Latest News in the category AI
A news aggregator from various RSS feeds, like technology, gaming, development and general news sites.
A Coding Guide to High-Quality Image Generation, Control, and Editing Using HuggingFace Diffusers
In this tutorial, we design a practical image-generation workflow using the Diffusers library. We start by stabilizing the environment, then generate high-quality images from text prompts using Stable Diffusion with an optimized scheduler. We accelerate inference with a LoRA-based latent consistency approach, guide composition with ControlNet under edge conditioning, and finally perform localized edits via […] The post
8 hours ago
Regional Endpoints for Geo-Replicated Azure Container Registries (Private Preview)
Imagine you're running Kubernetes clusters in multiple Azure regions—East US, West Europe, and Southeast Asia. You've configured ACR with geo-replication so your container images are available everywhere, but you've noticed something frustrating: you can't control which replica your clusters pull from. Sometimes your East US cluster pulls from West Europe, and you have no way to pin it to the co-located replica or troubleshoot why routing behaves unexpectedly.
9 hours ago
Title Plan Update - February 20, 2026
📁February 20, 2026 - Title Plan Now Available Access the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at
20/02/2026
How to enable HTTPS support for Microsoft Connected Cache for Enterprise and Education
Starting on June 16th, 2026, or soon after, Intune will enforce HTTPS content delivery for customers using Microsoft Connected Cache for Enterprise and Education. To continue using Microsoft Connected Cache to localize Intune Win32 app downloads and reduce the bandwidth impact on your network, you’ll need to configure HTTPS on Connected Cache nodes. Without this configuration, devices will still fetch the requested content, but they’ll fall back to the Content Deli...
20/02/2026
HLS Copilot Use Case Webinar Series
Friday 2/27 - Taming the Excel Jungle of Clinician SchedulingNurse clinicians face enough pressure without spending hours wrestling with six‑week schedules in Excel. Even with time‑tracking systems in place, many teams still export schedules, staff details, and skills into spreadsheets to manually resolve conflicts and coverage gaps—adding frustration and stress to an already demanding role. In this HLS webinar on February 27 at 12:00 PM ET
20/02/2026
How to Design a Swiss Army Knife Research Agent with Tool-Using AI, Web Search, PDF Analysis, Vision, and Automated Reporting
In this tutorial, we build a “Swiss Army Knife” research agent that goes far beyond simple chat interactions and actively solves multi-step research problems end-to-end. We combine a tool-using agent architecture with live web search, local PDF ingestion, vision-based chart analysis, and automated report generation to demonstrate how modern agents can reason, verify, and produce […] The post
20/02/2026
Plan for Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 2016 LTSB end of support
Three Windows products first released in 2016 are close to reaching end of support (EOS) on the following dates: Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016: October 13, 2026
20/02/2026
NVIDIA Releases DreamDojo: An Open-Source Robot World Model Trained on 44,711 Hours of Real-World Human Video Data
Building simulators for robots has been a long term challenge. Traditional engines require manual coding of physics and perfect 3D models. NVIDIA is changing this with DreamDojo, a fully open-source, generalizable robot world model. Instead of using a physics engine, DreamDojo ‘dreams’ the results of robot actions directly in pixels. Scaling Robotics with 44k+ Hours […] The post
20/02/2026
What to Expect from the Copilot & AI Sessions at Microsoft 365 Community Conference
AI isn’t a side conversation at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference—it’s at the center of how work is changing.The Copilot, Agents, & Copilot Services Sessions are designed for anyone who wants to move beyond curiosity and into real-world application.One of the biggest themes across the sessions are the evolution from AI as a helper to AI as an active participant in work.
20/02/2026
Skype for Business for Mac Client Update – Version 16.31.31 Released
We’re pleased to announce the availability of Skype for Business for Mac client version 16.31.31, the latest update for customers who continue to rely on Skype for Business in their daily communications.Customers using Skype for Business on Mac are encouraged to move to this latest version to benefit from the most up‑to‑date client build and to ensure continued supportability.Note that for the time being, we have left the previous Skype for Business on Mac download (Version 16.31.11) as an available download in case you still need it during your upgrade process.
20/02/2026
Learn to maximize your productivity at the proMX Project Operations + AI Summit 2026
As organizations accelerate AI adoption across business applications, mastering how Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions, Copilot, and agents work together is becoming a strategic priority. Fortunately, businesses no longer need to rely on speculation — they can gain practical insights with fellow industry professionals during a unique two-day event: On April 21-22, 2026, Microsoft and
20/02/2026
When Group Policy Goes Haywire: Spotting registry.pol Corruption Fast
If you’re in charge of Group Policy settings, you know how critical the registry.pol file is and how nerve-wracking it can be when things go awry. Luckily, Windows now provides much more actionable insight when corruption is detected in this vital file. Rather than introducing a new event or log, the existing Group Policy error, Event ID 1096 in the System event log...
20/02/2026
🚀 Git-Driven Deployments for Microsoft Fabric Using GitHub Actions
👋 Introduction If you've been working with Microsoft Fabric, you've likely faced this question: "How do we promote Fabric items from DEV → QA → PROD reliably, consistently, and with proper governance?" Many teams default to the built-in Fabric Deployment Pipelines — and they work great for simpler scenarios. But what happens when your enterprise demands: 🔒 Centralized governance across all pla...
