and a global audience that has grown to over 7,000 members and subscribers, we felt compell...
27/01/2026
DSGym Offers a Reusable Container Based Substrate for Building and Benchmarking Data Science Agents
Data science agents should inspect datasets, design workflows, run code, and return verifiable answers, not just autocomplete Pandas code. DSGym, introduced by researchers from Stanford University, Together AI, Duke University, and Harvard University, is a framework that evaluates and trains such agents across more than 1,000 data science challenges with expert curated ground truth and […] The post
27/01/2026
Enhance AI Productivity with Designed for Surface Accessories
In today’s workplaces, productivity thrives when technology helps people work smarter and with less friction. AI tools designed to support the way people think, create, and solve problems can help users move through tasks with greater confidence and clarity. But productivity and great AI experiences often benefit from more than compute power. Designed for Surface (DfS) accessories ...
27/01/2026
Updated Exchange Online SMTP AUTH Basic Authentication Deprecation Timeline
We understand that many customers continue to face real challenges modernizing legacy email workflows and need sufficient time to adopt viable, secure alternatives. Based on customer feedback and visibility into adoption progress, we are refining the
27/01/2026
How Tree-KG Enables Hierarchical Knowledge Graphs for Contextual Navigation and Explainable Multi-Hop Reasoning Beyond Traditional RAG
In this tutorial, we implement Tree-KG, an advanced hierarchical knowledge graph system that goes beyond traditional retrieval-augmented generation by combining semantic embeddings with explicit graph structure. We show how we can organize knowledge in a tree-like hierarchy that mirrors how humans learn, from broad domains to fine-grained concepts, and then reason across this structure using […] The post
27/01/2026
Microsoft Industrial AI Partner Guide: Choosing the Right Data Expertise for Every Stage
As organizations scale Industrial AI, the challenge shifts from technology selection to deciding who should lead which part of the journey -- and when. Which partners should establish secure connectivity? Who enables production grade, AI ready industrial data? When do systems integrators step in to scale globally? This Partner Guide helps customers navigate these decisions with clarity and confidence: Identify which partners align to...
27/01/2026
Partner Case Study | Heathrow Scientific
Heathrow Scientific, an innovative manufacturer and distributor of laboratory equipment, wanted to transform its finance and purchasing operations by migrating from its on-premises reporting system to a cloud-based solution. The company collaborated with Microsoft partner Western Computer to consolidate financial and business data in Dynamics 365 Business Central, incorporating the visualization tools of Power BI to track key performance metrics. Heathrow’s digital transformatio...
27/01/2026
Silicon to Systems: How Microsoft Engineers AI Infrastructure from the Ground Up
Every Copilot prompt or Microsoft Teams call runs on infrastructure most users never see. Behind these experiences across general purpose compute and AI is a purpose-built, end-to-end hardware and software system engineered specifically for modern AI workloads. Microsoft’s investment in custom silicon and systems is designed to enable infrastructure optimized for performance, power-efficiency, and cost. In Silicon to Systems, Microsoft leaders and engineers walk through how cu...
27/01/2026
General availability of source specific filters in Copilot Search
We’re excited to share that source specific filters are now generally available worldwide in Copilot Search 🎉. This release addresses a longstanding challenge in enterprise search: helping users move seamlessly from broad discovery ...
27/01/2026
Upcoming M365 Copilot Government Roadshow Dates
There’s never been a more exciting time to explore what Microsoft 365 Copilot and agentic AI can do for your organization. To help you build momentum, sharpen skills, and accelerate real adoption, we’re rolling out a series of immersive, hands‑on experiences across multiple cities. These sessions are designed to help teams move beyond the basics and start building high‑impact solutions that transform the way they work. Below is an overview of three upcoming events—each offering deep te...
27/01/2026
Enterprise Adoption Guide: Microsoft Dev Box
Audience: Platform Engineering, Cloud Architects, Security Teams, and Developer Leads Purpose: A practical, opinionated guide to plan, implement, and scale Microsoft Dev Box—covering decisions, trade‑offs, and best practices for real‑world enterprise adoption. Why This Guide Exists Developer onboarding and environment consistency are critical for productivity. Traditional approaches—manual laptop setup, dependency mismatches, and restrictive security—slow teams down and...
27/01/2026
Advance Your SOC Skills with the Power of Microsoft Sentinel data lake and graph
Microsoft Sentinel has evolved beyond a traditional SIEM into a unified, AI-ready security platform that brings data, analytics, intelligence, and automation together. At the core are Microsoft Sentinel data lake and Microsoft Sentinel graph: data lake enables long-term retention and high-scale analytics, and graph adds entity relationships to speed investigations. We have updated skilling to reflect these changes, so defenders can build the right hands-on skills faster.1...
27/01/2026
Agent Mode in Excel is now generally available on desktop
Agent Mode in Excel, part of Microsoft 365 Copilot, is now generally available on Windows, with Mac rolling out over the coming days — extending access beyond Excel for the web, which launched in ...
27/01/2026
The 3 Invisible Risks Every LLM App Faces (And How to Guard Against Them)
Building a chatbot prototype takes hours.
27/01/2026
Transforming Retry-After Headers in Azure APIM: A Step-by-Step Guide
In this blog post, you'll learn how to customize the Retry-After response header in Azure API Management (APIM) rate-limiting policies, enhancing your API's flexibility and user experience. While it does not delve into the specifics of the rate-limit or rate-limit-by-key policies, it provides a practical guide for altering the Retry-After header. For detailed information on the rate-limit policy, please visit
27/01/2026
In Summa, synvert ClearPeaks, and Asignet offer transactable solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like In Summa, synvert ClearPeaks, and Asignet deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace. Learn about these offers below:
27/01/2026
Moving Forward: Alternatives After Azure Data Studio - Azure SQL Migration Extension Deprecation
If you're currently using the Azure SQL Migration extension, this blog will guide you through recommended alternatives for every phase of your migration—whether you are moving to Azure SQL Managed Instance, SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, or Azure SQL Database. What's happening to Azure SQL Migration extension in ADS? Azure SQL Migration extension in Azure Data Studio officially retires on February 28, 2026 along with Azure Data Studio. This change aims to ...
27/01/2026
Enable auditing to identify Change Tracking history table drops using Extended Events (Azure SQL Db)
When Change Tracking is enabled, the system-maintained history table dbo.MSChange_tracking_history is a key place to look for cleanup progress and errors. For example, Microsoft’s troubleshooting guidance for Change Tracking auto-cleanup explicitly references querying the history table to validate whether cleanup is running and whether there are cleanup errors. In real-world environments, teams sometimes observe that dbo.MSChange_tracking_history
27/01/2026
The Hidden Memory Architecture of LLMs
Your LLM is not running out of intelligence. It is often hitting context and runtime memory limits. I’m Hazem Ali — Microsoft AI MVP, Distinguished AI and ML Engineer /...
27/01/2026
Azure Arc for SQL Server: Executive Summary for Enterprise Clients
The Azure Connected Machine Agent is the foundation of Azure Arc.With the SQL Server extension active, configure monitoring capabilities.Begin with a pilot deployment on a non production SQL Server to validate network connectivity and familiarize your team with the Azure Arc experience.
27/01/2026
Unifying Scattered Observability Data from Dynatrace + Azure for Self-Healing with SRE Agent
What if an AI agent could unify data from third-party observability platforms with Azure deployment history and act on it automatically—every week, before users even notice?Using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), you can connect external observability platforms like Dynatrace directly to your agent.It correlates Dynatrace log analysis with Azure Container Apps deployment history, generates correlation charts, and executes rollbacks when confidence is high.
27/01/2026
“Automating Export of Microsoft Sentinel Analytic Rules mapped to MITRE Tactics & Techniques”
1. Introduction In modern Security Operations Centers (SOCs), mapping detections to the MITRE ATT&CK framework is critical. MITRE ATT&CK provides a structured, globally recognized model of adversary behavior, categorized into Tactics (goals) and Techniques (methods). Microsoft Sentinel analytic rules frequently include MITRE mappings, but viewing or exporting these at scale isn’t straightforward within the portal. Security teams ofte...
27/01/2026
When and why startups add a Gateway in front of Microsoft Foundry
Note: This post focuses on when and why startups begin adopting a gateway in front of Microsoft Foundry. In a follow-up article, we’ll go into a technical deep dive, covering design decisions, operational tradeoffs, latency considerations, observability, and patterns used in production-scale environments. Most teams don’t hit scaling challenges with Microsoft Foundry on day one. ...
27/01/2026
How a Haystack-Powered Multi-Agent System Detects Incidents, Investigates Metrics and Logs, and Produces Production-Grade Incident Reviews End-to-End
In this tutorial, we design this implementation to demonstrate how Haystack enables building advanced, agentic AI systems that go far beyond toy examples while remaining fully runnable. We focus on a cohesive, end-to-end setup that highlights orchestration, stateful decision-making, tool execution, and structured control flow, demonstrating how complex agent behavior can be cleanly expressed. We […] The post
27/01/2026
Building a Reliable Real Time Data Pipeline with Microsoft Fabric
The Two Pillars That Determine Success Data Quality Cannot Be an Afterthought The most common mistake we see is treating data quality as something to address after the pipeline is running. This approach creates technical debt that compounds over time and erodes trust in your data. Your CDC pipeline will ingest millions of events daily. Without proper validation at each layer, small issues become major problems. A single source system changing a column from integer to ...
27/01/2026
How SRE Agent Pulls Logs from Grafana and Creates Jira Tickets Without Native Integrations
Your tools. Your workflows. SRE Agent adapts. SRE Agent natively integrates with PagerDuty, ServiceNow, and Azure Monitor. But your team might use Jira for incident tracking. Grafana for dashboards. Loki for logs. Prometheus for metrics. These aren't natively supported. That doesn't matter. SRE Agent supports MCP, the Model Context Protocol. Any MCP-compatible server extends the agent's capabilities. Connect your Grafana instance. Connect your Jira...
27/01/2026
Compliance Meets AI 2026 Kickoff: DSPM for AI
🚀 Compliance Meets AI 2026 Kickoff: DSPM for AI What a great way to kick off the Compliance Meets AI 2026 series! For the first session we took a deep dive into Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI and explored how organizations can govern, protect, and gain visibility into generative AI usage—without slowing innovation. If you missed the session, don't worry you can watch the recording here
26/01/2026
Celebrating Community Manager Appreciation Day - January 26
Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day, and I want to take a moment to shine a bright, well‑deserved spotlight on the people who ensure our communities feel supported, informed, inspired, and connected: our Community Managers. In the Microsoft ecosystem, community managers do far more than answer questions or keep conversations flowing. They are the bridge between customers and product teams. They elevate voices. They create belonging. They h...
26/01/2026
When and why startups add a Gateway in front of Azure AI Foundry
Most teams don’t hit scaling challenges with Azure AI Foundry on day one. Early on, things are simple. One or two applications call Foundry directly. Traffic is predictable. Model experimentation moves fast. Everything works, and there’s no reason to add extra layers. Then adoption grows. More applications start calling the same models. Traffic becomes spiky. Teams want better v...
26/01/2026
5 Essential Digital Skills Every Nonprofit Needs for 2026 and Beyond
With small teams and big missions, capacity comes from skills, not just software licenses. The right skill stack compounds value across your programs, fundraising, operations, and partnerships. Below are the five essential digital skills (plus starter steps you can take this month). Data Literacy — Turning Information into Insight Data powers everything from fundraising decisions to program outcomes.Every ...
26/01/2026
Introducing the Azure Static Web Apps Skill for GitHub Copilot
From "Built" to "Deployed" in Minutes You've just finished building something great: A marketing landing page for your startup A portfolio site showcasing your work A documentation site for your open-source project An e-commerce storefront built with Next.js An internal dashboard for your team A blog with your latest content
26/01/2026
A New Habit for a New Era | Make “Mastering AI” Your New Year’s Resolution
New Year’s is all about fresh starts—and this year, nothing offers more potential than AI. So, make a resolution that will transform both your personal and professional life: learn to use AI effectively. Just as regular exercise strengthens your body, making AI a daily habit will transform how you work - unlocking new opportunities and giving you more time to focus on what matters most. The key is consistency: make it a habit to ask, “How can AI help ...
26/01/2026
What is going on with RC4 in Kerberos?
Howdy everyone! The cat is out of the bag when it comes to Microsoft’s forward outlook on RC4 usage in Kerberos. In the past few months, we have published the following.
26/01/2026
Windows 365 now supported in Brazil South
Today, we’re pleased to announce that Windows 365 is now available in the Brazil South region. Organizations can now provision Cloud PCs closer to their users in Brazil and across South America, helping reduce latency and support regional data residency requirements. With this update, Brazil South joins the list of su...
26/01/2026
Partner Blog | January 2026 skilling kickoff: Turn readiness into growth
A new year is a natural planning moment. Partners are navigating various pressures and opportunities, including fast-moving AI, shifting cloud workloads, rising security expectations, and data becoming a bigger part of every solution motion. In that environment, skilling can’t be treated as an optional add-on. It’s a core business priority that supports what partners care about most: winning wo...
26/01/2026
Wireshark walkthrough: observing an Azure SQL Database TDS connection on the wire
One of the most effective ways to truly understand how Azure SQL Database connectivity works is to observe the connection at the packet level. A short Wireshark capture clearly shows the interaction between TCP, TLS, TDS, and the Azure SQL gateway / redirect flow. This section walks through what you should expect to see in a healthy Azure SQL Database connection. 1. Captur...
26/01/2026
Azure SQL Database and the TDS protocol: how it works (networking + protocol deep dive)
If you’ve ever opened a packet capture for an Azure SQL Database connection, you’ve seen a very “SQL-shaped” conversation riding on top of TCP: Tabular Data Stream (TDS). TDS is the application-layer request/response protocol used by SQL clients to talk to SQL Server family services—including Azure SQL Database. It’s the on-the-wire format that carries login/authentication, encryption negotiation,
26/01/2026
Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations is now generally available
Every data security investigation starts with the same question: What data security risks are buried in this data? Exposed credentials in thousands of files across a data estate. Evidence of fraud hidden in vendor communications. Sensitive documents accidentally shared to a large group. Finding these risks manually — reviewing content file by file, message by message — is no longer viable when organizations are managing 220 zettabytes of data
26/01/2026
Leveling Up Your Machine Learning: What To Do After Andrew Ng’s Course
Finishing Andrew Ng's machine learning course
26/01/2026
Accelerating Microsoft 365 Copilot Adoption with Automated Readiness Assessment
Note: This playbook is designed for Microsoft partners operating within the AI Business Solutions commercial solution area to support their customers with the adoption journey of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The Copilot Readiness Challenge...
26/01/2026
Driving DevSecOps Standards: Microsoft’s Role in Shaping NIST SP 1800-44 Volume B
We are grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) SP 1800-44 Volume B – DevSecOps Architecture. This publication represents a significant step forward in defining a reference architecture for secure software development, and we appreciate the collaborative efforts of all involved. Security is woven throughout the development lifecycle, addressing challenges such as open-source risk, s...
26/01/2026
Building a TOTP Authenticator App on Azure Functions and Azure Key Vault
Two-factor authentication (2FA) has become a cornerstone of modern digital security, serving as a crucial defense against unauthorized access and account compromises. While many organizations rely on popular authenticator apps like Microsoft Authenticator, there's significant value in understanding how to build and customize your own TOTP (Time-based One-Time Password) solution. This becomes particularly relevant for those requiring specific customizations, enhanced security controls, or seam...
26/01/2026
Deep dive into the Maia 200 architecture
Maia 200 is a breakthrough inference architecture engineered to dramatically shift the economics of large-scale token generation. As Microsoft’s first silicon and system platform optimized specifically for AI inference, Maia 200 is built for modern reasoning and large language models, delivering the most efficient performance per dollar of any inference system deployed in Azure and ...
26/01/2026
Where Partners Build and Scale: Partner-Built Security Copilot Agents in Security Store
At Microsoft, we believe that security is a team sport. That’s why we are committed to meeting customers where they are, integrating with the solutions they already use to ensure that everyone can take advantage of the agentic capabilities of Security Copilot. And it’s not just an idea—it’s a reality. We’re excited to share why partners such as BlueVoyant, OneTrust, and Tanium chose to build agents with Security Copilot—and the value this brings to their customers. By watching t...
26/01/2026
NVIDIA Revolutionizes Climate Tech with ‘Earth-2’: The World’s First Fully Open Accelerated AI Weather Stack
For decades, predicting the weather has been the exclusive domain of massive government supercomputers running complex physics-based equations. NVIDIA has shattered that barrier with the release of the Earth-2 family of open models and tools for AI weather and climate prediction accessible to virtually anyone, from tech startups to national meteorological agencies. In a move […] The post
26/01/2026
New in Excel for the web: The full Power Query experience
We’ve reached yet another milestone in Excel for the web: The full Power Query user experience is now generally available, including the import wizard and Power Query Editor.After we released the ability to refresh Power Query data from authenticated data sources, we were able to unlock the ability to complete the full user journey of importing data and editing it using Power Query.Connect to the data source.
26/01/2026
GitHub Copilot + SQL Server: Understanding the Security Analyzer
What problem is this trying to solve? Many security issues in applications come from the database layer: poorly written queries, dynamic SQL, or code that exposes more data than it should. These problems are often hard to spot, especially in large or older codebases. The MSSQL extension for VS Code (v1.37+) now integrates GitHub Copilot with a dedicated chat participant:
26/01/2026
Building Agents with GitHub Copilot SDK: A Practical Guide to Automated Tech Update Tracking
Introduction In the rapidly evolving tech landscape, staying on top of key project updates is crucial. This article explores how to leverage GitHub's newly released Copilot SDK to build intelligent agent systems, featuring a practical case study on automating daily update tracking and analysis for Microsoft's Agent Framework. GitHub Copilot SDK: Embedding AI Capabilities into Any Application SDK Overview On January 22, 2026, GitHub of...
26/01/2026
Créer votre première application avec PowerApps
De nos jours, créer une application n’est plus réservés uniquement qu’aux développeurs. Avec Microsoft Power Apps, tout le monde peut concevoir des applications d’entreprise professionnelles sans écrire une seule ligne de code. C’es la magie qu’on appelle le low-code / no-code. On peut construire une application en quelques minutes, gérer des données sur Excel, SharePoint ou Dataverse et aussi générer automatiquement l’application à partir d’une simple description avec...
26/01/2026
Engineering a Local-First Agentic Podcast Studio: A Deep Dive into Multi-Agent Orchestration
The transition from standalone Large Language Models (LLMs) to Agentic Orchestration marks the next frontier in AI development. We are moving away from simple "prompt-and-response" cycles toward a paradigm where specialized, autonomous units—AI Agents—collaborate to solve complex, multi-step problems. As a Technology Evangelist, my focus is on building these production-grade systems entirely on the edge, ensuring privacy, speed, and cost-effici...
26/01/2026
What is Clawdbot? How a Local First Agent Stack Turns Chats into Real Automations
Clawdbot is an open source personal AI assistant that you run on your own hardware. It connects large language models from providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI to real tools such as messaging apps, files, shell, browser and smart home devices, while keeping the orchestration layer under your control. The interesting part is not that […] The post Wh...
26/01/2026
StepFun AI Introduce Step-DeepResearch: A Cost-Effective Deep Research Agent Model Built Around Atomic Capabilities
StepFun has introduced Step-DeepResearch, a 32B parameter end to end deep research agent that aims to turn web search into actual research workflows with long horizon reasoning, tool use and structured reporting. The model is built on Qwen2.5 32B-Base and is trained to act as a single agent that plans, explores sources, verifies evidence and […] The post
25/01/2026
A Coding Implementation to Automating LLM Quality Assurance with DeepEval, Custom Retrievers, and LLM-as-a-Judge Metrics
We initiate this tutorial by configuring a high-performance evaluation environment, specifically focused on integrating the DeepEval framework to bring unit-testing rigor to our LLM applications. By bridging the gap between raw retrieval and final generation, we implement a system that treats model outputs as testable code and uses LLM-as-a-judge metrics to quantify performance. We move […] The post
25/01/2026
How Machine Learning and Semantic Embeddings Reorder CVE Vulnerabilities Beyond Raw CVSS Scores
In this tutorial, we build an AI-assisted vulnerability scanner that goes beyond static CVSS scoring and instead learns to prioritize vulnerabilities using semantic understanding and machine learning. We treat vulnerability descriptions as rich linguistic artifacts, embed them using modern sentence transformers, and combine these representations with structural metadata to produce a data-driven priority score. Also, […] The post
24/01/2026
Supercharging SharePoint Metadata with the Knowledge Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Organizations adopting Microsoft 365 Copilot are quickly realizing that great AI outcomes depend on great data foundations. But for many teams, keeping SharePoint content well‑structured, tagged, and optimized for search has always been a challenge. Enter Knowledge Agent (Preview) - now included with Microsoft 365 Copilot (premium) - a powerful new capability that automates metadata enrichment inside SharePoint. In just a few minutes, it can transform ...
23/01/2026
GitHub Releases Copilot-SDK to Embed Its Agentic Runtime in Any App
GitHub has opened up the internal agent runtime that powers GitHub Copilot CLI and exposed it as a programmable SDK. The GitHub Copilot-SDK, now in technical preview, lets you embed the same agentic execution loop into any application so the agent can plan, invoke tools, edit files, and run commands as part of your own […] The post GitHub Releases Copilot-SDK to ...
23/01/2026
Course Retirement Announcement: AZ-1010 and MS-4007
The following instructor‑led courses are scheduled to retire. You can find all past and upcoming retirements here: Course retirement | Microsoft Learn. Please note that it may take some time for newly announced courses to appear on the page. MS-4007: Microsoft 365 Copilot user Enablement Specialist
23/01/2026
Title Plan Update - January 23, 2026
📁January 23, 2026 - Title Plan Now Available Access the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at
23/01/2026
How an AI Agent Chooses What to Do Under Tokens, Latency, and Tool-Call Budget Constraints?
In this tutorial, we build a cost-aware planning agent that deliberately balances output quality against real-world constraints such as token usage, latency, and tool-call budgets. We design the agent to generate multiple candidate actions, estimate their expected costs and benefits, and then select an execution plan that maximizes value while staying within strict budgets. With […] The post
23/01/2026
How to Connect Azure SRE Agent to Azure MCP
To connect Azure MCP to your SRE Agent, you need to add an MCP connector through the Azure Portal.Use the Subagent Builder to create a subagent that leverages your MCP connector:Test your configuration by calling an MCP tool in the subagent's playground:
23/01/2026
Building an AI Red Teaming Framework: A Developer's Guide to Securing AI Applications
As an AI developer working with Microsoft Foundry, and custom chatbot deployments, I needed a way to systematically test AI applications for security vulnerabilities. Manual testing wasn't scalable, and existing tools didn't fit my workflow. So I built a configuration-driven AI Red Teaming framework from scratch. This post walks through how I architected and implemented a production-grade framework that:
23/01/2026
Scaling DNS on AKS with Cilium: NodeLocal DNSCache, LRP, and FQDN Policies
Why Adopt NodeLocal DNSCache? The primary drivers for adoption are usually: Eliminating Conntrack Pressure: In high-QPS UDP DNS scenarios, conntrack contention and UDP tracking can cause intermittent DNS response loss and retries; depending on resolver retry/timeouts, this can appear as multi-second lookup delays and sometimes much longer tails. Reducing Latency: By placing a cache on every node, you remove the network hop to th...
23/01/2026
Microsoft 365 Accessibility, a year in review: Building accessible experiences with support from AI
Hi, Insiders! You are at the forefront of how we design every new feature and update. Your feedback, suggestions, and insights help everyone have a great experience using our products. In 2025, we continued co-creating with internal and external blind and low vision and deaf and hard-of-hearing communities to make collaborating and creating content across Microsoft 365 seamless. Here’s a look back at some of our biggest accessibility enhancements over the past year: AI-assisted access...
23/01/2026
Exchange Online Public Folder Data and Retention Questions
Administrators managing public folders in Exchange Online may encounter scenarios where data loss occurs due to various reasons. For example, a user might delete an email from a public folder and later need to restore it after the retention period has expired, or purged data may be required for compliance or legal purposes. To mitigate such risks, Exchange Online provides retention policies for public folders. These policies allow you to retain deleted data for a specified duration or ...
23/01/2026
Qwen Researchers Release Qwen3-TTS: an Open Multilingual TTS Suite with Real-Time Latency and Fine-Grained Voice Control
Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen team has open-sourced Qwen3-TTS, a family of multilingual text-to-speech models that target three core tasks in one stack, voice clone, voice design, and high quality speech generation. Model family and capabilities Qwen3-TTS uses a 12Hz speech tokenizer and 2 language model sizes, 0.6B and 1.7B, packaged into 3 main tasks. The open […] The post
23/01/2026
Ep 34 | IAMCP Illuminate 2026 (India): Where Trust Turns into Real Partner Opportunities
If you’ve spent any time in the Microsoft partner ecosystem, you already know the truth: partnerships are the growth engine. But you also know the other truth: partnerships don’t work on PowerPoint. They work when trust comes first. That’s precisely what makes the IAMCP India chapter such a standout. In a world where partner communities often struggle to ...
23/01/2026
Handling Duplicate Metadata Errors When Re‑Enabling Mirroring in Azure SQL Database
Recently, during such a weekly refresh cycle, enabling mirroring failed for one specific table, resulting in a duplicate key error inside system metadata tables.To fix the metadata conflict, we manually cleaned up the stale change feed entry using the following command:handling duplicate metadata errors when re‑enabling Mirroring in Azure SQL Database.
23/01/2026
Microsoft Releases VibeVoice-ASR: A Unified Speech-to-Text Model Designed to Handle 60-Minute Long-Form Audio in a Single Pass
Microsoft has released VibeVoice-ASR as part of the VibeVoice family of open source frontier voice AI models. VibeVoice-ASR is described as a unified speech-to-text model that can handle 60-minute long-form audio in a single pass and output structured transcriptions that encode Who, When, and What, with support for Customized Hotwords. VibeVoice sits in a single […] The post
22/01/2026
Partner Blog | New partner benefits are coming: Plan now to maximize value.
The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program gives partners a strong foundation to build, market, and scale solutions for the next wave of cloud and AI innovation. No matter your size or focus area, the program is designed to enable growth by connecting technology, resources, and support in ways that reflect how partners operate and deliver value to customers. The scale and maturity of our partner ecosystem, paired with a deeply embedded co-sell and services model across ...
22/01/2026
Message Trace Support Using Graph API is now in Public Preview
We are excited to announce that Message Trace support using Graph API is now in Public Preview. In response to feedback from our community, we are making enhancements to improve the overall Message Trace experience. We plan to start GA roll-out by January-end and complete within the first week of February. With this RESTful web API, you can trace your email messages throughout your Exchange Online organization. The new Message Trace support using Graph API will replace the existing Message Tr...
22/01/2026
Scale your sales growth with negotiated deals and reselling with ease
Negotiated deals are one of the most effective ways to grow larger, more flexible sales through Microsoft Marketplace. They let you align pricing, billing, and terms to how customers prefer to buy, without changing how your app or agent is built. That last point matters. Negotiated deals don’t require you to create a new app or agent. Instead, they let you repackage existing, publicly transactable offers with customized terms for specific customers or partners. The res...
22/01/2026
News to Know – Volume 3, Edition 1, January 2026
A new year brings renewed focus and fresh opportunities to listen, learn, and act. In this month’s newsletter, we’re sharing the latest updates and insights from Viva Glint & Pulse—designed to help you start the year strong and continue building meaningful, actionable employee listening programs. New on your Viva Glint platform Reporting:
22/01/2026
Intune my Macs: Accelerating macOS proof of concepts with Microsoft Intune
We've developed a starter kit to make it easy to explore and set up macOS configurations in Intune: Intune my Macs.Intune my Macs is an open-source project from the Microsoft Intune Customer Experience Engineering team that allows you to deploy a complete macOS proof of concept in minutes.This starter kit brings together over 31 enterprise-grade configurations—identified by Apple’s Mac Evaluation Utility—along with policies, scripts, and applications, all of which can be deployed using a single PowerShell script.
22/01/2026
Set up a linked server from SQL Managed Instance to Azure Synapse SQL
Azure SQL Managed Instance supports setting up a linked server to Azure Synapse SQL using SQL Authentication or Managed Identity. The linked server will grant you access to the Synapse SQL instance, but you may encounter errors when trying to query the data due to missing permissions on the storage account side. In this blog post, we will go through the steps required, providing examples for both SQL Authentication and Managed Identity. Query Data from Synapse Before setting u...
22/01/2026
Licensing updates extend access to advanced capabilities in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Places
These licensing changes simplify access to capabilities spanning across Microsoft Places and Teams town halls and webinars, so you can deliver experiences that enhance virtual and in-person collaboration.Built directly on the Teams platform, Teams town hall and webinar enable events at scale with improved capabilities, reliability, and capacity.All users with a Teams Enterprise license will soon be able to host events for up to 3,000 attendees with all Teams town hall and webinar features.
22/01/2026
Accelerate your move to Microsoft Sentinel with the new AI Powered SIEM migration experience
Migrating from one SIEM to another is a critical decision—and often one of the hardest to execute. Legacy SIEM migrations are complex, resource-heavy, and time-consuming, often taking up to 15 months with extensive manual effort and cross-team coordination. Organizations face hurdles like multi-phased processes, translating and validating hundreds of detection rules, mapping diverse data sources, and maintaining operational continuity. These challenges have historically slowed cloud adoption ...
22/01/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: January 22, 2026
Learn about 330 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
22/01/2026
"Invalid Managed Identity" error in vulnerability assessments for SQL Managed Instance
The error suggests that there is an issue with the managed identity or the RBAC permissions required, but the same error occurs when there is a connectivity issue between SQL Managed Instance and the storage account selected.If the permissions do exist, then it may be due to connectivity issues between SQL Managed Instance and the storage account.If the DNS settings are custom or a private endpoint is being used, the DNS configuration for the SQL Managed Instance virtual network may need to be configured, for example, adding a private DNS zone.
22/01/2026
The 2026 Time Series Toolkit: 5 Foundation Models for Autonomous Forecasting
Most forecasting work involves building custom models for each dataset — fit an ARIMA here, tune an LSTM there, wrestle with
22/01/2026
A Technical Implementation Guide for Multi-Store Retail Environments
Understanding the Problem Space When organizations first approach multi-source data ingestion, they typically start with explicit configuration. Each database connection is defined individually, each table mapping is specified, and each destination partition is created manually. This works reasonably well for five or ten sources. It becomes painful at twenty. It becomes nearly unmanageable at fifty or more. The operational cost manifests in several ways. Every n...
22/01/2026
FlashLabs Researchers Release Chroma 1.0: A 4B Real Time Speech Dialogue Model With Personalized Voice Cloning
Chroma 1.0 is a real time speech to speech dialogue model that takes audio as input and returns audio as output while preserving the speaker identity across multi turn conversations.It is presented as the first open source end to end spoken dialogue system that combines low latency interaction with high fidelity personalized voice cloning […]
22/01/2026
Simplifying Image Signing with Notary Project and Artifact Signing (GA)
We’re excited to share an updated approach that combines the Notary Project, the CNCF standard for signing and verifying OCI artifacts, with Artifact Signing—formerly Trusted Signing—which is now generally available as a managed signing service.The Notary Project provides an open, interoperable framework for signing and verification across container images and other OCI artifacts, while Notary Project tools like Notation and Ratify enable enforcement in CI/CD pipelines and Kubernetes environments.Artifact Signing complements this by removing the operational complexity of certificate management through short‑lived certificates, verified Azure identities, and role‑based access control, without changing the underlying standards.
22/01/2026
Inworld AI Releases TTS-1.5 For Realtime, Production Grade Voice Agents
Inworld AI has introduced Inworld TTS-1.5, an upgrade to its TTS-1 family that targets realtime voice agents with strict constraints on latency, quality, and cost.TTS-1.5 is described as the number top ranked text to speech system on Artificial Analysis and is designed to be more expressive and more stable than prior generations while remaining […]The post Inworld AI Releases TTS-1.5 For Realtime, Production Grade Voice Agents appeared first on MarkTechPost.
21/01/2026
Fabric Data Agent for Semantic Model added to our free CMS Github Repo
In the most recent update we have added a new Fabric Data Agent that works with the semantic model using Direct Lake mode.The new AI Instructions for the Direct Lake Semantic Model will also work with Power BI Copilot (see examples for Power BI Copilot standalone version in the video below!).The updated GitHub repo that deploys 275 million rows of real CMS Medicare Part D healthcare data to your Fabric environment for an end-to-end demo and testing solution can be found at this link: fabric-samples-healthcare/analytics-bi-directlake-starschema at main · isinghrana/fabric-samples-healthcare
21/01/2026
M365 Copilot Agent-a-thon Coming to Arlington, VA
Join Us In-Person on February 26, 2026 – Arlington, VA Ready to boost your productivity, streamline mission workflows, and get hands-on with the latest in Microsoft 365 AI? We’re excited to invite government employees to an immersive, in-person Agentathon at the Washington DC Microsoft Innovation Hub on Thursday, February 26, 2026, from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM (EST).This session focuses on exactly that—personal productivity agents built within Microsoft 365 that connect your natural language instructions with your organization’s existing data.
21/01/2026
Announcing GitHub Copilot code completions in SQL Server Management 22.2.1
Hey folks! Welcome to a new year, and a new release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). That’s right, we’re starting off 2026 with SSMS 22.2.1, which may look like “just another” minor release, but it’s not…SSMS 22.2.1 contains a set of important bug fixes, thanks to our engineers.We’ve added support for code completions in the query editor for GitHub Copilot. Thanks to those who waited patiently for this functionality! While our GitHub Copilot is based on the one for Visual Studio, we had to add database context into completions functionality. For completions to behave in the manner that you expect, we had to give the model information about the database, and make sure it provided suggestions quickly.
21/01/2026
Elevate teaching and learning with AI-powered experiences on Surface Copilot+ PCs
Surface is a premium endpoint, designed and built by Microsoft to run Microsoft technology.Recently, we also announced the Microsoft Elevate for Educators skilling program along with more AI-powered experiences purpose-built for education, including the Study and Learn agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Study Guide. Microsoft Elevate helps equip educators with the AI skills they need for the classroom of the future. Delivered through platforms like Microsoft Learn and Minecraft Education, these flexible learning paths ensure that educators can build AI fluency at their own pace, whether they're just beginning their journey or advancing to specialized applications. Read more about Microsoft Elevate and other AI tools for education here.In classrooms where both teachers and students are using Surface Copilot+ PCs, Live Captions7 with on-device automatic translation can help make spoken content accessible to all students, including students with hearing impairments.
21/01/2026
Determine Defender for Endpoint offboarding state for Linux devices
The status “Can be onboarded” means that either the endpoint was offboarded from the platform or, that it is a new device discovered by the “Device Discovery” service of MDE and the platform is highlighting this for you as something to address and cover the security gap that represents an endpoint without protection.An additional benefit of this script is that it can also be run from Live Response console but only on devices that are onboarded in Defender for Endpoint.However, running the script will tell you if the device is properly onboarded and the output of the script will be shown in the Live Response console.
21/01/2026
Snow big deal: Winter activities worth braving the cold from Copilot
Make your own fun at homeSave time, money, and effort traveling by bringing winter celebrations right to your home.Just ask Copilot for ways to keep your kids engaged on snow days, or set up a romantic evening with your partner.
21/01/2026
Announcing seamless integration of Apache Kafka with Azure Cosmos DB in Azure Native Confluent
Confluent announced general availability (GA) of the fully managed V2 Kafka connector for Azure Cosmos DB, enabling users to seamlessly integrate their Azure Cosmos DB containers with Kafka-powered event streaming applications. without worrying about provisioning, scaling, or managing the connector infrastructure.The Confluent Cosmos DB v2 connector offers significant advantages as compared to the v1 connector in terms of higher throughput, enhanced security and observability, and increased reliability.We are excited to announce a new capability in Azure Native Confluent service that enables users to create and configure Confluent-managed Cosmos DB Kafka connectors (v2) for Azure Cosmos DB containers through a direct, seamless experience in the Azure portal.
21/01/2026
Data Security Posture Management for AI
Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI provides a unified location to monitor how AI Applications (Microsoft Copilot, AI systems created in Azure AI Foundry, AI Agents, and AI applications using 3rd party Large Language Models).This Blog Post aims to provide the reader with a holistic understanding of achieving Data Security and Governance using Purview Data Security and Governance for AI offering.Following customers’ feedback, Microsoft have announced during Ignite 2025 (18-21 Nov 2025, San Francisco – California) the inclusion of these recommendations in the Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) recommendations section, this helps Data Security Administrators view all relevant data security recommendations in the same place whether they apply to human interactions, tools interactions, or AI interactions of the data.
21/01/2026
Improving Efficiency through Adaptive CPU Uncore Power Management
Cloud servers often operate under low load due to diurnal resource utilization patterns (e.g., user-facing workloads such as Microsoft Teams), which exhibit reduced demand during weeknights and weekends, as shown in Figure 1.Intel and Microsoft Azure co-designed Efficiency Latency Control (ELC), a mechanism for managing uncore frequency that is now available on Intel Xeon 6 (Granite Rapids) processors.The implementation allows software to define CPU utilization thresholds and their corresponding uncore frequency targets, which are communicated to the CPU firmware for enforcement.
21/01/2026
Redis Keys Statistics
Due to the need to read all keys in the cache, both solutions can cause high workload on Redis side, specially for high datasets on the cache, with high number of keys.Both solutions are using LUA script that runs on Redis side, and depending on the amount of keys in the cache, may block all other commands to be processed, while the script is running.The duration time on the output from each script run, may help to identify the impact of the scripts to run.Run it carefully and do some tests first on your developing environment, before using in a production.use ttl_threshold = 0 AND size_threshold = 0 to return all key names with any TTL and any size in the cache (ex: /listKeys.sh [port] 0 0)use ttl_threshold = -1 AND size_threshold = 0 to return all key names with no TTL and any size in the cache (ex: /listKeys.sh [port] -1 0)
21/01/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: January 21, 2026
Learn about 96 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.Run compliant payroll with tax, super, leave, and pay runs directly in Dynamics 365 Business Central.The add-on enables users to generate secure payment links directly from sales quotes, orders, or invoices, making it effortless for customers to complete payments online.
21/01/2026
Everything You Need to Know About How Python Manages Memory
In languages like C, you manually allocate and free memory.
21/01/2026
Salesforce AI Introduces FOFPred: A Language-Driven Future Optical Flow Prediction Framework that Enables Improved Robot Control and Video Generation
Salesforce AI research team present FOFPred, a language driven future optical flow prediction framework that connects large vision language models with diffusion transformers for dense motion forecasting in control and video generation settings.FOFPred takes one or more images and a natural language instruction such as ‘moving the bottle from right to left’ and predicts […]The post Salesforce AI Introduces FOFPred: A Language-Driven Future Optical Flow Prediction Framework that Enables Improved Robot Control and Video Generation appeared first on MarkTechPost.
21/01/2026
How AutoGluon Enables Modern AutoML Pipelines for Production-Grade Tabular Models with Ensembling and Distillation
In this tutorial, we build a production-grade tabular machine learning pipeline using AutoGluon, taking a real-world mixed-type dataset from raw ingestion through to deployment-ready artifacts.We train high-quality stacked and bagged ensembles, evaluate performance with robust metrics, perform subgroup and feature-level analysis, and then optimize the model for real-time inference using refit-full and distillation.The post How AutoGluon Enables Modern AutoML Pipelines for Production-Grade Tabular Models with Ensembling and Distillation appeared first on MarkTechPost.
21/01/2026
SAP RISE & HANA Data Migration: AWS S3 to Azure Blob Storage via Azure Storage Mover
Cloud migration using Azure Storage Mover enables high‑volume data transfer from Amazon S3 into Azure Blob Storage as part of SAP on Azure modernization initiatives, including RISE and SAP HANA deployments.Storage Mover then orchestrates the end‑to‑end data movement using S3 source and Blob target endpoints, supporting large‑scale migrations with telemetry, integrity validation, and incremental sync options.The combined use of Azure Storage Mover and Azure Arc Multicloud Connector provides robust, scalable, and secure architecture for migrating data from Amazon S3 to Azure Blob Storage especially for SAP, RISE, and HANA modernization scenarios.
21/01/2026
Automated Java Performance Diagnostics in Kubernetes using Azure SRE Agent
Performance issues in Java applications running on Kubernetes can be notoriously hard to diagnose.That’s where the new Azure Performance Diagnostics Tool for Java, powered by Azure SRE Agent, comes in.The key takeaway: This tool automates Java performance analysis in Kubernetes environments, dramatically reducing the time and effort required to identify and resolve issues.
21/01/2026
Release of Bicep Azure Verified Modules for Platform Landing Zone
After months of collaboration and invaluable community feedback, we're thrilled to announce that Azure Verified Modules for Platform Landing Zone using Bicep is now generally available!The Bicep AVM starter module composed of 19 separate Azure Verified Modules: 16 resource modules and 3 pattern modules.With Bicep AVM now generally available and set as the default in the ALZ Accelerator for Bicep, we're beginning the deprecation process for classic ALZ-Bicep.
21/01/2026
Liquid AI Releases LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking: a 1.2B Parameter Reasoning Model That Fits Under 1 GB On-Device
Liquid AI has released LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking, a 1.2 billion parameter reasoning model that runs fully on device and fits in about 900 MB on a modern phone.What needed a data center 2 years ago can now run offline on consumer hardware, with a focus on structured reasoning traces, tool use, and math, rather than general […]
21/01/2026
What are Context Graphs?
Knowledge Graphs and their limitations With the rapid growth of AI applications, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have emerged as a foundational structure for representing knowledge in a machine-readable form.They organize information as triples—a head entity, a relation, and a tail entity—forming a graph-like structure where entities are nodes and relationships are edges.The post What are Context Graphs? appeared first on MarkTechPost.
21/01/2026
A Coding Guide to Anemoi-Style Semi-Centralized Agentic Systems Using Peer-to-Peer Critic Loops in LangGraph
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how a semi-centralized Anemoi-style multi-agent system works by letting two peer agents negotiate directly without a manager or supervisor.We show how a Drafter and a Critic iteratively refine an output through peer-to-peer feedback, reducing coordination overhead while preserving quality.We implement this pattern end-to-end in Colab using LangGraph, focusing […]
21/01/2026
Automating Microsoft Sentinel: A blog series on enabling Smart Security
Welcome to the fourth entry of our blog series on automating Microsoft Sentinel.In this series, we’re showing you how to automate various aspects of Microsoft Sentinel, from simple automation of Sentinel Alerts and Incidents, to more complicated response scenarios with multiple moving parts.In this entry, we explored how to create a Playbook from scratch in Microsoft Sentinel, emphasizing the importance of choosing the right trigger and identity and why running Playbooks as managed identities is more secure and reliable than using user accounts.
21/01/2026
Copilot: Data Loss Prevention with Sensitive Information Types
Curious about how to protect sensitive data while leveraging Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Chat?In my latest session, I walk through setting up Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies using sensitive information types—making it easier than ever to safeguard your organization’s data across Copilot, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.Watch to see real-world examples, alerting in action, and tips for rolling out DLP at scale.
21/01/2026
Updated requirements for the SAP on Microsoft Azure specialization
The SAP on Microsoft Azure specialization is a credential that validates your deep expertise in planning, migrating, and operating SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing) workloads on Microsoft Azure.Microsoft is updating this specialization to make it more accessible for a broader range of partners.Lower ACR threshold: Beginning in January 2026, the Azure consumed revenue (ACR) requirement decreased from $30,000 to $7,500,* totaled over three months, significantly reducing the barrier to entry while maintaining a high standard of technical capability.
21/01/2026
RAIDDR: Redefining Memory Reliability
Yet, traditional ECC incurs increased cost, power, and memory footprints, all of which challenge cloud scalability and sustainability.Enter RAIDDR (Redundant Array of Independent Disks for Double Data Rate), Microsoft’s innovative ECC architecture, designed to meet these challenges with a 50 percent reduction in overhead.To accelerate wide adoption of RAIDDR as a standard for memory reliability across the industry, Microsoft has released RAIDDR under the OWF CLA 0.9 open licensing model.
20/01/2026
Expanding the multicloud advantage: Database migration paths into Azure
Broaden your customer base and enhance your app’s exposure by bringing your AWS-based solution to Azure and listing it on Microsoft Marketplace.This guide walks you through how Azure database services compare to those on AWS—spotlighting differences in architecture, scalability, and feature sets—so you can make confident choices when replicating your app’s data layer to Azure.When replicating your app from AWS to Azure, start by mapping your existing database services to the closest Azure equivalents.
20/01/2026
Answer synthesis in Foundry IQ: Quality metrics across 10,000 queries
Answer synthesis lets your applications receive grounded, cited answers directly from your retrieval layer, no additional orchestration required.Available in Foundry IQ and Azure AI Search, it's built into the agentic retrieval engine in knowledge bases, streamlining how you build end-to-end RAG solutions. In this post, we'll explain how answer synthesis works, then share how it impacted answer quality across multiple experiments, datasets, and performance metrics.
20/01/2026
Connect Azure SRE Agent to ServiceNow: End-to-End Incident Response
Connect Azure SRE Agent to ServiceNow as your incident management platform🚨 Step 3: Create a Test Incident in ServiceNowClick on the incident to see the SRE Agent's investigation in action:
20/01/2026
Zhipu AI Releases GLM-4.7-Flash: A 30B-A3B MoE Model for Efficient Local Coding and Agents
GLM-4.7-Flash is a new member of the GLM 4.7 family and targets developers who want strong coding and reasoning performance in a model that is practical to run locally.Zhipu AI (Z.ai) describes GLM-4.7-Flash as a 30B-A3B MoE model and presents it as the strongest model in the 30B class, designed for lightweight deployment where […]The post Zhipu AI Releases GLM-4.7-Flash: A 30B-A3B MoE Model for Efficient Local Coding and Agents appeared first on MarkTechPost.
20/01/2026
Why “Working Smarter with AI” Matters for Every Nonprofit Right Now
It’s already helping teams streamline tasks, cut through busywork, and stay focused on mission‑critical work.This isn’t about working faster — it’s about working smarter.AI gives nonprofits the opportunity to rethink how work happens — reducing burnout, boosting creativity, and helping teams stay focused on advancing the mission.
20/01/2026
Azure Arc Server Jan 2026 Forum Recap
During the January 2026 Azure Arc Server Forum, the Azure Arc product group showcased:Register for SQL Con 2026 at sqlcon.us for insight into the future of SQLOur next session will be on Thursday, February 19 at 9:30 AM PST.
20/01/2026
Security Baseline for M365 Apps for enterprise v2512
Security baseline for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise (v2512, December 2025)Microsoft is pleased to announce the latest Security Baseline for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, version 2512, is now available as part of the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit.This release introduces and updates several security focused policies designed to strengthen protections in Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and core Microsoft 365 Apps components.
20/01/2026
Partner Case Study | Prescan
As a Microsoft partner for more than a decade, Conclusion’s deep expertise in cloud migration, semantic modeling, and data intelligence makes them a trusted advisor for organizations across Europe in healthcare, logistics, government, and beyond.When Prescan, a market leader in preventive medical diagnostics in the Netherlands, wanted to build a future-proof data platform, Conclusion was the logical partner to help make it happen.Prescan’s growing demand for intelligent insights
20/01/2026
Unleashing New Business Opportunities for Microsoft Partners with PostgreSQL & MySQL on Azure
The latest innovations announced at Microsoft Ignite 2025 for PostgreSQL and MySQL running on Azure are more than just technical upgrades—they’re a launchpad for new business growth, deeper customer engagement, and accelerated digital transformation. Here’s how these advancements can help you deliver greater value and unlock new opportunities for your clients.1. Introducing Azure HorizonDB: Built for Performance and AI Workloads We’re excited to unveil Azure HorizonDB in private preview—a new, fully managed PostgreSQL service engineered for business and developers alike. HorizonDB is designed for ultra-low latency, high read scale, and built-in AI capabilities, offering seamless scaling up to 192 virtual cores and 128 TB of storage.
20/01/2026
Run a SQL Query with Azure Arc
In this article, you can find a way to retrieve database permission from all your onboarded databases through Azure Arc.This solution is based on Azure Arc, so first you need to onboard your SQL Server to Azure Arc and enable the SQL Server extension.After you create the dcr and the log analytics workspace with its custom table.
20/01/2026
Simplify your identity landscape, reduce risk, and modernize access for any identity
That’s why we’re launching a new Microsoft Entra Access Priorities Series: a new, practitioner‑focused webinar series designed to help you turn Joy’s strategic guidance into actionable, demos-first steps you can take immediately.In four sessions, our experts will show you how to build secure identity and network access, move away from legacy VPNs, enable secure AI access, and simplify operations with Copilot in Microsoft Entra.Each session includes demos and templates to speed up your identity strategy.
20/01/2026
Engineering Without Borders: MVPs and Experts at CognitionX Egypt
CognitionX is a premier seasonal events series happening worldwide and a global community for people who care about depth and accountability in engineering.Backed by Microsoft MVPs, researchers, and industry experts, CognitionX focuses on knowledge sharing across borders, drawing experts from 35+ countries for practical, technical editions with real-world impact.It was hosted at Microsoft Egypt on December 23, 2025.
20/01/2026
Microsoft Purview Data Risk Assessments: M365 vs Fabric
It can surface data faster, to more people, with less friction, which means existing permission mistakes become more visible, more quickly.Microsoft Purview Data Risk Assessments are designed to identify and help you remediate oversharing risks before (or while) AI experiences like Copilot and analytics copilots accelerate access patterns.Use Microsoft 365 Data Risk Assessments when:
20/01/2026
Encodian, AppJetty, and KAISPE offer transactable partner solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like Encodian, AppJetty, and KAISPE deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace.CRMJetty offers AI-powered automation, real-time customer relationship management data, an intuitive interface, and flexible configuration options to streamline operations and personalize experiences.AutoAPX: This accounts payable automation solution from KAISPE enables finance teams to more swiftly process vendor invoices, with greater accuracy and full visibility.
20/01/2026
Creating a Contained Availability Group and Enabling Database Creation via CAG Listener
A Contained Availability Group (CAG) is designed to simplify high availability and disaster recovery by encapsulating system databases (master, msdb) within the availability group itself.Starting with SQL Server 2025 CU1, you can create or restore databases directly through the CAG listener - without connecting to the physical instance - by enabling a session context key or by using the automated stored procedure [msdb].[In this walkthrough, an existing database named CAGDB is added to a Contained Availability Group (CAG).
20/01/2026
Azure PostgreSQL Lesson Learned #13: Major Version Upgrade Failure Due to HypoPG Extension
We investigated a customer case where a Major Version Upgrade (MVU) from PostgreSQL 11 to 17 on Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server consistently failed during the pre-check phase.The upgrade was triggered through the Azure Portal, but the process was blocked due to the presence of the HypoPG extension installed across multiple databases.Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server supports only a specific list of extensions during major version upgrades.
20/01/2026
The Machine Learning Practitioner’s Guide to Model Deployment with FastAPI
If you’ve trained a machine learning model, a common question comes up: “How do we actually use it?” This is where many machine learning practitioners get stuck.
20/01/2026
Using ClientConnectionId to Correlate .NET Connection Attempts in Azure SQL
In this post, I want to share a simple yet effective pattern for producing JDBC-style trace logs in .NET — specifically focusing on the ClientConnectionId property exposed by SqlConnection.This gives you a powerful correlation key that aligns with backend diagnostics and significantly speeds up root cause analysis for connection problems.Azure SQL Database assigns a unique identifier to every connection attempt from the client.
20/01/2026
Microsoft Foundry for VS Code: January 2026 Update
The January 2026 update for Microsoft Foundry extension in VS Code brings a follow update to the capabilities we introduced during Ignite of last year.We’ve introduced the ability to open sample code files for all agents, including:Get started with building agents and workflows with Microsoft Foundry in VS Code
20/01/2026
Announcing Device IOCTL/WMI Record and Playback Platform (DRPP)
The Device IOCTL/WMI Record and Playback platform (DRPP) records the Device I/O Control Codes (IOCTLs, kernel model IRP_MJ_DEVICE_CONTROL) and WMI I/O Request Packets (IRPs, kernel mode IRP_MJ_SYSTEM_CONTROL) that are successfully processed by the devnode for one or more Device(s) Under Test (DUTs). The purpose of this security extension to the WDTF platform is to discover which Device I/O Control Codes and WMI IRPs cause the driver and/or device to perform a specific action as opposed to simply return an error. These IOCTLs, IRPs are recorded to a file which can be written to when executing any WDTF based test such as Devfund".The training phase is longer than the playback phase as we use the Fuzz Action to send many Device I/O Control Codes (IOCTLs) and WMI IRPs to the DUT. In this phase, we specifically identify the IOCTLs and IRPS that the DUT succeeded in and write this information to a data file specific to the DUT.Below is sample powershell script that is used to call the Replay action for a Microsoft LifeCam Camera or Media DUT, for example:
20/01/2026
How to Design a Fully Streaming Voice Agent with End-to-End Latency Budgets, Incremental ASR, LLM Streaming, and Real-Time TTS
In this tutorial, we build an end-to-end streaming voice agent that mirrors how modern low-latency conversational systems operate in real time.We simulate the complete pipeline, from chunked audio input and streaming speech recognition to incremental language model reasoning and streamed text-to-speech output, while explicitly tracking latency at every stage.The post How to Design a Fully Streaming Voice Agent with End-to-End Latency Budgets, Incremental ASR, LLM Streaming, and Real-Time TTS appeared first on MarkTechPost.
20/01/2026
Microsoft Research Releases OptiMind: A 20B Parameter Model that Turns Natural Language into Solver Ready Optimization Models
Microsoft Research has released OptiMind, an AI based system that converts natural language descriptions of complex decision problems into mathematical formulations that optimization solvers can execute.It targets a long standing bottleneck in operations research, where translating business intent into mixed integer linear programs usually needs expert modelers and days of work.The post Microsoft Research Releases OptiMind: A 20B Parameter Model that Turns Natural Language into Solver Ready Optimization Models appeared first on MarkTechPost.
20/01/2026
Modernizing Spring Boot Applications with GitHub Copilot App Modernization
Upgrading Spring Boot applications from 2.x to the latest 3.x releases introduces significant changes across the framework, dependencies, and Jakarta namespace.GitHub Copilot app modernization helps streamline this transition by analyzing your project, generating an upgrade plan, and applying targeted updates.GitHub Copilot app modernization supports upgrading Spring Boot applications to Spring Boot 3.5, including:
20/01/2026
Upgrade your Java JDK (8, 11, 17, 21, or 25) with GitHub Copilot App Modernization
Developers modernizing Java applications often need to upgrade the Java Development Kit (JDK), update frameworks, align dependencies, or migrate older stacks such as Java EE.GitHub Copilot app modernization dramatically speeds up this process by analyzing your project, identifying upgrade blockers, and generating targeted changes.This post highlights supported upgrade paths and what you can expect when using GitHub Copilot app modernization—optimized for search discoverability rather than deep tutorial content.
20/01/2026
Modernizing Spring Framework Applications with GitHub Copilot App Modernization
Upgrading Spring Framework applications from version 5 to the latest 6.x line (including 6.2+) enables improved performance, enhanced security, alignment with modern Java releases, and full Jakarta namespace compatibility.These capabilities align with the Microsoft Learn quickstart for upgrading Java projects with GitHub Copilot app modernization.Open your Spring Framework project in Visual Studio Code or IntelliJ IDEA with GitHub Copilot app modernization enabled.
20/01/2026
Migrating Application Credentials to Azure Key Vault with GitHub Copilot App Modernization
Migrating to Azure Key Vault centralizes secret management, supports rotation, and removes embedded credentials from application code.GitHub Copilot app modernization accelerates this process by identifying credential usage areas and generating changes for Key Vault integration.Once the project is opened in Visual Studio Code or IntelliJ IDEA, GitHub Copilot app modernization analyzes:
20/01/2026
Modernizing Applications by Migrating Code to Use Managed Identity with Copilot App Modernization
Migrating application code to use Managed Identity removes hard‑coded secrets, reduces operational risk, and aligns with modern cloud security practices.GitHub Copilot app modernization streamlines this transition by identifying credential usage patterns, updating code, and aligning dependencies for Managed Identity flows.Learn full upgrade workflows in the Microsoft Learn guide for upgrading Java projects with GitHub Copilot app modernization.
20/01/2026
Proactive Cloud Ops with SRE Agent: Scheduled Checks for Cloud Optimization
But security is drifting, costs are creeping, and capacity gaps are growing silently.Add the two resource groups to the SRE Agent and link the apps to their corresponding GitHub repos:The more context you give the agent, your SLOs, your runbooks, your policies, the more it reasons like a team member who understands your environment, not just Azure in general.
19/01/2026
Unlock growth with proactive renewals
The small and medium-sized business (SMB) cloud market continues to grow rapidly.Internal projections, informed by IDC market trends, estimate that the SMB cloud market will reach $777 billion1 in FY26.Microsoft internal data shows that on-time renewals drive 20% more revenue than late renewals.
19/01/2026
Deprecation Announcement: SSRS/PBIRS and SSAS Management Packs for SCOM
January 2026 – Microsoft is announcing the deprecation of the System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) Management Packs (MPs) for:SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and Power BI Report Server (PBIRS)SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
19/01/2026
Don't forget to register for the upcoming Microsoft Elevate H2 Partner Kick‑Off - Feb 3 (EMEA) / Feb 4 (AEDT)
Microsoft Elevate H2 Partner Kick-OffKick off the second half of the year with clarity, confidence, and momentum.Join the Microsoft Elevate H2 Partner Kick-Off, where nonprofit partners take center stage and Microsoft shares the priorities, programs, and investments shaping H2.
19/01/2026
Parallel AKS Node Pool Creation with Crossplane: A Version Compatibility Journey
When managing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters at scale, the ability to create multiple node pools in parallel can significantly reduce provisioning time.In this article, I'll share my journey troubleshooting and resolving node pool creation bottlenecks when using Crossplane to manage AKS infrastructure, culminating in a solution that enables true parallel creation of 30+ node pools.TL;DR: Upgrading to Crossplane v2.1.3 (community edition) with Azure Provider v2.2.0 resolved sequential node pool creation issues, enabling parallel provisioning with the correct field names and resource references.
19/01/2026
Introducing Reporting in Playwright Workspaces
Today, we’re thrilled to announce a powerful new reporting feature in Playwright Workspaces – designed to make debugging Playwright end-to-end tests faster, easier, and more insightful.Streamlined access to all your test reports through the Azure portal.Playwright Workspaces now lets you link your own Azure Storage account to store test results, traces, videos, and screenshots.
19/01/2026
Top 5 Agentic AI Website Builders (That Actually Ship)
I have been building a payment platform using vibe coding, and I do not have a frontend background.
19/01/2026
Azure Playwright Testing Service (Preview): Run Playwright Tests on Cloud Browsers
Azure Playwright Testing Service (Preview) simplifies this by allowing you to run Playwright tests on cloud-hosted browsers directly from your local setup.Set up Azure Playwright Testing ServiceRun UI and API tests on remote browsers
19/01/2026
Deep dive into the SSMA Code Conversion Copilot Architecture
Migrating from Oracle PL/SQL to SQL Server T‑SQL is notoriously complex.The Copilot was built to tackle this pain point: augment SSMA’s rule engine with large language models (LLMs) that can reason about tricky conversions, explain their logic, and accelerate the migration process.At the heart of SSMA Copilot lies Semantic Kernel, Microsoft’s open‑source framework for integrating LLMs.
19/01/2026
Using on-behalf-of flow for Entra-based MCP servers
I demoed a Python MCP server that uses Microsoft Entra for authentication, requiring users to first login to the Microsoft tenant before they could use a tool.That requires using an "on-behalf-of" flow, where the MCP server uses the user's Entra identity to call another API, like the Microsoft Graph API.In this blog post, I will explain how to use Entra with OBO flow in a Python FastMCP server.
19/01/2026
Nous Research Releases NousCoder-14B: A Competitive Olympiad Programming Model Post-Trained on Qwen3-14B via Reinforcement Learning
Nous Research has introduced NousCoder-14B, a competitive olympiad programming model that is post trained on Qwen3-14B using reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards.On the LiveCodeBench v6 benchmark, which covers problems from 08/01/2024 to 05/01/2025, the model reaches a Pass@1 accuracy of 67.87 percent.This is 7.08 percentage points higher than the Qwen3-14B baseline of […]
19/01/2026
OneDrive Office Hours | January 2026
OneDrive Consumer Office Hours are back this January, creating space for open conversation around the latest updates and how they support the way you use your files every day.January 2026This month's special topic: "OneDrive (Personal) Updates" with the Eli Waalkes!
18/01/2026
A Coding Guide to Understanding How Retries Trigger Failure Cascades in RPC and Event-Driven Architectures
In this tutorial, we build a hands-on comparison between a synchronous RPC-based system and an asynchronous event-driven architecture to understand how real distributed systems behave under load and failure.We simulate downstream services with variable latency, overload conditions, and transient errors, and then drive both architectures using bursty traffic patterns.The post A Coding Guide to Understanding How Retries Trigger Failure Cascades in RPC and Event-Driven Architectures appeared first on MarkTechPost.
18/01/2026
Vercel Releases Agent Skills: A Package Manager For AI Coding Agents With 10 Years of React and Next.js Optimisation Rules
Vercel has released agent-skills, a collection of skills that turns best practice playbooks into reusable skills for AI coding agents.The project follows the Agent Skills specification and focuses first on React and Next.js performance, web design review, and claimable deployments on Vercel.Skills are installed with a command that feels similar to npm, and […]
18/01/2026
NVIDIA Releases PersonaPlex-7B-v1: A Real-Time Speech-to-Speech Model Designed for Natural and Full-Duplex Conversations
NVIDIA Researchers released PersonaPlex-7B-v1, a full duplex speech to speech conversational model that targets natural voice interactions with precise persona control.From ASR→LLM→TTS to a single full duplex model Conventional voice assistants usually run a cascade.Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) converts speech to text, a language model generates a text answer, and Text to Speech […]
18/01/2026
How to Build a Self-Evaluating Agentic AI System with LlamaIndex and OpenAI Using Retrieval, Tool Use, and Automated Quality Checks
In this tutorial, we build an advanced agentic AI workflow using LlamaIndex and OpenAI models.We focus on designing a reliable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) agent that can reason over evidence, use tools deliberately, and evaluate its own outputs for quality.By structuring the system around retrieval, answer synthesis, and self-evaluation, we demonstrate how agentic patterns […]
17/01/2026
Modernizing Java EE Applications to Jakarta EE with GitHub Copilot App Modernization
Migrating a Java EE application to Jakarta EE is now a required step as the ecosystem has fully transitioned to the new jakarta.* namespace. This migration affects servlet APIs, persistence, security, messaging, and frameworks built on top of the Jakarta specifications. The changes are mechanical but widespread, and manual migration is slow, error‑prone, and difficult to validate at scale. GitHub Copilot app modernization accelerates this process by analyzing the project, identifying r...
17/01/2026
Azure Arc Portal Update: Simplifying Onboarding and Management at Scale
Azure Arc extends Azure’s powerful capabilities to resources running outside Azure - across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments.The Azure Arc portal acts as the central hub for discovering, onboarding, organizing, and managing these external resources just like native Azure assets.Today, we’re excited to introduce a major refresh of the Azure Arc portal, designed to make it easier to get started, onboard resources, and manage your Arc-enabled environments at scale.
16/01/2026
ICYMI: Upcoming Nonprofit & Education Partner Microsoft Elevate Webinars!
Microsoft Elevate (Nonprofit + Education) Partner Community CallGet the latest Microsoft product updates, Elevate Education announcements, and clear guidance to strengthen your Q3 customer conversations.Microsoft Elevate Security Updates: What’s New for Nonprofit & Education
16/01/2026
Microsoft Clipchamp, a year in review: cohesive, AI-powered video creation and editing experiences
To capitalize on each product’s unique advantages and reduce friction for users navigating video at work, we spearheaded a new, cohesive Microsoft video experience by evolving Clipchamp and Stream into a single, streamlined video solution.Microsoft 365 Copilot Create experience makes it easier to create videos from a prompt.And to top it off, at Ignite 2025, we announced the availability of OpenAI’s latest video model, Sora 2, in Frontier—bringing advanced video generation capabilities to Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users.
16/01/2026
Title Plan Update - January 16, 2026
📁January 16, 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.
16/01/2026
Black Forest Labs Releases FLUX.2 [klein]: Compact Flow Models for Interactive Visual Intelligence
Black Forest Labs releases FLUX.2 [klein], a compact image model family that targets interactive visual intelligence on consumer hardware.FLUX.2 [klein] extends the FLUX.2 line with sub second generation and editing, a unified architecture for text to image and image to image, and deployment options that range from local GPUs to cloud APIs, while keeping […]The post Black Forest Labs Releases FLUX.2 [klein]: Compact Flow Models for Interactive Visual Intelligence appeared first on MarkTechPost.
16/01/2026
Demystifying Exchange Online Mailbox Quotas
By doing this, when you then migrate the on-premises mailbox to the cloud using a hybrid migration, the mail user honors the LitigationHold flag coming from on-premises and there will be no data loss post migration to Exchange Online, for the recoverable items, due to RetainDeletedItemsFor setting.There is no switch to disable litigation hold on a mail user object in Exchange Online, after you’ve enabled it for cross-tenant migration purposes.If the source mailbox is bigger than 100 GB and is hosted at Google or an IMAP source, we have a Large Mailbox Migration built-in option: Perform automated migration of large mailboxes from Google or IMAP to Microsoft 365 Exchange |
16/01/2026
Azure File Sync: Azure Arc Integration, Additional Regions, and Secure Syncing
Azure Files and Azure File Sync empower IT and devops teams to seamlessly bridge on-premises Windows File Servers with the flexibility and scale of the cloud.Azure File Sync now provides simplified onboarding via Azure Arc integrating with the Azure hybrid management experience.Beginning January 2026, File Sync will be available at no per‑server cost for customers using Windows Server Software Assurance with Azure Arc and File Sync agent v22 or later.
16/01/2026
Updated requirements for the SAP on Microsoft Azure specialization
The SAP on Microsoft Azure specialization is a credential that validates your deep expertise in planning, migrating, and operating SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing) workloads on Microsoft Azure. Microsoft is updating this specialization to make it more accessible for a broader range of partners.Lower ACR threshold: Beginning in January 2026, the Azure consumed revenue (ACR) requirement decreased from $30,000 to $7,500,* totaled over three months, significantly reducing the barrier to entry while maintaining a high standard of technical capability.Streamlined skilling validation: Partners can validate required Microsoft learning coursework directly within Partner Center, removing the need to do so in the third‑party audit for this specialization. Skilling requirements may be met through either:
16/01/2026
Introducing Administration Client Support for the Azure Service Bus Emulator
We’re excited to announce administration client support for the Azure Service Bus emulator, extending the emulator beyond messaging operations to include management capabilities such as creating, updating, and deleting entities locally.Administration Client support unlocks on‑the‑fly entity creation and management, enabling developers to create, update, or delete entities while the emulator is running.For the Service Bus emulator, management operations using the Service Bus Administration Client are natively supported in .NET.
16/01/2026
Updated requirements for Microsoft Azure VMware Solution specialization
Updated requirements for the Microsoft Azure VMware Solution (AVS) specialization make it simpler to obtain—offering a path to showcase your unique capabilities and technical expertise.What's changedWe removed the requirement to pass the outdated AVS technical assessment to earn the specialization.Highlights of the specializationShow customers you're uniquely qualified to migrate VMware workloads to Azure with the AVS specialization.
16/01/2026
Save the date: Intune Tech Community Live – January 26
Level up your endpoint management skills at Tech Community Live: Intune Edition. IT professionals: mark your calendars for Monday, January 26, 2026.It’s an interactive event packed with four Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) sessions, where you can bring your toughest questions and get real answers from the experts.Let your network know they get the Intune answers and insights they need on January 26 on the Microsoft Tech Community.
16/01/2026
Microsoft Clipchamp, a year in review: a cohesive, AI-powered video editing experience
To capitalize on each product’s unique advantages and reduce friction for users navigating the video space, we spearheaded a new, cohesive Microsoft video experience by evolving Clipchamp and Stream into a single, streamlined video solution.Microsoft 365 Copilot Create experience makes it easier to create videos from a prompt.And to top it off, at Ignite 2025, we announced the availability of OpenAI’s latest video model, Sora 2, in Frontier—bringing advanced video generation capabilities to Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users.
16/01/2026
Announcing Public Preview of User delegation SAS for Azure Tables, Azure Files, and Azure Queues
We’re excited to announce that user delegation (UD) SAS is now in public preview for Azure Tables, Azure Files, and Azure Queues in all public regions. User delegation SAS is already available for Azure Blobs, and we are now extending support to Azure Tables, Azure Files, and Azure Queues. This will allow users to create a more secure SAS token than account or service SAS by tying the SAS token to the creator’s identity. UD SAS extends Entra ID and Azure role-based access control (RBAC) for Azure Storage, meaning lower-privileged users and services can now delegate subsets of their access to clients, using a pre-authorized URL.
16/01/2026
Announcing GA of SQL Server 2025 on RHEL 10 and Ubuntu 24.04, with additional enhancements for Linux deployments
We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of SQL Server 2025 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 and Ubuntu 24.04, starting with the CU1 release.To ensure you are installing the production-ready GA version of SQL Server 2025, it is essential to update your repository from mssql-server-preview.repo to mssql-server-2025.repo.You can now use the session context key 'allow_cag_create_db' set via the existing stored procedure sp_set_session_contex to enable database creation and restoration directly within a contained availability group (CAG) session through the CAG listener. Only users with the dbcreator role can create databases in a CAG session, and only users with the db_owner or sysadmin role can restore databases.
16/01/2026
Understanding USE HINT('FORCE_LEGACY_CARDINALITY_ESTIMATION') in Azure SQL DB
Query performance tuning is one of the most critical aspects of maintaining stable and predictable workloads in Azure SQL Database.While Microsoft continuously improves the SQL Server Cardinality Estimator (CE) to provide more accurate row estimates and better plan choices, there are scenarios where workloads may benefit from reverting to the Legacy CE—especially when upgrading databases or encountering regressions after plan compilation.In this blog, we explore what this hint does, when to use it, and how it impacts execution plans in Azure SQL Database.
16/01/2026
The Complete Guide to Data Augmentation for Machine Learning
Suppose you’ve built your machine learning model, run the experiments, and stared at the results wondering what went wrong.
16/01/2026
Announcing Unified SOX & DORA Compliance Solutions in Microsoft Sentinel
As financial organizations navigate increasingly complex regulatory landscapes, two frameworks stand out for their impact and rigor: the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of the Microsoft Sentinel Solution for DORA Compliance - a purpose‑built workbook that provides centralized, real‑time visibility into your organization’s ICT risks, incidents, threat exposure, and overall resilience posture mapped directly to DORA requirements.The DORA Compliance Workbook is designed for Compliance Officers, Risk Managers, Security Architects, SOC Analysts, and IT Administrators who need a single, integrated view across operational resilience controls.
16/01/2026
How to Build a Safe, Autonomous Prior Authorization Agent for Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management with Human-in-the-Loop Controls
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how an autonomous, agentic AI system can simulate the end-to-end prior authorization workflow within healthcare Revenue Cycle Management (RCM).We show how an agent continuously monitors incoming surgery orders, gathers the required clinical documentation, submits prior authorization requests to payer systems, tracks their status, and intelligently responds to denials through […]The post How to Build a Safe, Autonomous Prior Authorization Agent for Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management with Human-in-the-Loop Controls appeared first on MarkTechPost.
16/01/2026
Google AI Releases TranslateGemma: A New Family of Open Translation Models Built on Gemma 3 with Support for 55 Languages
Google AI has released TranslateGemma, a suite of open machine translation models built on Gemma 3 and targeted at 55 languages.The family comes in 4B, 12B and 27B parameter sizes.It is designed to run across devices from mobile and edge hardware to laptops and a single H100 GPU or TPU instance in the […]
16/01/2026
Cumulative Update #1 for SQL Server 2025 RTM
The 1st cumulative update release for SQL Server 2025 RTM is now available for download at the Microsoft Downloads site.To learn more about the release or servicing model, please visit:Starting with SQL Server 2017, we adopted a new modern servicing model.
16/01/2026
Cumulative Update #23 for SQL Server 2022 RTM
The 23rd cumulative update release for SQL Server 2022 RTM is now available for download at the Microsoft Downloads site.Please note that registration is no longer required to download Cumulative updates.To learn more about the release or servicing model, please visit:Starting with SQL Server 2017, we adopted a new modern servicing model.
16/01/2026
Deploy PostgreSQL on Azure VMs with Azure NetApp Files: Production-Ready Infrastructure as Code
The solution: We've created production-ready Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates that automate the entire deployment, from networking to database initialization, ensuring your PostgreSQL data lives on high-performance Azure NetApp Files storage from day one.The following sections will explore key scenarios for deploying PostgreSQL on Azure NetApp Files, focusing on both development and production environments.We'll highlight how these solutions address technical and economic requirements for rapid testing, operational consistency, and scaling with enterprise-grade storage.
16/01/2026
Postgres speakers - POSETTE 2026 CFP is closing soon!
Guidelines for submitting a proposal to the POSETTE CFPScheduled for June 16 – June 18, 2026, this free and virtual developer event brings together the global Postgres community for three days of learning, sharing, and deep technical storytelling.Whether you're a first-time speaker or a seasoned contributor, your story matters and the Call for Proposals (CFP) closes on February 1, 2026.
15/01/2026
What’s new in Microsoft Sentinel: January 2026
This release brings powerful enhancements, including streamlined ingestion of Microsoft Defender data into the Sentinel data lake, deeper partner connector integrations, QRadar migration support, enriched UEBA insights, and a refreshed ASIM schema for consistent normalization.Ingest Defender data directly into Sentinel data lakeAt Ignite 2025, Microsoft unveiled new connectors and integrations that seamlessly unify signals across multi-cloud and multiplatform environments.
15/01/2026
Unlocking Advanced Data Analytics & AI with Azure NetApp Files object REST API
Azure NetApp Files object REST API enables object access to enterprise file data stored on Azure NetApp Files, without copying, moving, or restructuring that data.This blog builds on How Azure NetApp Files Object REST API powers Azure and ISV Data & AI services – on YOUR data and goes deeper into applied integration patterns, highlighting real‑world scenarios with Azure Databricks and Microsoft OneLake.In this blog, we provide a technical overview of how the object REST API is implemented, how it maps object semantics onto existing file systems, and how it integrates with commonly used platforms such as Azure Databricks and Microsoft OneLake.
15/01/2026
Advancing embodied carbon measurement at scale for Microsoft Azure hardware
At Microsoft, 97% of our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions fall under the Scope 3 category, with the majority originating in our supply chain. Information and communication technology (ICT) hardware within our datacenters (e.g. servers) is a significant contributor to our supply chain emissions, making it essential to understand and reduce the embodied carbon of our Azure hardware as Microsoft and other major cloud providers pursue ambitious climate goals.To meet the complexity and scale of Azure hardware systems in our datacenters, we developed an in‑house, process‑based lifecycle assessment (LCA) approach for cloud ICT hardware.This approach, known internally as the cloud hardware emissions methodology (CHEM), scales environmental impact modeling of Azure hardware while preserving the data resolution needed to support meaningful decarbonization.
15/01/2026
SharePoint Embedded security features: A comprehensive Q&A guide
Q: How does SharePoint Embedded integrate with Microsoft Entra ID?A: SharePoint Embedded requires all users to authenticate through Microsoft Entra IDA: SharePoint Embedded provides granular security controls for each container:
15/01/2026
NVIDIA AI Open-Sourced KVzap: A SOTA KV Cache Pruning Method that Delivers near-Lossless 2x-4x Compression
As context lengths move into tens and hundreds of thousands of tokens, the key value cache in transformer decoders becomes a primary deployment bottleneck.The cache stores keys and values for every layer and head with shape (2, L, H, T, D).The post NVIDIA AI Open-Sourced KVzap: A SOTA KV Cache Pruning Method that Delivers near-Lossless 2x-4x Compression appeared first on MarkTechPost.
15/01/2026
What's New with Azure NetApp Files VS Code Extension
The latest update to the Azure NetApp Files (ANF) VS Code Extension introduces powerful enhancements designed to simplify cloud storage management for developers.From multi-tenant support to intuitive right-click mounting and AI-powered commands, this release focuses on improving productivity and streamlining workflows within Visual Studio Code.Under the hood, the new “Insert mount command” workflow combines Azure authentication, resource discovery, and code generation into a single guided, low-friction path that ends with a ready‑to‑run snippet in your file.
15/01/2026
AI Transcription & Text Analytics for Health
One of the most powerful components of this solution is Azure AI Language – Text Analytics for Health, which transforms raw text into structured clinical insights.This Azure-powered web application demonstrates how organizations can modernize transcription and clinical insights using cloud-native AI services.Finally, Azure OpenAI generates a concise summary and a downloadable clinical report, while FHIR-compliant JSON output seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Fabric OneLake for downstream analytics and reporting—unlocking a complete, scalable, and secure solution for healthcare data workflows.
15/01/2026
OptiMind: A small language model with optimization expertise
This optimization‑aware language model translates natural‑language problem descriptions into solver‑ready mathematical formulations, can help organizations move from ideas to decisions faster.OptiMind is not just as a language model, but as a specialized system built for real-world optimization tasks.Unlike general-purpose large language models adapted for optimization through prompting, OptiMind is purpose-built for mixed integer linear programming (MILP), and its design reflects this singular focus.
15/01/2026
Security Review for Microsoft Edge version 144
We have reviewed the new settings in Microsoft Edge version 144 and determined that there are no additional security settings that require enforcement.The Microsoft Edge version 139 security baseline continues to be our recommended configuration which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit.Please continue to give us feedback through the Security Baselines Discussion site or this post.
15/01/2026
Empowering.Cloud Community Update – January 2026
AI Voice Agents with Azure Communication ServicesIn this expert briefing, MVP Rolf Tröndle walks through what’s new with Microsoft 365 Copilot, taking us from Wave 0 to Wave 2, then demos the built‑in agents and the controls you need to run them safely.MVP Tom Arbuthnot shares all the latest Microsoft Teams and Copilot news and announcements in less than 15 minutes for the first update of 2026.
15/01/2026
Replicating your AWS application to Azure: key resources for software development companies
Azure offers a broad global footprint, strong security and compliance foundations, flexible cost options, and the ability to deploy your solution directly into a customer’s subscription for tighter integration with their environment.With ISV Success, you can also accelerate replication with cloud credits, AI services, and hands on technical guidance.This post highlights key resources that compare AWS and Azure components, outline migration considerations, and guide you through preparing an Azure‑ready version of your application.
15/01/2026
Bring data into Excel with the new Import Functions
Bring data into Excel with the new Import FunctionsThese new functions — including IMPORTTEXT and IMPORTCSV — let you load your data into a refreshable dynamic array with a single formula.IMPORTTEXT is a flexible new function that lets you import data from.txt, .csv, and .tsv files directly into a dynamic array in the grid.
15/01/2026
What’s New in Microsoft EDU, Bett Edition January 2026
The Bett conference takes place in London during the week of January 21st - January 23rd, and Microsoft Education has 18 exciting updates to share!Soon educators will be able to create unit plans in Teach.Bring the interactive, conversational Study and Learn Agent in the Microsoft 365 Copilot App to your students.
15/01/2026
From classroom to workforce: Helping higher ed faculty prepare students for what’s next
Through global faculty development programs, student growth and leadership opportunities, and AI Skills Navigator—an agentic learning space—we aim to foster a connected ecosystem that helps everyone build meaningful AI skills.AI Skills Navigator: A campus-wide agentic learning spaceChampioning AI through the Microsoft Student Ambassadors program
15/01/2026
⏰ Don’t miss out—there’s still time to submit your FastTrack Recognized Solution Architect (FTRSA) nominations and renewals!
The window to nominate for the FTRSA distinction closes on March 3, 2026 (just about 6 weeks from now).Helpful tips and resources to support your nomination:Let’s recognize outstanding architects—get your nominations in before the deadline!
15/01/2026
Starting a User Group: What You Need to Know
However, I found there was no user group at the time local to me so I reached out to the UK Dynamics 365 and Power Platform User Groups and asked to set up a local user group in Reading with the Group’s help.When choosing the date and time of your user group, consider:Microsoft Community – Set up your User Group within the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform community sites to drive awareness and list your events on there (with a link to meetup in the description if you are using that).
15/01/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: January 15, 2026
Learn about 399 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
15/01/2026
The Beginner’s Guide to Computer Vision with Python
Computer vision is an area of artificial intelligence that gives computer systems the ability to analyze, interpret, and understand visual data, namely images and videos.
15/01/2026
Advanced Function Calling and Multi-Agent Systems with Small Language Models in Foundry Local
Advanced Function Calling and Multi-Agent Systems with Small Language Models in Foundry LocalToday, I'm excited to show you something far more powerful: Foundry Local now supports native OpenAI-compatible function calling with select models.Currently, this native function calling capability is available for the Qwen 2.5 family of models in Foundry Local.
15/01/2026
Join our free livestream series on building agents in Python
Join us for a new 6‑part livestream series where we explore the foundational concepts behind building AI agents in Python using the Microsoft Agent Framework.In Session 5 of our Python + Agents series, we’ll go beyond workflow fundamentals and explore how to orchestrate advanced, multi‑agent workflows using the Microsoft Agent Framework.In the final session of our Python + Agents series, we’ll explore how to incorporate human‑in‑the‑loop (HITL) interactions into agentic workflows using the Microsoft Agent Framework.
15/01/2026
DeepSeek AI Researchers Introduce Engram: A Conditional Memory Axis For Sparse LLMs
Transformers use attention and Mixture-of-Experts to scale computation, but they still lack a native way to perform knowledge lookup.They re-compute the same local patterns again and again, which wastes depth and FLOPs.DeepSeek’s new Engram module targets exactly this gap by adding a conditional memory axis that works alongside MoE rather than replacing it.
15/01/2026
Active Directory Hardening Series - Part 8 – Disabling NTLM
Enable auditing for domain accountsMicrosoft developers have been busy working on new features to make it more feasible to audit NTLM and restrict NTLM. One such feature is the new enhanced audit events which captures much richer detail related to NTLM use. Here are some examples of the goodness that will soon be available on Windows 11 24H2 and Server 2025.As result the policy settings Enable RPC Endpoint Mapper Client Authentication and Restrict Unauthenticated RPC clients (Administrative Templates\System\Remote Procedure Call) were introduced which forces RPC EPM to authenticate with NTLM. Nearly 30 years later the feared RPC mapper exploit never came to fruition, but many hardening baselines (e.g. CIS / STIG) still recommend enabling both settings. As result there is a good chance an auditor is going to ding you for not enabling a policy that forces the use of NTLM. If that happens, please explain to the auditor that disabling these settings does not allow RPC services to be accessed anonymously because each RPC service has its own security descriptor to restrict access.
15/01/2026
What Are Canvas Apps? Your Guide to No-Code App Design
What Are Canvas Apps in Power Apps?Canvas apps give you complete control over the look and feel of your app.When your app is ready, save it to the cloud and share it with your team.
15/01/2026
Upcoming January 2026 Microsoft 365 Champion Community Call
Join our next community call on January 27, 2026, to dive into Copilot Pages!Once you register, you will receive an email confirmation and calendar invite with the webinar join link.While our calls are open to everyone, you must be a member of the Microsoft 365 Champion Program in order to access the presentation materials - the access link is in the initial welcome email and the monthly newsletter emails sent the week before the community calls.
14/01/2026
How to Build a Stateless, Secure, and Asynchronous MCP-Style Protocol for Scalable Agent Workflows
In this tutorial, we build a clean, advanced demonstration of modern MCP design by focusing on three core ideas: stateless communication, strict SDK-level validation, and asynchronous, long-running operations.We implement a minimal MCP-like protocol using structured envelopes, signed requests, and Pydantic-validated tools to show how agents and services can interact safely without relying on persistent […]The post How to Build a Stateless, Secure, and Asynchronous MCP-Style Protocol for Scalable Agent Workflows appeared first on MarkTechPost.
14/01/2026
Unlocking Hugging Face Gated Models in Microsoft Foundry
Microsoft Foundry will now integrate Hugging Face’s gated models, giving enterprises secure steps access to advanced open-source AI models directly within their Azure environment.Through secret injection, Hugging Face will use the provided access token to verify whether the user has access to the gated model.Roblox PII Classifier is designed to detect personally identifiable information (PII) in chat messages, supporting privacy and safety in online interactions.
14/01/2026
App Service Easy MCP: Add AI Agent Capabilities to Your Existing Apps with Zero Code Changes
At Microsoft Ignite, I teamed up to present session BRK116: Apps, agents, and MCP is the AI innovation recipe, where I demonstrated how you can add agentic capabilities to your existing applications with little to no code changes.Today, I'm excited to share a concrete example of that vision: Easy MCP—a way to expose any REST API to AI agents with absolutely zero code changes to your existing apps.Easy MCP is an OpenAPI-to-MCP translation layer that automatically generates MCP tools from your existing REST APIs.
14/01/2026
Women For Technical Talks: Building Visibility, Confidence, and Impact
The conference welcomed 291 registered attendees, with a notably high female participation rate of 79.04%, while male participation accounted for 20.96%.Participants joined from a wide range of countries, with Spain representing 68.04% of attendance, followed by Argentina (5.84%) and Colombia (4.12%).Beyond its own events, Women For Technical Talks (W4TT) has maintained an active presence in major conferences such as Bizz Summit, Power BI Days, .NET events, Global AI events, and other international conferences.
14/01/2026
Comparing Open-Source vs Closed LLMs for Enterprise Apps
When companies build applications that use AI, one of the most important decisions they face is choosing the right type of Large Language Model (LLM).There are two main choices: open‑source LLMs and closed or proprietary LLMs. Understanding the differences between them helps businesses decide which option fits their needs, goals, and security requirements.Internals of the Llama 3 model on Google Colab using Hugging Face Transformers library & Python code: Later, I plan to try something similar on the Azure platform using Microsoft Foundry.
14/01/2026
Securing the Browser Era - From Cloud to AI: A blog series on protecting the modern workspace
This post unpacks how organizations can build defense-in-depth strategies to provide browser centric protection. To protect against browser-specific threats like phishing, malicious extensions, data exfiltration, session hijacking, and drive-by downloads, organizations must apply the zero trust principles to browsers. A secure browser environment with multiple layers of defense that includes explicit verification of identity, device health enforcement, browser hardening, threat intelligence, and data protection is crucial to defend against sophisticated browser threats. Below are the multi-layered controls, defenses, and best practices an organization can implement to combat the risk from browser threats.Below are some of the security features and benefits of deploying an enterprise secure browser - Microsoft Edge for Business:
14/01/2026
Announcing GPT‑5.2‑Codex in Microsoft Foundry: Enterprise‑Grade AI for Secure Software Engineering
Generally available starting today through Azure OpenAI in Microsoft Foundry Models, GPT‑5.2‑Codex is built for the realities of enterprise codebases, large repos, evolving requirements, and security constraints that can’t be overlooked.GPT‑5.2‑Codex is designed for how software gets built in enterprise teams.Together with GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry provides a unified developer experience — from in‑IDE assistance to production‑grade AI workflows — backed by Azure’s security, compliance, and global scale.
14/01/2026
Driving Trust Through Certification: New TAC Feature Updates for IT Admins
Managing app security and compliance in Microsoft Teams just got easier!With recent updates in Teams Admin Center (TAC), IT admins can now quickly identify trusted apps and enforce organizational standards with confidence.Before the recent trust‑based enhancements, Teams Admin Center already provided foundational visibility into app trust through the Security & compliance tab in the app details experience.
14/01/2026
Windows Backup for Organizations expands to first sign-in restore
Windows Backup for Organizations is expanding to include a new restore experience at first sign-in.In early 2026, Windows 11 users will be able to restore their Windows settings and Microsoft Store apps at the very first sign-in.Users signed in with a Microsoft Entra ID on eligible devices get a “second chance” to restore their environment if they missed the option during the out-of-box experience (OOBE).
14/01/2026
Secure collaboration in Microsoft Teams with efficient and automated Threat Protection and response
To address these challenges, we are pleased to announce enhanced protection and Security Operations response capabilities for enterprise messages containing URLs in Teams, utilizing Microsoft Defender.We’re enabling users to report false negatives (FN) and false positives (FP) directly from Teams messages.In addition to these enhanced detection, investigation and hunting capabilities, security team members are now able to perform advanced response actions for Microsoft Teams directly in the Microsoft Defender portal.
14/01/2026
Join us for the SharePoint at 25 Birthday Event
As SharePoint celebrates its 25th birthday, we’re marking the occasion with a global digital event that reflects on this journey and looks ahead to what’s next.During the event, we’ll spotlight SharePoint’s most defining innovations while sharing a forward-looking view of the platform’s next chapter.Tune in live to hear what’s new, what’s coming next, and how you can be part of where SharePoint goes from here, including details on how to participate in this year’s SharePoint Hackathon.
14/01/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: January 14, 2026
Learn about 64 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.Asset Management System Using Microsoft Power Apps: The Asset Vault app, built on the Microsoft Power Platform, streamlines asset management with accurate inventory, QR tracking, role-based tasks, and controlled movement.Optimized for large datasets, CP Gantt Chart integrates fully with Power BI features like cross-filtering, drill interactions, bookmarks, and report export, enabling comprehensive project planning.
14/01/2026
AI-Native Drug Discovery using Insilico Medicine’s Nach01 Model and Microsoft Discovery
To address these challenges, Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage biotechnology company specializing in generative artificial intelligence (AI), has collaborated with Microsoft on a demonstration of its Nach01 foundation model deployed on the Microsoft Discovery science-focused platform for AI-accelerated research and development (R&D).Nach01 is a multimodal foundation model developed and provided by Insilico Medicine for accelerating drug discovery.It leverages language model architecture and molecular point cloud encoder to process both chemical structural and spatial data and was built to handle hundreds of diverse tasks in molecular design and prediction.
14/01/2026
Uncertainty in Machine Learning: Probability & Noise
Editor’s note: This article is a part of our series on visualizing the foundations of machine learning.
14/01/2026
Read-only queries are now captured in the Primary Query Store.
Azure SQL Database now captures read‑only replica queries directly in both Query Store and Performance Insight.This enhancement provides clear visibility into how queries execute on the primary and the read‑only replica, helping identify performance patterns more accurately.4) Use the T‑SQL query below to verify whether your query (if you have the Query ID) was executed on the Primary or a Secondary replica.For Azure SQL Database, Query Store for readable secondaries supports the following service tiers:
14/01/2026
Google AI Releases MedGemma-1.5: The Latest Update to their Open Medical AI Models for Developers
Google Research has expanded its Health AI Developer Foundations program (HAI-DEF) with the release of MedGemma-1.5.The model is released as open starting points for developers who want to build medical imaging, text and speech systems and then adapt them to local workflows and regulations.MedGemma 1.5, small multimodal model for real clinical data MedGemma […]
14/01/2026
ICYMI: Enabling AI Fluency in 2026 with Surface Copilot+ PCs
Welcome to 2026.In case you missed it, Sandra Andrews, Global GM of Surface Marketing, recently posted an article detailing ways businesses and Frontier Firms can enable AI fluency using Surface Copilot+ PCs. Head over to LinkedIn to read the full post:Enabling AI Fluency in 2026: How Surface helps organizations become Frontier Firms Also, be sure to follow Microsoft Surface on LinkedIn for more updates: Microsoft Surface |
14/01/2026
Security Update for SQL Server 2022 RTM CU22
The Security Update for SQL Server 2022 RTM CU22 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.Latest Updates for Microsoft SQL Server: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/releases/download-and-install-latest-updates
13/01/2026
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.Latest Updates for Microsoft SQL Server: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/releases/download-and-install-latest-updates
13/01/2026
Data Center Quantized Congestion Notification: Scaling congestion control for RoCE RDMA in Azure
Microsoft Azure’s journey to empower its storage infrastructure with RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) has been transformative, but it’s not without challenges—especially when it comes to congestion control at scale.Azure’s deployment of RDMA at regional scale relies on DCQCN (Data Center Quantized Congestion Notification), a protocol that’s become central to Azure’s ability to deliver high-throughput, low-latency storage services across vast, heterogeneous data center regions.Traditional TCP congestion control mechanisms don’t apply here, so Azure leverages DCQCN combined with Priority Flow Control (PFC) to maintain high throughput, low latency, and near-zero packet loss.
13/01/2026
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.Latest Updates for Microsoft SQL Server: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/releases/download-and-install-latest-updates
13/01/2026
Meeting Control, Now Within Reach: Surface Hub 3 + MAXHUB Universal Console
Announced at Microsoft Ignite 2024, center-of-table console support for Surface Hub 3 extends Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows by enabling certified third-party touch consoles for in-room meeting control.The MAXHUB TCP33T is a Teams Rooms Certified Universal Console designed to work with Windows-based touch board devices such as Surface Hub 3.It delivers touchscreen control for Microsoft Teams Rooms meetings and serves as a dedicated entry point for wired content sharing.
13/01/2026
Zero downtime migration from Oracle to Azure SQL
Oracle databases tend to be large, complex, with demanding high availability business SLAs, making it difficult to migrate them to Azure SQL without planned downtime, risk of data drift, or operational disruption.To remove these barriers, Microsoft and Striim partnered together to offer a real-time migration solution built on log-based Change Data Capture (CDC).The strategic partnership between Microsoft and Striim enables continuous data replication from existing databases into Azure in real time, enabling online migrations with zero downtime.
13/01/2026
Anthropic Releases Cowork As Claude’s Local File System Agent For Everyday Work
Anthropic has released Cowork, a new feature that runs agentic workflows on local files for non coding tasks currently available in research preview inside the Claude macOS desktop app.What Cowork Does At The File System Level Cowork currently runs as a dedicated mode in the Claude desktop app.The post Anthropic Releases Cowork As Claude’s Local File System Agent For Everyday Work appeared first on MarkTechPost.
13/01/2026
Understanding the Layers of AI Observability in the Age of LLMs
Artificial intelligence (AI) observability refers to the ability to understand, monitor, and evaluate AI systems by tracking their unique metrics—such as token usage, response quality, latency, and model drift.Unlike traditional software, large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI applications are probabilistic in nature.The post Understanding the Layers of AI Observability in the Age of LLMs appeared first on MarkTechPost.
13/01/2026
How to Build a Multi-Turn Crescendo Red-Teaming Pipeline to Evaluate and Stress-Test LLM Safety Using Garak
In this tutorial, we build an advanced, multi-turn crescendo-style red-teaming harness using Garak to evaluate how large language models behave under gradual conversational pressure.We implement a custom iterative probe and a lightweight detector to simulate realistic escalation patterns in which benign prompts slowly pivot toward sensitive requests, and we assess whether the model maintains […]The post How to Build a Multi-Turn Crescendo Red-Teaming Pipeline to Evaluate and Stress-Test LLM Safety Using Garak appeared first on MarkTechPost.
13/01/2026
How to Read a Machine Learning Research Paper in 2026
When I first started reading machine learning research papers, I honestly thought something was wrong with me.
13/01/2026
Google AI Releases Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): An Open-Source Standard Designed to Power the Next Generation of Agentic Commerce
Can AI shopping agents move beyond sending product links and actually complete trusted purchases end to end inside a chat?Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, is Google’s new open standard for agentic commerce.It gives AI agents and merchant systems a shared language so that a shopping query can move from product discovery to an […]
13/01/2026
How This Agentic Memory Research Unifies Long Term and Short Term Memory for LLM Agents
How do you design an LLM agent that decides for itself what to store in long term memory, what to keep in short term context and what to discard, without hand tuned heuristics or extra controllers?Can a single policy learn to manage both memory types through the same action space as text generation?The post How This Agentic Memory Research Unifies Long Term and Short Term Memory for LLM Agents appeared first on MarkTechPost.
12/01/2026
10 Ways to Use Embeddings for Tabular ML Tasks
Embeddings — vector-based numerical representations of typically unstructured data like text — have been primarily popularized in the field of natural language processing (NLP).
12/01/2026
Identity Bindings: A Cleaner Model for Multi‑Cluster Identity in AKS
Workload Identity relies on creating a Federated Identity Credential (FIC) in Azure that defines the trust relationship between the AKS OIDC issuer and Entra ID.If you want to deploy a demo workload to test out your bindings, you can use the Pod definition below.Identity Bindings offer a much cleaner model for managing workload identities in AKS, especially once you start operating at scale.
12/01/2026
Handling Sybase BIGTIME Data Type During Migration to Azure SQL
To unblock and accelerate this conversion, we have developed an script (sybase_bigtime_migration.sh) that provides automation to migrate schemas from Sybase ASE to SQL Server specifically where tables contain the BIGTIME datatype.It systematically discovers affected tables, then generates ALTER statements to convert BIGTIME columns to SQL Server’s TIME (6) with a controlled, auditable flow.The purpose of this blog is to provide end‑to‑end flow for discovering BIGTIME columns in Sybase and converting them to SQL Server’s TIME (6).
12/01/2026
A Coding Guide to Demonstrate Targeted Data Poisoning Attacks in Deep Learning by Label Flipping on CIFAR-10 with PyTorch
In this tutorial, we demonstrate a realistic data poisoning attack by manipulating labels in the CIFAR-10 dataset and observing its impact on model behavior.We construct a clean and a poisoned training pipeline side by side, using a ResNet-style convolutional network to ensure stable, comparable learning dynamics.By selectively flipping a fraction of samples from […]
11/01/2026
Meet SETA: Open Source Training Reinforcement Learning Environments for Terminal Agents with 400 Tasks and CAMEL Toolkit
What does an end to end stack for terminal agents look like when you combine structured toolkits, synthetic RL environments, and benchmark aligned evaluation?A team of researchers from CAMEL AI, Eigent AI and other collaborators have released SETA, a toolkit and environment stack that focuses on reinforcement learning for terminal agents.The project targets […]
11/01/2026
Upcoming Agentic Azure Logic Apps Workshops
Join me for a couple of upcoming workshops where you can learn about Logic Apps MCP Servers and building Agentic Business ProcessesTopic: Connecting the enterprise, using MCP Servers from Copilot StudioTopic: Building Agentic Business Processes in a Day, using Azure Logic Apps Agent LoopWhen: Friday, January 16th at 2pm CET/6 AM Mountain
09/01/2026
Gain clarity on your Marketplace offer type in minutes with App Advisor
Publishing your app or agent to Microsoft Marketplace is the first critical step to reaching customers, unlocking benefits, and monetizing your solution.A demonstration of the offer type wizard in App AdvisorBy answering a short set of targeted questions, you can quickly identify the marketplace offer type that best fits your app or agent technology and business goals, without guesswork or context switching.
09/01/2026
Smarter Shifts Start Here: Reimagining Retail Frontline Experiences
The new Frontline Agent, available in public preview, is a purpose-built and persona-tuned AI assistant that supports everyday workflows for frontline teams by delivering concise, simple responses grounded in the context of their work.Onboarding made simple for Microsoft Teams on frontline personal devicesMicrosoft is committed to empowering retail organizations with smart, secure digital solutions for their frontline workforce, and we’re excited to showcase these latest innovations at the National Retail Federation (NRF) expo in New York from January 11 – 13, 2026.
09/01/2026
Courseware Title Plan
If you previously bookmarked the old blog post directly, you will need to update that bookmark to this new location.The Courseware Title Plan is your central reference for current ILT course offerings.📥 Download the Excel file at the bottom of this post to stay current.
09/01/2026
Microsoft OneDrive, a year in review: AI-powered file management and smarter collaboration
This past year alone, we’ve introduced enhancements including AI-powered support and improved annotation options, many of which were influenced by your feedback and suggestions!Transform documents into actionable insights with CopilotWith Microsoft 365 Copilot in OneDrive, turning information into action has never been easier.
09/01/2026
Guarding Kubernetes Deployments: Runtime Gating for Vulnerable Images Now Generally Available
Kubernetes runtime gating within Microsoft Defender for Cloud effectively addresses these challenges.Now generally available, gated deployment for Kubernetes container images introduces a proactive, automated checkpoint at the moment of deployment.With Kubernetes Gating now generally available in Defender for Cloud, technical leaders and security teams can audit or block vulnerable containers across any cloud platform.
09/01/2026
Meta and Harvard Researchers Introduce the Confucius Code Agent (CCA): A Software Engineering Agent that can Operate at Large-Scale Codebases
How far can a mid sized language model go if the real innovation moves from the backbone into the agent scaffold and tool stack?Meta and Harvard researchers have released the Confucius Code Agent, an open sourced AI software engineer built on the Confucius SDK that is designed for industrial scale software repositories and long […]The post Meta and Harvard Researchers Introduce the Confucius Code Agent (CCA): A Software Engineering Agent that can Operate at Large-Scale Codebases appeared first on MarkTechPost.
09/01/2026
How to Build Portable, In-Database Feature Engineering Pipelines with Ibis Using Lazy Python APIs and DuckDB Execution
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how we use Ibis to build a portable, in-database feature engineering pipeline that looks and feels like Pandas but executes entirely inside the database.We show how we connect to DuckDB, register data safely inside the backend, and define complex transformations using window functions and aggregations without ever pulling raw […]The post How to Build Portable, In-Database Feature Engineering Pipelines with Ibis Using Lazy Python APIs and DuckDB Execution appeared first on MarkTechPost.
09/01/2026
‘TCP Provider: An Existing Connection Was Forcibly Closed by the Remote Host’ in MS Fabric SQL DB
This blog explains why this occurs, what scenarios trigger it, and how to resolve cases where a table does not appear in the SQL Analytics Endpoint, even though replication is enabled.Fabric currently provides public REST APIs for customers to control mirroring/replication using the Mirroring – Start Mirroring API:Microsoft Fabric SQL Database provides powerful integrated replication for analytics, but occasional replication initialization issues can surface as TCP provider disconnection errors.
09/01/2026
mpi-stage: High-Performance File Distribution for HPC Clusters
When running containerized workloads on HPC clusters, one of the first problems you hit is getting container images onto the nodes quickly and repeatably.In this post, I'll introduce mpi-stage, a lightweight tool that uses MPI broadcasts to distribute large files across cluster nodes at speeds that can saturate the backend network.Leave a comment below or open an issue on GitHub.
09/01/2026
Local Move Requests in Exchange Online – Why They’re Not Supported
In Exchange Online, administrators sometimes consider using the New-MoveRequest cmdlet to move mailboxes within the same tenant or datacenter.While this command exists for historical reasons, Microsoft does not support local move requests.Since local move initiated by the admin is not supported, there is no expected duration of the local move request.
08/01/2026
Determine Defender for Endpoint offboarding state of Windows machines using PowerShell
The status “Can be onboarded” means that either the endpoint was offboarded from the platform or, that it is a new device discovered by the “Device Discovery” service of MDE and the platform is highlighting this for you as something to address and cover the security gap that represents an endpoint without protection.To circumvent this existing challenge, Powershell can come to the rescue, and you can run a script that determines with a high level of confidence that a device was offboarded from the platform without the need to wait for the 7 days period it takes a device to be deemed as inactive in the console.In essence, the script checks an indicator in the registry and the status of the key service that is responsible for sending telemetry to the portal and a true indication that the device is onboarded in Defender for Endpoint, the Sense.exe service.
08/01/2026
Evaluating Generative AI Models Using Microsoft Foundry’s Continuous Evaluation Framework
In this article, we’ll explore how to design, configure, and operationalize model evaluation using Microsoft Foundry’s built-in capabilities and best practices.Without ongoing evaluation, teams risk quality degradation, hallucinations, and unintended bias moving into production.Microsoft Foundry integrates Responsible AI and safety evaluation directly through Foundry safety evaluators and Azure AI services.
08/01/2026
Customer Story: EPAM's Data-Driven Copilot Adoption Journey
The organization was among the first in Europe to provision Copilot licenses through Microsoft’s Early Access Program, taking a proactive approach to AI enablement.EPAM’s clients increasingly expect AI fluency and the ability to leverage cutting-edge tools like Microsoft Copilot.With prebuilt and custom reports in Copilot Analytics, EPAM was able to measure the impact of Copilot usage across more than 2000 employees in a 6-month period.
08/01/2026
Introducing AI-powered incident prioritization in Microsoft Defender
Microsoft Defender brings Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Sentinel signals together into correlated incidents, which is exactly what you want for end-to-end visibility.The goal of the incident queue experience is simple—to turn a high-volume stream of incidents across devices, identities, mailboxes, and cloud resources into a prioritized, explainable worklist so analysts can act faster with confidence.Microsoft Defender aggregates related alerts and automated investigations into an incident.
08/01/2026
Add links to text faster in Word
I’m excited to share an update to Word for the web, Word for Windows, and Word for Mac that makes it easier to add hyperlinks to your documents.Add links to text faster in WordIn Word for the web, Word for Windows, or Word for Mac, select the text you want to add the link to, and then paste the hyperlink.
08/01/2026
Introducing Viva Engage Masterclass: Your Guide to the Viva Engage Essentials (Season 2)
Last year, we launched the Viva Engage Masterclass: Your Guide to the Viva Engage Essentials to help communicators, community managers, and IT leaders build confidence with Viva Engage, and we were blown away by the engagement from customers around the world.and we were blown away by the engagement from customers around the world.So we’re excited to bring the series back for Season 2 in 2026.The Viva Engage Masterclass is a customer focused learning series that covers the essentials of Viva Engage.
08/01/2026
My MVP Story: Yolanda Cuesta's Journey from Accounting to Excel MVP
But in the world of technology, MVP means “Most Valuable Professional.”Discovering the Microsoft MVP ProgramReceiving the MVP Award was a turning point—opening doors to new opportunities, global events, and lifelong connections - Yolanda Cuesta.
08/01/2026
Resolve-DnsName vs. nslookup in Windows
The choice of tool you pick to diagnose name resolution, such as DNS, inside Windows can impact the accuracy of your troubleshooting.nslookup is a standalone executable which operates independently of the Windows DNS client resolver (DNS-CR).It does not make any name resolution Windows API calls.
08/01/2026
Stanford Researchers Build SleepFM Clinical: A Multimodal Sleep Foundation AI Model for 130+ Disease Prediction
A team of Stanford Medicine researchers have introduced SleepFM Clinical, a multimodal sleep foundation model that learns from clinical polysomnography and predicts long term disease risk from a single night of sleep.The research work is published in Nature Medicine and the team has released the clinical code as the open source sleepfm-clinical repository on […]The post Stanford Researchers Build SleepFM Clinical: A Multimodal Sleep Foundation AI Model for 130+ Disease Prediction appeared first on MarkTechPost.
08/01/2026
Kevään 2026 Tekniset ja myynnin Kumppanitunnit
Microsoftin tekniset ja myynnille suunnatut Kumppanitunnit järjestetään Cloud Champion -sivustolla, josta ne ovat kätevästi saatavilla tallenteina materiaaleineen pari tuntia live-lähetyksen jälkeen.Kumppanitunti on joka toinen perjantai klo 10–11 järjestettävä Microsoftin kumppaniwebinaari, joka on tarkoitettu kaikille Microsoftin kumppaneille.16.1. Tekninen Kumppanitunti: Intune Suite
08/01/2026
Quantizing LLMs Step-by-Step: Converting FP16 Models to GGUF
Large language models like LLaMA, Mistral, and Qwen have billions of parameters that demand a lot of memory and compute power.
08/01/2026
Azure Database Security Newsletter - January 2026
Security isn’t just a checkbox—it’s the backbone of everything we build.That’s why our database security strategy is rooted in the Zero Trust model, a simple but powerful idea: never assume, always verify.Dynamic Data Masking in Cosmos DB
08/01/2026
Why PITR Restore for Azure SQL Hyperscale Can Take Longer Than Expected
Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is designed to deliver fast, storage‑optimized backup and restore operations.According to Microsoft documentation, most Point‑in‑Time Restore (PITR) operations for Hyperscale should complete within 10 minutes, regardless of database size, because the service uses metadata-based restore techniques rather than copying full data files.However, some real‑world scenarios can lead to unexpectedly long restore times, even when the source database is Hyperscale and even when no obvious configuration changes are made.
08/01/2026
Implementing A2A protocol in NET: A Practical Guide
The Agent‑to‑Agent Standard (A2AS) addresses this gap by defining a universal, vendor‑neutral protocol for structured agent interoperability.A2A establishes a common language for agents, built on familiar web primitives: JSON‑RPC 2.0 for messaging and HTTPS for transport.The open‑source A2A project provides a full‑featured .NET SDK, enabling developers to build and host A2A agents using ASP.NET Core or integrate with other agents as a client.
08/01/2026
Global expansion—now available in West Europe (Netherlands)
Over the past year, we have worked closely with Oracle to rapidly expand the global footprint of Oracle Database@Azure, bringing Oracle AI Database services to more than 30 Azure regions worldwide.We are excited to announce that Oracle Database@Azure is now available in the West Europe (Netherlands) region.In addition, Oracle Database@Azure is now live in Brazil Southeast (Rio de Janeiro), enhancing regional disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities.
08/01/2026
EP 33 | Turning Chaos into Growth: The Power of Data-Driven Partnerships in the Microsoft Ecosystem
Yet, for many organizations, the partner channel still feels like a maze: fragmented data, unclear responsibilities, and missed opportunities abound.In this episode of IAMCP Profiles in Partnership, hosts Anthony Carrano and Rudy Rodriguez from Dunamis Marketing sit down with Nigel Postings, Partner at Channel Partner Intelligence at bizcise and a Global Finalist for the P2P Solution Provider Awards.A shining example of this new paradigm comes from a recent episode of the IAMCP Profiles in Partnership podcast, where host Anthony Carrano interviews Nigel Postings, founding partner of bizcise.
07/01/2026
A Coding Implementation to Build a Unified Apache Beam Pipeline Demonstrating Batch and Stream Processing with Event-Time Windowing Using DirectRunner
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to build a unified Apache Beam pipeline that works seamlessly in both batch and stream-like modes using the DirectRunner.We generate synthetic, event-time–aware data and apply fixed windowing with triggers and allowed lateness to demonstrate how Apache Beam consistently handles both on-time and late events.By switching only the […]
07/01/2026
Accelerate Your Security Copilot Readiness with Our Global Technical Workshop Series
The Security Copilot Technical Customer Readiness team is delivering free, virtual hands-on workshops year-round, available across multiple time zones to fit global schedules. These sessions are designed specifically for technical practitioners who want to deepen their AI for Security expertise with Microsoft Entra, Intune, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Threat Protection.Learn and Engage with the Microsoft Security Community
07/01/2026
Always‑on Diagnostics for Purview Endpoint DLP: Effortless, Zero‑Friction troubleshooting for admins
With always-on diagnostics in Purview endpoint data loss prevention (DLP), our goal has been simple: make troubleshooting seamless, and effortless—without ever disrupting the information worker.Today, we’re excited to share new enhancements to always-on diagnostics for Purview endpoint DLP.Earlier this year, we introduced continuous diagnostic trace collection on Windows endpoints (support for macOS endpoints coming soon).
07/01/2026
Introducing Dragon HD Omni: Azure Speech New Voice Type Now in Preview via Microsoft Foundry
Dragon HD Omni is Microsoft Azure Speech’s newest text‑to‑speech generation, delivering over 700 high‑quality voices with enhanced expressiveness, multi‑lingual fluency, and multi‑style control — all through a unified model built in Microsoft Foundry.Dragon HD Omni offers a range of prebuilt voices with distinct personas and emotions, supporting diverse use cases from agent-based applications to content creation.Dragon HD Omni supports the word boundary event, which allows developers to track the precise timing of each word as it is spoken.
07/01/2026
Azure V710 V5 Series -AMD Radeon GPU - Validation of Siemens CAD -NX
The NVads V710 v5-series virtual machines on Azure are designed for GPU-accelerated workloads and virtual desktop environments.ATS Interactive Test Results evaluate Siemens NX graphics behavior during real‑time user interactions such as rotation, zoom, pan, sectioning, and view manipulation.Siemens NX on Azure NVads_v710 powered by AMD GPUs enables enterprise-class CAD/CAM/CAE experiences in the cloud.
07/01/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: January 7, 2026
Learn about 405 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
07/01/2026
TII Abu-Dhabi Released Falcon H1R-7B: A New Reasoning Model Outperforming Others in Math and Coding with only 7B Params with 256k Context Window
Technology Innovation Institute (TII), Abu Dhabi, has released Falcon-H1R-7B, a 7B parameter reasoning specialized model that matches or exceeds many 14B to 47B reasoning models in math, code and general benchmarks, while staying compact and efficient.It builds on Falcon H1 7B Base and is available on Hugging Face under the Falcon-H1R collection.Falcon-H1R-7B is […]
07/01/2026
Supervised Learning: The Foundation of Predictive Modeling
Editor’s note: This article is a part of our series on visualizing the foundations of machine learning.
07/01/2026
Announcing Azure CycleCloud Workspace for Slurm: Version 2025.12.01 Release
We are excited to announce the latest release of Azure CycleCloud Workspace for Slurm, now available with the powerful features and enhancements introduced in CycleCloud 8.8.1.To use this feature, simply set up an Azure Monitor Workspace for Prometheus and an Azure Managed Grafana environment.The 2025.12.01 release of Azure CycleCloud Workspace for Slurm delivers substantial advancements that strengthen performance, security, and usability for HPC environments.
07/01/2026
General Availability of Mirroring Azure Database for PostgreSQL in Microsoft Fabric Is Here!
Few weeks ago at Microsoft Ignite 2025, we announced General Availability (GA) of Mirroring for Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server in Microsoft Fabric.Data from your operational PostgreSQL databases is continuously replicated into OneLake as Delta tables, making it instantly available for analytics, machine learning, and reporting.The General Availability of Mirroring for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server in Microsoft Fabric represents a significant advancement for organizations seeking to unlock real-time analytics, AI, and BI on their operational data—securely, reliably, and without ETL complexity.
07/01/2026
Azure Data Platform Security Newsletter - January 2026
Security isn’t just a checkbox—it’s the backbone of everything we build.That’s why our database security strategy is rooted in the Zero Trust model, a simple but powerful idea: never assume, always verify.Dynamic Data Masking in Cosmos DB
07/01/2026
Building scalable, cost-effective real-time multiplayer games with Azure Web PubSub
Modern multiplayer games demand more than fast servers - they require persistent, reliable, low-latency communication at massive scale, often under highly unpredictable traffic patterns.In this post, we’ll explore how a game studio building a large-scale online RPG addressed these challenges using Azure Web PubSub, and what lessons other game developers can apply when designing their own real-time backend architectures.By adopting a managed real-time service like Azure Web PubSub, teams can:
07/01/2026
Implementing Softmax From Scratch: Avoiding the Numerical Stability Trap
That’s where the Softmax activation function comes in.Softmax takes the raw, unbounded scores produced by a neural network and transforms them into a well-defined probability distribution, making it possible to interpret each output as the likelihood of a specific […]The post Implementing Softmax From Scratch: Avoiding the Numerical Stability Trap appeared first on MarkTechPost.
07/01/2026
NVIDIA AI Released Nemotron Speech ASR: A New Open Source Transcription Model Designed from the Ground Up for Low-Latency Use Cases like Voice Agents
NVIDIA has just released its new streaming English transcription model (Nemotron Speech ASR) built specifically for low latency voice agents and live captioning.The checkpoint nvidia/nemotron-speech-streaming-en-0.6b on Hugging Face combines a cache aware FastConformer encoder with an RNNT decoder, and is tuned for both streaming and batch workloads on modern NVIDIA GPUs.The post NVIDIA AI Released Nemotron Speech ASR: A New Open Source Transcription Model Designed from the Ground Up for Low-Latency Use Cases like Voice Agents appeared first on MarkTechPost.
07/01/2026
How to Design an Agentic AI Architecture with LangGraph and OpenAI Using Adaptive Deliberation, Memory Graphs, and Reflexion Loops
In this tutorial, we build a genuinely advanced Agentic AI system using LangGraph and OpenAI models by going beyond simple planner, executor loops.We implement adaptive deliberation, where the agent dynamically decides between fast and deep reasoning;a Zettelkasten-style agentic memory graph that stores atomic knowledge and automatically links related experiences;
06/01/2026
AI in Care Services: Restoring the Human Touch
In Australia alone, the care sector faces a 344,000-worker shortage.ACT in Australia and Parlan in the Netherlands—are showing how AI can do just that.Buddy, an AI assistant built on Microsoft Azure.
06/01/2026
Azure Maps: Understanding View vs. Routing Coordinates
When you work with Azure Maps long enough, you will eventually run into a subtle but important detail: the platform returns two different types of coordinates for the same address.Think of the Azure Maps view coordinate as “the place where the map pin should sit.”Azure Maps generates them to represent an access point.
06/01/2026
Securing the AI Pipeline – From Data to Deployment
Protecting this chain demands a holistic security strategy anchored in Zero Trust for AI, supply chain integrity, and continuous monitoring.In this post, we map the pipeline, identify key attack vectors at each stage, and outline practical defenses using Microsoft’s security controls—spanning data governance with Purview, confidential training environments in Azure, and runtime threat detection with Defender for Cloud.The Reference Architecture for Zero Trust in AI establishes a security-first blueprint for the entire AI pipeline—from raw data ingestion to model deployment and continuous monitoring.
06/01/2026
MVP Dominick Raimato Showcases Real-Time Intelligence with Microsoft Fabric & IoT
MVP Dominick Raimato Shows UsDominick Raimato shows the Raspberry Pi devices that power his hands‑on real‑time intelligence demo with Microsoft FabricThe Raspberry Pi devices Dominick Raimato used to bring real‑time intelligence to life during his Microsoft Fabric demo.
06/01/2026
Partner Blog | What's new for Microsoft partners: January 2026 edition
Your voice continues to shape how the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program evolves.From the innovations unveiled at Microsoft Ignite to updates across benefits, Azure, AI business solutions, Marketplace, security, and skilling, this edition is designed to build capability, accelerate execution, and drive meaningful customer impact as AI becomes central to every workload. Microsoft Ignite marked an important evolution for the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, introducing new investments for partners to lead as Frontier Firms, translating their own AI experience into customer impact. Read Nicole Dezen’s blog for a partner-focused recap of Microsoft Ignite 2025, bringing together the announcements that matter most across AI, cloud platforms, security, and developer tools.
06/01/2026
Exchange Online canceling the Mailbox External Recipient Rate Limit
We’re announcing an important change: the Mailbox External Recipient Rate Limit in Exchange Online is being canceled indefinitely at this time.Customers have shared that this limit creates significant operational challenges, especially given the limited capabilities of bulk sending offerings available today.The Recipient Rate Limit and the Tenant-level External Recipient Rate Limit mentioned in Exchange Online limits remain unchanged by this announcement.
06/01/2026
Microsoft Purview Data Governance - Authoring Custom Data Quality rules using expression languages
To maintain high-quality data, organizations must continuously measure and monitor data quality and understand the negative impact of poor-quality data on their specific use cases.Data quality rules play a critical role in objectively measuring, enforcing, and quantifying data quality, enabling organizations to improve trust, reduce risk, and maximize the value of their data assets.Data Quality (DQ) rules define how data should be structured, related, constrained, and validated so it can be trusted for operational, analytical, and AI use cases.Custom rules allow you to define validations that evaluate one or more values within a row, enabling complex, context-aware data quality checks tailored to specific business requirements.
06/01/2026
Partner Case Study | Unboxed
Unboxed, a Microsoft partner based in Richmond, Virginia, has spent more than 16 years helping Fortune 500 companies meet that challenge.The team specializes in skill-based learning and development, with a focus on what they call “Skill Agility”™—the ability to build and apply new skills at the pace of business change.The Unboxed Skill Building Platform, built entirely on Microsoft Azure, integrates AI-powered roleplay, coaching, and compliance validation to deliver personalized, scalable training across distributed teams.
06/01/2026
Artificial Intelligence & Security
The global AI market is on a trajectory of significant expansion, projected to increase nearly 5X by 2030, from $391 billion in 2025 to $1.81 trillion.Microsoft AIA responsible approach to AI security involves three dimensions:
06/01/2026
Find the Alerts You Didn't Know You Were Missing with Azure SRE Agent
Using SRE Agent to Find the Alert GapsStep 3: Create a Subagent inside SRE Agent for managing Azure Monitor AlertsAsk the agent to review your alerts before something breaks.
06/01/2026
Windows news you can use: December 2025
Last month, Windows security experts hosted an Ask Me Anything about updating Secure Boot certificates on Windows devices before the certificates expire in June 2026.Be sure to watch the video and read the questions and answers posted in the discussion section.[CLOUD] [VIRTUALIZATION] – Multimedia call redirection on Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 now supports Genesys Cloud and Five9 Contact-Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) platforms.
06/01/2026
Liquid AI Releases LFM2.5: A Compact AI Model Family For Real On Device Agents
Liquid AI has introduced LFM2.5, a new generation of small foundation models built on the LFM2 architecture and focused at on device and edge deployments.The model family includes LFM2.5-1.2B-Base and LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct and extends to Japanese, vision language, and audio language variants.It is released as open weights on Hugging Face and exposed through the […]
06/01/2026
2025 Microsoft 365 Insider Blog Awards
2025 Microsoft 365 Insider Blog AwardsWe’re thrilled to announce the newest round of Microsoft 365 Insider Blog Awards, with winners in 4 categories.Most engagement on LinkedIn
06/01/2026
When and How to Update Statistics in Azure SQL Database
Accurate statistics are a cornerstone of good query performance in Azure SQL Database.While the platform automatically manages statistics in most scenarios, there are real‑world cases where manual intervention is not only recommended—but essential.This article explains when, why, and how to update statistics in Azure SQL Database, with practical samples and real customer scenarios drawn from production support cases.
06/01/2026
Fake Employees, Real Threat: Decentralized Identity to combat Deepfake Hiring?
In recent months, cybersecurity experts have sounded the alarm on a surge of fake “employees” – job candidates who are not who they claim to be.Gartner predicts that by 2028, one in four job applicant profiles could be fake in some way (3).Microsoft Entra Blog – Building trust into digital experiences with decentralized identities (June 10, 2020 by A. Simons & A. Patel) – Background on Microsoft’s approach to decentralized identity (DID, Verifiable Credentials). https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-entra-blog/building-trust-into-digital-experiences-with-decentralized/ba-p/1257362 & Decentralized digital identities and blockchain: The future as we see it.
06/01/2026
Marktechpost Releases ‘AI2025Dev’: A Structured Intelligence Layer for AI Models, Benchmarks, and Ecosystem Signals
Marktechpost has released AI2025Dev, its 2025 analytics platform (available to AI Devs and Researchers without any signup or login) designed to convert the year’s AI activity into a queryable dataset spanning model releases, openness, training scale, benchmark performance, and ecosystem participants.Marktechpost is a California based AI news platform covering machine learning, deep learning, and […]The post Marktechpost Releases ‘AI2025Dev’: A Structured Intelligence Layer for AI Models, Benchmarks, and Ecosystem Signals appeared first on MarkTechPost.
06/01/2026
Check This Out! (CTO!) Guide (December 2025)
Summary: The article explains how shifting the Source of Authority (SOA) for users from on-premises Active Directory (AD) to Microsoft Entra ID enables organizations to fully leverage cloud-based identity management, security, and governance.Summary: Azure Container Registry (ACR) is deprecating the Docker Content Trust (DCT) feature over three years, which will remove the trustPolicy property from APIs and affect related Azure Policy aliases.Summary: The article outlines a robust, reusable pipeline for extracting actionable data from large, semi-structured documents—such as contracts, invoices, and compliance records—using Azure Document Intelligence, OpenAI, and AI Search.
05/01/2026
Ep 32 | Building Trust, Embracing AI, and Navigating Culture: Lessons from Global Partnerships
Welcome to another edition of IAMCP Profiles and Partnership, where we spotlight the stories behind successful collaborations in the Microsoft ecosystem.In this episode, hosts Anthony Carrano and Rudy Rodriguez reconnect with Patrícia Maia, director at Arquiconsult: Overview and a 2025 EMEA finalist for the P2P Solution Partner Awards.Patricia Maia's journey is a testament to the power of trust, honesty, and adaptability in global partnerships.
05/01/2026
Microsoft Copilot Studio vs. Microsoft Foundry: Building AI Agents and Apps
Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry (often referred to as Azure AI Foundry) are two key platforms in Microsoft’s AI ecosystem that allow organizations to create custom AI agents and AI-enabled applications.To help you decide which path suits your organization, this blog provides an educational comparison of Copilot Studio vs. Azure AI Foundry, focusing on their unique strengths, feature parity and differences, and key criteria like control requirements, preferences, and integration needs.When it comes to Copilot Studio vs. Azure AI Foundry, there is no universally “best” choice – the ideal platform depends on your team’s composition and project requirements.
05/01/2026
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Customer Newsletter
Now in public preview, DCSPM (Defender for Cloud Security Posture Management) extends its capabilities to cover serverless workloads in both Azure and AWS, like Azure Web Apps and AWS Lambda.Defender for Cloud’s integration with Endor Labs is now GA Check out Module 27 in the Defender for Cloud lab on GitHub.
05/01/2026
Beyond the Basics: How to Get More Value from Transcription in Microsoft Teams
This post is a follow‑up to my earlier guide, “How to Enable Transcription in Microsoft Teams: A Quick Guide to Smarter Meetings.”Transcription in Microsoft Teams isn’t just a convenience—it’s a powerful productivity engine hiding in plain sight.If you’ve already mastered how to enable transcription (or read my earlier guide), you’re ready for the next step: turning those transcripts into actionable insights, better collaboration, and smarter workflows.Whether you’re a project manager, educator, team lead, or someone who simply wants cleaner follow‑ups, this guide will help you unlock the full potential of Teams transcription.
05/01/2026
Key promotional offers in CSP extended through June 30, 2026
Microsoft is extending select Microsoft 365 suite promotional offers for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners on new commerce through June 30, 2026: 10% discount on Microsoft 365 E3, Security add-on suites (Purview Suite and Defender Suite), and Microsoft 365 E5 three-year subscriptions With the extension, partners can continue to drive customer adoption of Microsoft 365 suites by offering advanced security, compliance, and productivity solutions at a reduced cost.
05/01/2026
Announcing public preview: Uncovering hidden threats with the Dynamic Threat Detection Agent
At Ignite, we announced the Security Copilot Dynamic Threat Detection Agent in Microsoft Defender: an always on, adaptive backend agent that uncovers hidden threats across Defender and Microsoft Sentinel environments.Running in the Defender backend, the agent delivers Copilot-sourced alerts directly into familiar workflows—complete with natural language explanations, mapped MITRE techniques, and tailored remediation steps.The Dynamic Threat Detection Agent is available as a free Public Preview for Security Copilot customers.
05/01/2026
Unlocking scalable growth through Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft Marketplace has emerged as a central commercial engine designed to help software providers scale faster, reach new customers, and drive meaningful revenue growth through modern co-sell and partner-led motions.A Marketplace built for growth and innovationIt is a unified, enterprise-grade platform that supports discovery, procurement, contracting, and deployment of software solutions across customer segments—from SMBs to global enterprises.
05/01/2026
Evaluating AI Agents: Can LLM‑as‑a‑Judge Evaluators Be Trusted?
In our previous blog post, we explored why evaluating AI agents is more complex than evaluating a single Large Language Model (LLM), and we introduced the diverse set of evaluators needed to gain a holistic understanding of agent behavior.In this post, we explored why LLM-as-a-Judge is needed, how it performs in practice, and what our research revealed about its reliability.A holistic approach for test and evaluation of large language models [Technical report].
05/01/2026
Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter - January 2026
Ace Aviator of the MonthAce Aviator of the MonthJanuary's Ace Aviator: Sagar Sharma
05/01/2026
Engineering a Local-First Agentic Podcast Studio: A Deep Dive into Multi-Agent Orchestration
This technical guide explores the architecture and implementation of The AI Podcast Studio.This project demonstrates the seamless integration of the Microsoft Agent Framework, Local Small Language Models (SLMs), and VibeVoice to automate a complete tech podcast pipeline.The "Future Bytes" podcast is brought to life using VibeVoice, a specialized technology from Microsoft Research designed for natural conversational synthesis.
05/01/2026
Implementing Oracle Autonomous Transactions in Azure SQL for Seamless Logging
In Oracle PL/SQL, the directive PRAGMA AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION allows a block of code such as a procedure, function, or trigger to run in its own independent transaction.How to Implement Autonomous Transactions in Azure SQLIf you need logs that persist through rollbacks in Azure SQL, you can recreate the behavior of Oracle’s PRAGMA AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION using external logging via Azure Function
05/01/2026
A Coding Guide to Design and Orchestrate Advanced ReAct-Based Multi-Agent Workflows with AgentScope and OpenAI
In this tutorial, we build an advanced multi-agent incident response system using AgentScope.We orchestrate multiple ReAct agents, each with a clearly defined role such as routing, triage, analysis, writing, and review, and connect them through structured routing and a shared message hub.By integrating OpenAI models, lightweight tool calling, and a simple internal runbook, […]
05/01/2026
OPNsense Firewall as Network Virtual Appliance (NVA) in Azure
OPNsense is a powerful open-source firewall that can be used to secure your virtual networks.In this guide, you’ll learn how to install and configure OPNsense Firewall on an Azure Virtual Machine, leveraging its capabilities to secure your cloud resources effectively.Now that you have OPNsense firewall set up as an NVA in Azure and have successfully established a WireGuard VPN connection, we can explore additional features and configurations such as integrating OPNsense into a Hub and Spoke network topology.
05/01/2026
LLM-Pruning Collection: A JAX Based Repo For Structured And Unstructured LLM Compression
Zlab Princeton researchers have released LLM-Pruning Collection, a JAX based repository that consolidates major pruning algorithms for large language models into a single, reproducible framework.It targets one concrete goal, make it easy to compare block level, layer level and weight level pruning methods under a consistent training and evaluation stack on both GPUs and […]The post LLM-Pruning Collection: A JAX Based Repo For Structured And Unstructured LLM Compression appeared first on MarkTechPost.
05/01/2026
Tencent Researchers Release Tencent HY-MT1.5: A New Translation Models Featuring 1.8B and 7B Models Designed for Seamless on-Device and Cloud Deployment
Tencent Hunyuan researchers have released HY-MT1.5, a multilingual machine translation family that targets both mobile devices and cloud systems with the same training recipe and metrics.HY-MT1.5 consists of 2 translation models, HY-MT1.5-1.8B and HY-MT1.5-7B, supports mutual translation across 33 languages with 5 ethnic and dialect variations, and is available on GitHub and Hugging Face […]The post Tencent Researchers Release Tencent HY-MT1.5: A New Translation Models Featuring 1.8B and 7B Models Designed for Seamless on-Device and Cloud Deployment appeared first on MarkTechPost.
05/01/2026
AI Interview Series #5: Prompt Caching
Question: Imagine your company’s LLM API costs suddenly doubled last month.A deeper analysis shows that while user inputs look different at a text level, many of them are semantically similar.Prompt caching is an optimization […]
05/01/2026
DeepSeek Researchers Apply a 1967 Matrix Normalization Algorithm to Fix Instability in Hyper Connections
DeepSeek researchers are trying to solve a precise issue in large language model training. Residual connections made very deep networks trainable, hyper connections widened that residual stream, and training then became unstable at scale. The new method mHC, Manifold Constrained Hyper Connections, keeps the richer topology of hyper connections but locks the mixing behavior on […] The post
04/01/2026
Real‑World Cloud & Azure SQL Database Examples Using Kepner‑Tregoe
The Kepner‑Tregoe (KT) methodology is especially effective in modern cloud environments like Azure SQL Database, where incidents are often multi‑dimensional, time‑bound, and affected by asynchronous and self‑healing behaviors. Below are practical examples illustrating how KT can be applied in real Azure SQL scenarios. Example 1: Azure SQL Geo‑Replication Lag Observed on Read‑Only Replica ScenarioAn application team reports that changes committed on the p...
03/01/2026
Kepner‑Tregoe: A Structured and Rational Approach to Problem Solving and Decision‑Making
In complex, distributed systems—such as cloud platforms, high‑availability databases, and mission‑critical applications—effective problem solving requires more than intuition or experience. Incidents often involve multiple variables, incomplete signals, and tight timelines, making unstructured analysis both risky and inefficient. This is where Kepner‑Tregoe (KT) methodology proves its value. Developed in the 1960s by Charles K...
03/01/2026
How to Build a Production-Ready Multi-Agent Incident Response System Using OpenAI Swarm and Tool-Augmented Agents
In this tutorial, we build an advanced yet practical multi-agent system using OpenAI Swarm that runs in Colab. We demonstrate how we can orchestrate specialized agents, such as a triage agent, an SRE agent, a communications agent, and a critic, to collaboratively handle a real-world production incident scenario. By structuring agent handoffs, integrating lightweight tools […] The post
03/01/2026
Recursive Language Models (RLMs): From MIT’s Blueprint to Prime Intellect’s RLMEnv for Long Horizon LLM Agents
Recursive Language Models aim to break the usual trade off between context length, accuracy and cost in large language models. Instead of forcing a model to read a giant prompt in one pass, RLMs treat the prompt as an external environment and let the model decide how to inspect it with code, then recursively call […] The post
02/01/2026
A Coding Implementation to Build a Self-Testing Agentic AI System Using Strands to Red-Team Tool-Using Agents and Enforce Safety at Runtime
In this tutorial, we build an advanced red-team evaluation harness using Strands Agents to stress-test a tool-using AI system against prompt-injection and tool-misuse attacks. We treat agent safety as a first-class engineering problem by orchestrating multiple agents that generate adversarial prompts, execute them against a guarded target agent, and judge the responses with structured evaluation […] The post
02/01/2026
Title Plan Update – January 2, 2026
🥳January 2, 2026 - Title Plan Now Available Access 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. This means each update may...
02/01/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: January 2, 2026
Learn about 141 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
02/01/2026
Geo‑Replication Redo Lag in Azure SQL Database
Monitoring and Troubleshooting Using Public DMVs Azure SQL Database provides built‑in high availability and geo‑replication capabilities to ensure database resilience and business continuity. While replication is fully managed by the platform, customers may occasionally observe a delay between the primary and geo‑replicated secondary database, especially during periods of heavy write activity. This article provid...
02/01/2026
How Cloudflare’s tokio-quiche Makes QUIC and HTTP/3 a First Class Citizen in Rust Backends
Cloudflare has open sourced tokio-quiche, an asynchronous QUIC and HTTP/3 Rust library that wraps its battle tested quiche implementation with the Tokio runtime. The library has been refined inside production systems such as Apple iCloud Private Relay, next generation Oxy based proxies and WARP’s MASQUE client, where it handles millions of HTTP/3 requests per second […] The post
31/12/2025
What’s New in Microsoft Teams | December 2025
As 2025 comes to a close, I want to thank you all for being part of the Microsoft Tech community! Your suggestions and feedback have been incredibly impactful as we’ve continued working toward our goal of making Teams smarter, more secure, and easier to use. In 2026, you can look forward to new ways to collaborate and do more, with Teams as the platform where people and agents collaborate together. We hope you’ll keep sharing your experience with new Teams features in the new year! To ...
31/12/2025
How to Design Transactional Agentic AI Systems with LangGraph Using Two-Phase Commit, Human Interrupts, and Safe Rollbacks
In this tutorial, we implement an agentic AI pattern using LangGraph that treats reasoning and action as a transactional workflow rather than a single-shot decision. We model a two-phase commit system in which an agent stages reversible changes, validates strict invariants, pauses for human approval via graph interrupts, and commits or rolls back only then. […] The post
31/12/2025
Azure SQL Database High Availability: Architecture, Design, and Built‑in Resilience
High availability (HA) is a core pillar of Azure SQL Database. Unlike traditional SQL Server deployments—where availability architectures must be designed, implemented, monitored, and maintained manually—Azure SQL Database delivers built‑in high availability by design. By abstracting infrastructure complexity while still offering enterprise‑grade resilience, Azure SQL Database enables customers to achieve strict availability SLAs with minimal oper...
31/12/2025
Azure SQL Database Data Sync Retirement: Migration Scenarios and Recommended Alternatives
Azure SQL Database Data Sync has long been used to keep data consistent across multiple Azure SQL databases. However, as the service moves toward retirement, many customers are now asking an important question: How do we replace Azure SQL Data Sync with a supported, future‑proof solution—without significant data loss or downtime? In this article, we’ll walk through: What Data Sync retirement means in practice Typical migration challenges A real-wor...
31/12/2025
Tencent Released Tencent HY-Motion 1.0: A Billion-Parameter Text-to-Motion Model Built on the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) Architecture and Flow Matching
Tencent Hunyuan’s 3D Digital Human team has released HY-Motion 1.0, an open weight text-to-3D human motion generation family that scales Diffusion Transformer based Flow Matching to 1B parameters in the motion domain. The models turn natural language prompts plus an expected duration into 3D human motion clips on a unified SMPL-H skeleton and are available […] The post
31/12/2025
AI-assisted load test authoring in Azure App Testing
Creating reliable load tests shouldn’t require hours of manual scripting. With AI-assisted load test authoring in Azure App Testing, you can go from a simple browser recording to a production-ready JMeter script in minutes, while staying fully in control of what gets applied. This new experience helps you: Create load tests faster by recording real user journeys directly from the browser Improve script quality automatically with AI-recommended best practices ...
31/12/2025
Excel in 2025: A Year of Culture, Craft, and Copilot
As 2025 comes to a close, one thing feels clearer than ever: Excel is no longer just something you use. It’s something you belong to.
30/12/2025
A Coding Implementation of an OpenAI-Assisted Privacy-Preserving Federated Fraud Detection System from Scratch Using Lightweight PyTorch Simulations
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how we simulate a privacy-preserving fraud detection system using Federated Learning without relying on heavyweight frameworks or complex infrastructure. We build a clean, CPU-friendly setup that mimics ten independent banks, each training a local fraud-detection model on its own highly imbalanced transaction data. We coordinate these local updates through a […] The post
30/12/2025
Alibaba Tongyi Lab Releases MAI-UI: A Foundation GUI Agent Family that Surpasses Gemini 2.5 Pro, Seed1.8 and UI-Tars-2 on AndroidWorld
Alibaba Tongyi Lab have released MAI-UI—a family of foundation GUI agents. It natively integrates MCP tool use, agent user interaction, device–cloud collaboration, and online RL, establishing state-of-the-art results in general GUI grounding and mobile GUI navigation, surpassing Gemini-2.5-Pro, Seed1.8, and UI-Tars-2 on AndroidWorld. The system targets three specific gaps that early GUI agents often ignore, […] The post
30/12/2025
Partner Case Study | Cloudforce
As global threats evolve and national security challenges grow more complex, defense organizations are mobilizing to deliver faster insights, adapt to emerging technologies, and maintain the highest standards of data protection. In that effort, AI is reshaping how agencies respond to crises, model future risks, and support decision-making. Deploying AI securely in high-compliance environments remains a challenge. Nonprofit organization CNA, a federally funded research and development c...
30/12/2025
From Vibe Coding to Working App: How SRE Agent Completes the Developer Loop
The Most Common Challenge in Modern Cloud Apps There's a category of bugs that drive engineers crazy: multi-layer infrastructure issues. Your app deploys successfully. Every Azure resource shows "Succeeded." But the app fails at runtime with a vague error like Login failed for user ''. Where do you even start? You're checking the Web App, the SQL Server, the VNet, the private endpoint, the DNS zone, the identity configuration... and eac...
30/12/2025
Azure SQL Database Data Sync Retirement: Migration Scenarios and Recommended Alternatives
Why Azure SQL Data Sync Retirement Matters Azure SQL Data Sync relies on: Triggers Metadata tables Hub-and-spoke topology While functional, this architecture introduces complexity, performance overhead, and operational risks, especially as data volumes and workloads grow. Microsoft’s long-term direction favors scalable, resilient, and observable data integration services, such as Azure Data ...
30/12/2025
Azure SQL Database Sharding: How It Works, Why It Matters, and How to Distribute Data Across Shards
What Is Sharding in Azure SQL Database? Sharding is the technique of splitting a large dataset horizontally across multiple independent databases—called shards. Every shard contains the same schema but holds only a subset of the data. This approach allows an application to scale out nearly indefinitely because storage, compute load, and network demand are distributed across multiple database nodes rather than centralized in one.  ...
30/12/2025
Meet LLMRouter: An Intelligent Routing System designed to Optimize LLM Inference by Dynamically Selecting the most Suitable Model for Each Query
LLMRouter is an open source routing library from the U Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign that treats model selection as a first class system problem. It sits between applications and a pool of LLMs and chooses a model for each query based on task complexity, quality targets, and cost, all exposed through […] The post
30/12/2025
How to Ensure Seamless Data Recovery and Deployment in Microsoft Azure
Overcoming Cosmos DB Backup and Restore Challenges with Azure Databricks The Challenge of Backing Up and Restoring Azure Cosmos DB One of the significant pain points when working with Azure Cosmos DB is the lack of instant, self-service backup restoration. While Cosmos DB is engineered for global scalability and high availability, its backup and recovery process introduces a crucial bottleneck for organizations that demand agility. Backups in Cosmos DB are created automaticall...
30/12/2025
How to Build a Robust Multi-Agent Pipeline Using CAMEL with Planning, Web-Augmented Reasoning, Critique, and Persistent Memory
In this tutorial, we build an advanced, end-to-end multi-agent research workflow using the CAMEL framework. We design a coordinated society of agents, Planner, Researcher, Writer, Critic, and Finalizer, that collaboratively transform a high-level topic into a polished, evidence-grounded research brief. We securely integrate the OpenAI API, orchestrate agent interactions programmatically, and add lightweight persistent memory […] The post
30/12/2025
Microsoft Sentinel Platform: Audit Logs and Where to Find Them
*Thank you to my teammates Ian Parramore and David Hoerster for reviewing and contributing to this blog.* With the launch of the Sentinel Platform, a new suite of features for the Microsoft Sentinel service, users may find themselves wanting to monitor who is using these new features and how. This blog sets out to highlight how auditing and monitoring can be achieved and where this data can be found. What are Audit Logs? ...
29/12/2025
Now Generally Available: Azure Database for MySQL Triggers for Azure Functions
We’re thrilled to announce the general availability of Azure Database for MySQL Trigger bindings for Azure Functions! This feature, previously in Public Preview, enables you to track changes and develop event-driven applications at scale on any MySQL table. This release completes the unified suite of Azure Database for MySQL bindings for Azure Functions, which now includes native support for
29/12/2025
Missing MSchange_tracking_history Table in SQL Server: Causes, Cleanup Behavior
Confirming Whether Auto-Cleanup Has Run Successfully When diagnosing Change Tracking cleanup issues, the first step is verifying whether the auto‑cleanup process has executed at least once on the affected database. Here are key questions to ask: ✔ Was the auto‑cleanup process ever triggered? SQL Server's CT cleanup runs automatically in the background based on...
29/12/2025
Understanding Windows Settings URIs and How to Use Them in Enterprise Environments
Understanding Windows Settings URIs and How to Use Them in Enterprise Environments Windows provides a powerful and flexible management framework that enables organizations to configure, restrict, or simplify the Settings experience for their users. One of the key mechanisms behind this framework is the ms-settings: URI scheme — a consistent, internal navigation system that defines how each Settings page in Windows is accessed. If you have ever opened Windows Settings and navig...
29/12/2025
How to Build Contract-First Agentic Decision Systems with PydanticAI for Risk-Aware, Policy-Compliant Enterprise AI
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to design a contract-first agentic decision system using PydanticAI, treating structured schemas as non-negotiable governance contracts rather than optional output formats. We show how we define a strict decision model that encodes policy compliance, risk assessment, confidence calibration, and actionable next steps directly into the agent’s output schema. By […] The post
29/12/2025
NVIDIA AI Researchers Release NitroGen: An Open Vision Action Foundation Model For Generalist Gaming Agents
NVIDIA AI research team released NitroGen, an open vision action foundation model for generalist gaming agents that learns to play commercial games directly from pixels and gamepad actions using internet video at scale. NitroGen is trained on 40,000 hours of gameplay across more than 1,000 games and comes with an open dataset, a universal simulator, […] The post
28/12/2025
Liquid AI’s LFM2-2.6B-Exp Uses Pure Reinforcement Learning RL And Dynamic Hybrid Reasoning To Tighten Small Model Behavior
Liquid AI has introduced LFM2-2.6B-Exp, an experimental checkpoint of its LFM2-2.6B language model that is trained with pure reinforcement learning on top of the existing LFM2 stack. The goal is simple, improve instruction following, knowledge tasks, and math for a small 3B class model that still targets on device and edge deployment. Where LFM2-2.6B-Exp Fits […] The post
28/12/2025
How to Build Production-Grade Agentic Workflows with GraphBit Using Deterministic Tools, Validated Execution Graphs, and Optional LLM Orchestration
In this tutorial, we build an end-to-end, production-style agentic workflow using GraphBit that demonstrates how graph-structured execution, tool calling, and optional LLM-driven agents can coexist in a single system. We start by initializing and inspecting the GraphBit runtime, then define a realistic customer-support ticket domain with typed data structures and deterministic, offline-executable tools. We show […] The post
27/12/2025
Tableau to Power BI Migration: Semantic Layer-First Approach for Cloud Architects
In this guide, we provide practical guidance for migrating from Tableau to Power BI, with a focus on technical best practices and architecture.
27/12/2025
Azure Databricks & Fabric Disaster Recovery: The Better Together Story
Disaster recovery (DR) is a critical component of any cloud-native data analytics platform, ensuring business continuity even during rare regional outages caused by natural disasters, infrastructure failures, or other disruptions.
27/12/2025
Tableau to Power BI: Semantic Layer-First Approach for Cloud Architects
In this guide, we provide practical guidance for migrating from Tableau to Power BI, with a focus on technical best practices and architecture.
27/12/2025
Context Engineering Lessons from Building Azure SRE Agent
We spent a long time chasing model upgrades, polishing prompts, and debating orchestration strategies. The gains were visible in offline evals, but they didn’t translate into the reliability and outcomes we wanted in production. The real breakthrough came when we started caring much more about what we were adding to the context, when, and in what form. In other words: context engineering. Every co...
26/12/2025
From Gemma 3 270M to FunctionGemma, How Google AI Built a Compact Function Calling Specialist for Edge Workloads
Google has released FunctionGemma, a specialized version of the Gemma 3 270M model that is trained specifically for function calling and designed to run as an edge agent that maps natural language to executable API actions. But, What is FunctionGemma? FunctionGemma is a 270M parameter text only transformer based on Gemma 3 270M. It keeps […] The post
26/12/2025
Anonimização de Dados Sensíveis com a plataforma de IA do Azure
A Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD) estabelece padrões rigorosos para o tratamento de dados pessoais e sensíveis no Brasil. Dados pessoais incluem informações que identificam diretamente um indivíduo, como nome, endereço, telefone, CPF, RG e data de nascimento. Já os dados sensíveis abrangem categorias especiais, como origem racial ou étnica, crenças religiosas, opiniõ...
26/12/2025
Training a Model on Multiple GPUs with Data Parallelism
This article is divided into two parts; they are: • Data Parallelism • Distributed Data Parallelism If you have multiple GPUs, you can combine them to operate as a single GPU with greater memory capacity.
26/12/2025
A Coding Implementation on Building Self-Organizing Zettelkasten Knowledge Graphs and Sleep-Consolidation Mechanisms
In this tutorial, we dive into the cutting edge of Agentic AI by building a “Zettelkasten” memory system, a “living” architecture that organizes information much like the human brain. We move beyond standard retrieval methods to construct a dynamic knowledge graph where an agent autonomously decomposes inputs into atomic facts, links them semantically, and even […] The post
26/12/2025
Train a Model Faster with torch.compile and Gradient Accumulation
This article is divided into two parts; they are: • Using `torch.
25/12/2025
MiniMax Releases M2.1: An Enhanced M2 Version with Features like Multi-Coding Language Support, API Integration, and Improved Tools for Structured Coding
Just months after releasing M2—a fast, low-cost model designed for agents and code—MiniMax has introduced an enhanced version: MiniMax M2.1. M2 already stood out for its efficiency, running at roughly 8% of the cost of Claude Sonnet while delivering significantly higher speed. More importantly, it introduced a different computational and reasoning pattern, particularly in how […] The post
25/12/2025
A Coding Guide to Build an Autonomous Multi-Agent Logistics System with Route Planning, Dynamic Auctions, and Real-Time Visualization Using Graph-Based Simulation
In this tutorial, we build an advanced, fully autonomous logistics simulation in which multiple smart delivery trucks operate within a dynamic city-wide road network. We design the system so that each truck behaves as an agent capable of bidding on delivery orders, planning optimal routes, managing battery levels, seeking charging stations, and maximizing profit through […] The post
25/12/2025
This AI Paper from Stanford and Harvard Explains Why Most ‘Agentic AI’ Systems Feel Impressive in Demos and then Completely Fall Apart in Real Use
Agentic AI systems sit on top of large language models and connect to tools, memory, and external environments. They already support scientific discovery, software development, and clinical research, yet they still struggle with unreliable tool use, weak long horizon planning, and poor generalization. The latest research paper ‘Adaptation of Agentic AI‘ from Stanford, Harvard, UC […] The post
24/12/2025
Training a Model with Limited Memory using Mixed Precision and Gradient Checkpointing
This article is divided into three parts; they are: • Floating-point Numbers • Automatic Mixed Precision Training • Gradient Checkpointing Let's get started! The default data type in PyTorch is the IEEE 754 32-bit floating-point format, also known as single precision.
24/12/2025
Practical Agentic Coding with Google Jules
If you have an interest in agentic coding, there's a pretty good chance you've heard of
24/12/2025
Data Security: Azure key Vault in Data bricks
Why this article? To remove the vulnerability of exposing the data base connection string in Databricks notebook directly, by using Azure key vault. Database connection strings are extremely confidential/vulnerable data, that we should not be exposed in the DataBricks notebook explicitly. Azure key vault is a secure option to read the secrets and establish connection. What do we need? Tenant Id ...
24/12/2025
InstaDeep Introduces Nucleotide Transformer v3 (NTv3): A New Multi-Species Genomics Foundation Model, Designed for 1 Mb Context Lengths at Single-Nucleotide Resolution
Genomic prediction and design now require models that connect local motifs with megabase scale regulatory context and that operate across many organisms. Nucleotide Transformer v3, or NTv3, is InstaDeep’s new multi species genomics foundation model for this setting. It unifies representation learning, functional track and genome annotation prediction, and controllable sequence generation in a single […] The post
24/12/2025
Google Health AI Releases MedASR: a Conformer Based Medical Speech to Text Model for Clinical Dictation
Google Health AI team has released MedASR, an open weights medical speech to text model that targets clinical dictation and physician patient conversations and is designed to plug directly into modern AI workflows. What MedASR is and where it fits? MedASR is a speech to text model based on the Conformer architecture and is pre […] The post
24/12/2025
Extend SRE Agent with MCP: Build an Agentic Workflow to Triage Customer Issues
Your inbox is full. GitHub issues piling up. "App not working." "How do I configure alerts?" "Please add dark mode." You open each one, figure out what it is, ask for more info, add labels, route to the right team. An hour later, you're still sorting issues. Sound familiar? The Triage Tax Every L1 support engineer, PM, and on-call developer who's handled customer issues knows this pain. When tickets come in, you're not solving problems, you're sorting them. ...
23/12/2025
AI-assisted load test authoring in Azure Load Testing
Creating reliable load tests shouldn’t require hours of manual scripting. With AI-assisted load test authoring in Azure Load Testing, you can go from a simple browser recording to a production-ready JMeter script in minutes, while staying fully in control of what gets applied. This new experience helps you: Create load tests faster by recording real user journeys directly from the browser Improve script quality automatically with AI-recommended best practices...
23/12/2025
Host ChatGPT apps on Azure Functions
This blog post is for developers learning and building ChatGPT apps. It provides an overview of how these apps work, why build them, and how to host one on Azure Functions. Chat with ChatGPT apps OpenAI recently launched ChatGPT apps. These are apps you can chat with right inside ChatGPT, extending what ChatGPT can do beyond simple chats to actions. These apps can be invoked by s...
23/12/2025
Generative AI Video Comes to Microsoft 365 Copilot Create
With built‑in generative video capabilities powered by advanced OpenAI video models such as Sora 2, Copilot Create enables anyone—from business users to marketing teams—to turn ideas, prompts, and documents into compelling video content, directly within the Microsoft 365 experience.At the core of this new capability is Sora 2, an advanced generative AI video model from OpenAI.Business Use Cases for Generative AI Video in Microsoft 365
23/12/2025
Partner Case Study | RSM
More than 80% of the global workforce says they lack the time or energy to do their jobs. RSM, a global audit, tax, and consulting services firm, saw this as an opportunity to redefine productivity by demonstrating what it looks like for organizations to embrace AI—first for themselves, and then for their customers. With a focus on serving mid-sized a...
23/12/2025
How to Build a Proactive Pre-Emptive Churn Prevention Agent with Intelligent Observation and Strategy Formation
In this tutorial, we build a fully functional Pre-Emptive Churn Agent that proactively identifies at-risk users and drafts personalized re-engagement emails before they cancel. Rather than waiting for churn to occur, we design an agentic loop in which we observe user inactivity, analyze behavioral patterns, strategize incentives, and generate human-ready email drafts using Gemini. We […] The post
23/12/2025
Evaluating Perplexity on Language Models
This article is divided into two parts; they are: • What Is Perplexity and How to Compute It • Evaluate the Perplexity of a Language Model with HellaSwag Dataset Perplexity is a measure of how well a language model predicts a sample of text.
23/12/2025
Refactoring a Career Through Consistency: TodayCode’s Joeun Park’s MVP Story
Joeun Park is building milestones through consistency and community Joeun Park’s MVP story is not defined by a single breakthrough, but by decades of steady, intentional progress. With more than 20 years of experience as a developer, she began coding long before developer communities and content platforms became mainstream. Over time, she navigated...
23/12/2025
Managing Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender XDR permissions in Microsoft Defender portal
In November 2023 at Microsoft Ignite, we announced the integration of Microsoft Sentinel with Microsoft Defender XDR into the unified Microsoft Defender portal. Fast forward, in July 2024 we announced this integration GA, and in July 2025 we announced the Microsoft Sentinel experience will be retired in the Azure portal on July 1, 2026. As we introduced the new portal experience, many customers naturally had questions, particularly around permissions. Common concerns included: How will...
23/12/2025
Google DeepMind Researchers Release Gemma Scope 2 as a Full Stack Interpretability Suite for Gemma 3 Models
Google DeepMind Researchers introduce Gemma Scope 2, an open suite of interpretability tools that exposes how Gemma 3 language models process and represent information across all layers, from 270M to 27B parameters. Its core goal is simple, give AI safety and alignment teams a practical way to trace model behavior back to internal features instead […] The post
23/12/2025
Fix It Before They Feel It: Higher Reliability with Proactive Mitigation
What if your infrastructure could detect performance issues and fix them automatically—before your users even notice? This blog brings that vision to life using Azure SRE Agent, an AI-powered autonomous agent that monitors, detects, and remediates production issues in real-time. 💡 The magic: Zero human intervention required. The agent handles detection, diagnosis, remediation, and reporting—...
23/12/2025
Copilot Your Holidays: Episode 4 – New Year Energy, Team Alignment, and Party Planning!
The holiday season is here, and Copilot can help you start the new year strong. In Episode 4 of our Copilot Your Holidays series, Samhita and Saurabh share practical ways to set the tone for the new year and celebrate in style: drafting team emails, brainstorming party themes, and even creating fun invitations.
22/12/2025
Title Plan Update – December 22, 2025
☃️December 22, 2025 Title Plan Now Available - Please note this will be the last title plan of the calendar year. The next title plan will be published on January 2, 2026. Access 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 s...
22/12/2025
Migration from SAP ERP On-Premises to SAP S/4HANA in Microsoft Azure
This describes the tool guided migration of an on-premises SAP ERP system into Microsoft Azure, combined with a system conversion to SAP S/4HANA. The Software Update Manager (SUM) acts as the technical engine for the conversion. I will also explain how the SAP Cloud Appliance Library streamlines this process through a step-by-step approach.
22/12/2025
Meta AI Open-Sourced Perception Encoder Audiovisual (PE-AV): The Audiovisual Encoder Powering SAM Audio And Large Scale Multimodal Retrieval
Meta researchers have introduced Perception Encoder Audiovisual, PEAV, as a new family of encoders for joint audio and video understanding. The model learns aligned audio, video, and text representations in a single embedding space using large scale contrastive training on about 100M audio video pairs with text captions. From Perception Encoder to PEAV Perception Encoder, […] The post
22/12/2025
Course Retirement Announcement: AZ-2002
AZ-2002: Develop an ASP.NET Core web app that consumes an API
22/12/2025
Automatic alt text generation in Word and PowerPoint on Copilot+ PCs
Hello, Insiders! I’m Shireen Salma, a Product Manager on the Office Accessibility team. I’m excited to share that rich alt text is automatically generated when you insert an image in Word and PowerPoint on a Copilot+ PC device. Automatic alt text generation in Word and PowerPoint on Copilot+ PCs This new experience is designed to make documents and presentations more accessible from the moment images are added, while also prioritizing performance, privacy, and user contr...
22/12/2025
3 Smart Ways to Encode Categorical Features for Machine Learning
If you spend any time working with real-world data, you quickly realize that not everything comes in neat, clean numbers.
22/12/2025
Automating Windows Server Licensing Benefits with Azure Arc Policy
Introduction: Managing Windows Server benefits licensing across hybrid environments can be challenging. Azure Arc combined with Azure Policy simplifies this by automatically enforcing licensing compliance. This blog explains how the provided policy works and how to deploy it. Why implement this policy? Automating Windows Server Licensing Benefits with Azure Arc Policy ensures that all eligible machines are seamlessly enabled for essential management services, includin...
22/12/2025
How to Build a Fully Autonomous Local Fleet-Maintenance Analysis Agent Using SmolAgents and Qwen Model
In this tutorial, we walk through the process of creating a fully autonomous fleet-analysis agent using SmolAgents and a local Qwen model.We generate telemetry data, load it through a custom tool, and let our agent reason, analyze, and visualize maintenance risks without any external API calls.At each step of implementation, we see how […]
22/12/2025
Google Introduces A2UI (Agent-to-User Interface): An Open Sourc Protocol for Agent Driven Interfaces
Google has open sourced A2UI, an Agent to User Interface specification and set of libraries that lets agents describe rich native interfaces in a declarative JSON format while client applications render them with their own components. The project targets a clear problem, how to let remote agents present secure, interactive interfaces across trust boundaries without […] The post
22/12/2025
Pretraining a Llama Model on Your Local GPU
This article is divided into three parts; they are: • Training a Tokenizer with Special Tokens • Preparing the Training Data • Running the Pretraining The model architecture you will use is the same as the one created in the
22/12/2025
Anthropic AI Releases Bloom: An Open-Source Agentic Framework for Automated Behavioral Evaluations of Frontier AI Models
Anthropic has released Bloom, an open source agentic framework that automates behavioral evaluations for frontier AI models. The system takes a researcher specified behavior and builds targeted evaluations that measure how often and how strongly that behavior appears in realistic scenarios. Why Bloom? Behavioral evaluations for safety and alignment are expensive to design and maintain. […] The post
21/12/2025
AI Interview Series #4: Explain KV Caching
Question: You’re deploying an LLM in production. Generating the first few tokens is fast, but as the sequence grows, each additional token takes progressively longer to generate—even though the model architecture and hardware remain the same. If compute isn’t the primary bottleneck, what inefficiency is causing this slowdown, and how would you redesign the inference […] The post AI Intervi...
21/12/2025
NVIDIA AI Releases Nemotron 3: A Hybrid Mamba Transformer MoE Stack for Long Context Agentic AI
NVIDIA has released the Nemotron 3 family of open models as part of a full stack for agentic AI, including model weights, datasets and reinforcement learning tools. The family has three sizes, Nano, Super and Ultra, and targets multi agent systems that need long context reasoning with tight control over inference cost. Nano has about […] The post
20/12/2025
Your AI connection expert for the Microsoft partner ecosystem
The Microsoft partner ecosystem is one of the most powerful business communities in the world. But even in a community this strong, so many great partnerships never happen—simply because the right people never cross paths. Ralphi is here to change that. Ralphi strengthens the ecosystem by helping the right partners find each other. When that happens, everyone wins: Innovation accelerates Customers get better solutions Smaller partners ...
20/12/2025
Stop Running Runbooks at 3 am: Let Azure SRE Agent Do Your On-Call Grunt Work
Your pager goes off. It's 2:47am. Production is throwing 500 errors. You know the drill - SSH into this, query that, check these metrics, correlate those logs. Twenty minutes later, you're still piecing together what went wrong. Sound familiar? The On-Call Reality Nobody Talks About Every SRE, DevOps engineer, and developer who's carried a pager knows this pain. When incidents hit, you're not solving problems - you're executing runbooks. Copy-paste this query. Check t...
20/12/2025
Rotary Position Embeddings for Long Context Length
This article is divided into two parts; they are: • Simple RoPE • RoPE for Long Context Length Compared to the sinusoidal position embeddings in the original Transformer paper, RoPE mutates the input tensor using a rotation matrix: $$ \begin{aligned} X_{n,i} &= X_{n,i} \cos(n\theta_i) - X_{n,\frac{d}{2}+i} \sin(n\theta_i) \\ X_{n,\frac{d}{2}+i} &= X_{n,i} \sin(n\theta_i) + X_{n,\frac{d}{2}+i} \cos(n\theta_i) \end{aligned} $$ where $X_{n,i}$ is the $i$-th element of the vector at the $n$-...
20/12/2025
A Coding Guide to Design a Complete Agentic Workflow in Gemini for Automated Medical Evidence Gathering and Prior Authorization Submission
In this tutorial, we devise how to orchestrate a fully functional, tool-using medical prior-authorization agent powered by Gemini. We walk through each component step by step, from securely configuring the model to building realistic external tools and finally constructing an intelligent agent loop that reasons, acts, and responds entirely through structured JSON. As we progress, […] The post
20/12/2025
Title Plan Update – December 19, 2025
☃️December 19, 2025 Title Plan Now Available - Please note this will be the last title plan of the calendar year. The next title plan will be published on January 2, 2026. Access 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 mo...
19/12/2025
Using Reading Coach in the classroom: Microsoft 365 LTI app + educator tools
Hi everyone! As we work to better support learners on their journey to becoming confident readers, I’m excited to share a few updates about Reading Coach – our free, AI-powered reading fluency tool – and highlight how it’s now even more accessible for your classroom. 📣 What's new: Reading Coach in the Microsoft 365 LTI We've heard from educators that managi...
19/12/2025
Spotlight on… Glint and Pulse: A Year in Review Volume 1, Edition 3, December 2025
2025 has been a remarkable year for Microsoft Viva Glint and Viva Pulse—made possible by you, our customers. Your partnership, insights, and trust have shaped every step of our journey. Together, we delivered transformative integrations, reached new engagement milestones, and saw meaningful outcomes across the organizations we serve. This year, we introduced enhancements that not only st...
19/12/2025
Register now for the Microsoft 365 Archive + Preservica Webinar
Register now for the Microsoft 365 Archive + Preservica WebinarJanuary 28, 10:00 AM PT / 6:00 PM GMT Join us for this free webinar on January 8th, 2026 featuring Microsoft 365 Archive and Preservica’s new embedded integration that helps make data secure, usable, and accessible. This live session will showcase the integration in action—including a full demo, real customer scenarios, and guidance from both Microsoft and Preservica experts.
19/12/2025
Mistral AI Releases OCR 3: A Smaller Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Model for Structured Document AI at Scale
Mistral AI has released Mistral OCR 3, its latest optical character recognition service that powers the company’s Document AI stack. The model, named as mistral-ocr-2512, is built to extract interleaved text and images from PDFs and other documents while preserving structure, and it does this at an aggressive price of $2 per 1,000 pages with […] The post
19/12/2025
Ignite Your Creativity at the Microsoft 365 Copilot Prompt a thon in Malvern
The Microsoft 365 Copilot Prompt‑a‑thon is coming to Malvern on February 24, and it’s shaping up to be an energizing, hands‑on experience designed to help people explore what’s possible when human creativity meets AI‑powered productivity. Whether you're new to M365 Copilot or already experimenting with advanced prompting techniques, this event delivers a full day of learning, collaboration, and high‑impact innovation. Prompt‑a‑thons are built on a simple but powerful idea: when peo...
19/12/2025
Get Ready, Atlanta! The First Government Prompt-a-thon is coming to YOU!
If you’re looking to elevate your Copilot skills and see what’s possible when creativity meets AI, the upcoming Microsoft 365 Copilot Promptathon in Atlanta on January 27 is the place to be. This hands-on, fast-paced experience brings together makers, problem solvers, and innovators for a day built around one core goal: crafting high impact prompts that save...
19/12/2025
How to Build a High-Performance Distributed Task Routing System Using Kombu with Topic Exchanges and Concurrent Workers
In this tutorial, we build a fully functional event-driven workflow using Kombu, treating messaging as a core architectural capability. We walk through step by step the setup of exchanges, routing keys, background workers, and concurrent producers, allowing us to observe a real distributed system. As we implement each component, we see how clean message flow, […] The post
19/12/2025
Event Recap - ESPC 2025 - Dublin, Ireland
ESPC 2025 proved to be an unforgettable event, held in the vibrant city of Dublin, Ireland from December 2–4, 2025. Bringing together technology professionals from around the world, this year’s conference was a true celebration of innovation, learning, and collaboration. With a strong focus on AI-powered tools, Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 Copilot, SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot Studio, and more, attendees were offered an exciting look into the future of work and t...
19/12/2025
Announcing hardware-accelerated BitLocker
We know that users desire both security and great performance. Historically, we have strived to keep BitLocker performance overhead within single digit percentage points. However, with the rapid rise in popularity and advancement of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) drive technology, these drives now achieve much higher Input/Output (I/O) operation speeds. As a result, corresponding BitLocker cryptographic operations can require a higher proportion of CPU (Central Processing Unit) cycles. Th...
19/12/2025
Get clarity on complex presentations with Explainer in PowerPoint
Hi, Insiders! I’m Ananta Gupta, a Product Manager on the PowerPoint team. I’m excited to announce a new Microsoft 365 Copilot-powered feature in Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows and for Mac that breaks down complex concepts in slides, improving your reading experience and comprehension. Get clarity on complex presentations with Explainer in PowerPoint If you’ve ever encountered a presentation packed with unfamiliar acronyms, confusing slides, or dense text and thought to yours...
19/12/2025
Securing the AI era starts with identity
Yet only one in four enterprise AI initiatives are properly secured.Introducing the first identity-centric secure web & AI gatewayAt Ignite 2025, Microsoft unveiled a breakthrough in AI security: Microsoft Entra Internet Access now includes a secure web and AI gateway.
19/12/2025
Learn how to build MCP servers with Python and Azure
We just concluded Python + MCP, a three-part livestream series where we:Built MCP servers in Python using FastMCPIn our third session of the Python + MCP series, we explore the best ways to build authentication layers on top of your MCP servers.
19/12/2025
Call to Action: Migrate Your Classic Alert‑trigger Automations to Automation Rules Before March 2026
Reminder: Following the Retirement Announcement published in March 2023, classic alert‑trigger automation in Microsoft Sentinel, where playbooks are triggered directly from analytic rules will be deprecated in March 2026.To help you quickly identify if any analytic rules should be updated, we created a Logic App solution that identifies all the analytic rules which use classic automation.Identify classic automation in your analytic rules
19/12/2025
New in Microsoft Marketplace: December 19, 2025
Learn about 328 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
19/12/2025
Google Introduces T5Gemma 2: Encoder Decoder Models with Multimodal Inputs via SigLIP and 128K Context
Google has published T5Gemma 2, a family of open encoder-decoder Transformer checkpoints built by adapting Gemma 3 pretrained weights into an encoder-decoder layout, then continuing pretraining with the UL2 objective. The release is pretrained only, intended for developers to post-train for specific tasks, and Google explicitly notes it is not releasing post-trained or IT checkpoints […] The post
19/12/2025
A Complete Workflow for Automated Prompt Optimization Using Gemini Flash, Few-Shot Selection, and Evolutionary Instruction Search
In this tutorial, we shift from traditional prompt crafting to a more systematic, programmable approach by treating prompts as tunable parameters rather than static text. Instead of guessing which instruction or example works best, we build an optimization loop around Gemini 2.0 Flash that experiments, evaluates, and automatically selects the strongest prompt configuration. In this […] The post
19/12/2025
How to Fine-Tune a Local Mistral or Llama 3 Model on Your Own Dataset
Large language models (LLMs) like Mistral 7B and Llama 3 8B have shaken the AI field, but their broad nature limits their application to specialized areas.
19/12/2025
Unsloth AI and NVIDIA are Revolutionizing Local LLM Fine-Tuning: From RTX Desktops to DGX Spark
Fine-tune popular AI models faster with Unsloth on NVIDIA RTX AI PCs such as GeForce RTX desktops and laptops to RTX PRO workstations and the new DGX Spark to build personalized assistants for coding, creative work, and complex agentic workflows.The landscape of modern AI is shifting.We are moving away from a total reliance […]
19/12/2025
JSON Web Token (JWT) Validation in Azure Application Gateway: Secure Your APIs at the Gate
Recently, in an E2E conversation with my colleague Vyshnavi Namani, we dug into a topic every ITPro supporting modern apps should understand: JSON Web Token (JWT) validation, specifically using Azure Application Gateway.In this post we’ll distill that conversation into a technical guide for infrastructure pros who want to secure APIs and backend workloads without rewriting applications.JWT validation in Azure Application Gateway means the gateway will check every incoming HTTPS request for a valid JWT before it forwards the traffic to your backend service.
19/12/2025
Azure Front Door: Implementing lessons learned following October outages
Azure Front Door is Microsoft's advanced edge delivery platform encompassing Content Delivery Network (CDN), global security and traffic distribution into a single unified offering.Here we describe how the two recent service incidents impacting Azure Front Door have reinforced the need to accelerate ongoing investments in hardening our resiliency, and tenant isolation strategy to mitigate likelihood and the scale of impact from this class of risk.This is the first in a series of planned blogs on Azure Front Door resiliency enhancements.
19/12/2025
Azure Networking 2025: Powering cloud innovation and AI at global scale
Consider the construction of Microsoft’s new Fairwater AI datacenter in Wisconsin – a 315-acre campus housing hundreds of thousands of GPUs.Azure’s networking team delivered: the facility’s network fabric links GPUs at 800 Gbps speeds in a non-blocking architecture, enabling 10× the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer.Notably, Azure Route Server now supports up to 500 virtual network connections (spokes) per route server, a significant scale boost that enables larger hub-and-spoke topologies and simplified Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route exchange even in very large environments.
18/12/2025
Marketplace offer live? Now make it shine!🌟
Microsoft gives you the tools, best practices, and guidance to boost visibility, drive traffic, and turn interest into real customers fast.🚀 Start with App Advisor: Your Marketplace growth playbookApp Advisor is your self‑serve hub packed with step‑by‑step best practices, optimization guidance, and proven GTM strategies designed to your help app or agent rise above the noise and stand out to buyers.
18/12/2025
Building Reliable AI Travel Agents with the Durable Task Extension for Microsoft Agent Framework
In this post, we'll walk through the AI Travel Planner, a C# application I built that demonstrates how to build reliable, scalable multi-agent applications using the durable task extension for Microsoft agent framework.After generating the travel plan, the workflow pauses for user approval:It's fully instrumented with the Azure Developer CLI and Bicep, so you can deploy it to Azure with a few simple CLI commands.
18/12/2025
In case you missed it: A roundup of the latest Planner announcements
The Microsoft Planner team recently celebrated two pivotal milestones: International Project Management Day and Microsoft Ignite.In honor of International Project Management Day on November 6, our team published a blog post to highlight lesser-known but powerful Planner features that help teams work more efficiently across Planner and Microsoft Teams.These features include the ability to bulk edit tasks, export plans to Excel, and auto-generate status reports.
18/12/2025
🎅 Software Santa Arrives Early for the SAP on Azure Community!
It looks like Software Santa is making an early stop at the SAP on Azure Partner Community—because we’re thrilled to announce that the Microsoft Copilot + SAP Joule integration is now Generally Available!First unwrapped at Sapphire 2025, this milestone brings together the best of Microsoft Copilot and SAP Joule to deliver seamless, AI‑powered productivity across SAP business processes—right inside the tools users rely on every day.With GA now live, our customers can:✨ Tap directly into SAP insights from within Microsoft Copilot✨ Streamline and automate end‑to‑end SAP workflows✨ Harness secure, contextual, enterprise‑grade AI across platforms✨ Deliver measurable business value faster than ever
18/12/2025
Microsoft Defender Experts Disrupt Jasper Sleet’s Insider Access Campaign
Recently, Microsoft Defender Experts, powered by Microsoft Threat Intelligence, successfully thwarted a sophisticated campaign by Jasper Sleet (formerly Storm-0287), a North Korean state-sponsored threat actor known for stealthy infiltration tactics.Jasper Sleet leveraged social engineering and identity fraud to bypass traditional security controls.By impersonating remote IT contractors, the actors blend into legitimate workflows, using shared devices for MFA and VPN services to mask their origin.
18/12/2025
New capabilities for AI admins from Ignite 2025
Microsoft Ignite 2025 brought a wave of exciting updates for admins, focusing on enhanced visibility, control and efficiency in management of AI-powered experiences. Here’s a deeper dive into the key features released to public preview, general availability, or announced and planned for release in the coming weeks.Copilot Control System (CCS) is Microsoft’s integrated framework for governing and managing Microsoft 365 Copilot at scale.Cloud Update, now generally available, modernizes how organizations manage Microsoft 365 Apps by automating updates and ensuring devices stay current, secure, and consistent. This cloud‑driven servicing model is especially important for Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents because maintaining high update currency ensures they run on optimized, secure, and feature‑ready environments.
18/12/2025
Windows skilling snacks: bite-sized technical learning
If you are looking for a quick way to get up to speed on features, tools, and recommended approaches for deploying and managing Windows, skilling snacks are here to help.With Windows skilling snacks, we've curated a library of technical learning journeys, each of which can be consumed in less than two hours.Follow and bookmark this page for new installments—and comment below if there is there is a topic you'd like us to cover.
18/12/2025
RD Perspectives on Microsoft Ignite 2025: Opportunities Shaping the Next Wave of Enterprise AI
Microsoft Ignite addressed this head‑on through the Fabric IQ Stack.Across Europe, organizations are accelerating AI adoption with a focus on efficiency, cost optimization, and operational standardization.Across every perspective - security, agents, knowledge automation, hybrid AI, and regional adoption - Microsoft Ignite 2025 sets the stage for a new era of enterprise AI.
18/12/2025
New Agents in Microsoft Purview
Use the Data Security Triage Agent to cut through alert overload, eliminate false positives, and immediately understand which Insider Risk or DLP incidents need your attention.Ask natural-language questions to reveal data risks across Outlook, Teams, Copilot, SharePoint, OneDrive, and AI interactions.As you start your day, the Data Security Triage Agent is your AI-powered assistant for managing insider risk management and data loss prevention alerts.
18/12/2025
Microsoft and NASA apply AI agents to key hydrology data, deepening our understanding of Earth
Together, NASA and Microsoft are working to make these insights more accessible with the use of AI agents powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Foundry. Building on the success of the Earth Copilot demonstration, researchers in NASA’s Hydrological Sciences Lab are developing a multi-agent copilot to make it easier for a wider range of scientists, researchers and policy makers to engage with and draw insights from the comprehensive, yet complex, datasets.To address this challenge, NASA and Microsoft collaborated a new multi-agent AI system that enables intuitive, plain-language interaction with hydrology datasets.The hydrology copilot is powered by a modern Azure AI and data architecture purpose-built for scientific workloads.
18/12/2025
5 Agentic Coding Tips & Tricks
Agentic coding only feels "smart" when it ships correct diffs, passes tests, and leaves a paper trail you can trust.
18/12/2025
2025 Year in Review: What’s new across SQL Server, Azure SQL and SQL database in Fabric
For the FIFTH(!!) year in a row (my heart is warm with the number, I love SQL and #SQLfamily, and time is flying), I am sharing my annual Year in Review blog with all the SQL Server, Azure SQL and SQL database in Fabric news this year.Any updates across Microsoft Fabric that apply to the SQL analytics endpoint are generally supported in mirrored databases and Fabric SQL databases via the SQL analytics endpoint.Anna’s Pick of the Month Year
18/12/2025
New in Microsoft Marketplace: December 18, 2025
Learn about 97 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.AI Narrative: The AI Narrative visual from Astral Insights connects to Microsoft Fabric data sources and generates AI-powered narrative summaries of your analytics, turning complex charts and metrics into easy-to-understand business stories.This visual works seamlessly with Microsoft Power BI.
18/12/2025
Network Detection and Response (NDR) in Financial Services
Organizations in the Financial Services industry handling sensitive account holder information must comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).This post explains how NDR supports PCI DSS v4.0.1 compliance, with a focus on deployments in Azure.We will map NDR capabilities to key PCI requirements, describe how Azure’s native tools (Azure Virtual Network TAP, VNET Flow Logs, Traffic Analytics) enable an NDR solution by capturing network data, and discuss third-party NDR tools that analyze this data for threats.We will also evaluate Microsoft Sentinel’s role as a partial NDR solution, and highlight how Microsoft Defender for Cloud contributes to PCI compliance.
18/12/2025
Application layer DDoS protection using the HTTP DDoS Ruleset in Azure WAF
Today, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can strike as soon as public connectivity is enabled, highlighting their widespread prevalence.The most common types of Application layer/HTTP based DDOS attacks are outlined below.The HTTP DDoS Ruleset is a built-in capability of Azure Application Gateway WAF designed to protect your applications from large-scale HTTP floods at the application layer.
18/12/2025
Azure Policy: Required Actions for Docker Content Trust Deprecation in Azure Container Registry
One such upcoming change is the deprecation of the Docker Content Trust (DCT) feature in Azure Container Registry (ACR) which is ongoing over a three-year period.This blog post explains what is changing, the potential impact on your Azure Policy environment, and steps you can take to mitigate disruption.The Docker Content Trust (DCT) feature in ACR is being deprecated.
17/12/2025
Event-Driven to Change-Driven: Low-cost dependency inversion
While not inherently event-driven, CQRS is often paired with event sourcing or event-carried state transfer to optimize for scalability and maintainability.As developers are disconnected from the real-world business, they struggle to understand the nuances of domain events, a dangerous pattern emerges.In DDD, an Anti-Corruption Layer (ACL) protects your bounded context from external models that would corrupt your domain.
17/12/2025
10 Essential tips for Marketplace success: Insights from Microsoft Ignite 2025
At Microsoft Ignite 2025, the Marketplace took centre stage as the unified platform for cloud and AI innovation.With the global expansion of resale-enabled offers, new incentives, and a reimagined partner ecosystem, the Marketplace is now the fastest path for customers to discover, purchase, and deploy solutions—and for partners to scale.This article distils the top 10 tips for Marketplace success, blending strategic guidance with practical actions for partners ready to lead in the AI-first era.
17/12/2025
Introducing updated GPT Voice Models in Microsoft Foundry
These models deliver state‑of‑the‑art performance across real‑time audio input/output, transcription, and natural‑sounding speech synthesis, while giving developers the tools to optimize for accuracy, latency, and brand voice consistency.The new gpt-realtime-mini-2025-12-15 model powers real-time voice agents with strong parity to full-scale models in instruction-following and function-calling, while delivering improved prosody, better voice fidelity across turns, and reduced latency for seamless dialogue.It outperforms industry leaders with 35% fewer word errors on multilingual benchmarks and achieves up to 3× lower WER in non-English languages.
17/12/2025
How Microsoft Used Its Own Tech To Lead The Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for AI Application Development
Big news: Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for AI Application Development Platforms.To put it to the test, I built the third version of my questionnaire-answering app, a system designed to automate the process of responding to those sprawling analyst questionnaires.This is the third iteration of this agentic system. This time, I used Spec Kit, an AI-powered tool that breaks down requirements into user stories, functional specs, and success criteria.
17/12/2025
Azure Arc Monthly Forum Recap – November 2025
Capability: Filter, search, exclude and modify baseline settings in Azure Policy.Essential Machine Management (EMM) Operations Center is a new unified management experience.
17/12/2025
Meta AI Releases SAM Audio: A State-of-the-Art Unified Model that Uses Intuitive and Multimodal Prompts for Audio Separation
Meta has released SAM Audio, a prompt driven audio separation model that targets a common editing bottleneck, isolating one sound from a real world mix without building a custom model per sound class. Meta released 3 main sizes, sam-audio-small, sam-audio-base, and sam-audio-large.The model is available to download and to try in the Segment Anything […]The post Meta AI Releases SAM Audio: A State-of-the-Art Unified Model that Uses Intuitive and Multimodal Prompts for Audio Separation appeared first on MarkTechPost.
17/12/2025
Announcing General Availability of Geo-Replication for Azure Service Bus Premium
Today we are excited to announce general availability of the Geo-Replication feature for Azure Service Bus in the premium tier.This feature ensures that the metadata and data of a namespace are continuously replicated from a primary region to a secondary region.The Geo-Replication feature implements metadata and data replication in a primary-secondary replication model.
17/12/2025
ODBC Driver 18.6 for SQL Server Released
Version 18.6 of the Microsoft ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server has been released.Version 18.6 brings some minor changes and fixes to the driver.Support for the new vector data type (float32)
17/12/2025
What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot | November & December 2025
Welcome to the special edition of What's new in Microsoft 365 Copilot for both November and December 2025!Glance cards in Copilot Search are now available for Copilot users without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.Soon Microsoft Purview unified audit logs will include all agent-related admin activities in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
17/12/2025
Surfing the AI Wave: Manage, Govern, and Protect AI Agents with Microsoft Entra Agent ID
This blog kicks off a series that will dive deeper into the three solution areas that Agent ID unlocks: the ability to register and manage AI agents, govern agent identities and lifecycle, and protect agent access to resources.Agent ID is the heartbeat of Microsoft Agent 365, the control plane for all your agents.IDC says there’ll be 1.3 billion AI agents in the next three years.
17/12/2025
Performance Tuning for CDC: Managing Replication Lag in Azure Database for PostgreSQL with Debezium
Change Data Capture (CDC) powers real-time integrations, pushing row-level changes from OLTP systems into event streams, data lakes, caches, and microservices.However, during large DML operations (bulk updates, deletes) or schema changes (DDL), replication lag can occur because:This article explains why lag happens, grounded in logical decoding internals, and shows how to diagnose it quickly and what to tune across the database, Azure, and connector layers to keep pipelines healthy under heavy load.
17/12/2025
Top 5 Vector Databases for High-Performance LLM Applications
Building AI applications often requires searching through millions of documents, finding similar items in massive catalogs, or retrieving relevant context for your LLM.
17/12/2025
Microsoft BizTalk Server Product Lifecycle Update
To help customers plan confidently for the future, Microsoft is sharing an update to the BizTalk Server product lifecycle and long-term support timelines.BizTalk Server 2020 will be the final version of BizTalk Server.Guidance to support long-term planning for mission-critical workloads
17/12/2025
How to Orchestrate a Fully Autonomous Multi-Agent Research and Writing Pipeline Using CrewAI and Gemini for Real-Time Intelligent Collaboration
In this tutorial, we implement how we build a small but powerful two-agent CrewAI system that collaborates using the Gemini Flash model.We set up our environment, authenticate securely, define specialized agents, and orchestrate tasks that flow from research to structured writing.As we run the crew, we observe how each component works together in […]
17/12/2025
𝐀𝐈 𝐈𝐬 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐢𝐬𝐤. 𝐔𝐧𝐠𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐀𝐈 𝐈𝐬
𝘈𝘐 𝘪𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘺’𝘴 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴.And when AI goes live without governance, it doesn’t fail loudly —it fails quietly, repeatedly, and at scale.⚠️𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐑𝐢𝐬𝐤𝐬 𝐀𝐫𝐞𝐧’𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 — 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲’𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐚𝐩𝐬Ungoverned AI creates risks we don’t see coming:❌ Models making decisions no one can explain❌ Sensitive data leaking through prompts and logs❌ Shadow AI tools bypassing security and compliance❌ No ownership when AI output causes business impact❌ Incidents detected after customers are affectedThis isn’t an AI problem.This is an 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 problem.🧭 𝐆𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 ≠ 𝐒𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐃𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐈𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧Let’s break a myth.Governance is 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐮𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲.Governance is 𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐝.Strong AI governance answers simple but critical questions:Without these answers, AI becomes a risk multiplier instead of a value driver.🏗️ 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 “𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐞𝐝 𝐀𝐈” 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐋𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐋𝐢𝐤𝐞Mature organizations treat AI like any other production system:✔️ Clear accountability and RACI✔️ Risk classification before deployment✔️ Secure prompt and data boundaries✔️ Monitoring, alerting, and audit trails✔️ Incident and change management aligned with ITSM✔️ Continuous reviews — not one-time approvalsAI doesn’t need less governance.It needs modern governance built for speed and scale.💡𝐅𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭The future won’t be decided by who adopts AI first.It will be decided by who operationalizes AI responsibly.Because in the end.....𝑨𝑰 𝒘𝒐𝒏’𝒕 𝒃𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒌 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒔𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏.
17/12/2025
Learn about KnowledgeLake's transactable partner solution in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like KnowledgeLake deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Azure Marketplace.Learn about KnowledgeLake's offer below:Powered by Microsoft Azure, KnowledgeLake features robust workflow automation and RPA capabilities that enable businesses to reduce manual tasks, streamline operations, and improve productivity by automating complex processes.
17/12/2025
Security Guidance Series: CAF 4.0 Threat Hunting From Detection to Anticipation
The CAF 4.0 update reframes C2 (Threat Hunting) as a cornerstone of proactive cyber resilience.it now demands structured, frequent, and intelligence-led threat hunting that evolves in line with organizational risk.Microsoft E3 equips organizations with the baseline capabilities to begin threat investigation, forming the starting point for Partially Achieved maturity under CAF 4.0 C2.
17/12/2025
JSON Structure: A JSON schema language you'll love
JSON Schema is a powerful document validation tool, but it is not a data definition language.The Structurize tool converts JSON Structure schemas into SQL DDL for various database dialects, as well as self-serializing classes for multiple programming languages.We've submitted JSON Structure as a set of Internet Drafts to the IETF, aiming for formal standardization as an RFC.
17/12/2025
Thinking Machines Lab Makes Tinker Generally Available: Adds Kimi K2 Thinking And Qwen3-VL Vision Input
Thinking Machines Lab has moved its Tinker training API into general availability and added 3 major capabilities, support for the Kimi K2 Thinking reasoning model, OpenAI compatible sampling, and image input through Qwen3-VL vision language models.For AI engineers, this turns Tinker into a practical way to fine tune frontier models without building distributed training […]The post Thinking Machines Lab Makes Tinker Generally Available: Adds Kimi K2 Thinking And Qwen3-VL Vision Input appeared first on MarkTechPost.
17/12/2025
Coreinfo v4.0, NotMyFault v4.30, and Process Explorer v17.09
This update to Coreinfo, a tool that reports processor, socket, NUMA memory, and cache topology of a system, as well as processor features supported, now includes a GUI version and adds checks for features present in modern CPUs.This update to NotMyFault, a tool that can crash, hang, and cause kernel memory leaks on the Windows system, adds Arm64 support and a new crash type for HalTimerWatchdogTriggerSystemReset.This update to Process Explorer, an advanced process, DLL, and handle viewing utility, fixes an image type bug, and enables the assemblies tab for .NET processes.
17/12/2025
Introducing OpenAI’s GPT-image-1.5 in Microsoft Foundry
That’s why we are excited to announce OpenAI's GPT Image 1.5 is now generally available in Microsoft Foundry.This model can bring sharper image fidelity, stronger prompt alignment, and faster image generation that supports iterative workflows.Based on an internal Microsoft dataset, GPT Image 1.5 performs higher than other image generation models in prompt alignment and infographics tasks.
16/12/2025
Identify causes of auto-resuming serverless workloads in Azure SQL Database
We are pleased to announce that telemetry is now available in Azure Monitor activity log to identify the causes of auto-resuming serverless workloads in Azure SQL Database. Prior to exposing this telemetry, the correlation of specific auto-resume causes with database activity could be time consuming and imperfect with no programmatic solution.Serverless in SQL Database automatically scales compute based on workload demand and bills for compute used per second. In the General Purpose tier, serverless also provides an option to automatically pause the database during idle usage periods when only storage related costs are billed. The more a database is idle, the more auto-pausing can help reduce compute costs. In this example, the serverless database is auto-resumed in around 38 seconds in order to perform a security related vulnerability assessment.
16/12/2025
More control over proofing language in OneNote on Windows
I’m excited to share an update to Microsoft OneNote on Windows that gives you more flexibility over proofing languages in your notebook pages.More control over proofing language in OneNote on WindowsIt will reach general availability by the end of January 2026.
16/12/2025
WPC Milan 2025: AI, Cloud and Community Power a Record Breaking Edition
Over the course of three full days, WPC welcomed one thousand attendees who had access to one hundred and eight technical sessions, ten keynotes and six specialized tracks that covered the most relevant areas of modern technology.These figures confirm WPC as the most significant independent Microsoft‑focused conference in Italy.Artificial Intelligence and Microsoft Copilot represented the core of WPC Milan 2025.
16/12/2025
Anatomy of an Outage: How Microsoft focuses on Transparency during and post incident
I had the opportunity to co-present a session on the topic of how Microsoft communicates during outages and what YOU can do to be more proactive on how your Azure based infra is weathering the storm.Tajinder Pal Singh Ahluwalia and I pulled back the curtain on how Microsoft handles major incidents—from the first customer impact signal to the deep‑dive retrospectives that follow.Shockingly, only 20–30% of Azure subscriptions actively use Azure Service Health—yet it’s the single most important tool for understanding how outages affect your specific workloads.
16/12/2025
Beyond the Model: Empower your AI with Data Grounding and Model Training
With over 11,000 foundational, open, task-specific, and industry-tuned models, Foundry Models serve as the indispensable engine of Microsoft Foundry—empowering developers to build, optimize, and govern AI applications and agents with unmatched flexibility, speed, and contextual intelligence. Foundation models are powerful—but they don’t know your business.By combining Foundry Models with Foundry IQ and agent orchestration, organizations unlock faster time-to-value and up to 30% productivity gains—translating into hundreds of hours saved per day and significant reductions in AI development costs.With Foundry IQ powered by Azure AI Search, customers index their own documents, policies, and data repositories, enabling models to answer with context and citations.
16/12/2025
Partner Blog | Azure updates for partners: December 2025
At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we explored what it means for organizations to move into the era of Frontier transformation.This shift is focused on embedding AI across every part of the business to improve decision-making, increase speed, and create new value.For partners, this move toward Frontier represents a significant opportunity to lead customers into this new era.
16/12/2025
Building Bridges: Microsoft’s Participation in the Fedora Linux Community
Over the past year, our Community Linux Engineering team has been doing just that, focusing on Fedora Linux and working closely with the community to improve infrastructure, tooling, and collaboration.Modernizing Fedora Cloud Image Delivery One of our most impactful contributions this year has been expanding the availability of Fedora Cloud images across major cloud platforms.
16/12/2025
Partner Case Study | University of Chicago
Working closely with Microsoft and UChicago’s IT Services team, Royal Cyber helped design and deploy PhoenixAI—a secure, scalable generative AI assistant powered entirely by Azure.The goal: deliver an institutionally managed AI solution built on trusted Azure infrastructure, deployable before the semester’s start, customizable by department or course, and capable of serving tens of thousands of users without adding operational overhead.PhoenixAI was built entirely on Azure using a modular, container-based architecture designed for performance, observability, and scalability.
16/12/2025
Public Preview: Cross-tenant Orchestrated User Data Migration
Today we’re excited to announce the Public Preview of Cross-tenant Orchestrated User Data Migration (UDM), a new set of capabilities that help IT teams move user mailboxes, files, and collaboration assets between Microsoft 365 tenants with greater speed, predictability, and control.With a single orchestration layer coordinating the migration of multiple services, admins won’t need to manage timelines, dependencies, or interfaces of multiple tools. The submission and monitoring of a migration is all available in one spot, and batching of up to 2,000 users is supported.This product uses the technology behind the GA solutions for moving OneDrive and mailboxes. For the first time, Microsoft is offering a cross-tenant migration tool to move Teams data.
16/12/2025
Efficiently process high volume logs and optimize costs with Microsoft Sentinel data lake
With Microsoft Sentinel data lake, you can ingest high‑volume logs directly into the data lake tier—significantly reducing storage costs while maintaining full visibility.In this post, we will demonstrate how to leverage the Sentinel data lake by ingesting data into the CommonSecurityLog table.KQL jobs in Sentinel data lake are automated one-time or scheduled jobs that run Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries directly on data lake.
16/12/2025
Ignite Recap: How Copilot Search and Connectors Are Redefining Productivity
Ready to see how AI is transforming the way you work?At Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft 365 Copilot Search and Connectors took center stage - ushering in a new era of productivity and intelligent search.At Ignite we introduced AI Views, which are a new way to surface relevant information instantly within Copilot Search.
16/12/2025
Synced passkeys and high assurance account recovery
Almost half of Microsoft Entra ID users are now protected with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), per the latest Microsoft Digital Defense Report. Yet many organizations still face high costs because of training needs, usability challenges and productivity loss. At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we introduced two new features in Entra ID to address those challenges for existing MFA deployments and to increase adoption of MFA across users and organizations: synced passkeys and account recovery.Microsoft Entra account recovery in Microsoft Entra helps users regain access quickly and securely, leveraging government issued ID and biometric verification to deliver high assurance.
16/12/2025
Azure PostgreSQL Lesson Learned#11: Major Version Upgrade Failure Due to Unsupported Extensions
Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server only supports a specific list of extensions during major version upgrades.If your source server contains any extension outside that allowlist, the major version upgrade will be blocked.To unblock the Azure PostgreSQL MVU:
16/12/2025
Microsoft named an overall leader in KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Generative AI Defense
Today, we are proud to share that Microsoft has been recognized as an overall leader in the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Generative AI Defense (GAD), an independent report from a leading European analyst firm.Microsoft delivers this through a comprehensive and integrated approach that provides visibility, protection, and governance across the full AI stack.Guidance for Security Leaders and CISOs
16/12/2025
Announcing Native NVMe in Windows Server 2025: Ushering in a New Era of Storage Performance
We’re thrilled to announce the arrival of Native NVMe support in Windows Server 2025—a leap forward in storage innovation that will redefine what’s possible for your most demanding workloads.Modern NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSDs now operate more efficiently with Windows Server.With Native NVMe in Windows Server 2025, the storage stack is purpose-built for modern hardware—eliminating translation layers and legacy constraints.
15/12/2025
Executive Voice Agent Playbook—Empowering Leadership Communications with Microsoft 365 Copilot
That’s why we created this Executive Voice Agent Playbook, which is designed to help communicators build scalable agents that capture and amplify their leadership’s unique voice—delivering consistent, impactful messaging across every channel.By embedding an executive’s authentic voice into Microsoft 365 Copilot agents, organizations can:The playbook provides a step-by-step guide to building your own executive voice agent using Microsoft Agent Builder or Copilot Studio:
15/12/2025
Black Forest Labs FLUX.2 Visual Intelligence for Enterprise Creative now on Microsoft Foundry
Black Forest Labs’ (BFL) FLUX.2 is now available on Microsoft Foundry. Building on FLUX1.1 [pro] and FLUX.1 Kontext [pro], we’re excited to introduce FLUX.2 [pro] which continues to push the frontier for visual intelligence. FLUX.2 [pro] delivers state-of-the-art quality with pre-optimized settings, matching the best closed models for prompt adherence and visual fidelity while generating faster at lower cost.FLUX.2 combines image generation and editing in a single latent flow matching architecture, coupling a Mistral‑3 24B vision‑language model (VLM) with a rectified flow transformer.Black Forest Labs models in Foundry Models are delivered under the Microsoft Product Terms, giving you enterprise-grade security and compliance out of the box. Each FLUX endpoint offers Content Safety controls and guardrails.
15/12/2025
How to Design a Gemini-Powered Self-Correcting Multi-Agent AI System with Semantic Routing, Symbolic Guardrails, and Reflexive Orchestration
In this tutorial, we explore how we design and run a full agentic AI orchestration pipeline powered by semantic routing, symbolic guardrails, and self-correction loops using Gemini.We walk through how we structure agents, dispatch tasks, enforce constraints, and refine outputs using a clean, modular architecture.The post How to Design a Gemini-Powered Self-Correcting Multi-Agent AI System with Semantic Routing, Symbolic Guardrails, and Reflexive Orchestration appeared first on MarkTechPost.
15/12/2025
Part 3: Unified Security Intelligence - Orchestrating GenAI Threat Detection with Microsoft Sentinel
Why Sentinel for GenAI Security Observability? Before diving into detection rules, let's address why Microsoft Sentinel is uniquely positioned for GenAI security operations—especially compared to traditional or non-native SIEMs.
15/12/2025
From Large Semi-Structured Docs to Actionable Data: In-Depth Evaluation Approaches Guidance
Extracting structured data from large, semi-structured documents (the detailed solution implementation overview and architecture is provided in this tech community blog: From Large Semi-Structured Docs to Actionable Data: Reusable Pipelines with ADI, AI Search & OpenAI) demands a rigorous evaluation framework. The goal is to ensure our pipeline is accurate, reliable, and scalable before we trust it with mission-critical data.It provides metrics, examples, and best practices at each step, forming a generic pattern that can be applied to various domains.
15/12/2025
Streamline Azure NetApp Files Management—Right from Your IDE
The Azure NetApp Files VS Code Extension is designed to streamline storage provisioning and management directly within the developer’s IDE.The extension addresses these challenges by enabling AI-powered automation through natural language commands, reducing provisioning time from hours to minutes while minimizing errors and improving compliance.The Azure NetApp Files VS Code Extension brings automation and intelligence directly into your development environment.
15/12/2025
Microsoft hits the road with Oracle AI World Tour 2026.
That’s why Microsoft and Oracle have partnered to deliver the most comprehensive, enterprise-ready solution for Oracle workloads in the public cloud.With Oracle Database@Azure, organizations can make mission-critical workloads AI-ready through simplified migration, integrated security, and AI-optimized infrastructure—backed by the broadest regional footprint for enterprise workloads.Attend one of the Oracle AI World Tour events below and stop by the Microsoft booth to speak with our experts, explore demos, and learn more about Oracle Database@Azure.
15/12/2025
Message brokers as the cornerstone of the next generation of agentic AI backends
Instead of one-off model calls, we are starting to see networks of agents and MCP services working together.Message brokers, such as Azure Service Bus, are ideal for the capabilities needed in this future.Why agentic AI backends need enterprise messaging
15/12/2025
Preparing for Azure PostgreSQL Certificate Authority Rotation: A Comprehensive Operational Guide
A routine Certificate Authority (CA) rotation for Azure Database for PostgreSQL.Understanding where your application’s trust store is located determines how you’ll update it for CA rotations.To detect certificate-related issues before and after CA rotation, configure Azure Monitor alerts.
15/12/2025
Introducing DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale in Microsoft Foundry
Today, we’re excited to announce that DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale are now available in Microsoft Foundry directly from Azure.These models bring state-of-the-art reasoning, hyper-efficient architecture, and breakthrough reinforcement learning innovations into the Foundry ecosystem giving developers unprecedented access to frontier-class intelligence that is fully enterprise-ready.With this launch, customers can deploy DeepSeek’s latest reasoning engines with the reliability, scalability, and compliance of Azure, and integrate them seamlessly with Foundry’s evaluation tools, routing systems, agent framework, and observability stack.DeepSeek-V3.2 represents a major evolution of the DeepSeek family—a model engineered for thinking, not just text generation.
15/12/2025
How AI Is Helping Patients Access Life-Saving Treatments Faster
NSF partnered with the Cloud Accelerate Factory to build an Azure AI-powered solution that automates document review, compliance checks, and summary generation.Audit times cut by 50%, freeing experts to focus on strategy and enabling treatments to reach patients sooner.With near-perfect accuracy and scalable design, this AI tool is transforming how NSF works—reducing inefficiencies, minimizing human error, and unlocking capacity for global impact.
15/12/2025
Ep 31 | Building Trust and Innovation in the Microsoft Ecosystem with Suresh Ramani
In this engaging episode of IAMCP Profiles in Partnership, hosts Anthony Carrano and Rudy Rodriguez sit down with Suresh Ramani, CEO of TechGyan, a multi-time Microsoft Partner of the Year, and a leader in building thriving communities and innovative solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem.Suresh Ramani’s Journey: From System Integrator to Microsoft PowerhouseMove from reactive, one-off deals to proactive, strategic alliances.
15/12/2025
Secure, Seamless Access using Managed Identities with Azure Files SMB
We are excited to announce the Public Preview of Managed Identities support with Azure Files SMB.This capability provides a secure, identity-driven approach for customer applications that eliminates credentials-based access and integrates seamlessly with MS Entra ID. Azure virtual machines, containers, and applications running in Azure can now authenticate to Azure Files using their own managed identity, and mount shares using short lived OAuth tokens over Kerberos.This unlocks secure file share access for both first party and customer applications, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Functions, App Services, and other cloud native services
15/12/2025
Announcing the Winners of the MVP Summit Swag Design Contest!
This year marked something special for the MVP community—the inaugural MVP Summit Swag Design Contest, a brand‑new way for MVPs and RDs to express their creativity and contribute to the visual identity of MVP Summit 2026. The contest ran November 13-December 2 and winners were notified the week of December 8.Participants could submit a single entry and were encouraged to bring their best ideas, boldest visuals, and most community‑inspired concepts.
15/12/2025
Announcing AI Entity Analyzer in Microsoft Sentinel MCP Server - Public Preview
The tool leverages your organization’s security data in Sentinel to deliver comprehensive, reasoned risk assessments for any entity you encounter - starting with users and urls.By providing this unified, out-of-the-box solution for entity analysis, Entity Analyzer also enables the AI agents you build to make smarter decisions and automate more tasks - without the need to manually engineer risk evaluation logic for each entity type.So, we introduced the User Analyzer, a specialized analyzer that unifies, correlates, and analyzes user activity across all these security data sources.
15/12/2025
Adopting Copilot: Improving Response Quality via Connectors
Microsoft has provided Copilot Connectors and Power Platform Connectors.delivering content which is included in 15% of all copilot responses, >1.8M citations per month.Successful grounding is based on 3 interdependent pillars - good relevance, good content quality, and good completeness.
15/12/2025
November 2025 Recap: PostgreSQL on Azure
November was an exciting month for PostgreSQL on Azure, packed with announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2025.We introduced a wave of new capabilities focusing on performance, analytics, security and AI-assisted migration for Azure Database for PostgreSQL.We are excited to announce that the Call for Proposals (CFP) for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026 is now open!
15/12/2025
Using natural language to build healthcare imaging cohorts for research
For Microsoft’s Global Hackathon 2025 in September, a multi-disciplinary team from Microsoft set out to transform this process by developing an AI-powered prototype that would help democratize access to imaging data for research.The goal was to allow researchers to acquire imaging data in minutes by defining imaging cohorts in natural language — no complex coding, no manual retrieval, no coordinated, months-long effort.During the Microsoft Global Hackathon 2025, the annual company-wide innovation event, engineers and data scientists from Microsoft’s Health & Life Sciences group teamed up with research IT specialists and radiologists from one of our priority customers, The University of Texas Medical Branch, to build a prototype.
15/12/2025
Announcing Azure Database for MySQL Support for Resource Move with Private Link
Azure Database for MySQL now supports moving servers with Private Link enabled across subscriptions, resource groups, without disabling Private Link.For Azure MySQL customers, the impact is significant: you gain the ability to reorganize and migrate your database servers more easily.With Azure Database for MySQL’s new support for Azure Resource Move with Private Link, you get the best of both worlds: the security of private network connectivity and the freedom to move your databases within Azure’s cloud environment.
15/12/2025
In-App Notification PCF Control
A robust Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) control for Dataverse, designed to deliver, display, and manage in-app notifications.This control supports secure environment variable lookup, publisher-agnostic logic, recipient resolution, and integrates with Microsoft Graph for advanced scenarios.For MSAL.js to perform silent authentication (acquire tokens without user interaction), your Azure AD app registration must include a valid redirect URI.
15/12/2025
Exchange Online ActiveSync Device Support Update
Starting March 1, 2026, devices running ActiveSync versions lower than 16.1 will no longer be able to connect to our services.EAS 16.1 was released as a part of Exchange Server and Exchange Online in June 2016.If users and organizations keep their devices and applications updated to the latest supported versions, there should be minimal disruption in service.
15/12/2025
New in Microsoft Marketplace: December 15, 2025
Learn about 254 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.AI-Powered TDS 26AS Reconciliation: Compusoft’s AI-enabled 26AS Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) reconciliation toolkit automates high-volume TDS transaction matching using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft Azure.It streamlines sales, inventory, employee, and store management with features like multi-payment methods, real-time reporting, and multi-store support, eliminating the need for third-party software. Zertify: Zertify is a certification management solution that streamlines creating, managing, and verifying certifications.
15/12/2025
Meet Agents in OneDrive: Your AI project assistant, built from your own content
Agents in OneDrive are your personal AI project assistants, built directly from your own files and folders, allowing you to create an Agent that “knows” your content and delivers instant, tailored answers using different actions like:Send your feedback and use cases through your usual Microsoft channels - your input helps shape the future of Agents in OneDrive.Agents in OneDrive are rolling out worldwide for OneDrive on the web, starting November 2025, completing in January 2025.
15/12/2025
Industry-Wide Certificate Changes Impacting Azure App Service Certificates
In early 2026, industry-wide changes mandated by browser applications and the CA/B Forum will affect both how TLS certificates are issued as well as their validity period. The CA/B Forum is a vendor body that establishes standards for securing websites and online communications through SSL/TLS certificates.Azure App Service is aligning with these standards for both App Service Managed Certificates (ASMC, free, DigiCert-issued) and App Service Certificates (ASC, paid, GoDaddy-issued).Most customers will experience no disruption. Action is required only if you pin certificates or use them for client authentication (mTLS).
15/12/2025
Empower Your Cloud Identity: How to Convert User SOA from AD to Entra ID
We synchronize users from on-premises Active Directory (AD) to Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), giving our people one set of credentials for both cloud and local resources.But this setup comes with a hidden limitation: Active Directory remains the Source of Authority (SOA).Microsoft has introduced the capability to shift the SOA for your users entirely to Entra ID.
15/12/2025
Empower Your Cloud Identity: How to Convert User SOA from AD to Entra ID
We synchronize users from on-premises Active Directory (AD) to Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), giving our people one set of credentials for both cloud and local resources.But this setup comes with a hidden limitation: Active Directory remains the Source of Authority (SOA).Microsoft has introduced the capability to shift the SOA for your users entirely to Entra ID.
15/12/2025
كلما كان تصميم نموذج البيانات مبني بشكل صحيح كلما اصبح التحليل اسهل والأداء افضل
هو الأساس الذي يحدد قوة التحليل وغالبا يكون أهم من إنشاء الرسوم البيانية نفسها (Data Modeling) تصميم نموذج البيانات، Power BI في.سابسط شرحها الان One-to-Manyالعلاقات من نوع واحد الى متعدد ما هي؟ علاقة واحد إلى متعدد تعني أن جدولًا واحدا يحتوي على قيم فريدة (مثل جدول المنتجات)، بينما الجدول الآخر يحتوي على قيم مكررة مرتبطة به (مثل جدول المبيعات)- مثال عملي يحتوي على كل منتج مرة واحدة Products جدول المنتجات يحتوي على كل عملية بيع، وقد تتكرر المنتجات فيه Sales جدول المبيعات لماذا مهم؟ . هذه العلاقة تضمن أن التحليلات تكون دقيقة عند تجميع البيانات، مثل حساب إجمالي المبيعات لكل منتج. نموذج النجمة (Star Schema) ما هو؟ حيث يكون لديك Power BIهو تصميم مثالي لنموذج البيانات في جدول حقائق (Fact Table) يحتوي على الأرقام (مثل المبيعات، الكميات) جداول أبعاد (Dimension Tables)تحتوي على تفاصيل التصنيف (مثل العملاء، المنتجات، الوقت) لماذا مهم؟ يقلل التعقيد يحسن الأداء يسهل فهم العلاقات مثال Products, Customers, Dateفي الوسط، مرتبط بجداول Sales جدول المبيعات (Filter Direction)اتجاه التصفية ما هو؟ عند إنشاء علاقة بين جدولين، يجب تحديد اتجاه انتقال الفلاتر Single Direction الفلتر ينتقل من جدول الأبعاد إلى جدول الحقائق Both Directionsالفلتر ينتقل في الاتجاهين (يستخدم بحذر لأنه قد يسبب مشاكل في الأداء) لماذا مهم؟ إذا كان الاتجاه خاطئا، قد تظهر نتائج غير دقيقة أو تتأثر سرعة التقرير الخلاصةإذا كان نموذج البيانات قويا ومبنيا بشكل صحيح ستصبح الرسوم البيانية أكثر دقةالأداء سيكون أفضل التحليل سيكون أسهل
14/12/2025
Leina Future Data & AI Hub – Weekly Tip (Inspired by Microsoft Learn)
One-to-many relationshipsStar schemaFilter direction
14/12/2025
OpenAI has Released the ‘circuit-sparsity’: A Set of Open Tools for Connecting Weight Sparse Models and Dense Baselines through Activation Bridges
OpenAI team has released their openai/circuit-sparsity model on Hugging Face and the openai/circuit_sparsity toolkit on GitHub.The release packages the models and circuits from the paper ‘Weight-sparse transformers have interpretable circuits‘.The models are GPT-2 style decoder only transformers trained on Python code.
14/12/2025
5 AI Model Architectures Every AI Engineer Should Know
Behind the scenes, a whole family of specialized architectures is quietly transforming how machines see, plan, act, segment, represent concepts, and even run efficiently on small devices.Each of these models solves a different part of the intelligence puzzle, and together […]The post 5 AI Model Architectures Every AI Engineer Should Know appeared first on MarkTechPost.
13/12/2025
Nanbeige4-3B-Thinking: How a 23T Token Pipeline Pushes 3B Models Past 30B Class Reasoning
Can a 3B model deliver 30B class reasoning by fixing the training recipe instead of scaling parameters?Nanbeige LLM Lab at Boss Zhipin has released Nanbeige4-3B, a 3B parameter small language model family trained with an unusually heavy emphasis on data quality, curriculum scheduling, distillation, and reinforcement learning.The research team ships 2 primary checkpoints, […]
13/12/2025
Troubleshooting Replication Performance Issues
If you notice high writer wait times in the Distribution Agent performance statistics, you should investigate the performance of the Distribution Agent execution against the distribution server and database.If you notice high reader wait times in the Distribution Agent performance statistics, you should investigate the performance of the Distribution Agent execution against the subscriber server and database.Use the profiler trace tool to investigate the performance of the execution of the replication stored procedures.
12/12/2025
Announcing Windows Admin Center for Arm-based Copilot+ PCs
Great news for IT pros managing the next generation of Windows devices!Windows Admin Center now supports Arm-based Copilot+ PCs, bringing the powerful, browser-based management experience you rely on to Microsoft's most advanced AI-powered devices.Copilot+ PCs are next-generation Windows devices designed with built-in AI capabilities, delivering faster performance, enhanced productivity, and intelligent experiences powered by Windows and Microsoft Copilot.
12/12/2025
How to Design a Fully Local Agentic Storytelling Pipeline Using Griptape Workflows, Hugging Face Models, and Modular Creative Task Orchestration
In this tutorial, we build a fully local, API-free agentic storytelling system using Griptape and a lightweight Hugging Face model.We walk through creating an agent with tool-use abilities, generating a fictional world, designing characters, and orchestrating a multi-stage workflow that produces a coherent short story.By dividing the implementation into modular snippets, we can […]
12/12/2025
Copilot Your Holidays: Episode 3 - Focus Time, Year-End Reviews, and Travel Planning!
In Episode 3 of our Copilot Your Holidays series, Samhita, Maria, and Saurabh dive into practical ways to reclaim your time—clearing your calendar, crafting thoughtful performance reviews, and even planning the perfect moment to head to the airport.Check my calendar and list 6–8 open 30–45-minute slots over the next 10 business days, between 9 AM and 4 PM in my time zone, so I can prepare for my end of year review.Share your favorite Copilot-generated holiday ideas with us in the comments!
12/12/2025
Title Plan Update – December 12, 2025
December 12, 2025 Title Plan Now Available Access 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.
12/12/2025
Verified skills, real impact: Microsoft Credentials help you get AI-ready
AI has rapidly evolved from trendy buzzword to critical business tool.In The No. 1 Skill Employers Want In 2025 And Most Job Seekers Don’t List It, Forbes points out that 81% of hiring managers prioritize AI skills.EPAM Systems, a global leader in digital engineering, has seen firsthand how Microsoft Credentials strengthen AI readiness and improve project results.
12/12/2025
How to Access ChatGPT‑5.2 in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
Microsoft has started rolling out OpenAI’s GPT‑5.2 into Microsoft 365 Copilot—including Copilot Chat—so you can choose the newest model directly from the model selector. GPT‑5.2 comes in two strengths: an efficient, everyday option (“Instant”) and a deeper reasoning option (“Thinking”), which is exactly why Microsoft also gives you Quick Response and Think Deeper styles for how much “thinking time” Copilot should spend. GPT‑5.2 is now available in Microsoft 365 Copilot via the model selector, which means you can explicitly pick it for a chat when you want the newest capabilities. Microsoft describes GPT‑5.2 as combining GPT‑5.2 Thinking (best for complex problems and strategic insights) and GPT‑5.2 Instant (efficient for everyday writing, translation, and skill-building). OpenAI also positions GPT‑5.2 as improved for professional work—like creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, and handling complex multi-step projects—especially when you select the deeper “Thinking” variant. Microsoft’s framing is simple: GPT‑5.2 becomes more powerful “at work” because Copilot applies it inside Microsoft 365, where it can support insights and planning across common productivity workflows (as your licensing and tenant configuration allow). And because GPT‑5.2 is built to be stronger on long context and complex professional tasks, you can reach for “Think Deeper” when you want higher-quality reasoning—and use “Quick Response” to stay fast for everyday work.
12/12/2025
Get Ready, Arlington: M365 Copilot Prompt-a-thon Is Coming January 21
The future of productivity is here—and we’re bringing it straight to the DMV.On Wednesday, January 21, 2026, Microsoft experts will be on-site in Arlington, Virginia, to host an immersive, hands-on Microsoft 365 Copilot Prompt‑a‑thon designed to help you unlock the full power of modern AI in your everyday work.This in-person workshop focuses on building confidence, creativity, and fluency with Copilot across Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams.The Microsoft 365 Copilot Prompt‑a‑thon is more than a workshop.
12/12/2025
Level Up Your Productivity: Join Our 2026 Copilot in Action Series this January and February
Create Your First Agent Using Agent Builder (Copilot Studio Light)Learn how to ground your agent in your own M365 data and extend Copilot’s value even further.Create an Agent for M365 Copilot Using Microsoft Copilot Studio
12/12/2025
Key Considerations for Modernizing and Migrating Custom Applications to Azure
A detailed understanding of the existing application is the foundation of a successful migration.The Azure Migration Guide helps map applications to the right strategy.During database modernization, Azure SQL and Cosmos DB use built-in intelligence to index data, tune queries, detect anomalies, and improve performance autonomously.Azure SQL Intelligent Performance: Automatic Tuning Overview - Azure SQL & SQL database in Fabric |
12/12/2025
AI Upskilling Framework Level 3 Building
The Global AI Community is excited to bring you the latest updates on AI Upskilling Framework Level 3 Building, straight from Microsoft Ignite!Next, we introduce the Microsoft Agentic Framework (MAF), comparing traditional workflows with agentic workflows and addressing common issues.To bring these concepts to life, we showcase two new demos: a Claims Intake Workflow and a Claims Fraud Detection Workflow, highlighting how agentic design transforms real-world processes.
12/12/2025
Sales agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot: Evaluation Results – Technical Report
Today, we’re announcing the Microsoft Sales Bench—a new collection of evaluation benchmarks designed to assess the performance of AI-powered sales agents across real-world scenarios.This technical deep dive outlines how Sales agent is built, how it reasons over enterprise CRM and work data, and how we evaluated its accuracy, completeness, relevance, and usefulness across end-to-end sales workflows.To evaluate the Sales agent in a way that reflects how real sellers work, we built a full Dynamics 365 Sales environment populated with synthetically generated, but realistic CRM data.
12/12/2025
Sales agent - the Copilot agent that speaks sales
Today, we are excited to announce that the public preview of Sales agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot is now available.Sales agent brings insights from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, emails, meetings, enterprise content stores and other sales applications, into the flow of work.Today, we’re announcing the Microsoft Sales Bench—a new collection of evaluation benchmarks designed to assess the performance of AI-powered sales agents across real-world scenarios.
12/12/2025
Stop Re‑typing: Use Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat to Turn Image Snapshots into Excel Tables—Fast
A faster path now exists across Microsoft 365: take a quick image snapshot, upload it to Copilot Chat, and ask it to extract the data into a structured table and create a ready‑to‑use Excel file.This workflow combines Copilot’s multimodal understanding of images with Excel’s “Data from Picture” capabilities—dramatically cutting the time you spend wrangling non‑Excel sources. In Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Teams, or the Microsoft 365 app, open Copilot Chat, choose Add an image (or Upload from phone via QR if available), and insert your screenshot.
12/12/2025
New in Microsoft Marketplace: December 5, 2025
Learn about 395 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
12/12/2025
Configure a log analytics workspace to collect Window Server Event log, IIS and performance data.
Configuring Azure Monitor with Log Analytics for IIS ServersAzure Monitor combined with Log Analytics provides centralized telemetry collection for performance metrics, event logs, and application logs from Windows-based workloads.This guide demonstrates how to configure data collection from IIS servers using Data Collection Rules (DCRs).
12/12/2025
Ep 30 | How the AvePoint-IAMCP Partnership Empowers Microsoft Partners for AI-Driven Success
Welcome to a behind-the-scenes look at the latest episode of Profiles in Partnership, entitled “Scaling Smarter: AI, Talent, and Opportunity in the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem,” where innovation, community, and growth converge to shape the future of the Microsoft partner ecosystem.Enter the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP).Dux Raymond Sy's journey is a master class in adaptability.
12/12/2025
Microsoft Ignite 2025 AI announcements: What software developers need to know
Igniting what’s next: What software development companies need to know about Microsoft’s AI announcements at Ignite 2025The AI landscape took a major leap forward at Microsoft Ignite 2025, and for software development companies and digital natives, the announcements represent a massive opportunity: faster innovation, simplified agent development, access to enterprise‑ready AI platforms, and a dramatically expanded ecosystem to build on.Ignite 2025 formally unveiled Microsoft Foundry, our unified platform for building, governing, and scaling intelligent agents.
11/12/2025
Private Preview: Azure Managed Prometheus on VM / VMSS
Today we are excited to announce the private preview of Azure Managed Prometheus support for virtual machines (VM) and virtual machine scale sets (VMSS).Until now, Managed Prometheus on Azure was primarily targeted at containerized workloads — e.g. Kubernetes (AKS) or Azure Arc–enabled clusters.With this preview, you can now extend Prometheus-style monitoring to your IaaS workloads running on VMs/VMSS, giving you unified, scalable, resilient metric collection and observability across both containers and traditional compute —including full support for GPU and InfiniBand (IB) metric collection for HPC scenarios.
11/12/2025
Congratulations to Nicole Dezen on being named a CRN 2025 Woman of the Year in the Vendor/Distributor category!
The third annual CRN Women of the Year Awards spotlight the incredible achievements of women leaders and rising stars in the IT channel, as well as the companies and allies who support their work.These awards celebrate the exceptional dedication and leadership of women and their advocates who have make significant impacts promoting innovation and equity in the technology industry. We’re proud to share that Nicole Dezen, Chief Partner Officer and Corporate Vice President, Global Channel Partner Sales at Microsoft, has been named a CRN 2025 Woman of the Year in the Vendor/Distributor category.
11/12/2025
OpenAI Introduces GPT 5.2: A Long Context Workhorse For Agents, Coding And Knowledge Work
OpenAI has just introduced GPT-5.2, its most advanced frontier model for professional work and long running agents, and is rolling it out across ChatGPT and the API.GPT-5.2 is a family of three variants.In ChatGPT, users see ChatGPT-5.2 Instant, Thinking and Pro.
11/12/2025
Skilling snack: AI on Windows Copilot+ PCs
You can be a lot more productive with AI on Copilot+ PCs, the newest type of Windows PCs.In the past year, we’ve added several new features and capabilities designed to boost productivity and inclusivity.See how Copilot+ PCs evolved with AI powered features like Click to Do, Recall, improved Windows search, and Fluid dictation (in preview).
11/12/2025
DataDay 2025 Bogotá: Connecting Ideas, Creating Opportunities
Bogotá became the epicenter of data innovation during DataDay 2025, a hybrid event that brought together professionals, enthusiasts, and industry leaders from across Latin America.Throughout the year, virtual sessions covered topics such as KPI design, intelligent Excel functions, and automation with AI—setting the stage for the grand finale: a three-day in-person experience at Microsoft’s Bogotá offices on November 20, 21, and 24.This year’s edition was even more special as Microsoft Colombia’s office in Bogotá opened its doors for the event for the first time.
11/12/2025
Fine-tuning at Ignite 2025: new models, new tools, new experience
At Ignite 2025, we saw how Docusign fine-tuned models that powered their document management system to achieve major gains: more than 50% cost reduction per document, 2x faster inference time, and significant improvements in accuracy.At Ignite, we launched several new features in Microsoft Foundry that make fine‑tuning easier, more scalable, and more impactful than ever with the goal of making agents unstoppable in the real world:To make it easier than ever to get started, we’re introducing Developer Training tier – providing users with a 50% discount when they choose to run workloads on pre-emptible capacity.
11/12/2025
CopilotKit v1.50 Brings AG-UI Agents Directly Into Your App With the New useAgent Hook
Agent frameworks are now good at reasoning and tools, but most teams still write custom code to turn agent graphs into robust user interfaces with shared state, streaming output and interrupts.It is an open source framework for building AI copilots and in-app agents directly in your app, with real […]The post CopilotKit v1.50 Brings AG-UI Agents Directly Into Your App With the New useAgent Hook appeared first on MarkTechPost.
11/12/2025
Write formulas with natural language using Copilot in Excel
Now, we’re introducing an additional on-grid Copilot tool that takes it a step further: With this new capability, you can simply describe what you need, and Copilot will create the formula for you.In Excel for the Web, select the cell in which you want to enter a formula.This feature is currently rolling out to Excel for Web users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
11/12/2025
What's new in Microsoft Intune: December 2025
Following Microsoft Ignite 2025, I caught up with colleagues and Intune MVPs who made the trip to San Francisco.Throughout 2025, the Intune engineering team has shipped capabilities for cross-platform support, security, and more that has helped to remove many areas of friction from day-to-day operations.November's updates deliver improvements across three areas: app management, privacy controls, and policy targeting.
11/12/2025
Transforming Data migration using Azure Copilot
With the new “Storage Migration Solutions Advisor” capability in Azure Copilot, Microsoft is transforming this experience into a conversational, AI-driven workflow that accelerates decision-making and reduces operational friction.The Storage Migration Solutions Advisor feature introduces:Start using Azure Copilot’s Storage Migration Solutions Advisor today and experience AI-driven efficiency for your cloud transformation.
11/12/2025
System Center 2025 Update Rollup 1 and more
We are excited to announce that System Center 2025 Update Rollup 1 (UR1) is now generally available!In addition to the 2025 Update Rollup, we continue to invest in System Center 2022 with targeted hotfixes and compliance updates to ensure all customers benefit from the latest security, language, and platform improvements:Update Rollup 1 for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2025 will be released in upcoming months.
11/12/2025
Azure Sphere OS version 25.12 is now available for evaluation
Azure Sphere OS version 25.12 is now available for evaluation in the Retail Eval feed.During this time, please verify that your applications and devices operate properly with both the 25.12, and subsequent 26.02 release, before it is deployed broadly to devices in the Retail feed. The 25.12 OS Retail Eval release includes significant underlying build system updates.
11/12/2025
Partner Blog | Preparing for the next stage of partner skilling in 2026
This year, partners made skilling a deliberate priority.Our November skilling update outlined the latest resources, bootcamps, and learning paths available to partners.As we look ahead to 2026, this moment is about turning those investments into a scalable skilling foundation that supports consistent delivery, drives customer outcomes, and positions your organization to grow as demand for AI, cloud, security, and data solutions continues to accelerate.
11/12/2025
The Machine Learning Divide: Marktechpost’s Latest ML Global Impact Report Reveals Geographic Asymmetry Between ML Tool Origins and Research Adoption
Los Angeles, December 11, 2025 — Marktechpost has released ML Global Impact Report 2025 (AIResearchTrends.com).This educational report’s analysis includes over 5,000 articles from more than 125 countries, all published within the Nature family of journals between January 1 and September 30, 2025.The post The Machine Learning Divide: Marktechpost’s Latest ML Global Impact Report Reveals Geographic Asymmetry Between ML Tool Origins and Research Adoption appeared first on MarkTechPost.
11/12/2025
Technology that Gives Time Back to Care
For nonprofits like World Vision Germany and Diakonisches Werk Rheinland-Westfalen-Lippe, embracing modern technology wasn’t about going digital—it was about giving people help faster, building trust deeper, and freeing teams to focus on what truly matters: human connection. When an earthquake struck Myanmar, World Vision Germany launched an emergency appeal within hours—because technology cleared the path for action.Please read the full story on Microsoft for Nonprofits LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/driving-impact-faster-aid-smarter-fundraising-3udke
11/12/2025
From Oracle to Azure: How Quadrant Technologies accelerates migrations
Streamlining migrations with Azure MigrateAs part of our on-premises database migration initiatives, we rely on Azure Migrate to seamlessly migrate a wide range of structured databases (including MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and Oracle) from on-premises environments to Azure IaaS and PaaS.Since implementing Azure Migrate, which now facilitates discovery and assessment for on-premises PostgreSQL workloads, we’ve accelerated deployment by 75% compared to traditional migration methods.
11/12/2025
Introducing Cohere Rerank 4.0 in Microsoft Foundry
These new retrieval models deliver state-of-the-art accuracy, multilingual coverage across 100+ languages, and breakthrough performance for enterprise search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.With Rerank 4.0, customers can dramatically improve the quality of search, reduce hallucinations in RAG applications, and strengthen the reasoning capabilities of their AI agents, all with just a few lines of code.The models achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in 10 of the world’s most important business languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, making them exceptionally well suited for global organizations with multilingual knowledge bases, compliance archives, or international operations.
11/12/2025
Preserving strategic value: Microsoft 365 Archive + Preservica Active Digital Preservation
In the AI era, long-term content is no longer just a compliance overhead – it’s a strategic asset.From completed project sites in SharePoint to legacy records, organizations are increasingly required to retain critical, high-value content for decades to meet regulatory, legal, and operational needs, and for unlocking insights through AI.Microsoft 365 Archive enables organizations to archive inactive SharePoint sites into low-cost, secure storage - preserving site structure and content for full restoration.
11/12/2025
Accelerate your sales growth with resale enabled offers (REO) through guidance in App Advisor
It provides tailored guidance to help you understand resale enabled offers (REO) and determine whether this pathway to near global scale is right for your marketplace strategy.Grow globally with resale enabled offers Resale enabled offers (REO) open the channel-led marketplace opportunity for near-global scale.
11/12/2025
What’s New in Microsoft Sentinel: December 2025
Take advantage of the latest innovations in Microsoft Sentinel SIEM and platform by migrating from the Azure to Defender experience.At Ignite, Microsoft announced a streamlined Sentinel SIEM migration experience, designed to simplify transitions from Splunk and QRadar (coming soon).Increase visibility with direct data lake ingestion – At Ignite we announced Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) data can now flow directly into the Sentinel data lake, with table settings managed in the Defender portal.
11/12/2025
Optimizing Exchange Online PowerShell
This post takes a holistic approach to optimizing Exchange Online management and automation in four parts:Best practices specific to the Exchange Online PowerShell moduleThe Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK is the future of Microsoft 365 automation.
11/12/2025
Breaking down security silos: Microsoft Defender for Cloud Expands into the Defender Portal
That world is no longer a dream: Microsoft Defender for Cloud (MDC) is now integrated into Defender XDR in public preview.It’s a strategic leap forward toward a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) that scales with your business.With Microsoft Defender for Cloud’s deep integration into the unified portal, we eliminate security silos and bring a modern, streamlined experience that is more intuitive and purpose-built for today’s security teams, while delivering a single pane of glass for hybrid and multi-cloud security.
11/12/2025
Data Migration Strategies for Large-Scale Sybase to SQL Migrations Using SSMA, SSIS and ADF- Part 1
Our recent project for migrating data from Sybase ASE to MSSQL set out to illuminate this process, using tools like Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA), Microsoft SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS) packages, and Azure Data Factory (ADF). Set the IsSorted property of a component in the output data flow upstream to True.ADO .NET Source: When retrieving data from a view using an OLE DB data source, choose SQL command as the data access mode and provide a SELECT statement.
11/12/2025
Data Migration Strategies for Large-Scale Sybase to SQL Migrations Using SSMA, SSIS and ADF- Part 2
Our recent project for migrating data from Sybase ASE to MSSQL set out to illuminate this process, using tools like Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA), Microsoft SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS) packages, and Azure Data Factory (ADF). Part 2 covers the Azure Data Factory (ADF), tests results, performance improvement guidelines and conclusion.SSMA, SSIS, and ADF each offer unique strengths for migrating Sybase ASE to SQL Server, Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance.
11/12/2025
SqlError Number: 3961 Message: Snapshot isolation transaction failed in database 'DatabaseName'
This error indicates a snapshot isolation conflict caused by concurrent schema changes during Azure SQL Data Sync operations.Snapshot isolation does not version metadata, so concurrent schema changes break consistency and SQL Server abort the transaction.Message: Snapshot isolation transaction failed because metadata changed during the transaction.
11/12/2025
Backup immutability for short-term retention backup
Short-Term Retention (PITR) backups (1–35 days) do not support immutability.Immutability is available only for Long-Term Retention (LTR) backups in Azure SQL Database.Summary:You cannot configure immutability for short-term retention backups in Azure SQL Database today.
11/12/2025
Capacity Planning with Azure Container Apps Workload Profiles
Azure Container Apps (ACA) simplifies container orchestration, but capacity planning often confuses developers.This guide pairs official ACA guidance with practical examples to demystify workload profiles, autoscaling, and resource modelling.Understanding Workload Profiles in Azure Container Apps
11/12/2025
Deploy and configure an Azure Application Gateway for load balancing and website protection.
Azure Application Gateway provides layer 7 load balancing with integrated Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities, enabling traffic distribution across backend servers while protecting against common web exploits like SQL injection and DDoS attacks.This guide walks through deploying an Application Gateway to front-end two Windows Server IIS instances in an availability set.The first step you need to take is to prepare your Azure network infrastructure for Azure Application Gateway deployment.
11/12/2025
Announcing Support for S2D Campus Cluster on Windows Server 2025
Applies to: Windows Server 2025 Failover Clustering with the 2025-12 Security Update (KB5072033) (26100.7462) applied on each Failover Cluster node.Included in the 2025-12 Security Update (KB5072033) (26100.7462) for Windows Server 2025 is the Rack Level Nested Mirror (RLNM) for S2D, which improves resiliency for the S2D Campus Cluster by keeping the same number of copies in each rack – one copy in each rack for a two-copy volume, and two copies per rack for a four copy volume.What are the support requirements for the S2D Campus Cluster on Windows Server 2025?
11/12/2025
Windows Admin Center version 2511 is now generally available!
Today we’re announcing the general availability of Windows Admin Center version 2511!Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode and Windows Admin Center 2511 are distinct installations. This version of Windows Admin Center cannot be registered in Azure Government sovereign cloud.
11/12/2025
FY26 Q2 Update: What's new in certified software designations
Starting on January 1, 2026, all partners will need to have a Solutions Partner* with certified software** designation to continue accessing legacy Azure IP co-sell benefits—including partner-reported Azure consumed revenue (PRACR), partner-led incentives, go-to-market benefits, and prioritized sales engagement.Any net-new partner who wants to access benefits like PRACR and Azure IP co-sell support will need to have a certified software designation. Starting January 1, 2026: Partners will need to have a certified software designation to continue accessing these benefits, so if you currently have Azure IP co-sell top tier benefits, you may already be eligible to pursue a certified software designation.
10/12/2025
Introducing resiliency improvements with Microsoft Hosted Network
To meet this requirement, we are introducing a new region group location tier that will sit between the current geography and region locations.Besides Microsoft Hosted Network (MHN) enhancements, we are introducing two new service capabilities for newly created provisioning policies that will apply to Cloud PCs deployed to either the geography or region group tiers without requiring manual intervention.To maximize Cloud PC resiliency, Windows 365 now distributes deployments across all healthy regions within a geography or region group when selected.
10/12/2025
News to Know – Volume 2, Edition 10, December 2025
In January 2026, we’re introducing enhancements to the focus area experience in Glint to improve how organizations track and act on employee feedback.Customers are invited to preview support for custom PPT templates with the new Export report to PPT option.Be among the first to experience a new era of continuous engagement and actionable feedback with the Glint Employee Feedback Agent.
10/12/2025
Course Retirement Announcement: AI-3024
AI-3024: Design a dream destination with AIRetirement date: January 30, 2026Kindly note: This blog is intended solely for informational purposes.
10/12/2025
How Microsoft Agent 365 works
-Importantly, because it runs on the Agent 365 control plane, it works according to your organization’s security and compliance requirements.-The Agent 365 control plane in the Microsoft 365 admin center provides an overview of all agents in your organization, with a breakdown by publisher and platform.And while today I focused on the experience in the Microsoft 365 admin center, the Agent 365 control plane extends to role-specific views for agents in Microsoft Entra for agent identity and access management, Microsoft Purview for data security protections.
10/12/2025
n8n and Foundry IQ for smarter agents and RAG workflows
n8n now natively supports Azure AI Search as a verified vector store, enabling you to store, retrieve, and query embeddings directly in your automation workflows.This integration leverages the same Azure AI Search capabilities that power Microsoft Foundry IQ, with agentic retrieval features coming soon to n8n.Azure AI Search combines vector similarity, keyword search, and semantic reranking into a single query, delivering better answer quality than vector-only approaches.
10/12/2025
Don’t miss Building Agents with Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Foundry Agent Service!
Our dynamic four-part webinar series, Agentic AI + Copilot Partner Skilling Accelerator, empowers you to harness the Microsoft AI ecosystem to unlock new revenue streams and enhance customer success.Don't miss the final session in the series, Building Agents with Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, where you'll learn how to design and deploy intelligent agents with Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, including multi-agent architectures and key protocols such as A2A and MCP.The live virtual event is scheduled for December 15, 2025.
10/12/2025
Using ExcludeFromAllHolds to Remove Holds from Inactive Mailboxes
When managing inactive mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange Online, administrators often need to remove holds to allow for permanent deletion while maintaining compliance requirements.The ExcludeFromAllHolds parameter provides an enhanced and comprehensive solution for removing multiple types of holds from inactive mailboxes in a single operation.The ExcludeFromAllHolds parameter is a cmdlet switch that removes all applicable holds from inactive mailboxes except for eDiscovery holds, litigation hold, and restrictive retention policies.
10/12/2025
Why voice matters in clinical environments
In the demo from the video, I'm pretending to be a clinical manager who uses voice with Copilot to work through a backlog of operational tasks ahead of the next clinic day.In the video, I also showcase a powerful next step: using Copilot’s App Builder to create a no-code tool for real-time inventory management.The app connects to a SharePoint list and allows clinicians to:Microsoft has also announced Dragon Copilot, bringing together Dragon Medical One and DAX Copilot into a unified clinical voice assistant.
10/12/2025
Unlocking Efficient and Secure AI for Android with Foundry Local
The ability to run advanced AI models directly on smartphones is transforming the mobile landscape. Foundry Local for Android simplifies the integration of generative AI models, allowing teams to deliver sophisticated, secure, and low-latency AI experiences natively on mobile devices.This post highlights Foundry Local for Android as a compelling solution for Android developers, helping them efficiently build and deploy powerful on-device AI capabilities within their applications.
10/12/2025
Native macOS screen sharing in Teams meetings
Native macOS screen sharing in Teams meetingsThis new opt-in feature allows you to share your screen or window directly from macOS during Teams meetings.To use this feature, you must be a member of the Teams Public Preview or Microsoft 365 Targeted release and use the Teams client for Mac.
10/12/2025
Cloud Champion Italia – Tutte le sessioni di FY26
Cloud Champion è la piattaforma di riferimento gratuita per i partner italiani che desiderano ampliare le proprie competenze e accelerare la crescita del business.In questa sessione approfondiremo i tip&tricks su Partner Center, le modalità di creazione delle offerte private e risponderemo alle domande più frequenti (F.A.Q.) per aiutarti a operare con maggiore efficacia e autonomia.In questo webinar di 30 minuti vedremo le ultime novità in casa Microsoft, dai modelli appena rilasciati alle nuove funzionalità e agli aggiornamenti su Azure, per ritrovare facilmente il filo del discorso e guardare avanti.
10/12/2025
What’s new in Microsoft Entra – November 2025
New capabilities for managing, governing, and protecting agents with the public preview of Microsoft Entra Agent ID, part of the new Agent 365 control plane for agents;This article shares security improvements and innovations across Microsoft Entra from October and November 2025, organized by product. Starting February 2026, we'll introduce Jailbreak/Root detection for Microsoft Entra credentials in the Authenticator app.
10/12/2025
Five Ways to Implement the Great Copilot Journey
What is the Great Copilot Journey?The Great Copilot Journey is a structured, habit-building program that delivers daily or weekly prompts to help users practice and explore Copilot in real-world scenarios.If you’re new to Copilot and are looking for a more hands-off approach, opt your new users in to receive the Great Copilot Journey emails directly from Microsoft.
10/12/2025
Imagine Cup x GitHub x Replit: The Power Combo Helping Student Founders Build What Matters
You’re not just working on a project, you’re building a product with real potential. GitHub and Replit give you the tools to iterate quickly, refine your build, and act on the customer insights and market guidance you’ll get from Imagine Cup mentors and industry experts.: Tap into the world’s largest open-source community (180M+ developers)
10/12/2025
We Want to Hear from You!
We believe the best ideas don’t just come from within—they come from you, our community.Take our quick survey here: Help Us Improve: Share Your Feedback – Fill out formThank you for taking the time to share your thoughts.
10/12/2025
Security Guidance Series: CAF 4.0 Understanding Threat From Awareness to Intelligence-Led Defence
Rather than focusing solely on awareness of common cyber-attacks, the framework now calls for a sector-specific, intelligence-informed understanding of the threat landscape.To support this higher level of maturity, Microsoft’s security ecosystem helps public sector authorities turn threat intelligence into actionable understanding, directly aligning with CAF 4.0’s Achieved criteria for control A2.b.Microsoft E3 provides public sector authorities with the foundational capabilities to start aligning with CAF 4.0 A2.b by enabling awareness of common threats and applying that awareness to risk decisions.
10/12/2025
AI Genius Season 2: MVP Speakers Power Asia’s AI Tour—Build Smarter, Faster, and Hands-On
The Microsoft AI Genius Season 2 is here, bringing together the Asia Pacific’s top MVP speakers and developer leaders for a technical deep dive into the future of AI.Inspired by the success of last year’s series, the new season of videos on-demand is designed for developers and dev managers eager to master the tools behind GitHub Copilot, AI Foundry, Microsoft Fabric, and Azure Databricks.The program features three in-depth episodes designed to empower participants.
10/12/2025
Bulk Device Tagging in MDE: PowerShell & API Approach
In Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE), device tagging plays a key role by enabling logical grouping, targeted policy application, efficient incident response, compliance tracking, and automation.This guide presents a streamlined method for bulk tagging devices in MDE using the API and PowerShell automation.Use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint API to add tags for multiple devices efficiently.
10/12/2025
Mistral AI Ships Devstral 2 Coding Models And Mistral Vibe CLI For Agentic, Terminal Native Development
Mistral AI has introduced Devstral 2, a next generation coding model family for software engineering agents, together with Mistral Vibe CLI, an open source command line coding assistant that runs inside the terminal or IDEs that support the Agent Communication Protocol.Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2, model sizes, context and benchmarks Devstral 2 is […]The post Mistral AI Ships Devstral 2 Coding Models And Mistral Vibe CLI For Agentic, Terminal Native Development appeared first on MarkTechPost.
10/12/2025
Announcing the release of SQL Server Management Studio 22.1
Welcome to December and another release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)!Today we released SSMS 22.1, which has a few improvements related to GitHub Copilot, as well as several fixes for both GitHub Copilot and SSMS.Bring your own model (BYOM) is now available in SSMS 22.1 for personal subscriptions.
10/12/2025
Don’t miss Building Agents with Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Foundry Agent Service!
Our dynamic four-part webinar series, Agentic AI + Copilot Partner Skilling Accelerator, empowers you to harness the Microsoft AI ecosystem to unlock new revenue streams and enhance customer success.Don't miss the final session in the series, Building Agents with Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, where you'll learn how to design and deploy intelligent agents with Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, including multi-agent architectures and key protocols such as A2A and MCP.The live virtual event is scheduled for December 15, 2025.
09/12/2025
A Coding Guide to Build a Procedural Memory Agent That Learns, Stores, Retrieves, and Reuses Skills as Neural Modules Over Time
In this tutorial, we explore how an intelligent agent can gradually form procedural memory by learning reusable skills directly from its interactions with an environment.We design a minimal yet powerful framework in which skills behave like neural modules: they store action sequences, carry contextual embeddings, and are retrieved by similarity when a new situation […]The post A Coding Guide to Build a Procedural Memory Agent That Learns, Stores, Retrieves, and Reuses Skills as Neural Modules Over Time appeared first on MarkTechPost.
09/12/2025
Azure Managed Redis & Azure Cosmos DB with cache‑aside: a practical guide
Using Azure Managed Redis alongside Azure Cosmos DB is a powerful way to reduce operational costs in read-heavy applications.What each service does: Azure Managed Redis is Microsoft’s first‑party, fully managed service built on Redis Enterprise.adding Azure Managed Redis on top of Azure Cosmos DB reduces RU consumption from repeat reads and smooths tail latency spikes during peak load.
09/12/2025
Now generally available: Modernizing Microsoft Entra ID auth flows with WebView2 in Windows 11
We’re thrilled to share an important update: Entra ID app sign-in through Web Account Manager (WAM) now has the option to be powered by WebView2, the Chromium-based web control, starting with KB5072033 (OS Builds 26200.7462 and 26100.7462) or later.o Configure browsers to use Windows Integrated Authentication (WIA) with AD FS |Disable the WebView2Integration registry key by using the registry, command line, or policy to configure a registry entry by updating the registry with:
09/12/2025
Demystifying AI Security Posture Management
Link: Build a strong security posture for AI |The Next Era of Cloud Security report created by the IDC highlights Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) as a key investment area for organizations: Defender for Cloud is Microsoft’s modern Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), encompassing multiple cloud security solution services across both Proactive Security and Runtime Protection.
09/12/2025
Important Update: AI-3017 Retirement and New Course AB-731
We want to share an important update regarding the scheduled retirement of AI-3017: AI for Business Leaders which was announced on November 19th.Replacement Course: AB-731T00: Drive AI Transformation in Your Organization (ILT trainer files available December 19, 2025;Encourage learners to register for AB-731 to stay current with Microsoft’s AI strategy.
09/12/2025
SubgenAI makes AI practical, scalable, and sustainable with Azure Database for PostgreSQL
A recent MIT report shows that 95 percent of projects fail to reach production.SubgenAI, a European generative AI company that focuses on democratizing AI for businesses and governments, saw an opportunity to change this.Its flagship platform, Serenity Star, transforms AI agent development from a code-heavy, fragmented process into a streamlined, no-code experience.
09/12/2025
Meeting Recordings in Microsoft Teams are available for M365 subscribers
Built to help you capture, store, and share meeting content securely, this capability is now live for all Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium subscribers in Microsoft Teams. Access recordings securely in the cloud for up to 30 days after the meeting ends.Here’s how you can share your thoughts:
09/12/2025
Introducing a fresh new look for comments in Word for the web
I’m excited to share our newly updated design for comments in Word for the web.Introducing a fresh new look for comments in Word for the webWe’ve listened and introduced a cleaner, more modern design featuring refreshed icons, buttons, and an improved layout.
09/12/2025
Google LiteRT NeuroPilot Stack Turns MediaTek Dimensity NPUs into First Class Targets for on Device LLMs
The new LiteRT NeuroPilot Accelerator from Google and MediaTek is a concrete step toward running real generative models on phones, laptops, and IoT hardware without shipping every request to a data center.It takes the existing LiteRT runtime and wires it directly into MediaTek’s NeuroPilot NPU stack, so developers can deploy LLMs and embedding models […]The post Google LiteRT NeuroPilot Stack Turns MediaTek Dimensity NPUs into First Class Targets for on Device LLMs appeared first on MarkTechPost.
09/12/2025
Released: December 2025 Exchange Server Security Updates
Microsoft has released Security Updates (SUs) for vulnerabilities found in:Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE)Customers who enrolled in the Extended Security Update (ESU) program are eligible to receive the December 2025 (and later) security updates for Exchange Server 2016 and 2019.
09/12/2025
No Skype for Business Server Security Updates for December 2025
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 December 2025, for customers with SfB SE, or SfB 2015 or 2019 ESU.The Skype for Business Team
09/12/2025
Partner Case Study | Tiger Analytics
Tiger Analytics is a solutions integrator and Microsoft partner that implements AI-powered solutions.They believe in using AI to transform operations for customers across industries.Their commitment to using AI to develop smart solutions empowered them to help a medical device company develop a predictive maintenance solution for their radiation therapy devices.
09/12/2025
Close the Year Strong with Surface for Business Deals
As organizations look to maximize their remaining budget and prepare for 2026, now is the moment to modernize device fleets with Surface for Business.Through December 24, limited-time Surface promotions make it easier to accelerate refresh cycles, strengthen endpoint security, and equip employees with devices that are AI-ready from day one.Surface for Business devices combine productivity-forward design, leading AI capabilities, and Microsoft security at multiple layers. Whether refreshing a subset of users or upgrading entire departments, organizations can close the year with hardware that helps reduce risk, assists in lowering management overhead, and positions teams for the next wave of AI-driven productivity.
09/12/2025
New! Centralized Agent Dashboard and Enhanced Reporting
Track Adoption Trends and Export Insights with Copilot and Agent AnalyticsAt Ignite 2025, we unveiled key updates to Copilot and Agent Analytics, introducing new features designed to address a critical challenge facing organizations in their AI transformation journey: the need for actionable, transparent insights into Copilot and agent impact and adoption.These enhanced Copilot and Agent Analytics features empower IT, business leaders, and analysts to track usage trends, adoption benchmarks, and agent performance across Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat, all through intuitive dashboards and robust reporting tools.
09/12/2025
Research Drop: Reframing AI Friction as a Mastery Challenge to Drive Impact
More than half of employees say agentic AI integration feels overwhelming and that they are struggling with the pace of change.57% of employees feel overwhelmed by the idea of integrating agentic AI into their work55% of employees struggle to keep up with the pace of change around agentic AI
09/12/2025
Security and governance innovations for Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents from Ignite 2025
Last year, we announced Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Microsoft 365 Copilot (now Generally Available) to block Copilot from processing files and email with specific sensitivity label.Purview DLP for Copilot prompt provides real-time control to help you mitigate data leakage and oversharing risks. It prevents Microsoft 365 Copilot, including pre-built agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, from returning a response when the prompt contains sensitive data. This feature helps to ensure sensitive data is not used for internal grounding or sent through web searches.To help customers address oversharing for a Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment, we published the Oversharing blueprint, powered by two powerful tools: Microsoft Purview, and SharePoint Advanced Management - included in your Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
09/12/2025
Introducing healthcare AI model evaluator: an open-source framework for healthcare AI evaluation
At Microsoft Build, we unveiled the healthcare agent orchestrator —a modular, open-source framework that enables healthcare organizations to compose, coordinate, and govern AI agents across clinical workflows.Building on this foundation, we are excited to introduce healthcare AI model evaluator, available now on GitHub—an open-source evaluation framework that enables healthcare organizations to rigorously benchmark AI systems using their own data, clinical tasks, and performance metrics.Healthcare AI model evaluator enables comprehensive hybrid quantitative and qualitative assessment by integrating automated metrics with expert clinical judgment.
09/12/2025
OSS AI Summit: Building with LangChain
The OSS AI Summit is an interactive online event designed to showcase how open-source AI frameworks empower developers to build, innovate, and scale faster.This first event spotlights LangChain, the leading framework for creating AI-driven applications in Python and JavaScript.Attendees will explore core LangChain components, agents, and tools, learn how Azure AI enhances scalability and integration, and see real-world demonstrations of agent workflows powered by LangChain and MCP.
09/12/2025
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐔𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐢𝐧 𝐈𝐓: 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐄𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐲
In an industry obsessed with speed, automation, and tooling, there’s one capability that quietly determines whether a project actually succeeds:👉 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐄𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐲Not empathy in the emotional sense —but the ability to step into the shoes of:Operational Empathy is the habit of stepping into the shoes of the teams who will run, monitor, secure, and support the application after go-live.It means asking questions like:- If I introduce this design choice, who will maintain it?- How will the support team troubleshoot this?- Will this create noise on monitoring dashboards?- Is onboarding new engineers going to be a nightmare?- What happens at 2 AM when an alert fire — is the runbook clear?This single mindset shift dramatically transforms delivery outcomes.🎯 𝑾𝒉𝒚 𝑰𝒕 𝑴𝒂𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒔: 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒐𝒘𝒏𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒎 𝑹𝒊𝒑𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝑬𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒄𝒕Every upstream decision has a downstream cost.1️⃣ Smoother Deployments & Fewer EscalationsWhen engineering anticipates operational needs early, issues like missing alerts, unclear log patterns, or unsupported configurations don’t become last-minute fire drills.2️⃣ Faster Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)If Ops has the right tools, logs, metrics, and runbooks from Day 1, incidents shrink from hours → minutes.3️⃣ Happier Support TeamsHandovers stop feeling like “surprise gifts” and more like mature transitions.4️⃣ Stronger Relationships & AccountabilityTeams collaborate instead of blame-shifting.Delivery stops seeing Operations as blockers;Operational Empathy is not a soft skill.It is a strategic differentiator in modern IT delivery.Teams that practice it ship faster, break less, escalate less, and collaborate better.And in a world moving toward automation, AI, and cloud-native complexity, the ability to think about downstream impact will become the new superpower for IT professionals.
09/12/2025
How AI closes requirements gaps, and how Modern Requirements and Microsoft Marketplace can help
In this guest blog post, Asif Sharif, CEO of Modern Requirements, explores where DevOps workflows fall short and how teams can better manage requirements with Copilot4DevOps, Modern Requirements4DevOps, and Microsoft Azure DevOps.Every DevOps leader I meet agrees on one thing: Requirements remain the least automated and most error-prone part of the DevOps lifecycle.How AI in requirements management improves Azure DevOps lifecycle
09/12/2025
Agent Mode in Excel is now generally available on Excel for Web
We’re excited to announce that Agent Mode in Excel is now generally available on Excel for Web, rolling out to users with a commercial Microsoft 365 Copilot license or a Microsoft 365 Premium subscription.This launch marks a major shift in how you work with Copilot in Excel—moving from basic assistance to an agentic experience with capabilities to build multi-step workflows directly in your workbook.Agent Mode in Excel
09/12/2025
🌩️ 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐍𝐨 𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐓𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐝 𝐌𝐢𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬🌩️
Everyone talks about 𝙩𝙤𝙤𝙡𝙨, 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙚𝙘𝙝 𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙠𝙨 — but the real challenges of cloud migrations often live below the surface.Here are the invisible challenges no one warns you about:⚠️ 1. 𝐎𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐨𝐬Everyone is “involved” — but no one is responsible.Migration stalls in the grey zones.🔍 2. 𝐇𝐢𝐝𝐝𝐞𝐧 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐆𝐚𝐩𝐬No runbooks.No monitoring.No rollback plans.Issues waiting to explode at cutover.📉 3. 𝐔𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲Some apps fly.Some crawl.But the migration date?Same for all.𝐑𝐢𝐬𝐤𝐬 𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐈𝐭'𝐬 𝐓𝐨𝐨 𝐋𝐚𝐭𝐞Most “critical blockers” were actually early signals…just never captured, assessed, or tracked.This is where 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 (𝐎𝐑) changes the game.🌟 𝑪𝒍𝒐𝒖𝒅 𝒎𝒊𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝒅𝒐𝒏’𝒕 𝒇𝒂𝒊𝒍 𝒃𝒆𝒄𝒂𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉.They fail due to lack of readiness.When 𝐎𝐑 is done right, go-lives feel less like firefighting…
09/12/2025
Extending SharePoint capabilities - Lightning Tools - SharePoint Partner Showcase
We are excited to share a new episode on our partner showcase series focused on SharePoint in Microsoft 365.In this brief discussion and demonstration, Brett Lonsdale, Founder and CEO at Lightning Tools, joins Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft to explore the different products Lightning Tools have build with with SharePoint Framework (SPFx) for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.During the demo, Brett shows four SPFx-based products that solve real challenges for customers every day:
09/12/2025
Zhipu AI Releases GLM-4.6V: A 128K Context Vision Language Model with Native Tool Calling
Zhipu AI has open sourced the GLM-4.6V series as a pair of vision language models that treat images, video and tools as first class inputs for agents, not as afterthoughts bolted on top of text.Model lineup and context length The series has 2 models.GLM-4.6V is a 106B parameter foundation model for cloud and […]
09/12/2025
From Bronze to Gold: Data Quality Strategies for ETL in Microsoft Fabric
When combined with Great Expectations, an open-source data quality framework, Fabric becomes a powerful environment for enforcing data quality at scale.In this article, we explore how to implement enterprise-ready, parameterized data validation inside Fabric notebooks using Great Expectations including row-count drift detection, schema checks, primary-key uniqueness, and time-series batch validation.Great Expectations + Microsoft Fabric creates a scalable, modular, enterprise-ready approach for ensuring data quality across the entire medallion architecture.
09/12/2025
AI Dev Days 2025: Your Gateway to the Future of AI Development
Building AI Applications with Azure, GitHub, and FoundryExplore cutting-edge topics like:Using AI to Boost Developer ProductivityGet hands-on with:Highlights from Microsoft Ignite & GitHub Universe 2025: Stay ahead of the curve.
09/12/2025
From Large Semi-Structured Docs to Actionable Data: Reusable Pipelines with ADI, AI Search & OpenAI
The potential applications for an Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) pipeline differ across industries.Intelligent Document Processing for large semi-structured documents isn’t just about extracting data, it’s about building trust in that data.By combining Azure Document Intelligence for layout-aware OCR with OpenAI models for contextual understanding, we create a well thought out in-depth pipeline that is accurate, scalable, and resilient against complexity.
09/12/2025
Microsoft Foundry - Everything you need to build AI apps & agents
Yina Arenas, Microsoft Foundry CVP, shares how to keep your development and operations teams coordinated, ensuring productivity, governance, and visibility across all your AI projects. Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog-So that’s how the expanded Microsoft Foundry simplifies the development and operations experience to help you and your team build powerful AI apps and agents faster, with more control, while integrated directly into your code.
09/12/2025
Microsoft Learn for Educators Newsletter – December 2025
Have you or a colleague leveraged MSLE to make a meaningful impact on teaching or student success? We’d love to hear about it! Recognize your own work or spotlight a colleague who is elevating learning through MSLE. Your story could inspire faculty around the world.👉 Share your story in the Faculty Spotlight and help amplify faculty voices across the MSLE community.Microsoft Ignite 2025 introduced groundbreaking tools to help you teach smarter, research faster, and engage students in new ways. Here’s what’s new:
09/12/2025
Azure Arc Server Forum: 2026 Updates
We are excited to announce the fourth calendar year of the Azure Arc Server Forum.From January 2026, the monthly Azure Arc Server Forum will be hosted on the third Thursday of each month from 9:30 – 10:15 AM PST.Each Arc Server Forum includes live demos of new capabilities, question and answer sessions with the product group, and feedback opportunities covering Windows, Linux, and SQL Server management, licensing, and connectivity across hybrid, multicloud, and edge environments.
08/12/2025
Microsoft Agent Pre-Purchase Plan: One Unified Path to Scale AI Agents
AI is now essential, and at Microsoft Ignite 2025, we introduced a new foundation for intelligent agents: Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and Foundry IQ.How to purchase a Microsoft Agent Pre-Purchase Plan?The Microsoft Agent Pre-Purchase Plan is designed to make your AI journey simpler, smarter, and more cost-effective.
08/12/2025
Improved address management in service orders on Surface Portals
We’ve introduced an important usability improvement to the address selection experience in the service order workflow on both Surface Management Portal and Surface Support Portal.When raising a service order, users can add both the billing and shipping addresses and save them for future use.Shipping addresses now appear only in the Shipping Address dropdown, and billing addresses appear only in the Billing Address dropdown.
08/12/2025
Jina AI Releases Jina-VLM: A 2.4B Multilingual Vision Language Model Focused on Token Efficient Visual QA
Jina AI has released Jina-VLM, a 2.4B parameter vision language model that targets multilingual visual question answering and document understanding on constrained hardware.The model couples a SigLIP2 vision encoder with a Qwen3 language backbone and uses an attention pooling connector to reduce visual tokens while preserving spatial structure.Among open 2B scale VLMs, it […]
08/12/2025
Check This Out! (CTO!) Guide (November 2025)
Summary: Microsoft has announced the general availability of the JavaScript Challenge feature for Azure Front Door’s Web Application Firewall (WAF).Summary: The article explains how to derive expiry days and remaining retention days for blobs in Azure Blob Storage and Data Lake Gen2 accounts using Blob Inventory reports.Summary: Microsoft has announced a limited preview of Azure Virtual Desktop for hybrid environments, enabling organizations to run cloud-native virtual desktops and applications on existing on-premises infrastructure via Azure Arc.
08/12/2025
How to Modernise a Microsoft Access Database (Forms + VBA) to Node.JS, OpenAPI and SQL Server
Its integration with Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), an object-based programming language, ensured that Access solutions often became central to business operations. Analyse the available documentation and changelog to identify the structure, relationships, and business context of the `<business_entity>`.This modernization initiative demonstrated how strategic use of automation and best practices can transform legacy Microsoft Access solutions into scalable, maintainable architectures utilizing Node.js, SQL Server, MongoDB, and OpenAPI.
08/12/2025
Never Explain Context Twice: Introducing Azure SRE Agent memory
One of the most requested capabilities from customers has been the ability for agents to retain knowledge across sessions-learning from past incidents, remembering team preferences, and continuously improving troubleshooting accuracy.Today, we're excited to dive deeper into the Azure SRE Agent memory, a powerful feature that transforms how your operations teams work with AI.When building custom sub-agents with the Sub-Agent Builder, you can enable memory retrieval by adding the SearchMemory tool to your sub-agent's toolset.
08/12/2025
Accelerated Collaboration Forums: Join the Conversation and Drive Innovation!
If so, Accelerated Collaboration Forums (ACFs) are designed for you!What Are Accelerated Collaboration Forums (ACFs)?Membership in the Microsoft Customer Connection Program (MCCP) is required—if you’re not a member yet, you can join here.
08/12/2025
Kimi K2 Thinking Now in Microsoft Foundry
Designed as a true thinking agent, it performs multi-step reasoning, orchestrates long chains of tool calls, and maintains stable, goal-directed behavior across hundreds of steps.With this launch, Microsoft Foundry continues to expand its leadership as the cloud platform with the widest, most diverse models, spanning frontier models, open models, and now state-of-the-art thinking systems.Kimi K2 Thinking represents a new wave of open, high-performance reasoning models that don’t just answer but truly think through complex problems with tools and data.
08/12/2025
Exploring the Future of AI Agents with Microsoft Foundry
Over 1 billion AI agents are expected to be in use by 2028.80% of organisations plan to integrate agents within the next 2–3 years.Agents address critical challenges such as inefficiencies in manual processes, human error, lack of visibility, and scalability issues.
08/12/2025
Microsoft Defender: Smart Containment Stops Exposed Privileged AD Domain Accounts
In the context of Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), a high-risk account is any user or service account that, if compromised, could pose a significant security threat to the organization.Microsoft Defender XDR provides groundbreaking capability: proactive containment of exposed high-risk domain accounts.Microsoft Defender XDR proactive containment of exposed high-risk domain accounts represents a paradigm shift from reactive defense to preemptive protection.
08/12/2025
Interview: From CUDA to Tile-Based Programming: NVIDIA’s Stephen Jones on Building the Future of AI
As AI models grow in complexity and hardware evolves to meet the demand, the software layer connecting the two must also adapt.We recently sat down with Stephen Jones, a Distinguished Engineer at NVIDIA and one of the original architects of CUDA.Jones, whose background spans from fluid mechanics to aerospace engineering, offered deep insights […]
08/12/2025
Prep for year-end reviews with Microsoft Copilot
To ease some of the burden, turn to Microsoft Copilot!Generate ideas for you and your team’s reviewsHelp me draft my self-evaluation for my performance review.
08/12/2025
Copilot Pages & Notebooks, Microsoft Loop: IT Admin Update – December 2025
Many key governance, lifecycle, and compliance features for Loop workspaces and Copilot Pages & Notebooks are now available. Learn more here Also, check out the latest from Ignite 2025 on Unlocking Productivity with Copilot Pages.IT policy to require Microsoft 365 groups for lifecycle management of shared Loop workspaces
08/12/2025
Data Mapper Test Executor: A New Addition to Logic Apps Standard Test Framework
The Data Mapper Test Executor changes that by bringing first-class support for map testing directly into the Logic Apps Standard Automated Test Framework.Native Support for Data Mapper TestingExecute unit tests for XSLT 1.0/2.0/3.0 and Logic Apps Data Mapper (.lml) files without leaving your development environment.Add the Data Mapper Test Executor to Your Test ProjectInclude the new class in your unit test suite for Logic Apps workflows.
08/12/2025
Unlocking AI-Driven Data Access: Azure Database for MySQL Support via the Azure MCP Server
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an emerging open protocol designed to integrate AI models with external data sources and services in a scalable, standardized, and secure manner.Introducing new Azure MCP Server tools to interact with Azure Database for MySQLUse GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code to gain meaningful insights from your business data in Azure Database for MySQL.
08/12/2025
Fero Labs and Valimail offer transactable partner solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like Fero Labs and Valimail deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace.Valimail Enforce: Valimail Enforce accelerates your journey to Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) enforcement, ensuring Microsoft 365 users get complete email security with seamless integration and automation.With a unique blend of speed and simplicity, Valimail boosts security against phishing and spoofing, increases trust and credibility, and enhances your company's brand image.
08/12/2025
.NET 10 and Memory: Less Heap, Smarter GC, Faster Apps
As Microsoft steps into the Ignite 2025 era of “AI-first everything” across Azure, Foundry, and cloud-native workloads, .NET quietly got its own big upgrade: .NET 10, a new long-term support (LTS) release and the official successor to .NET 9, supported for three years.A few days later at Microsoft Ignite 2025 in San Francisco, the story zoomed out: AI agents, Azure-hosted workloads, and App Service / Functions all moved forward with first-class .NET 10 support, positioning this runtime as the default foundation for modern cloud and AI solutions.In .NET 10, if the JIT can inline DoubleResult and prove the delegate never escapes the method, the delegate object is stack-allocated instead.
08/12/2025
From Transformers to Associative Memory, How Titans and MIRAS Rethink Long Context Modeling
Google Research is proposing a new way to give sequence models usable long term memory with Titans and MIRAS, while keeping training parallel and inference close to linear.Titans is a concrete architecture that adds a deep neural memory to a Transformer style backbone.MIRAS is a general framework that views […]
08/12/2025
Deploying Windows Servers in an Azure Availability Set
Deploying Windows Servers in an Azure Availability SetThis guide demonstrates deploying Windows Server an Azure Availability Set for Windows Server IIS workloads.An availability set logically groups virtual machines across fault domains and update domains within a single Azure data center.
08/12/2025
Cisco Released Cisco Time Series Model: Their First Open-Weights Foundation Model based on Decoder-only Transformer Architecture
Cisco and Splunk have introduced the Cisco Time Series Model, a univariate zero shot time series foundation model designed for observability and security metrics.It is released as an open weight checkpoint on Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license, and it targets forecasting workloads without task specific fine tuning.The model extends TimesFM 2.0 […]
07/12/2025
Google Colab Integrates KaggleHub for One Click Access to Kaggle Datasets, Models and Competitions
Google is closing an old gap between Kaggle and Colab.Colab now has a built in Data Explorer that lets you search Kaggle datasets, models and competitions directly inside a notebook, then pull them in through KaggleHub without leaving the editor.What Colab Data Explorer actually ships?
07/12/2025
A Coding Implementation of a Complete Hierarchical Bayesian Regression Workflow in NumPyro Using JAX-Powered Inference and Posterior Predictive Analysis
In this tutorial, we explore hierarchical Bayesian regression with NumPyro and walk through the entire workflow in a structured manner.We start by generating synthetic data, then we define a probabilistic model that captures both global patterns and group-level variations.Through each snippet, we set up inference using NUTS, analyze posterior distributions, and perform posterior […]
07/12/2025
End-to-End Observability for Azure Databricks: From Infrastructure to Internal Application Logging
By combining internal and external observability mechanisms, organizations can achieve a comprehensive view: internal logs enable detailed analysis of Spark jobs and data quality, while external logs ensure global visibility, auditing, and integration with broader monitoring dashboards and alerting systems. Compute log delivery in Azure Databricks enables you to automatically collect and archive logs from Spark driver nodes, worker nodes, and cluster events for both all-purpose and job compute resources.Tags are key-value pairs applied at the resource level and can be propagated to Azure for billing and monitoring.
07/12/2025
Windows Authentication for Cloud-Native Identities: Modernizing Azure SQL Managed Instance (Preview)
Today, we’re excited to announce support for Windows Authentication for Microsoft Entra principals on Azure SQL Managed Instance, enabling cloud-native identities to authenticate using familiar Windows credentials.Cloud-Only Identity (Preview): Identities that exist only in Microsoft Entra ID can now leverage Kerberos-based Windows Authentication for workloads like Azure SQL Managed Instance—without requiring domain controllers.Seamless Migration: Move legacy applications to Azure SQL Managed Instance without rewriting authentication logic.
07/12/2025
Microsoft AI Releases VibeVoice-Realtime: A Lightweight Real‑Time Text-to-Speech Model Supporting Streaming Text Input and Robust Long-Form Speech Generation
Microsoft has released VibeVoice-Realtime-0.5B, a real time text to speech model that works with streaming text input and long form speech output, aimed at agent style applications and live data narration.The model can start producing audible speech in about 300 ms, which is critical when a language model is still generating the rest of […]The post Microsoft AI Releases VibeVoice-Realtime: A Lightweight Real‑Time Text-to-Speech Model Supporting Streaming Text Input and Robust Long-Form Speech Generation appeared first on MarkTechPost.
07/12/2025
How to Build an Adaptive Meta-Reasoning Agent That Dynamically Chooses Between Fast, Deep, and Tool-Based Thinking Strategies
We begin this tutorial by building a meta-reasoning agent that decides how to think before it thinks.Instead of applying the same reasoning process for every query, we design a system that evaluates complexity, chooses between fast heuristics, deep chain-of-thought reasoning, or tool-based computation, and then adapts its behaviour in real time.The post How to Build an Adaptive Meta-Reasoning Agent That Dynamically Chooses Between Fast, Deep, and Tool-Based Thinking Strategies appeared first on MarkTechPost.
07/12/2025
OpenAGI Foundation Launches Lux: A Foundation Computer Use Model that Tops Online Mind2Web with OSGym At Scale
How do you turn slow, manual click work across browsers and desktops into a reliable, automated system that can actually use a computer for you at scale?Lux is the latest example of computer use agents moving from research demo to infrastructure.OpenAGI Foundation team has released Lux, a foundation model that operates real desktops […]
06/12/2025
Kernel Principal Component Analysis (PCA): Explained with an Example
Dimensionality reduction techniques like PCA work wonderfully when datasets are linearly separable—but they break down the moment nonlinear patterns appear.That’s exactly what happens with datasets such as two moons: PCA flattens the structure and mixes the classes together. Kernel PCA fixes this limitation by mapping the data into a higher-dimensional feature space where nonlinear […]The post Kernel Principal Component Analysis (PCA): Explained with an Example appeared first on MarkTechPost.
06/12/2025
How to Design a Fully Local Multi-Agent Orchestration System Using TinyLlama for Intelligent Task Decomposition and Autonomous Collaboration
In this tutorial, we explore how we can orchestrate a team of specialized AI agents locally using an efficient manager-agent architecture powered by TinyLlama.We walk through how we build structured task decomposition, inter-agent collaboration, and autonomous reasoning loops without relying on any external APIs.By running everything directly through the transformers library, we create […]
06/12/2025
Windows on Arm runs more apps and games with new Prism update
Today, Windows on Arm devices, such as those powered by the Snapdragon X series processors, are getting a boost thanks to an update to Prism that increases performance and enables running more apps and games under emulation. The Prism emulator is a core part of the Windows on Arm platform, ensuring that Windows apps are able to run seamlessly on ...
05/12/2025
Title Plan Update – December 5, 2025
December 5, 2025 Title Plan Now Available Access 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. This means each update ...
05/12/2025
Apple Researchers Release CLaRa: A Continuous Latent Reasoning Framework for Compression‑Native RAG with 16x–128x Semantic Document Compression
How do you keep RAG systems accurate and efficient when every query tries to stuff thousands of tokens into the context window and the retriever and generator are still optimized as 2 separate, disconnected systems?A team of researchers from Apple and University of Edinburgh released CLaRa, Continuous Latent Reasoning, (CLaRa-7B-Base, CLaRa-7B-Instruct and CLaRa-7B-E2E) a […]The post Apple Researchers Release CLaRa: A Continuous Latent Reasoning Framework for Compression‑Native RAG with 16x–128x Semantic Document Compression appeared first on MarkTechPost.
05/12/2025
Discover skills used by employees – and how to act on them – with the new Skills landscape report
Given the diversification of skill sets in today’s global workforce, it’s more important than ever for business leaders to stay informed about the skills used by their employees. This information can be difficult to ascertain, given today’s broadly distributed workforce, the variety and complexity of HR information management systems, and the lack of unifying connectors between them.  ...
05/12/2025
Microsoft Ignite 2025: Top Security Innovations You Need to Know
🤖 Security & AI -The Big Story This Year 2025 marks a turning point for cybersecurity. Rapid adoption of AI across enterprises has unlocked innovation but introduced new risks. AI agents are now part of everyday workflows-automating tasks and interacting with sensitive data—creating new attack surfaces that traditional security models cannot fully address. Threat actors are leveraging AI to accelerate attacks, making speed and automation critica...
05/12/2025
The City Leader's Dilemma: How AI Is turning urban strain into strategic advantage
Ready to transform how your city plans and operates? Download the Trend Report 2025: Planning and operating thriving cities – innovation for smarter urban living to access the complete playbook on AI-powered urban innovation, complete with case studies from Bangko...
05/12/2025
Teams Phone Extensibility: Bridging Microsoft Teams with Contact Center Platforms
In the modern workplace, communication is no longer confined to emails and meetings. With the rise of hybrid and remote work models, organizations are increasingly relying on unified communication platforms to stay connected. Among these, Microsoft Teams has emerged as a central hub for collaboration, offering chat, meetings, and calling capabilities. But what happens when the need goes beyond internal communications, into the realm of customer service and high-volume interactions? Thi...
05/12/2025
Open AI’s GPT-5.1-codex-max in Microsoft Foundry: Igniting a New Era for Enterprise Developers
Announcing GPT-5.1-codex-max: The Future of Enterprise Coding Starts Now We’re thrilled to announce the general availability of OpenAI's GPT-5.1-codex-max in Microsoft Foundry Models—a leap forward that redefines what’s possible for enterprise-grade coding agents. This isn’t just another model release; it’s a celebration of innovation, partnership, and the relentless pursuit of develop...
05/12/2025
Boosting cloud and AI ROI: The power of Microsoft Marketplace
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations face mounting pressure to adapt to new AI-centric technologies while maximizing the value of their cloud investments. The challenge is not just about keeping up with innovation, but also about making smart, future-proof decisions that balance speed, security, and cost efficiency. We had the chance to explore this during the recent
05/12/2025
Azure Bot Identity | Application with identifier 'x' was not found in the directory 'Bot Framework'
TL;DR Every Azure Bot has a fixed identity (MicrosoftAppId) tied to either an App Registration or a Managed Identity—it cannot be changed or reused. Azure Bot supports three identity types:
05/12/2025
New in Microsoft Marketplace: December 5, 2025
Learn about 199 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
05/12/2025
Learn MCP from our free livestream series in December
Our Python + MCP series is a three-part, hands-on journey into one of the most important emerging technologies of 2025: MCP (Model Context Protocol) — an open standard for extending AI agents and chat interfaces with real-world tools, data, and execution environments. Whether you're building custom GitHub Copilot tools, powering internal developer agents, or creating...
05/12/2025
Proactive Monitoring Made Simple with Azure SRE Agent
SRE teams strive for proactive operations, catching issues before they impact customers and reducing the chaos of incident response. While perfection may be elusive, the real goal is minimizing outages and gaining immediate line of sight into production environments. Today, that’s harder than ever. It requires correlating countless signals and alerts, understanding how they relate—or don’t relate—to each other, and assigning the right sense of urgency and impact. Anything that s...
05/12/2025
Faster Data Copy between Source and target for partitioned table using Partition Switch in ADF
Introduction This blog post presents a comprehensive Azure Data Factory (ADF) solution for automating the migration of partitioned tables from IBM Db2 z/OS to Azure SQL Database. The solution consists of two main components: a Partition Discovery & Preparation Pipeline and a Parallel Copy Pipeline with partition switching capabilities. This approach significantly reduces migratio...
05/12/2025
Deploying a Bun + Hono + Vite app to Azure App Service
TOC Introduction Local Environment Deployment Conclusion 1. Introduction Anthropic, the company behind Claude, recently acquired the JavaScript runtime startup Bun, marking one of the most significant shifts in the modern JavaScript ecosystem since the arrival of Node.js and Deno. This acquisition signals more than a business move, it represents a strategic consolidation of performance-oriented tooli...
05/12/2025
Announcing Support for S2D and SAN Coexistence
Applies to: Windows Server 2022 and Windows Server 2025 Failover Clustering Failover Clustering has supported SAN storage since Windows NT 4.0 Server, Enterprise Edition was released in 1997! In addition, Failover Clustering has supported Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) since Windows Server 2016! Many customers have been asking if they can use (or reuse) their existing iSCSI and Fibre Channel SANs together with S2D – and now the answer is Yes!...
04/12/2025
Evaluating AI Agents: More than just LLMs
Artificial intelligence agents are undeniably one of the hottest topics at the forefront of today’s tech landscape. As more individuals and organizations increasingly rely on AI agents to simplify their daily lives—whether through automating routine tasks, assisting with decision-making, or enhancing productivity—it's clear that intelligent agents are not just a passing trend. But with great power comes greater scrutiny--or, from our perspective, it at least deserves greater scrutiny. ...
04/12/2025
Migrate from Amazon API Gateway to Azure API Management
For teams moving from Amazon API Gateway to Azure API Management, we've published a detailed migration guide that addresses the technical considerations and implementation steps for a successful transition: Migrate Amazon API Gateway to Azure API Management. The guide focuses on helping AWS...
04/12/2025
Congrats to the Winners of the 2025 MECC & MEWC!
The 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship and Collegiate Challenge wrapped up their season in spectacular fashion at Las Vegas’ HyperX Arena, drawing competitors from nearly every continent and crowning new champions in the fast-growing world of Excel esports. What is Excel esports? It’s a phenomenon redefining competitive gaming. For a deeper dive, see “What is the fast-growing e-sport of competiti...
04/12/2025
Architecting the Next-Generation Customer Tiering System
Authors Sailing Ni*, Joy Yu*, Peng Yan...
04/12/2025
Introducing the updated Agentic DevOps with Microsoft Azure and GitHub specialization
As modern DevOps practices evolve to include AI-powered tooling and GitHub-based workflows, Microsoft is updating the Accelerate Developer Productivity with Microsoft Azure specialization to better reflect how partners are driving customer outcomes today. The specialization has been renamed to the Agentic DevOps with Microsoft Azure and GitHub specialization and features updated performance and audit requirements. What's changing
04/12/2025
Explore changes to the updated AI Apps on Microsoft Azure specialization
Our specialists deliver high-performing solutions backed by deep technical expertise. To help ensure the ecosystem of specialists remains strong, the performance and audit criteria for the AI Apps on Microsoft Azure specialization have been updated. To earn or renew this specialization, your organization must first have an active Solutions Partner designation for either Data & AI (Azure) or Digital & App Innovation (Azure). Then, you must meet all of the following updated...
04/12/2025
Becoming a Frontier Firm: Accelerate custom app development with Quick-Start Development Toolkit
The theme of Ignite was undeniable: Frontier firms are transforming business with investments and projects developing AI apps and agents. And these aren’t just businesses using AI - they’re companies developing and monetizing AI apps and agents. The numbers are clear - here are a few compelling stats from a global study commissioned by Microsoft with the International Data Corporation (IDC...
04/12/2025
Drive Microsoft 365 renewals and upgrades ahead of pricing and packaging updates
We recently announced that in 2026, we’re expanding the availability of security and management capabilities to the commercial Microsoft 365 suites. Along with these added features, there will also be a global price update to these suites across all purchasing channels effective July 1, 2026. ...
04/12/2025
Protect against React RSC CVE-2025-55182 with Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF)
On December 3, 2025, the React team disclosed a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in React Server Components (RSC), tracked as CVE-2025-55182. The vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to send a specially crafted request to an RSC “Server Functio...
04/12/2025
Genesys Cloud and Five9 now supported on Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365
We’re excited to announce that multimedia call redirection on Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 now supports Genesys Cloud and Five9, both Contact-Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) platforms. This enhancement enables a more optimized calling experience for contact center agents using Genesys Cloud or Five9 in virtual environments. To see a full list of supported CCaaS solutions, refer to our
04/12/2025
Do your deep customer support capabilities set you apart?
Announced at Microsoft Ignite, the Solutions Partner designation for Support Services publicly recognizes and rewards partners with the capabilities required to deliver a quality support experience to customers. The designation highlights your proven support capabilities and differentiates you in the market. It also unlocks valuable incentives
04/12/2025
View Microsoft Ignite sessions on demand
Microsoft Ignite sessions are now available on demand. Whether you were unable to attend this year's event or just want a refresher, you can catch up on what you missed, relive your favorite moments, and continue to gain transformative insights.
04/12/2025
New Windows Autopatch report on CVEs
Your security team needs clear, actionable insights to protect your organization from emerging threats. The new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) report in Windows Autopatch delivers just that. Get a comprehensive view of Windows CVEs addressed by recent quality updates, along with direct links to remediation documentation and device-level vulnerability status.
04/12/2025
December edition of Microsoft Marketplace Partner Digest
Microsoft Ignite 2025 - Marketplace highlights Microsoft Ignite was packed with announcements and insights for Marketplace partners. From new commerce capabilities to AI-driven innovations, here are some key takeaways: Global expansion of Microsoft Marketplace - Microsoft announced that the reimagined
04/12/2025
Customer Spotlight: Copilot Adoption in Viva Engage with Micron
One of the most effective ways to accelerate adoption and build confidence is by learning from the experiences of others. Gaining insights from customers who have already navigated similar journeys provides invaluable real-world examples and practical lessons, helping organizations avoid common pitfalls and capitalize on proven strategies. It's especially beneficial to connect with other customers who have gone first, as their firsthand knowledge can guide and inspire your own approach to Cop...
04/12/2025
Advancing Microsoft 365 Government: New Capabilities and Pricing Update
Public sector organizations are navigating increasingly complex security challenges, evolving technology needs, and the imperative to modernize for an AI-driven future. To support these priorities, Microsoft is expanding availability of security, management, and AI features to a wider range of Microsoft 365 Government offerings in 2026. We will also up...
04/12/2025
Microsoft 365 adds advanced Microsoft Intune solutions at scale
In the last three years, Microsoft launched multiple endpoint management solutions with advanced capabilities that enable IT professionals to unify mission critical endpoint management functionality in one cost-effective plan with the Microsoft Intune Suite. These capabilities are essential to accelerate every organization’s journey towards Zero Trust security, improving end user productivity, and empowering IT and security professionals to improve total cost of ownership (TC...
04/12/2025
Announcing compliance recording for call queues in Microsoft Teams
We are excited to announce that support for compliance recording for call queues in Microsoft Teams will be generally available next week! What’s New? Compliance recording for call queues enables organizations to record the entirety of call queue calls, ensuring regulatory compliance and a seamless caller experience. User-level compliance recording isn't supported for call queues, which can cause overlapping announcements...
04/12/2025
MVPs at Microsoft Ignite 2025: Champions of Innovation and Community
Microsoft Ignite 2025 gathered 20,000 technology professionals in San Francisco and many more joined online from November 18 to 21, offering a dynamic environment focused on learning, networking, and innovation. At the heart of this experience were our Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and Regional Directors (RDs) - community leaders who shared their expertise, inspired attendees, and amplified the spirit of collaboration across the globe....
04/12/2025
New in Microsoft Marketplace: December 4, 2025
Learn about 128 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Go further with workshops, proofs of concept, and implementations
04/12/2025
Monthly news - December 2025
Microsoft DefenderMonthly news - December 2025 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from October 2025. Defender for Cloud has its own Monthly News post, have a look at
04/12/2025
AI Interview Series #4: Transformers vs Mixture of Experts (MoE)
Question: MoE models contain far more parameters than Transformers, yet they can run faster at inference. How is that possible? Difference between Transformers & Mixture of Experts (MoE) Transformers and Mixture of Experts (MoE) models share the same backbone architecture—self-attention layers followed by feed-forward layers—but they differ fundamentally in how they use parameters and compute. […] The post
04/12/2025
How to Build a Meta-Cognitive AI Agent That Dynamically Adjusts Its Own Reasoning Depth for Efficient Problem Solving
In this tutorial, we build an advanced meta-cognitive control agent that learns how to regulate its own depth of thinking. We treat reasoning as a spectrum, ranging from fast heuristics to deep chain-of-thought to precise tool-like solving, and we train a neural meta-controller to decide which mode to use for each task. By optimizing the […] The post
04/12/2025
Compliance Meets Ai 2026: Microsoft Purview in the Age of Ai
AI is no longer a future trend—it’s the present reality. From Microsoft Copilot to custom-built AI agents, organizations are embracing generative AI to transform productivity. But with innovation comes responsibility. Compliance can’t be an afterthought—it must be the foundation. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the return of our highly acclaimed webinar series: Compliance Meets AI, now bigger, bolder, and laser-focused on the challenges and oppor...
04/12/2025
Build less, secure more: Simplify security data management with Microsoft Sentinel data lake
Most DIY security data lakes start with good intentions—promising flexibility, control, and cost savings. But in reality, they lead to endless data ingestion fixes, schema drift battles, and soaring costs. They fail because they lack the capabilities to manage security data that’s not just massive, but complex, dynamic, and compliance heavy. Ingestion chaos: Every team implements its own pipelines for diverse data sets like firewalls, endpoint, network, threat in...
03/12/2025
Beyond the Chat Window: How Change-Driven Architecture Enables Ambient AI Agents
AI agents are everywhere now. Powering chat interfaces, answering questions, helping with code. We've gotten remarkably good at this conversational paradigm. But while the world has been focused on chat experiences, something new is quietly emerging: ambient agents. These aren't replacements for chat, they're an entirely new category of AI system that operates in the background, sensing, processing, and responding to the world in real time. And here's the thing, this is a new frontier. The in...
03/12/2025
Unlocking AI-Powered Insights with SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Microsoft Fabric
A New Era of Data Integration for SAP Partners At Microsoft Ignite, SAP and Microsoft unveiled SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Microsoft Fabric, a breakthrough capability designed to help enterprises—and their partners—unlock the full potential of their data for advanced analytics and AI-driven innovation. This integration simplifies access to semantically rich SAP data products through bi-directional, zero-copy sharing with Microsoft Fabric. For partners, t...
03/12/2025
M365 Copilot App Builder & Workflows Agents
Hey there! 😀 In this video you will learn how M365 Copilot App Builder and Workflows Agents can help you streamline your business processes with ease! 🙌
03/12/2025
Copilot Your Holidays: Episode 2 – Gift Ideas, Party Planning, and Year-End Insights
The holiday season is here, and Copilot can make it easier—and more fun. In Episode 2 of our Copilot Your Holidays series, we explored creative ways to use Copilot for holiday planning, from quirky gift ideas to organizing office parties and analyzing year-end feedback. What We Covered Recap of Episode 1: Thanksgiving-inspired meals generated by Copilot. Holiday Fun with Copilot: Creative prompts f...
03/12/2025
What's new in Teams Free | October 2025
Two big features are available to Teams Insiders and spell check on desktop and web to get rid of typos. Learn more on the Teams Insider Blog: https://insider.teams.com/blog/whats-new-in-teams-free-october-2025/
03/12/2025
What's new in Teams Free | September 2025
Start an instant meeting on mobile from chat and see your recent calls on Meet tab on desktop and web. Read more about the latest updates on the Teams Insider Blog: https://insider.teams.com/blog/whats-new-in-teams-free-september-2025/
03/12/2025
What's new in Teams Free | August 2025
It's easier than ever to find contacts in Teams Free. And there's a new compact chat mode as well. Read more on the Teams Insider Blog: https://insider.teams.com/blog/whats-new-in-teams-free-august-2025/
03/12/2025
What's new in Teams Free | July 2025
Learn more about the latest meeting improvements and new privacy controls in Teams Free on the Teams Insider Blog: https://insider.teams.com/blog/whats-new-in-teams-free-july-2025/
03/12/2025
What's new in Teams Free | June 2025
Read more about the recent meeting improvements (PowerPoint Live consumption now supported!) and other updates in Teams Free on the Teams Insider Blog: https://insider.teams.com/blog/whats-new-in-teams-free-june-2025/
03/12/2025
View or restore previous versions of Microsoft 365 Copilot Pages
Hi, Insiders! I’m Oby Omu, and I’m a Product Manager on the Microsoft 365 Copilot app team. I’m excited to share that you can now view and restore previous Microsoft 365 Copilot Page versions to easily and confidently refine your work. View or restore previous versions of Microsoft 365 Copilot Pages Copilot Pages are built for iteration, and being able to edit and refine AI responses is a core part of the experience. With version history on Windows, Mac, and the web, you can n...
03/12/2025
Partner Blog | Powering growth through benefits that drive real impact
Partner benefits packages sit at the center of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. These packages are bundled offerings designed for partners, and they include discounted licenses on the Microsoft products you already use to run your business, along with one-on-one personalized support, developer tools, and additional resources. The three-tiered packages feature increasingly robust offerings to meet your business in any stage of growth, whether you’re building new practices, scaling servi...
03/12/2025
Unlocking growth: The channel-led Marketplace opportunity
Microsoft’s ecosystem, now boasting over 500,000 partners and tens of thousands of solutions, is seeing explosive growth.Deals brokered through collaboration between software companies and channel partners are not only more frequent, but also 75% larger than average.The multiplier effect is real: for every dollar transacted, software companies see an additional $1.75 in value, while channel partners are seeing a remarkable $6.26 for every dollar.
03/12/2025
Essential Intune reading list: MVP community content for 2025
As we head into the holiday season, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate something truly special: the incredible contributions from our Microsoft Intune MVP community this year. Last year, I released our first Holiday Reading post, which got a lot of traction, and I was asked to do it again this year — so I guess we are starting a new tradition! Whet...
03/12/2025
AI- powered maintenance management with Microsoft Azure
Welcome to another edition of our Partner Spotlight series, where we showcase the innovators transforming maintenance and field service operations through the Microsoft Marketplace. Each feature uncovers the unique journey of a partner leveraging the Microsoft ecosystem to deliver AI-powered solutions and transactable offers that simplify enterprise adoption and accelerate digital transformation. In this article, I connected with Benjamin Schwärzler from Workheld, a Vienna-based SaaS p...
03/12/2025
Unlock AI-Ready Insights: Empowering Nonprofits with Microsoft Fabric
Disconnected data slows impact—but it doesn’t have to. Nonprofit data solutions in Microsoft Fabric unify your data, accelerate insights, and create an AI-ready foundation for smarter decisions. Imagine moving from raw donor data to actionable insights in weeks, not months. With Fabric, nonprofits gain: Unified fundraising data in one place Instant insights through ready-made dashboards ...
03/12/2025
International Day of Persons with Disabilities: Our commitment to a better screen reader experience
Hi, Insiders! I’m Clint Covington, Group Product Manager for Microsoft 365 Apps Accessibility. Today is the United Nations-sponsored International Day of Persons with Disabilities, where we reaffirm our commitment to fostering disability-inclusive societies. In honor of this important goal, I wanted to recap several major enhancements we’ve ...
03/12/2025
Moderation strategies to scale participation and communications in Viva Engage
Viva Engage brings people together around org-wide communications, communities, and knowledge sharing. Leaders, frontline workers, employees, and corporate communicators, want the benefits of two-way dialog and community participation, but often wonder how to make sure relevant content reaches the right audiences while keeping public spaces safe for all. When your network is thoughtfully crafted to match your business needs and reflect your culture, users can contribute openly wi...
03/12/2025
Azure PostgreSQL Lesson Learned #10: Why PITR Networking Rules Matter
Co‑authored with angesalsaa Symptoms Customer attempted to restore a server configured with public access into a private virtual network. Restore operation failed with an error indicating unsupported configuration. Root ...
03/12/2025
The Microsoft Defender for AI Alerts
I will start this blog post by thanking my Secure AI GBB Colleague Hiten Sharma for his contributions to this Tech Blog as a peer-reviewer. Microsoft Defender for AI (part of Microsoft Defender) helps organizations threats to generative AI application...
03/12/2025
Syskit and Solgari offer transactable partner solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like Syskit and Solgari deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace. Learn about these offers below:
03/12/2025
Security Review for Microsoft Edge version 143
We have reviewed the new settings in Microsoft Edge version 143 and determined that there are no additional security settings that require enforcement. The Microsoft Edge version 139 security baseline continues to be our recommended configuration which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit. Microsoft Edge version 143 introduced 3 new Computer and User settings...
03/12/2025
Automating HPC Workflows with Copilot Agents
Introduction High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads are complex, requiring precise job submission scripts and careful resource management. Manual scripting for platforms like OpenFOAM is time-consuming, error-prone, and often frustrating. At SC25, we showcased how Copilot Agents—powered by AI—are transforming HPC workflows by automating Slurm submission scripts, making scientific computing more efficient and accessible. A full demonstration can be found in the vide...
03/12/2025
Building an Agentic, AI-Powered Helpdesk with Agents Framework, Azure, and Microsoft 365
The High-Level ArchitectureThe core idea is to decouple the system. Instead of one large application doing everything, we split the process into distinct, scalable components.Ingestion: A lightweight API endpoint simply to capture the request.Decoupling: A message queue to hold the request for background processing.Processing: An asynchronous worker that handles all the heavy lifting: AI e...
03/12/2025
Announcing General Availability for Azure Resource Graph (ARG) GET/LIST API
ARG GET/LIST API delivers 10X higher throttling quotas to callers compared to ARG query unlocking a more scalable, resilient way to perform resource lookups in Azure. ARG GET/LIST API is a new platform capability within Azure Resource Graph that provides a high-performance experience for both Point GET and collect...
03/12/2025
NVIDIA and Mistral AI Bring 10x Faster Inference for the Mistral 3 Family on GB200 NVL72 GPU Systems
NVIDIA announced today a significant expansion of its strategic collaboration with Mistral AI. This partnership coincides with the release of the new Mistral 3 frontier open model family, marking a pivotal moment where hardware acceleration and open-source model architecture have converged to redefine performance benchmarks. This collaboration is a massive leap in inference speed: the […] The post
03/12/2025
Understand and fix errors with descriptive error cards in Excel for Windows
Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! I’m Natalie Wiegand, and I’m a Product Manager on the Excel team. I’m excited to share that Microsoft Excel for Windows now offers descriptive error cards to help you understand and fix errors more easily! Understand and fix errors with descriptive error cards in Excel for Windows Historically, it has been difficult to get context on errors like #SPILL! and #VALUE! as to what the problem is or how it could be solved. About six years ago, we released...
03/12/2025
How We Learn Step-Level Rewards from Preferences to Solve Sparse-Reward Environments Using Online Process Reward Learning
In this tutorial, we explore Online Process Reward Learning (OPRL) and demonstrate how we can learn dense, step-level reward signals from trajectory preferences to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning tasks. We walk through each component, from the maze environment and reward-model network to preference generation, training loops, and evaluation, while observing how the agent gradually improves […] The post
02/12/2025
Serverless Workspaces are live in Azure Databricks
As customers continue to deploy large scale data and AI projects in Azure Databricks, the complexity of deploying and managing these increases. To help you with this, we’re excited to announce the public preview of Serverless workspaces in Azure Databricks. With Serverless workspaces, creation of workspaces is extremely simplified. This means you can quickly create a workspace with serverless compute and default storage. Your teams can focus on gathering the insights from the data instead of ...
02/12/2025
Google DeepMind Researchers Introduce Evo-Memory Benchmark and ReMem Framework for Experience Reuse in LLM Agents
Large language model agents are starting to store everything they see, but can they actually improve their policies at test time from those experiences rather than just replaying context windows? Researchers from University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and Google DeepMind propose Evo-Memory, a streaming benchmark and agent framework that targets this exact gap. Evo-Memory evaluates […] The post
02/12/2025
PostgreSQL: Migrating Large Objects (LOBs) with Parallelism and PIPES
Why This Approach? Migrating large objects (LOBs) between PostgreSQL servers can be challenging due to size, performance, and complexity. Traditional methods often involve exporting to files and re-importing, which adds overhead and slows down the process. Also, there could be some Cloud restrictions that limit the usage of other tools like: Pgcopydb: Welcome to pgcopydb’s docu...
02/12/2025
Scaling Azure Compute for Performance
Ignite 2025 highlighted a clear trend across customer and partner discussions: modern workloads—AI inference, data-intensive analytics, and globally distributed applications—require infrastructure that delivers consistent performance, rapid scale-out, and adaptive behavior under real-world pressure. The focus this year was on practical capabilities that remove bottlenecks, simplify operations, and provide the compute foundation needed to support the next wave of innovati...
02/12/2025
Highlights from Ignite 2025: How Agentic AI and Microsoft Copilot are Empowering Healthcare
Copilot in Healthcare: Microsoft 365’s AI Innovations Transforming HLS Workflows Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) organizations today face intense pressures: workforce shortages, clinician burnout, rising costs, and ever-growing patient care demands. Doctors, nurses, and staff are overburdened with administrative tasks and documentation, fueling stress and attrition. The promise of AI-powered assistants, or Copilots, offers a ray of hope. At the latest Microsoft Ignite con...
02/12/2025
Update to EWS Access for Kiosk / Frontline Worker Licensed Users
As part of our ongoing efforts to deprecate Exchange Web Services (EWS), starting with March 1, 2026, we will start to block EWS access for all mailboxes without license rights to EWS. This is another step in our ongoing commitment to enhance the security and control mechanisms of EWS. The impacted licenses are:
02/12/2025
From the Classroom to Las Vegas: MVP David Brown and the Excel Esports Revolution
Microsoft Excel Collegiate Challenge (MECC) championship stage in Las Vegas What if crunching numbers could land you on a championship stage in Las Vegas? Welcome to the Microsoft Excel Collegiate Challenge (MECC) - where spreadsheets meet esports, and students battle fo...
02/12/2025
Partner Blog | Lead SMBs into the AI frontier with Microsoft 365 Copilot Business
In today’s fast-changing digital landscape, the Microsoft partner ecosystem is the catalyst for building Frontier Firms that lead with AI, embrace innovation, and deliver transformative outcomes for enterprise customers. To illustrate this, the Enterprise Partner Solutions (EPS) Asia Regional Leadership Team (RLT) has launched a new series called Frontier Forward: Asia Edition
02/12/2025
Partner Case Study | CloudFronts
In manufacturing, precision is paramount. Machine quality, specification, and the accuracy of results is critical. That’s always been the case. What’s newer in the manufacturing world is the precision required from the systems that support operations. Manufacturers today are under pressure to deliver seamless customer experiences, whether through e-commerce or service operations, while also maintaining efficiency across global supply chains. Yet many still rely on aging integration fra...
02/12/2025
Whats new in the Backup/Restore area in SQL Server 2025
Over the past several months, we’ve heard from countless customers who are eager for more robust options to protect, compress, and safeguard their SQL Server data. Since introducing these features in public preview, organizations of all sizes have validated their value in real-world workloads and provided invaluable feedback. Following are three
02/12/2025
Making the everyday easier: Behind the scenes with the Surface Pro 12-Inch Keyboard
Everyday barriers in plain sight Most people don’t spend much time thinking about their keyboard. That’s part of what makes it work. You open your device, start typing, and the keyboard fades into the background—until it doesn’t. Until the lighting changes, or your eyes are tired, or you can’t quite tell which key your finger is on. For millions of users, that slight f...
02/12/2025
Windows news you can use: November 2025
In case you haven’t yet had time to catch up on all the announcements from Microsoft Ignite, I’m happy to offer a recap of what was revealed in the world of Windows and Windows 365 plus a few security and Microsoft Intune highlights. Have questions on any of what you read below? Join us this week for Windows Tech Community Live. We’ll be live streaming panel-based discussions today—then answering your questions on th...
02/12/2025
Microsoft Defender Experts - S.T.A.R. Series
Co-author: Samantha Gardener To stay ahead of today’s sophisticated cyber threats, organizations must embrace a proactive defense strategy that includes these three pillars: emerging trends, adaptive strategies, and actionable insights. Threat actors are increasingly leveraging AI-driven attacks, supply chain compromises, and identity-based exploits. Modern strategies focus on zero trust principles, continuous threat hunting, and leveraging advanced threat int...
02/12/2025
Improved keyboard and Narrator support for comments in Word for Windows
Hi, Insiders! I’m Shireen Salma, a Product Manager on the Office Accessibility team. I’m excited to share some new improvements to Microsoft Word for Windows that make keyboard and screen reader navigation for comments more efficient and intuitive. Improved keyboard and Narrator support for comments in Word for Windows At Microsoft, we believe great design starts with listening to feedback – both from you, our customers, but also from our peers. This feature was born fr...
02/12/2025
Hands-On Session: Teach Module in Copilot (available for all educators)
Join us on Wednesday, December 10th, 2025 @ 8am Pacific Time for an in-depth professional development webinar on the new AI-powered "Teach" module in Microsoft 365 that is fully rolled out and available to all educators. This will be a 45 minute hands-on webinar where the Product team will walk through the new updates in detail and you can follow- along at home with your own M365 account! Sign up for the session
02/12/2025
Zero-Trust Agent Architecture: How To Actually Secure Your Agents
Microsoft’s announcements at Ignite 2025 hit right at this point. With the evolution of Azure AI Foundry into Microsoft Foundry, and the launch of Foundry Agent Service, we now have a platform designed not just to build smarter agents, but safer ones — agents with identity,...
02/12/2025
Security Guidance Series: CAF 4.0 Building Proactive Cyber Resilience
It’s Time To Act Microsoft's Digital Defense Report 2025 clearly describes the cyber threat landscape that this guidance is situated in, one that has become more complex, more industrialized, and increasingly democratized. Each day, Microsoft processes more than 100 trillion...
02/12/2025
Cloud as a War Against Entropy
From Physics and Information Theory to Practical Reliability in the Cloud Two years ago I wrote about mitigating downtime and increasing reliability by managing complexity in cloud‑native systems. I used ideas from physics and chaos theory as a lens to explain why cloud archi...
02/12/2025
DeepSeek Researchers Introduce DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale for Long Context Reasoning and Agentic Workloads
How do you get GPT-5-level reasoning on real long-context, tool-using workloads without paying the quadratic attention and GPU cost that usually makes those systems impractical? DeepSeek research introduces DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale. They are reasoning-first models built for agents and targets high quality reasoning, long context and agent workflows, with open weights and production APIs. The […] The post
02/12/2025
🎉 Announcing General Availability of AI & RAG Connectors in Logic Apps (Standard)
We’re excited to share that a comprehensive set of AI and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities is now Generally Available in Azure Logic Apps (Standard). This release brings native support for document processing, semantic retrieval, embeddings, and grounded reasoning directly into the Logic Apps workflo...
01/12/2025
Push method for Azure AI Search
You may be aware that you can build indexes in Azure AI Search by pulling data from known data sources, like Azure Blob storage, SQL server, OneLake, etc. When using the ‘pull’ method, the
01/12/2025
How we talk about the value of Microsoft Marketplace with customers
At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we introduced the reimagined Microsoft Marketplace to our customers as your trusted source for cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents. This brief, 20-minute breakout session talked about how Marketplace is empowering organizations to become Frontier Firms by streamlining the discovery, purchase, and deployment of tens of thousands of partner solutions. You can watch the session
01/12/2025
How to search for deleted memberships of a group in Active Directory
Have you ever seen a user suddenly lose access to a resource, only to discover they were removed from a group—but with no record of when or how it happened? Tracking deleted group memberships in Active Directory (AD) can be challenging, especially when auditing is not enabled or the logs don’t capture which users were removed. If someone deletes multiple memberships from a Security Group, the Active Directory Recycle Bin won’t help, since it only retains deleted objects—not the details of whi...
01/12/2025
Copilot Studio advanced customization webinar on December 8: Don't Miss out!
Our dynamic four-part webinar series, Agentic AI + Copilot Partner Skilling Accelerator, empowers you to harness the Microsoft AI ecosystem to unlock new revenue streams and enhance customer success. Across the four sessions, Microsoft partners can expect to learn how to apply AI tools across no-code, low-code, and pro-code scenarios to build intelligent chat and workflow solutions, extend and customize capabilities, and create advanced, cus...
01/12/2025
Don’t miss out: Copilot Studio advanced customization webinar on December 8
Our dynamic four-part webinar series, Agentic AI + Copilot Partner Skilling Accelerator, empowers you to harness the Microsoft AI ecosystem to unlock new revenue streams and enhance customer success. Across the four sessions, Microsoft partners can expect to learn how to apply AI tools across no-code, low-code, and pro-code scenarios to build intelligent chat and workflow solutions, extend and customize capabilities, and create advanced, cus...
01/12/2025
November Update: What's new in Azure for Partners
Navigate to News and Announcements, Incentives and Offers, Skilling and Events, Go-To-Market, Customer Success<...
01/12/2025
#MSIgnite Nonprofit AI Sessions
AI is opening new doors for nonprofits to collaborate, innovate, and drive mission impact. During Ignite, we hosted two sessions designed to show how AI can connect IT, fundraising, program management, and operations teams. These on‑demand sessions highlight practical strategies and real nonprofit experiences you can learn from today: Silo Busting for Nonprofits - bridging gaps between technology and program staff in nonprofit organizations
01/12/2025
Immersive events in Microsoft Teams: Now generally available
We’re excited to announce the general availability of immersive events in Teams! This milestone brings 3D event experiences natively into Teams, making it easier to host engaging, interactive events that bring people together on PC, Mac, and Meta Quest devices. With immersive events, organizers can create tailored 3D environments where attendees join as avatar...
01/12/2025
How AI Is Accelerating the Fight Against Pediatric AIDS
When Data Meets Compassion, Lives Change For over three decades, the Elizabeth Glase...
01/12/2025
Faster Python on Azure Functions with uvloop
Python 3.13+ apps on Azure Functions are now faster by default. By replacing the standard event loop with uvloop, the Functions Python worker delivers higher throughput and lower latency for asynchronous workloads — no code changes required. Introduction Azure Functions powers millions of customer sc...
01/12/2025
Faster Azure Functions Python with uvloop
Python 3.13+ apps on Azure Functions are now faster by default. By replacing the standard event loop with uvloop, the Functions Python worker delivers higher throughput and lower latency for asynchronous workloads — no code changes required. Introduction Azure Functions powers millions of customer sc...
01/12/2025
Course Retirement Announcement: MB-7005 and MB-7006
The below courses are being retired on January 30, 2026 due to low performance. Any students interested in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights can look forward to new AI feature focused certifications in the Business Applications space. MB-7005: Create and manage journeys with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
01/12/2025
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Customer Newsletter
What's new in Defender for Cloud? Defender for Cloud integrates into the Defender portal as part of the broader Microsoft Security ecosystem, now in public preview. This integration, while adding posture management insight, eliminates silos natively to allow security teams to see and act on threats across all cloud, hybrid, and code environments from one place. For more information, see our public
01/12/2025
Beyond Visibility: Hybrid Identity Protection with Microsoft Entra & Defender for Identity
In a previous blog, we explored how Microsoft Entra and Defender for Identity form a powerful ...
01/12/2025
Key findings from product telemetry: top storage security alerts across industries
1.0 Introduction Cloud storage stands at the core of AI-driven applications, making its security more vital than ever. As generative AI continues to drive innovation, protecting the storage infrastructure becomes central to ensuring both the reliability and safety of AI solutions.Every industry encounters its own set of storage security challenges. For example, financial services must navigate complex compliance requirements and guard against insider risks. Healthcare organizat...
01/12/2025
MiniMax-M2: Technical Deep Dive into Interleaved Thinking for Agentic Coding Workflows
The AI coding landscape just got a massive shake-up. If you’ve been relying on Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o for your dev workflows, you know the pain: great performance often comes with a bill that makes your wallet weep, or latency that breaks your flow.This article provides a technical overview of MiniMax-M2, focusing on its […] The post MiniMa...
01/12/2025
Microsoft 365 Copilot is now available in GCC-High
We’re excited to announce that Microsoft 365 Copilot is now available for customers in GCC-High, bringing powerful work-ready AI capabilities to organizations with the highest security and compliance requirements. This announcement builds on previous launches in the GCC and
01/12/2025
Catch up on Microsoft Security sessions and announcements from Ignite 2025
Ignite 2025 delivered groundbreaking innovations for securing the agentic era—where AI agents transform how we work and collaborate. If you missed the live sessions, news announcements, or want to dive deeper, here’s your quick start guide to the most important resources and actionable steps to stay informed. <...
01/12/2025
20 Years of Student Innovation: Helping Students Turn Builds into Breakthroughs
Meet A Few Student Founders Who Turned Ideas into Impact Imagine Cup alumni have gone on to raise funding, w...
01/12/2025
Ushering in the Next Era of Cloud-Native AI Capabilities for Radiology
Introducing Dragon Copilot, your AI companion for PowerScribe One For radiologists, the reporting workflow of the future is here. At RSNA 2025, in Chicago, we’re showcasing Dragon Copilot, a cloud-native companion for PowerScribe One. Currently in preview, Dragon Copilot builds on the trusted capabilities of PowerScribe One to accelerate innovation and modernize reporting workflows while unlocking extensibility for radiology teams and partners. ...
01/12/2025
Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter - December 2025
In this issue: Ace Aviator of the Month News from our product group Community Playbook News from our community ...
01/12/2025
PostgreSQL 18 Now GA on Azure Postgres Flexible Server
We’re thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of PostgreSQL 18 on Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server. This release marks Azure’s fastest turnaround ever between community release and managed service availability - bringing PostgreSQL 18 to Azure customers withi...
01/12/2025
Introducing the Dragon Copilot experience for nurses
The solution isn’t layering AI onto outdated workflows—it’s reinventing how nurses work, making technology invisible and care effortless.Microsoft Dragon Copilot brings that vision to life—empowering nurses to “care out loud” and capturing documentation seamlessly while technology fades into the background.Dragon Copilot turns real-time bedside conversations and observations into the clinical documentation nurses need—without pulling focus from the patient.
01/12/2025
Implementing and Managing an ADCS Offline Root Certificate Authority (Part 1)
My name is Ron Arestia, and I am a Security Researcher with Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team (DART). We respond to customer cybersecurity incidents to assist with containment and recovery from threat actors. In this blog post, we will be covering the basics of implementing an Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) offline root Certificate Authority (CA) and how to manage it securely. This is the first in a series of follow up posts to my original article reviewing
01/12/2025
How to Design an Advanced Multi-Page Interactive Analytics Dashboard with Dynamic Filtering, Live KPIs, and Rich Visual Exploration Using Panel
In this tutorial, we build an advanced multi-page interactive dashboard using Panel.Through each component of implementation, we explore how to generate synthetic data, apply rich filters, visualize dynamic time-series trends, compare segments and regions, and even simulate live KPI updates.The post How to Design an Advanced Multi-Page Interactive Analytics Dashboard with Dynamic Filtering, Live KPIs, and Rich Visual Exploration Using Panel appeared first on MarkTechPost.
30/11/2025
Defender for AI services: Threat Protection and AI red team workshop
Generative AI is reshaping how enterprises operate, introducing new efficiencies—and new risks. Imagine launching a helpful chatbot, only to learn a cleverly crafted prompt can bypass safety controls and exfiltrate sensitive data. This is today’s reality: every system prompt, plugin/tool, dataset, fine‑tune, or orchestration step can change the attack surface. This is due to the non deterministic nature in how LLM models craft responses in output. The slightest change in the input of a prompt...
30/11/2025
Meta AI Researchers Introduce Matrix: A Ray Native a Decentralized Framework for Multi Agent Synthetic Data Generation
How do you keep synthetic data fresh and diverse for modern AI models without turning a single orchestration pipeline into the bottleneck? Meta AI researchers introduce Matrix, a decentralized framework where both control and data flow are serialized into messages that move through distributed queues. As LLM training increasingly relies on synthetic conversations, tool traces […] The post
30/11/2025
Common Misconceptions When Running Locally vs. Deploying to Azure Linux-based Web Apps
TOC Introduction Environment Variable Build Time Compatible Memory Conclusion 1. Introduction One of the most common issues during project development is the scenario where “the application runs perfectly in the local environment but fails after being deployed to Azure.” <...
30/11/2025
StepFun AI Releases Step-Audio-R1: A New Audio LLM that Finally Benefits from Test Time Compute Scaling
Why do current audio AI models often perform worse when they generate longer reasoning instead of grounding their decisions in the actual sound. StepFun research team releases Step-Audio-R1, a new audio LLM designed for test time compute scaling, address this failure mode by showing that the accuracy drop with chain of thought is not an […] The post
29/11/2025
Securing Confidential VM Backups with Azure Recovery Services Vault and Private Endpoints
The answer lies in combining Azure Recovery Services Vault (RSV) with Private Endpoints.With private endpoints, all traffic between your Confidential VM and RSV flows over the secure Microsoft backbone instead of the public internet.Backing up Confidential VMs with Azure Recovery Services vault over private endpoints gives you the best of both worlds: confidential computing protections for your workloads and secure, compliant backups that never leave the private network.
29/11/2025
NVIDIA AI Releases Orchestrator-8B: A Reinforcement Learning Trained Controller for Efficient Tool and Model Selection
How can an AI system learn to pick the right model or tool for each step of a task instead of always relying on one large model for everything? NVIDIA researchers release ToolOrchestra, a novel method for training a small language model to act as the orchestrator- the ‘brain’ of a heterogeneous tool-use agent From […] The post
29/11/2025
A Coding Guide to Design an Agentic AI System Using a Control-Plane Architecture for Safe, Modular, and Scalable Tool-Driven Reasoning Workflows
In this tutorial, we build an advanced Agentic AI using the control-plane design pattern, and we walk through each component step by step as we implement it. We treat the control plane as the central orchestrator that coordinates tools, manages safety rules, and structures the reasoning loop. Also, we set up a miniature retrieval system, […] The post
29/11/2025
Connection, Innovation and Social Impact at Latin America’s Largest Microsoft Community Conference
A Historic Gathering for the Microsoft CommunityMVP Conf 2025 was a milestone for the Microsoft community in Latin America, bringing together 3,000 attendees across six Brazilian cities.Beyond technology, MVP Conf 2025 had a strong social impact.
28/11/2025
Replace your VPN — Global Secure Access in Microsoft Entra
Where, on your domain controllers, you can install a Private Access sensor which redirects authentication traffic to Microsoft Entra for Conditional Access checks prior to the DC issuing Kerberos tickets to access the resource.On the right, the Global Secure Access Client shows network traffic traversing out to Microsoft Entra service, and I don’t have the Global Secure Access Client enabled just yet.We can also defend against prompt injection attacks where users try to bypass AI system guidelines.
28/11/2025
Addressing .Net EOL installations for Windows Admins
TL; DR: Installing the latest .NET runtime on a server does not upgrade existing applications that are built on unsupported versions (for example, anything older than .NET 8 as of Nov 2025). Applications must be explicitly upgraded through a full development lifecycle—retargeting the project to a supported framework, updating dependencies, rebuilding, testing, and redeploying.
28/11/2025
Azure App Service AI Scenarios: Complete Sample with AI Foundry Integration
This sample application demonstrates how to implement various AI scenarios on Azure App Service using Azure AI Foundry. It provides production-ready code that you can integrate into your existing Flask applications by copying the AIPlaygroundCode package and following the integration steps. Ideal for: Developers looking to add AI capabilities to existing Flask applications, learn Azure AI Foundry integration patterns, and implement enterprise-grade AI fe...
28/11/2025
Function Calling with Small Language Models
With this, we have ability to transform small language models from passive text generators into intelligent agents that can:The model calls this function to get the weather data. it contacts OpenWeatherMap API, gets real weather data and returns it as a python dictionaryMCP is an open standard that provides pre-built, standardized servers for common tools.
28/11/2025
Upcoming Live Stream: Building AI Agents with the AI Toolkit & Microsoft Foundry
We’re at a moment where generative AI is shifting from single-prompt interactions to agents that can process visuals, store memory, and act.That’s exactly what we’re doing in my upcoming live stream on Building AI Agents with the AI Toolkit & Microsoft Foundry — a hands-on walkthrough of the full lab experience from Microsoft Ignite 2025!This session is designed for developers, makers, and anyone curious about how multimodal agents get from idea to working prototype.
28/11/2025
DeepSeek AI Releases DeepSeekMath-V2: The Open Weights Maths Model That Scored 118/120 on Putnam 2024
How can an AI system prove complex olympiad level math problems in clear natural language while also checking that its own reasoning is actually correct? DeepSeek AI has released DeepSeekMath-V2, an open weights large language model that is optimized for natural language theorem proving with self verification. The model is built on DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp-Base, runs as […] The post
28/11/2025
Step-by-Step Guide: Route Azure SQL Audit Logs to Multiple Log Analytics Workspaces
Scenario:Many organizations need to route audit logs from Azure SQL Database to more than one Log Analytics workspace. Enable Auditing to Log Analytics WorkspaceConfiguring multiple diagnostic settings allows you to send Azure SQL Database audit logs to several Log Analytics workspaces.
28/11/2025
A Coding Implementation for an Agentic AI Framework that Performs Literature Analysis, Hypothesis Generation, Experimental Planning, Simulation, and Scientific Reporting
In this tutorial, we build a complete scientific discovery agent step by step and experience how each component works together to form a coherent research workflow. We begin by loading our literature corpus, constructing retrieval and LLM modules, and then assembling agents that search papers, generate hypotheses, design experiments, and produce structured reports. Through snippets […] The post
28/11/2025
Transforming SAP for the Intelligent Enterprise with Azure, Microsoft Fabric, and AI
Why SAP on Azure Matters: Azure gives SAP systems the performance, stability, and global reach they need. It also includes built-in tools for analytics, AI, governance, and security, which are all essential for modern businesses. Microsoft’s documentation on SAP workloads in Azure explains this broader modernization vision: Get started with SAP and Microsoft integrat...
27/11/2025
Microsoft palkitsee Suomen kumppaneitaan Vuoden kumppani 2025 -tunnustuksilla
Microsoft on jälleen palkinnut teknologiakumppaneitaan Suomessa ja globaalisti. Microsoftin Vuoden kumppani Suomessa -tunnustuksen sai tänä vuonna Vivicta, joka on erinomainen esimerkki innovatiivisesta ja asiakaslähtöisestä työstä asiakkaiden digitalisaation edistämiseksi.Lisäksi tunnustuksia jaettiin seitsemässä paikallisessa kategoriassa. Microsoftin ekosysteemiin kuuluu Suomessa 3000 kumppaniyritystä. ”Microsoftin kumppaniekosysteemi Suomessa on ainutla...
27/11/2025
Azure PostgreSQL Lesson Learned#9: How to Stay Informed About Planned Maintenance and Alerts
Co‑authored with HaiderZ-MSFT Symptoms Customer reported no visibility into the timing of planned maintenance. Uncertainty about how to receive alerts or verify maintenance status. Root Cause Azure sends
27/11/2025
Unlocking Your First AI Solution on Azure: Practical Paths for Developers of All Backgrounds
Over the past several months, I’ve spent hundreds of hours working directly with teams—from small startups to mid-market innovators—who share the same aspiration: “We want to use AI, but where do we start?” This question comes up everywhere. It crosses industries, geographies, skill levels, and team sizes. And as developers, we often feel the pressure to “solve AI” end-to-end—model...
27/11/2025
Background tasks in .NET
What is a Background Task? A background task (or background service) is work that runs behind the scenes in an application without blocking the main user flow and often without direct user interaction. Think of it as a worker or
27/11/2025
OceanBase Releases seekdb: An Open Source AI Native Hybrid Search Database for Multi-model RAG and AI Agents
AI applications rarely deal with one clean table. They mix user profiles, chat logs, JSON metadata, embeddings, and sometimes spatial data. Most teams answer this with a patchwork of an OLTP database, a vector store, and a search engine. OceanBase released seekdb, an open source AI focused database (under the Apache 2.0 license). seekdb is […] The post
27/11/2025
From Zero to Hero: Building a Production-Ready SIP Gateway for Azure Voice Live
Introduction Voice technology is transforming how we interact with machines, making conversations with AI feel more natural than ever before. With the public beta release of the Voice Live API developers now have the tools to create low-latency, multimodal voice experiences in their apps, opening up endless possibilities for innovation. Gone are the days when building a voice bot required stitching together multiple models for transcription, inference, and text-t...
27/11/2025
Exploring USB4 in Windows Device Portal
OverviewUSB4™ brings high-speed connectivity and advanced tunneling capabilities to modern Windows devices. To help developers and IT professionals visualize and manage USB4 topologies, Windows provides the USB4 domain viewer via the Windows device portal. A demo of USB4 Domain Viewer in Windows Device Portal.
27/11/2025
Observability for the Age of Generative AI
Every generation of computing brings new challenges in how we monitor and trust our systems. With the rise of Generative AI, applications are no longer static code—they’re living systems that plan, reason, call tools, and make choices dynamically. Traditional observability, built for servers an...
27/11/2025
Guide for Architecting Azure-Databricks: Design to Deployment
Author's: Chris Walk cwalk, Dan Johnson danjohn1234, Eduardo dos Santos
26/11/2025
Azure Skilling at Microsoft Ignite 2025
The energy at Microsoft Ignite was unmistakable. Developers, architects, and technical decision-makers converged in San Francisco to explore the latest innovations in cloud technology, AI applications, and data platforms. Beyond the keynotes and product announcements was something even more valuable: an integrated skilling ecosystem designed to transform how you build with Azure. This year Azure Skilling at Microsoft Ignite 2025 brought together distinct learning experiences, over 150+...
26/11/2025
Getting Started with Copilot Studio: Your PAA & FAQ Guide
What is Microsoft Copilot Studio?Microsoft Copilot Studio is a low-code, graphical tool within the Power Platform used for building and conversational bots. It empowers users, even those without extensive technical backgrounds, to create sophisticated logic and connect to various data sources and services using prebuilt or custom plugins.Is Copilot Studio easy to use for beginners?Yes Copilot Studio is designed to be easy for beginners.
26/11/2025
App Assure Powers Seamless Transitions for the new Outlook
Microsoft is continually evolving its products to deliver greater functionality, stronger security, and better experiences for users. That evolution is now underway for Outlook as we transition from classic Outlook to the new Outlook for Windows, a move that accelerates access to innovations like Copilot and other AI-native tools essential for success in today’s business landscape. Users ar...
26/11/2025
Best Practices for Migrating COTS Applications to Microsoft Azure
Understanding the Nature of COTS Migrations Migrating Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) applications to Microsoft Azure requires more care than a standard application migration. These workloads usually depend on strict vendor requirements, fixed upgrade cycles, licensing limitations, and specific operating systems or databases. Because of this, the first step in any COTS migration is a detailed discussion with the software vendor to confirm what Azure services, operating...
26/11/2025
Ask the Windows experts at Tech Community Live
Join us December 2 for a Windows edition of Tech Community Live. Together, my colleagues across Windows will be answering your questions on the new features and capabilities announced at Microsoft Ignite and in recent months. This event is your opportunity to engage directly with the engineering teams behind the features and get the information you need to keep your updates flowing and your deployments progressing.
26/11/2025
Medical imaging embeddings bake-off: How Microsoft’s MedImageInsight compares to leading models
Note: This post reports performance results on a specific evaluation dataset collected from real clinical data. These results do not constitute general clinical performance claims. This post shares methods and principles that can guide clinical AI development but are not meant for direct use in clinical settings without validation. You must validate performance on your own data, ensure models fit within your regulatory processes. You are fully responsible...
26/11/2025
Tencent Hunyuan Releases HunyuanOCR: a 1B Parameter End to End OCR Expert VLM
Tencent Hunyuan has released HunyuanOCR, a 1B parameter vision language model that is specialized for OCR and document understanding. The model is built on Hunyuan’s native multimodal architecture and runs spotting, parsing, information extraction, visual question answering, and text image translation through a single end to end pipeline. HunyuanOCR is a lightweight alternative to general […] The post
26/11/2025
The Journey of a Token: What Really Happens Inside a Transformer
Large language models (LLMs) are based on the transformer architecture, a complex deep neural network whose input is a sequence of token embeddings.
26/11/2025
Securing Azure AI Applications: A Deep Dive into Emerging Threats
Why AI Security Can’t Be Ignored? Generative AI is rapidly reshaping how enterprises operate—accelerating decision-making, enhancing customer experiences, and powering intelligent automation across critical workflows. But as organizations adopt these capabilities at scale, a new challenge emerges: AI introduces security risks that traditi...
26/11/2025
Building personalized experiences - Ichicraft - SharePoint Partner Showcase
We are excited to share a new episode on our partner showcase series focused on SharePoint in Microsoft 365. In this post, we focus on Ichicraft. Ichicraft crafts digital experiences with precision, personality, and purpose. They are a boutique software company on a mission to make the Microsoft 365 workplace feel more human. Rooted in the Netherlands and driven by deta...
26/11/2025
Black Forest Labs Releases FLUX.2: A 32B Flow Matching Transformer for Production Image Pipelines
Black Forest Labs has released FLUX.2, its second generation image generation and editing system. FLUX.2 targets real world creative workflows such as marketing assets, product photography, design layouts, and complex infographics, with editing support up to 4 megapixels and strong control over layout, logos, and typography. FLUX.2 product family and FLUX.2 [dev] The FLUX.2 family […] The post
26/11/2025
How to Implement Functional Components of Transformer and Mini-GPT Model from Scratch Using Tinygrad to Understand Deep Learning Internals
In this tutorial, we explore how to build neural networks from scratch using Tinygrad while remaining fully hands-on with tensors, autograd, attention mechanisms, and transformer architectures. We progressively build every component ourselves, from basic tensor operations to multi-head attention, transformer blocks, and, finally, a working mini-GPT model. Through each stage, we observe how Tinygrad’s simplicity […] The post
26/11/2025
Pretrain a BERT Model from Scratch
This article is divided into three parts; they are: • Creating a BERT Model the Easy Way • Creating a BERT Model from Scratch with PyTorch • Pre-training the BERT Model If your goal is to create a BERT model so that you can train it on your own data, using the Hugging Face `transformers` library is the easiest way to get started.
26/11/2025
ICYMI: Watch replays of Microsoft Entra sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2025
At Microsoft Ignite 2025, Microsoft Security took center stage with a clear message: secure access is foundational for the AI-driven future. Across keynotes, breakout sessions, and demos, we showcased innovations that help organizations confidently expand Zero Trust strategies to include AI agents, apps, and identities. We hope you were able to be there or tune in live; but if not, we’ve pulled this article together with all the best replay links for identity and network access professionals....
26/11/2025
Copilot Your Holidays
Holiday-stress creeping up on you? You're not alone! Between travel, grocery shopping, and wrapping up work, it’s easy to feel like a gingerbread house on the verge of collapse. Good news: you've stumbled across Copilot Your Holidays! A podcast-style series where three Microsoft folks share simple ways to use Copilot to make the season smoother. Join us each week for Copilot tips, tricks, and a hearty laugh along the way 🙂.
25/11/2025
Why Your Organization Should Set Up Asset Libraries in SharePoint (and Enable Them for Copilot)
In today’s fast-paced digital workplace, brand consistency and productivity are critical. Yet, many organizations struggle with scattered images, outdated templates, and employees spending time hunting for approved assets. This is where SharePoint Organization Asset Libraries (OALs) come in—and when integrated with Microsoft Copilot, they become a game-changer. Watch the following two videos on setup in SharePoint and Copilot.
25/11/2025
Salesforce AI Research Introduces xRouter: A Reinforcement Learning Router for Cost Aware LLM Orchestration
When your application can call many different LLMs with very different prices and capabilities, who should decide which one answers each request? Salesforce AI research team introduces ‘xRouter’, a tool-calling–based routing system that targets this gap with a reinforcement learning based router and learns when to answer locally and when to call external models, while […] The post
25/11/2025
K-Means Cluster Evaluation with Silhouette Analysis
Clustering models in machine learning must be assessed by how well they separate data into meaningful groups with distinctive characteristics.
25/11/2025
Agent0: A Fully Autonomous AI Framework that Evolves High-Performing Agents without External Data through Multi-Step Co-Evolution
Large language models need huge human datasets, so what happens if the model must create all its own curriculum and teach itself to use tools? A team of researchers from UNC-Chapel Hill, Salesforce Research and Stanford University introduce ‘Agent0’, a fully autonomous framework that evolves high-performing agents without external data through multi-step co-evolution and seamless […] The post
25/11/2025
How to Build a Neuro-Symbolic Hybrid Agent that Combines Logical Planning with Neural Perception for Robust Autonomous Decision-Making
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to combine the strengths of symbolic reasoning with neural learning to build a powerful hybrid agent. We focus on creating a neuro-symbolic architecture that uses classical planning for structure, rules, and goal-directed behavior, while neural networks handle perception and action refinement. As we walk through the code, we see […] The post
25/11/2025
Microsoft AI Releases Fara-7B: An Efficient Agentic Model for Computer Use
How do we safely let an AI agent handle real web tasks like booking, searching, and form filling directly on our own devices without sending everything to the cloud? Microsoft Research has released Fara-7B, a 7 billion parameter agentic small language model designed specifically for computer use. It is an open weight Computer Use Agent […] The post Microsof...
24/11/2025
The Complete Guide to Docker for Machine Learning Engineers
Machine learning models often behave differently across environments.
24/11/2025
NVIDIA AI Releases Nemotron-Elastic-12B: A Single AI Model that Gives You 6B/9B/12B Variants without Extra Training Cost
Why are AI dev teams still training and storing multiple large language models for different deployment needs when one elastic model can generate several sizes at the same cost? NVIDIA is collapsing the usual ‘model family’ stack into a single training job. NVIDIA AI team releases Nemotron-Elastic-12B, a 12B parameter reasoning model that embeds nested […] The post
24/11/2025
AI Interview Series #3: Explain Federated Learning
Question: “You’re an ML engineer at a fitness company like Fitbit or Apple Health. Millions of users generate sensitive sensor data every day — heart rate, sleep cycles, step counts, workout patterns, etc. You want to build a model that predicts health risk or recommends personalized workouts. But due to privacy laws (GDPR, HIPAA), none […] The post AI Interview Series ...
24/11/2025
Preparing Data for BERT Training
This article is divided into four parts; they are: • Preparing Documents • Creating Sentence Pairs from Document • Masking Tokens • Saving the Training Data for Reuse Unlike decoder-only models, BERT's pretraining is more complex.
24/11/2025
BERT Models and Its Variants
This article is divided into two parts; they are: • Architecture and Training of BERT • Variations of BERT BERT is an encoder-only model.
22/11/2025
From Shannon to Modern AI: A Complete Information Theory Guide for Machine Learning
In 1948, Claude Shannon published a paper that changed how we think about information forever.
20/11/2025
General Availability announcement of Backup/Restore capabilities in SQL Server 2025
Over the past several months, we’ve heard from countless customers who are eager for more robust options to protect, compress, and safeguard their SQL Server data. Since introducing these features in public preview, organizations of all sizes have validated their value in real-world workloads and provided invaluable feedback. Today, we are thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of three powerful SQL Server 2025 features:
19/11/2025
Microsoft Ignite 2025: Kumppanit AI-murroksen eturintamassa
Microsoft Ignite 2025 toi selkeän viestin: tekoäly ja agenttiteknologiat eivät ole enää tulevaisuuden lupauksia, vaan tämän päivän kilpailuetu. Yritykset, jotka omaksuvat AI:n strategisesti ja laajasti, erottuvat markkinoilla – ja kumppaneilla on tässä ratkaiseva rooli. Asiakkaat etsivät luotettavia asiantuntijoita, jotka eivät ainoastaan myy AI-ratkaisuja, vaan myös elävät AI-transformaatiota omassa toiminnassaan. Ignite esitteli uuden Fr...
19/11/2025
ESPC25 Conference: December 1-4
ESPC is Europe’s premier Microsoft 365 and AI conference. Don’t miss this year’s community conference in Dublin, December 1-4. Hear from more than 120 speakers, connect with Microsoft experts, and achieve more with Microsoft 365 and AI. Use discount code ESPC25MSPART for €200 off. Secure your spot at ESPC25 by booking now
19/11/2025
Pure Storage Cloud, Azure Native evolves at Microsoft Ignite!
The Azure Storage team has heavily invested in our partner ecosystem to meet all customer data storage needs and make it easier to migrate any application workload to Azure. You will find our complete list in the validated partner catalog (link below) and find partner solutions conveniently located in Storage Center on the Azure Portal. Azure Native Pure Storage Cloud is the latest example of our deep investment in partners. ...
19/11/2025
Sensitivity labels preservation and SharePoint ACLs in Azure AI Search
We’re introducing new enterprise security capabilities in Azure AI Search and knowledge bases to help you deliver more trusted, policy-aligned knowledge retrieval for RAG apps and agentic applications. This...
19/11/2025
Managing Multiple Deployment Stacks in Azure Bicep: Patterns and Best Practices
Deployment Stacks: Deployment Stacks are a logical grouping of Azure resources defined using Bicep or ARM. When you deploy a stack: Azure tracks which resources belong to that stack You can update or delete resources as a group G...
19/11/2025
How to get a free Azure SQL Database or Managed Instance
Next to the performance and security proven engine, with Azure SQL solutions you’re getting dozens of other benefits, such as auto-scaling, auto-patching/maintenance, auto-backups and built-in HA. Free Azure SQL offers fully managed resources with zero cost and zero commitment. There’re two options ...
19/11/2025
New in Microsoft Marketplace: November 19, 2025
Learn about 80 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
19/11/2025
Azure Copilot Migration Agent - Bringing Agentic Migration and Modernization to life
Enterprises today need more than speed they need confidence. Migration projects often stall because of complexity, fragmented tools, and unclear ROI. With Migration Agent in Azure Copilot, we’re changing that equation. This new capability brings AI-driven intelligence to every stage of migration and modernization, helping you move from discovery to execution in hours, not weeks. and completing the journey with confidence. Migration is no longer just about moving workloads. It’s about u...
19/11/2025
Why Decision Trees Fail (and How to Fix Them)
Decision tree-based models for predictive machine learning tasks like classification and regression are undoubtedly rich in advantages — such as their ability to capture nonlinear relationships among features and their intuitive interpretability that makes it easy to trace decisions.
19/11/2025
Build and connect Microsoft Foundry agents to MongoDB Atlas with new native integrations
MongoDB Atlas is a leading document database that’s rapidly gaining traction among Azure customers due to various deep integrations available across Microsoft platforms. In Aug 2025, we announced the General Availability (GA) of native integration for MongoDB Atlas — a milestone that marked a new era for developers and enterprises building AI-powered applications on Azure. Alongside ...
19/11/2025
General Availability: Granular RBAC in Azure Monitor Logs
We’re excited to announce the general availability of Granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Azure Monitor Logs! This capability enables you to set fine-grained data access control at the row level, giving you more flexibility and security when managing log data. Back in May 2025,
19/11/2025
Enabling Private Connectivity for Microsoft Fabric: A Practical Guide
As an Infra Architect working with large, security-sensitive enterprise environments, one principle consistently guides infrastructure architects: If a platform can't operate inside a private network boundary, it won’t make it to production. This became very real when our Data Engineering team sent me a simple-looking request:
19/11/2025
Introducing Microsoft’s Network Operations Agent – A Telco framework for Autonomous Networks
How NOA Works: Multi-Agent Intelligence with Human Oversight At its core, NOA is a multi-agent system tailored for telecom operations. It hosts a suite of specialized agents, each with a focused ...
19/11/2025
Reimagining Network Operations: How Microsoft NetAI Tackles Hyperscale Challenges
The Business Imperative: Why Network Operations Must Change Modern network operators face a perfect storm of challenges: Exponential Growth in Events and Maintenance Network events and maintenance activities are increasing at an unprecedented rate. According to Microsoft’s analysis, weekly network events are projected to grow from hundreds to thousands over the next five years. Maintena...
19/11/2025
Azure ND GB300 v6 now Generally Available - Hyper-optimized for Generative and Agentic AI workloads
We are pleased to announce the General Availability (GA) of ND GB300 v6 virtual machines, delivering the next leap in AI infrastructure. On 10/09, we shared the delivery of the first at-scale production cluster with more than 4,600 NVIDIA GB300 NVL72, featuring NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs connected through...
19/11/2025
Announcing Deployment capabilities (preview) in Azure Copilot
What's new? Today, we are excited to announce the Deployment Agent for Azure Copilot, designed to make infrastructure planning and deployment faster, smarter, and easier. The Deployment Agent acts as your dedicated cloud architecture assistant, leveraging Azure’s Well-Architected Framework (WAF) ...
19/11/2025
Microsoft Foundry on Windows Server
As organizations embrace AI, new opportunities exist for Windows Server customers who want to leverage on-premises AI. While Azure remains the best pl...
19/11/2025
Accelerating Enterprise AI with Microsoft Foundry
Today at Ignite 2025, the spotlight shone brightly on Microsoft Foundry the unified AI platform empowering enterprises to build, deploy, and govern intelligent agents at scale. New features released today are designed to enhance model accessibility, agent sophistication, and enterprise-grade reliability. Below is a deep dive into these powerful updates. Anthropic’s Claude Models Join Foundry
19/11/2025
SQL Server 2025 Integration Services General Availability
Microsoft.Data.SqlClient offers a modern, secure, and future-ready data access solution for SQL Server and Azure SQL.Integration Services support will be included in the upcoming CU.Integration Services features in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS IS)
18/11/2025
How to Build an Agentic Deep Reinforcement Learning System with Curriculum Progression, Adaptive Exploration, and Meta-Level UCB Planning
In this tutorial, we build an advanced agentic Deep Reinforcement Learning system that guides an agent to learn not only actions within an environment but also how to choose its own training strategies. We design a Dueling Double DQN learner, introduce a curriculum with increasing difficulty, and integrate multiple exploration modes that adapt as training […] The post
18/11/2025
SQL Server Management Studio 22 (GA) supporting SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
SQL Server Management Studio 22 generally availability has been released. SSMS 22 GA version is recommended to use with Integration Services, as ...
18/11/2025
xAI’s Grok 4.1 Pushes Toward Higher Emotional Intelligence, Lower Hallucinations and Tighter Safety Controls
How do you build an AI assistant that feels emotionally intelligent and reliable to humans, instead of just making a bigger model? Meet Grok 4.1, xAI’s latest large language model and it now powers Grok across grok.com, X and the mobile consumer apps. According to xAI team, the model is available to all users and […] The post
18/11/2025
Unlocking Client-Side Configuration at Scale with Azure App Configuration and Azure Front Door
As modern apps shift more logic to the browser, Azure App Configuration now brings dynamic configuration directly to client-side applications. Through its integration with Azure Front Door, developers can deliver configuration to thousands or millions of clients with CDN-scale performance while avoiding the need to expose secrets or maintain custom proxy layers. This capability is especially important for AI-powered and agentic client...
18/11/2025
Windows Hardware Compatibility Program - Guidance for Windows 11, version 26H1 Release
Building on the recent WIP Blog post, we’re releasing WHCP and HLK for Windows 11, version 26H1 to support partners working on engineering efforts. This release is focused on enabling new platforms and is not intended for existing or previously released silicon. For mainstream products, continue using <...
18/11/2025
New Portal Experience for Feature Management
Feature flags have become an essential tool for modern software development, enabling teams to deploy code safely, control feature rollouts, and experiment with new functionality without the risk of breaking production environments. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into applications— from LLM-powered features to model version management— the need for safe, controlled deployments has never been more critical. The previous experience forced you to make a decision upfront: should I create a...
18/11/2025
December Prompt-a-thon for Government Customers
Power Your AI Transformation: Government Copilot Prompt-a-thon As we wrap up an incredible year of innovation, we’re thrilled to invite you to our fifth Copilot Prompt‑a‑thon of 2025—a hands‑on experience that’s transforming how government teams work. This event isn’t just about learning prompts; it’s about collaborating directly with Microsoft coaches, exploring real mission sc...
18/11/2025
Announcing Kubernetes Center (Preview) On Azure Portal
Today, we’re excited to introduce the Kubernetes Center in the Azure portal, a new experience to simplify how customers manage, monitor, and optimize Azure Kubernetes Services environments at scale. The Kubernetes Center provides a unified view across all clusters, intelligent insights, and streamlined workflows that help platform teams stay in control while enabling developers to move fast. As Kubernetes adoption accelerates, many teams face growing challenges in managing clusters and...
18/11/2025
Agentic Applications on Azure Container Apps with Microsoft Foundry
By combining Azure Container Apps with the Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) and Microsoft Foundry, developers can run containerized agents on ACA while using Foundry to visualize and monitor how those agents behave.In this blog, we’ll walk through how to build an agent running on Azure Container Apps using Microsoft Agent Framework and OpenTelemetry, and then connect its telemetry to Microsoft Foundry so you can see your ACA-hosted agent directly in the Foundry monitoring experience.Connect the resource to your AI Foundry project.
18/11/2025
OracleDatabase@Azure expands footprint to 31 regions and strengthens security with Azure Key Vault
With plans to bring two more regions online in the next three months, Oracle Database@Azure will continue to lead the industry with 33 regions around the world – more than any other hyperscaler.Oracle Database@azure is now live in 31 regions worldwideOracle Database@Azure is live in North Central, South India, and France South, giving enterprises more flexibility and control over global deployments of their business-critical applications.
18/11/2025
Protect patient privacy across languages with the de-identification service's preview expansion
Machine learning and analytics are transforming healthcare by streamlining clinical workflows, powering AI models and unlocking new insights from patient data. These innovations are fueled by textual data rich in Protected Health Information (PHI). To be used for research, innovation and operational improvements, this data must be responsibly de-identified to protect patient privacy. Manual de-identification can be slow, expensive, and error-prone, creating bottlene...
18/11/2025
Training a Tokenizer for BERT Models
This article is divided into two parts; they are: • Picking a Dataset • Training a Tokenizer To keep things simple, we'll use English text only.
18/11/2025
Removing barriers to migrating databases to Azure with Striim’s Unlimited Database Migration program
Alok Pareek, co-founder and Executive Vice President of Product and Engineering at Striim Shireesh Thota, Corporate Vice President of Databases at Microsoft Every modernization strategy starts with data. It’s what enables advanced analytics and AI agents today, and prepares enterprises for what’s to come in th...
18/11/2025
Announcing Public Preview of Window Server 2025 on Azure Kubernetes Service
We are excited to announce the public preview of Windows Server 2025 support on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) - delivering the latest security, performance, and compatibility improvements for our customers. You can now deploy node pools running Windows Server 2025 alongside those running Windows Server 2022, Azure Linux, and Ubuntu. With the new Windows container portability functionality introduced in Windows Server 2025, you can also run your Windows Server 2022-based containers on Windows...
18/11/2025
Announcing Advanced Kubernetes Troubleshooting Agent Capabilities (preview) in Azure Copilot
What’s new? Today, we're announcing Kubernetes troubleshooting agent capabilities in Az...
18/11/2025
Google’s Gemini 3 Pro turns sparse MoE and 1M token context into a practical engine for multimodal agentic workloads
How do we move from language models that only answer prompts to systems that can reason over million token contexts, understand real world signals, and reliably act as agents on our behalf? Google just released Gemini 3 family with Gemini 3 Pro as the centerpiece that positions as a major step toward more general AI […] The post
18/11/2025
General Availability: Large Message Support in Azure Event Hubs
Azure Event Hubs is a cloud-native service that streams millions of events per second with minimal latency, fully compatible with Apache Kafka and requiring no code changes for existing Kafka workloads. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Large Message Support in Azure Event Hubs, enabling you to send and receive messages up to
18/11/2025
Available today: OpenAI's Sora 2 in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Transform your creative workflow with AI-generated video – what it means for IT We're excited to announce that OpenAI's Sora 2—their breakthrough video and audio generation model—is now available in Microsoft 365 Copilot. This integration brings professional-grade AI video creation directly into your familiar Microsoft 365 environment, empowering users to generate compelling video content while maintaining the enterprise security and compliance standards you expect from Microsoft.
18/11/2025
Announcing General Availability of the mssql-python Driver
We’re thrilled to announce that the mssql-python driver is now Generally Available! 🎉 This milestone marks a major step forward in delivering a modern, high-performance, and developer-friendly experience for Python developers working with SQL Server, Azure SQL and SQL databases in Fabric. Why mssql-python? The mssql-python driver is a DB-API 2.0 compliant driver designed from the ground up to provide speed, simplicity, and security for Python applicati...
18/11/2025
Unlocking Storage Optimizations: Smart Tiering for Blobs and ADLS in Azure Storage
We are excited to introduce the public preview of smart tier for Azure Blob and Azure Data Lake Storage. Smart tier is a fully managed, automated data tiering solution that takes the guesswork and manual effort out of optimizing your storage costs. Smart tier continuously analyzes your data’s access patterns and automatically moves objects between the hot, cool, and cold tiers. Smart tier will keep regularly accessed objects on the hot capacity tier to optimize transaction costs and mo...
18/11/2025
Introducing Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode (vMode)
Now in Public Preview Windows Admin Center has long been a favorite tool for IT pros, trusted to manage
18/11/2025
Azure Databricks Genie integration with Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry is now live!
This blog was co-authored by Toussaint Webb, Databricks We’re excited to announce the Public Preview availability of AI/BI Genie
18/11/2025
Steer length, tone, style, and images when creating a PowerPoint presentation with Copilot
Hi, Insiders! We’re Victoria Tran, Jess Kwok, and Shea Tuli, and we’re Product Managers on the PowerPoint team. We’re excited to share an update with you that allows you to steer your presentation length, tone, style, and images when creating presentations with Microsoft 365 Copilot in PowerPoint for Windows, for Mac, and for the web. Steer length, tone, style, an...
18/11/2025
📢 Agent Loop - New Set of AI Features Arrive in Public Preview
Today at Ignite, we announced the General Availability of Agent Loop in Logic Apps Standard—bringing production-ready agentic automation to every customer. But GA is just the beginning. We’re also releasing a broad set of new and powerful AI-first capabilities in Public Preview that dramatically expand what developers can build: run agents in the Consumption SKU ,bring your own models through APIM AI Gateway, cal...
18/11/2025
🎉Announcing General Availability of Agent Loop in Azure Logic Apps
Transforming Business Automation with Intelligent, Collaborative Multi-Agentic workflows! TL;DR Agent Loop is now Generally Available in Azure Logic Apps Standard, turning Logic Apps platform into a complete multi-agentic automation system. Build AI agents that work alongside workflows and humans, secured with enterprise-grade identity and access controls, deployed using your existing CI/CD pipelines. Thousands of customers have already...
18/11/2025
SQL Server 2025: Deeply Integrated and Feature-rich on Linux
SQL Server continues to power mission-critical workloads across enterprises, and with SQL Server 2025, we’re delivering innovations that redefine performance, security, developer experience, AI innovation and flexibility along with additional features tailored for Linux environments. Momentum on SQL Server for Linux The adoption of SQL Server on Linux has been phenomenal. The public preview of SQL Server 2025 has seen remarkable adoption, with Linux based deploy...
18/11/2025
Announcing Public Preview of Agent Loop in Azure Logic Apps Consumption
We’re excited to announce a major leap forward in democratizing AI-powered business process automation: Agent Loop is now available in Azure Logic Apps Consumption, bringing advanced AI agent capabilities to a broader audience with a frictionless, pay-as-you-go experience. What’s New? Agent Loop, previously available only in Logic Apps Standard, is now available in Consumption logic apps, providing developers,...
18/11/2025
📢Announcing MCP Server Support for Logic Apps Agent Loop
At Ignite, we announced that Agent Loop in Azure Logic Apps Standard now supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling agents to discover and call external tools through an open, standardized interface. This brings powerful, flexible tool extensibility to both conversational and autonomous agents. MCP support gives agents a common lan...
18/11/2025
🔐Enabling API Key Authentication for Logic Apps MCP Servers
We previously announced support for building Logic Apps MCP servers. This capability comes in a couple forms including via the wizard hosted in API Center and through manual configurations inside an existing Logic App. When we initially shipped this f...
18/11/2025
Reduce latency and enhance resilience with Azure Files zonal placement
We are pleased to announce the General Availability of zonal placement for Azure Files Premium LRS in select regions. Zonal placement enables you to pin Azure Files storage accounts to a specific Availability Zone within a region — giving you better control over data locality, resilience, and lower latency for your workloads. Benefits of zonal placement Azure Files provides both local-redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS) options today....
18/11/2025
Host remote MCP servers on Azure Functions
Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers allow AI agents to access external tools, data, and systems, greatly extending the capability and power of agents. When you’re ready to expose your MCP servers externally, within your organization or to the world, it’s important that the servers are run in a secure, scalable, and reliable environment. Azure Functions provides such a robust platform for hosting your remote MCP servers, offering high scalability with the
18/11/2025
Announcing Elastic MCP Server in Microsoft Foundry Tool Catalog
Introduction The future of enterprise AI is agentic - driven by intelligent, context-aware agents that deliver real business value. Microsoft Foundry is committed to enabling developers with the tools and integrations they need to build, deploy, and govern these advanced AI solutions. Today, we are excited t...
18/11/2025
Microsoft Ignite 2025: Empowering Innovation with MDEP
Joining a Global Community of Innovators We’re thrilled to be part of Microsoft Ignite 2025 in San Francisco, CA, where thousands of technology leaders, partners, and customers gather to shape the future. This year’s event is centered on AI-driven transformation, secure platforms, and connected ecosystems, and MDEP stands at the forefront of that vision. Ignite is more than just a showcase for us: It’s a valuable opportunity to connect with partners, exchange insights, and demonstrat...
18/11/2025
Partner Case Study | Tiger Analytics
Organizations need to adopt more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solutions to keep up with the evolving landscape of data analytics. Traditional on-premises systems, while robust and reliable, often face limitations in handling the increasing volume and velocity of data. To thrive, organizations must modernize their critical applications, replacing legacy systems with cloud-native solutions that offer better scalability, fault tolerance, and security. Microsoft partner Tiger Ana...
18/11/2025
Cloud Native Identity with Azure Files: Entra-only Secure Access for the Modern Enterprise
As organizations accelerate their cloud-first journeys, the ability to deliver secure, seamless identity and access management for storage in the cloud is now a game-changer. We are excited to announce the Public Preview of Entra-only identities support with Azure Files SMB. With native Entra ID (identities are created and managed entirely in the cloud, with no reliance on on-premises Active Directory or hybrid setups) authentication for Azure Files SMB...
18/11/2025
Announcing the Preview of the new Azure Ebsv6 VMs based on the 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processor
Authored by Misha Bansal, Product Manager, Azure Compute We are excited to announce the public preview of the new Azure Ebsv6 and Ebdsv6 Virtual Machines, powered by 5th Generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8573C (Emerald Rapids) processors. These VMs deliver significantly higher remote storage performance, scaling up to 800,000 IOPS and 14 Gbps of remote disk throughput featured by
18/11/2025
Announcing General Availability of Scheduled Actions for Azure Virtual Machines
Managing VMs at scale in Azure can be a pain. Subscription throttling can prevent your operations from being received, and having to track and retry intermittent failures adds extra overhead. Scheduled Actions reduces the complexity of managing concurrent API requests in Azure at scale and allows for scheduling actions at a time in the future. What is Scheduled Actions? Scheduled Actions is a separate resource provider that sits above our REST API and makes calls...
18/11/2025
Announcing Public Preview: Auditing for Fabric SQL Database
We’re excited to announce the public preview of Auditing for Fabric SQL Database—a powerful feature designed to help organizations strengthen security, ensure compliance, and gain deep operational insights into their data environments. Why Auditing Matters
18/11/2025
Integrating Azure Application Gateway v2 with Azure API Management for secure and scalable API
Why Application Gateway v2 + Azure API Management? - Layer-7 routing with path-based rules, host headers, URL rewrites, and WAF protection (OWASP Core Rule Set). - Azure API Management provides API abstraction, versioning, throttling, caching, JWT validation, and per-API policies. - Combined, App Gateway becomes the internet-facing secure entry point and Azure API Management the control plane for API governance. Scenario: Internet...
18/11/2025
Announcing the public preview of StandardV2 NAT Gateway and StandardV2 public IPs
In today’s rapidly changing digital landscape, organizations are innovating faster and delivering cloud native experiences at global scale. With this acceleration comes higher expectations: applications must remain always available. An outage in a single availability zone can have a ripple effect on application performance, user experience, and business continuity. To safeguard against zone outages, making your cloud architecture zone resilient isn't an option—it’s ...
18/11/2025
Compose for Agents on Azure Container Apps and Serverless GPU (public preview)
Empowering intelligent applications The next wave of AI is agentic
18/11/2025
🔐Secure AI Agent Knowledge Retrieval - Introducing Security Filters in Agent Loop
Building secure, permission-aware AI agents with Agent Loop We’re excited to introduce a new capability in Azure Logic Apps that enables document-level authorization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows. With security filters, you can now ensure that agents only retrieve and respond with information users are authorized to view. Why Security Trimming Matters In RAG-enabled workflows, agents often retrieve know...
18/11/2025
Enhancing Resiliency in Azure Compute Gallery
In today's cloud-driven world, ensuring the resiliency and recoverability of critical resources is top of mind for organizations of all sizes. Azure Compute Gallery (ACG) continues to evolve, introducing robust features that safeguard your virtual machine (VM) images and application artifacts. In this blog post, we'll explore two key resiliency innovations: the new Soft Delete feature (currently in preview) and Zonal Redundant Storage (ZRS) as the default storage type for image versions. Toge...
18/11/2025
Azure Functions Ignite 2025 Update
Azure Functions is redefining event-driven applications and high-scale APIs in 2025, accelerating innovation for developers building the next generation of intelligent, resilient, and scalable workloads. This year, our focus has been on empowering AI and agentic scenarios: remote MCP server hosting, bulletproofing agents with Durable Functions, and first-class support for critical technologies like OpenTelemetry, .NET 10 and Aspire. With major advances in serverless Flex Consumption, enhanced...
18/11/2025
Introducing Preview of Async Scaling for App Service Plans
Have you ever attempted to deploy or scale out an App Service Plan and received a 429 response that “Not enough available reserved instance servers to satisfy this request. Currently n instances are available. If you are changing instance size you can reserve up to n instances at this moment. If you are increasing instance count then you can add extra n instances at this moment. Please get available machines and retry later.”? If so, then we have a new capability wit...
18/11/2025
AI Toolkit Extension Pack for Visual Studio Code: Ignite 2025 Update
Unlock the Latest Agentic App Capabilities—Now Available with Ignite 2025 The Ignite 2025 update delivers a major leap forward for the AI Toolkit extension pack in VS Code, introducing a unified, end-to-end environment for building, visualizing, and deploying intelligent agentic applications. This release enables developers to build and debug locally in VS Code, then deploy to the cloud with a single click. Seamlessly switch between VS Code and the Foundry portal for visualization, o...
18/11/2025
Charting the Future of SOC: Human and AI Collaboration for Better Security
Co-authors: Rajiv Bharadwaja, Principal Software Engineering ManagerAbhishek Kumar, Principal Group Manager - Security Research & Operations Security operations centers are under pressure from unprecedented scale and complexity. Speed, precision, and consistency matter more than ever, and AI is everywhere—but hype alone doesn’t solve the challenge. This blog shares our journey and insights from building autonomous AI agents for MDR operations and...
18/11/2025
Fine-Tuning Healthcare AI Models: Custom Segmentation for Your Healthcare Data
This post is part of our healthcare AI fine-tuning series: MedImageInsight Fine-Tuning - Embeddings and classification MedImageParse Fine-Tuning - Segmentation and spatial understanding (you are here)
18/11/2025
What's new in Microsoft Intune at Ignite
Welcome to Microsoft Ignite, where the future of IT is being reimagined. Today we’re unveiling how Microsoft Intune is transforming endpoint management by putting AI at its core, with assistive chat-based and agentic experiences to help you streamline operations, unify cross-service insights, and enable scalable action, tailored to your organization's needs. With Security Copilot chat embedded across Intune, you gain expert assistance to help guide you through daily...
18/11/2025
Azure Intel® TDX confidential VMs momentum
Azure’s next generation of Confidential Virtual Machines powered by 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors (code-named Emerald Rapids) with Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel® TDX) is out in preview now. This will help to enable organizations ...
18/11/2025
Azure delivers the first cloud VM with Intel Xeon 6 and CXL memory - now in Private Preview
Intel released their new Intel Xeon 6 6500/6700 series processor with P-cores this year. Intel Xeon 6 processors provide performance and scalability by delivering outstanding performance for transactional and analytical workloads and provide scale-up capacities of up to 64TB of memory. In addition, Intel Xeon 6 supports the new
18/11/2025
AI Gateway in Azure API Management Is Now Available in Microsoft Foundry (Preview)
For more than a decade, Azure API Management has been the trusted control plane for API governance, security, and observability on a global scale supporting more than 38,000 customers, almost 3 million APIs, and 3 trillion API requests every month. AI Gateway builds on this foundation, extending API Management’s proven governance, security, and observability model to AI workloads, including models, tools, and agents. Today, more than 1,200 enterprise customers use AI Gateway to safely operati...
18/11/2025
Announcing the Public Preview of AMLFS 20: Azure Managed Lustre New SKU for Massive AI&HPC Workloads
Sachin Sheth - Principal PDM Manager Brian Barbisch - Principal Group Software Engineering Manager Matt White - Principal Group Software Engineering Manager Brian Lepore - Principal Product Manager Wolfgang De Salvador - Senior Product Manager Ron Hogue - Senior Product...
18/11/2025
App Assure Powers Seamless Transitions for the new Outlook
Microsoft is continually evolving its products to deliver greater functionality, stronger security, and better experiences for users. That evolution is now underway for Outlook as we transition from classic Outlook to the new Outlook for Windows, a move that accelerates access to innovations like Copilot and other AI-native tools essential for success in today’s business landscape. <...
18/11/2025
Announcing General Availability: Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana
Continuing our commitment to open-source solutions, we are announcing the general availability of Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana. This service offers a powerful solution for cloud-native monitoring and visualizing all your Azure data. Dashboards with Grafana enable you to create and edit Grafana dashboards directly in the Azure portal without additional cost and less administrative overhea...
18/11/2025
Pantone’s Palette Generator enhances creative exploration with agentic AI on Azure
Color can be powerful. When creative professionals shape the mood and direction of their work, color plays a vital role because it provides context and cues for the end product or creation. For more than 60 years, creatives from all areas of design—including fashion, product, and digital—have turned to Pantone color guides to translate inspiration into precise, reproducible color choices. These guides offer a shared language for colors, as well as inspiration and communication a...
18/11/2025
Azure Linux: Driving Security in the Era of AI Innovation
Microsoft is advancing cloud and AI innovation with a clear focus on security, quality, and responsible practices. At Ignite 2025, Azure Linux reflects that commitment. As Microsoft’s ubiquitous Linux OS, it powers critical services and serves as the hub for security innovation. This year’s announcements, Azure Linux with OS Guard public preview and GA of pod sandboxing, reinforce security as one of our core priorities, helping customers build and run workloads with confidence in an increasin...
18/11/2025
Richer alt text in Word and PowerPoint, powered by generative AI
Today, I’m excited to announce a major improvement to how alt text is generated in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint for Windows.Leveraging generative AI, you can write richer, more descriptive, and more context-aware image descriptions.Richer alt text in Word and PowerPoint, powered by generative AI
18/11/2025
Announcing General Availability for AccelNet on Windows Server 2025
That’s why we’re bringing Accelerated Networking (AccelNet), the same technology used in Azure, to Windows Server 2025 Datacenter.Accelerated Networking (SR‑IOV) for Windows Server 2025 Datacenter solves this by: Bypassing the virtual switch for data plane traffic using SR‑IOV, reducing CPU overhead.
18/11/2025
Announcing Network HUD: Operational Network Monitoring for Windows Server 2025
Network HUD brings real-time health monitoring to Windows Server clusters, helping you catch misconfigurations and drift before they impact performance.Network HUD simplifies this by continuously monitoring your cluster’s networking health and surfacing actionable insights.Microsoft Learn
18/11/2025
Announcing the preview of Azure Local rack aware cluster
We are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Local rack aware cluster! We previously published a blog post with a sneak peek of Azure Local rack aware cluster and now, we're excited to share more details about its architecture, features, and benefits. Azure Local rack aware cluster is an advanced architecture designed to enhance fault tolerance and data distribution within an Azure Local instance. This solution enables you to cluster machines that are strategically placed across two physical racks in different rooms or buildings, connected by high bandwidth and low latency within the same location.Network architecture diagram of an Azure Local rack aware cluster instance
18/11/2025
Reimagining Data Excellence: SQL Server 2025 Accelerated by Pure Storage
The arrival of SQL Server 2025 marked a pivotal moment in the evolution of enterprise data management and modern AI application development from ground to cloud.Designed to transform data into actionable intelligence, it aligns perfectly with the Pure Storage mission to simplify, accelerate, and modernize data infrastructure.SQL Server 2025 calls the REST endpoint of the FlashArray system and takes a snapshot application consistent with no external tools.
18/11/2025
Build Smarter with Azure HorizonDB
Today, at Microsoft Ignite, we are announcing a new PostgreSQL database service - Azure HorizonDB.To help with database management we are introducing a set of new capabilities in PostgreSQL extension for Visual Studio Code, as well as announcing General Availability of the extension.We are excited to announce a new enhancement in the Microsoft’s state of the art vector indexing algorithm DiskANN – DiskANN Advanced Filtering.
18/11/2025
Introducing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot
The new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot are dedicated agents that help users create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations—directly in chat.With dedicated Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, users can now start projects in Copilot Chat—using natural language prompts to quickly generate documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot are just the beginning.
18/11/2025
Generally Available: Azure SQL Managed Instance Next-gen General Purpose
Next-gen General Purpose is the evolution of General Purpose service tier that brings significantly improved performance and scalability to power up your existing Azure SQL Managed Instance fleet and helps you bring more mission-critical SQL workloads to Azure.The new #SQLMINextGen General Purpose tier delivers a built-in performance upgrade available to all customers at no extra cost.The SQL Managed Instance General Purpose tier is designed with full separation of compute and storage layers.
18/11/2025
What's New in Azure App Service at #MSIgnite 2025
Azure App Service introduces a new approach to accelerate application migration and modernization at Microsoft Ignite 2025.Known as Managed Instance on Azure App Service, it enables seamless modernization of classic web apps to the cloud with minimal code changes, especially for apps with custom Windows dependencies.Other major updates include enhanced Aspire support for .NET developers on Azure App Service for Linux, new AI integration features, expanded language/runtime support, and improvements in scaling, networking, and developer experience.
18/11/2025
Stream data in near real time from SQL to Azure Event Hubs - Public preview
If near-real time integration is something you are looking to implement and you were looking for a simpler way to get the data out of SQL, keep reading. SQL is making it easier to integrate and Change Event Streaming is a feature continuing this trend. Modern applications and analytics platforms increasingly rely on event-driven architectures and real-time data pipelines. As the businesses speed up, real time decisio...
18/11/2025
Expanding Azure Arc for Hybrid and Multicloud Management
Hybrid and multi-cloud environments are no longer optional—they’re essential for modern enterprises. At Ignite 2025, we are announcing key enhancements to Azure Arc based on your feedback, designed to simplify governance, improve security, and deliver operational consistency across diverse infrastructures. Here’s what’s new: 1. Multicloud Connector for GCP – Public Preview Azure Arc now extends its multicloud reach with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
18/11/2025
Public Preview: Multicloud connector support for Google Cloud
We are excited to announce that the Multicloud connector is now in preview for GCP environments.With the Multicloud connector, you can easily connect your GCP projects and AWS accounts to Azure with the following capabilities: The agentless inventory solution will periodically scan your GCP environment, project the discovered resources in GCP as Azure resources, including all of the GCP metadata like GCP labels.
18/11/2025
Accelerate your cloud migration journey with Azure Arc resource discovery in Azure Migrate (preview)
Today, we’re excited to announce a new preview capability that extends this value:Azure Migrate’s Arc-based discovery—designed to accelerate your migration decision-making and planning without additional on-premises deployments.With Arc-based discovery, you can leverage your existing Arc-enabled servers and Arc-enabled SQL Server instances to quickly gain insights into:Migration readiness for Azure targets such as Azure VMs, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Managed Instance.
18/11/2025
AI-Powered Performance Testing
Performance testing is critical for delivering reliable, scalable applications. We have been working on AI-driven innovations in Azure Load Testing that will change how you author and analyze load tests. AI-Assisted Authoring of JMeter Scripts Writing high-quality load test scripts has traditionally required deep expertise. From setting correlations and think times to properly parameterizing inputs, it requires significant time and effort. This manual effort s...
18/11/2025
Optimize Your Cloud Environment Using Agentic AI
In today’s cloud-first world, optimization is no longer a luxury—it’s a strategic imperative. As IT professionals and developers navigate increasingly complex environments, the need to reduce costs, improve sustainability, and accelerate decision-making has never been more urgent. At Ignite 2025, Microsoft is introducing a new wave of agentic capabilities within Azure Copilot—one of the key capabilities includes the
18/11/2025
Empowering organizations with integrated data security: What’s new in Microsoft Purview
Today, data moves across clouds, apps, and devices at an unprecedented speed, often outside the visibility of siloed legacy tools. The rise of autonomous agents, generative AI, and distributed data ecosystems means that traditional perimeter-based security models are no longer sufficient. Even though companies are spending more than $213 billiongl...
18/11/2025
What’s New at Ignite: Powerful Enhancements in Unified Threat Intelligence
At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we’re unveiling transformative upgrades in threat intelligence designed to empower security teams. With the Threat Intelligence Briefing Agent now fully integrated into the Defender portal, defenders can shift from reactive to proactive security strategies, using Microsoft’s global intelligence combined with insights tailored to their organization. Additionally, the latest phase of the integration of Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence (MDTI) with Defender XDR and...
18/11/2025
What's new in Azure Container Apps at Ignite'25
Azure Container Apps (ACA) is a fully managed serverless container platform that enables developers to design and deploy microservices and modern apps without requiring container expertise or needing infrastructure management. ACA is rapidly emerging as the preferred platform for hosting AI workloads and intelligent agents in the cloud. With features like code interpreter, Serverless GPUs, simplifi...
18/11/2025
Introducing optimized locking v2
Executive summary New improvements in optimized locking further reduce the overhead of locks in the MSSQL database engine. For many transactions, row and page locks aren’t taken at all while still retaining ACID transaction semantics. The improvements require no changes in customer workloads or configuration and are a part of optimized locking in SQL Server 2025, Azu...
18/11/2025
Simplify Application Monitoring for AKS with Azure Monitor (Public Preview)
As cloud-native workloads scale, customers increasingly expect application and infrastructure observability to be unified, automated, and devops-friendly. Azure Monitor is advancing this vision with Application Monitoring for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). With seamless onboarding and troubleshooting experiences in the Azure Portal, now in Public Preview. This new capability brings first-class OpenTelemetry&n...
18/11/2025
Resource governor - a new beginning
Executive summary In addition to increased CPU and memory limits, we are making another change to benefit customers using the SQL Server Standard edition. Starting with SQL Server 2025, resource governor, previously an Enterprise edition feature, is also available in the Standard edition. A powerful tool Resource governor has been a p...
18/11/2025
Unlocking Enterprise AI: SQL Server 2025 and NVIDIA Nemotron RAG Accelerate AI
Today, most of the world’s data still remains untapped, sitting in databases, documents, and systems across organizations. Enterprises are racing to unlock this data’s value by building the next wave of generative AI applications—solutions that can answer questions, summarize documents, and drive smarter decisions. At the heart of these innovations are retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, which enable users to interactively engage with large amount of data that continuously evolves...
18/11/2025
SQL Server 2025 is Now Generally Available
Today at Ignite, we announce the general availability of SQL Server 2025. This marks the latest milestone in the more than 30-year history of SQL Server. It is also a key part of our commitment to the one consistent SQL promise, delivering consistent experience across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments, with one engine and one unified platform. Built on SQL Server’s foundation of best-in-class security, performance and availability, SQL Server 2025 is the AI-ready enterprise dat...
18/11/2025
Introducing Project Opal: A New Way to Get Task-Based Work Done
Today we’re introducing Project Opal in Microsoft 365 Copilot – a new AI-powered capability that executes task-based work inside a secure, observable environment you control. Every organization faces the challenge of repetitive, manual work – tasks that consume valuable time and take away from strategic priorities, creativity, and high-impact work. Consider the time it takes to gather information across multiple sites and tools for a compliance audit, onboarding new employees with equi...
18/11/2025
Azure app platform at Ignite 2025: New innovations for all your apps and agents
Software is evolving faster than ever, and organizations now operate across multiple generations of application architectures at once: AI apps and agents, cloud-native microservices, modernized enterprise applications, and mission-critical workloads that have powered their businesses for decades. To innovate at the pace AI demands, organizations need a unified platform that supports where they are today and accelerates where they’re going. The need has never been clearer: 95% of IT decision m...
18/11/2025
Scale with Ease: Simplified Setup and Management for Connectors
At Microsoft, we’re continuously evolving our platform to make it easier for organizations to connect their data, unlock insights, and maximize their Copilot experience. The Copilot connector ecosystem has expanded from 30 to over 75+ connectors, enabling seamless integration with the tools your organization relies on every day — from ServiceNow, Jira, and Confluence to shared drives and line-of-business applications. By indexing data from these key business apps, Copilot Connectors he...
18/11/2025
Building AI apps and agents for the new frontier
Every new wave of applications brings with it the promise of reshaping how we work, build and create. From digitization to web, from cloud to mobile, these shifts have made us all more connected, more engaged and more powerful. The incoming wave of agentic applications, estimated to number 1.3 billion over the next 2 years is no different. But the expectations of these new services are unprecedented, in part for how they will uniquely operate with both intelligence and agency, how they will a...
18/11/2025
Microsoft Ignite 2025: Power the next era of cybersecurity with Microsoft Sentinel
At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we’re showcasing how Microsoft Sentinel —trusted by over 40,000 customers worldwide— combines industry-leading SIEM capabilities with a purpose-built security data lake to transform security operations. This powerful combination delivers deep visibility, advanced analytics, and cost-efficiency—empowering security teams to detect, investigate, and respond faster in an AI-driven e...
18/11/2025
Microsoft Sentinel MCP Server - Generally Available With Exciting New Capabilities
Today, we’re excited to announce the General Availability of Microsoft Sentinel MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, a fully managed cloud service built on an open standard that empowers AI agents to seamlessly access your entire security context through natural language, eliminating the need for complex data engineering as you build agents. This unlocks new levels of AI agent performance and effectiveness, enabling them to do more for you. Since the public preview launch on Sept...
18/11/2025
Microsoft Security Store: Now Generally Available
When we launched the Microsoft Security Store in public preview on September 30, our goal was simple: make it easier for organizations to discover, purchase, and deploy trusted security solutions and AI agents that integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Security products. Today, Microsoft Security Store is generally available—with three major ...
18/11/2025
Post-Quantum Cryptography APIs Now Generally Available on Microsoft Platforms
Introduction We are excited to announce a significant leap forward in security: Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms are now generally available in Windows Server 2025 and Windows 11 clients (24H2,...
18/11/2025
Troubleshoot with OTLP signals in Azure Monitor (Limited Public Preview)
As organizations increasingly rely on distributed cloud-native applications, the need for comprehensive standards-based observability has never been greater. OpenTelemetry (OTel) has emerged as the industry standard for collecting and transmitting telemetry data, enabling unified monitoring across diverse platforms and services. Microsoft is among the
18/11/2025
Security as the core primitive in the agentic era: New innovations to secure AI agents and apps
This week at Microsoft Ignite, we shared our vision for Microsoft security -- In the agentic era, security must be ambient and autonomous, like the AI it protects. It must be woven into and around everything we build—from silicon to OS, to agents, apps, data, platforms, and clouds—and throughout everything we do. In this blog, we are going to dive deeper into many of the new innovations we are introducing this week to secure AI agents and apps. As I spend time with our customers and pa...
18/11/2025
Ignite 2025: Advancing Azure Database for MySQL with Powerful New Capabilities
At Ignite 2025, we’re introducing a wave of powerful new capabilities for Azure Database for MySQL, designed to help organizations modernize, scale, and innovate faster than ever before. From enhanced high availability and seamless serverless integrations to AI-powered insights and greater flexibility for developers, these advancements reflect our commitment to delivering a resilient, intelligent data platform. Join us as we unveil what’s next for MySQL on Azure - and discover how industry le...
18/11/2025
Accelerate frontline adoption of Microsoft Teams on personal devices
Frontline workers are the heartbeat of your organization and they need quick, secure access to Microsoft Teams to stay connected and productive. Yet, for many companies, onboarding Teams on a personal device can feel like a maze of extra steps due to security and compliance requirements. That’s where our new web-based onboarding experience comes in. This solution is designed to simplify and accelerate setup for frontline workers, ensuring they can start collaborating on their first day...
18/11/2025
Migration Agent - Unlocking transformation
IT Modernization is far more than adopting a new technology—it’s a transformative, ongoing journey that reshapes processes and culture. It has no finish line, and when embraced fully, it delivers lasting strategic advantage. Modernization unlocks agility, resilience and innovation to keep up with customer expectations and shifts in the competitive landscape. Cloud-native architectures are best positioned to support modernization while securely providing access to innovations such as A...
18/11/2025
Enhancing visibility into your identity fabric with Microsoft Defender
Layered identity security for the modern enterpriseIdentity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) has to combine modern identity and access management (IAM) and security operations (SOC) through an integrated partnership between identity and security teams.Microsoft Defender’s latest identity security enhancements empower organizations to see and understand their entire identity fabric with unprecedented clarity.
18/11/2025
Public Preview: Azure Monitor Integration with Fabric Real Time Intelligence Eventhouse
Customers need to enable different scenarios to successfully operate their IT/OT environments and business processes for meeting business objectives. Building solutions to solve these problems requires deriving rich insights from telemetry data emitted by devices, assets, applications, typically, by combining with other data to answer business questions. The common need for the systems that produce the insights is the ability to obtain the data they need within acceptable latency, to process,...
18/11/2025
Introducing Microsoft Agent Factory
Introducing Microsoft Agent FactoryMicrosoft Agent Factory is a new program designed for organizations that want to move from experimentation to execution faster.With a single metered plan, organizations can build agents with Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and Foundry IQ using Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio.
18/11/2025
Windows CLAT Enters Private Preview: A Milestone for IPv6 Adoption
IPv6 Adoption: A Global Shift Since its standardization in the late 1990s, IPv6 has steadily gained traction. The last 15 years, especially since World IPv6 Launch Day in 2011, have seen significant progress. Global IPv6 adoption now hovers around 43 to 48%, with countries li...
18/11/2025
OpenShift Virtualization on Azure Red Hat OpenShift GA: Accelerating Hybrid Cloud Modernization
Today at Microsoft Ignite 2025, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on Azure Red Hat OpenShift reaches General Availability (GA), unlocking a unified platform where enterprise IT teams can run virtual machines and containers side by side. This milestone enables organizations to migrate legacy VMs to Azure, consolidate disparate infrastructure, and modernize applications at t...
18/11/2025
AI Agents Are Rewriting the App Modernization Playbook
The Modernization Moment: Why Now? Modernizing enterprise applications has historically been slow, manual, and costly. For many IT leaders and developers, it’s meant wrestling with aging frameworks, complex dependencies, and the constant tug-of-war between maintaining legacy systems and driving innovation. The stakes are high: every dollar spent on maintenance is a dollar not invested in the future. But the game is changing. Today, agentic AI is transforming mod...
18/11/2025
Azure PostgreSQL Lesson Learned#7: Database Missing After Planned Maintenance
If you’re running Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server, you might encounter a scenario where your database disappears after planned maintenance.The missing database files were located in a temporary tablespace.Unfortunately, data cannot be recovered because temporary tablespaces are excluded from backups during maintenance activities or server restarts.