20/02/2026
Empowering.Cloud Community Update – February 2026
The latest Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 expert community briefings, podcasts and upcoming community events. Expert Briefings: Microsoft Places in 2026: APIs, Desk Booking, and Copilot Context https://empowering.cloud/microsoft-places-in-2026-apis-desk-booking-and-copilot-context/
20/02/2026
Learning Cost Efficient AI Agents Development on Azure
The Maximize the Cost Efficiency of AI Agents on Azure webinar is designed to help answer these questions.This session provides practical guidance on designing and scaling AI agents on Azure while keeping cost efficiency in mind.Rather than focusing only on tools and services, the webinar helps learners and educators understand how architectural decisions, model choices, and usage patterns directly impact cost, performance, and outcomes.
20/02/2026
Building an AI Study Agent - How GitHub Copilot CLI & SDK helped Reimagine LMS
This is what the Model Context Protocol provides, a standard that connects AI native apps/ agents to data and tools dynamically.In the steps above, Copilot CLI uses this very same protocol to pull data from external sources, accessing documentation on how the MCP architecture works and how to build and connect to MCP servers, and in a single prompt, is able to extend my existing backend (API Layer) into an MCP server with tools that will allow the agent to perform actions dynamically.Enter GitHub Copilot SDK
20/02/2026
Seamless Migrations From Self Hosted Nginx Ingress To The AKS App Routing Add-On
The Kubernetes Steering Committee has announced that the Nginx Ingress controller will be retired in March 2026.Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers a managed routing add-on which also implements Nginx as the Ingress Controller.There is also an updated version of the App Routing add-on in the works, that will be based on Istio to allow for transition off Nginx Ingress.
20/02/2026
Using Azure API Management with Azure Front Door for Global, Multi‑Region Architectures
Azure provides two complementary services that help achieve this: Azure API Management (APIM) as the API gateway and Azure Front Door (AFD) as the global entry point and load balancer.That led us to design the solution detailed in this article which explains how to configure multi‑regional, active‑active APIM behind Azure Front Door using Custom origins and regional gateway endpoints.To make your APIM publicly accessible, you need to front it with both an Application Gateway and an Azure Front Door because:
20/02/2026
NVIDIA Releases Dynamo v0.9.0: A Massive Infrastructure Overhaul Featuring FlashIndexer, Multi-Modal Support, and Removed NATS and ETCD
This is the most significant infrastructure upgrade for the distributed inference framework to date.This update simplifies how large-scale models are deployed and managed.The release focuses on removing heavy dependencies and improving how GPUs handle multi-modal data.
20/02/2026
How to Build Transparent AI Agents: Traceable Decision-Making with Audit Trails and Human Gates
In this tutorial, we build a glass-box agentic workflow that makes every decision traceable, auditable, and explicitly governed by human approval.We design the system to log each thought, action, and observation into a tamper-evident audit ledger while enforcing dynamic permissioning for high-risk operations.By combining LangGraph’s interrupt-driven human-in-the-loop control with a hash-chained database, we […]
20/02/2026
Beautifully invisible: The engineering intelligence behind Surface for Business displays
Open a Surface Copilot+ PC, and the display just feels right. Whites look clean, text is sharp, and colors stay true and consistent in varied lighting conditions. Move from a bright office to a dim café and the screen keeps pace, adjusting as the light around you changes. That sense of ease is deliberate. It comes from years of engineering designed to make the display feel natural in any setting, with work that is meant to be invisible rather than attention-grabbing. In this blog post, we’ll ...
20/02/2026
Build a Custom SSL Certificate Monitor with Azure SRE Agent: From Python Tool to Production Skill
TL;DR Expired SSL certificates cause outages that are 100% preventable. In this post, you’ll learn how to create a custom Python tool in Azure SRE Agent that checks SSL certificate expiry across your domains, then wrap it in a skill that gives your agent a complete certificate health audit workflow. The result: your SRE Agent proactively flags certificates expiring in the next 30 days and recommends renewal actions , before they become 3 AM pages. <...
20/02/2026
Host Declarative Markdown-Based Agents on Azure Functions
Like many of you, the Azure Functions team and others at Microsoft have been building agents for our day-to-day work using mostly markdown and configuration: like AGENTS.md instructions, skills, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools. These sophisticated and powerful agents run locally right in VS Code or the Copilot CLI. But inevitably, the question comes up: "How do I share this agent with my team by running it in the cloud?" <...
20/02/2026
Cross Forest Enrollment – PKISync.PS1
Here is the link: Cross Forest - Certificate Enrollment | Microsoft Community Hub PKIsync.ps1 script At this time, we’re going to keep things simple. The goal is to create an Active Directory resource Forest (Source Forest) that will host an Enterprise CA; it will be responsible for issuing all certificates.
19/02/2026
Google AI Releases Gemini 3.1 Pro with 1 Million Token Context and 77.1 Percent ARC-AGI-2 Reasoning for AI Agents
Google has officially shifted the Gemini era into high gear with the release of Gemini 3.1 Pro, the first version update in the Gemini 3 series. This release is not just a minor patch; it is a targeted strike at the ‘agentic’ AI market, focusing on reasoning stability, software engineering, and tool-use reliability. For devs, […] The post
19/02/2026
Copilot adoption: Move your org from pilot to production with this guide
Are you an IT admin or Copilot adoption lead ready to safely start or scale your rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot? Piecing together the right guidance can be something of a treasure hunt so we created a trusted, single starting point for you: 8 Copilot & agent hubs every adoption leader should bookmark. This guide is organized around the typical adoption lifecycle (plan → b...
19/02/2026
A Coding Implementation to Build Bulletproof Agentic Workflows with PydanticAI Using Strict Schemas, Tool Injection, and Model-Agnostic Execution
In this tutorial, we build a production-ready agentic workflow that prioritizes reliability over best-effort generation by enforcing strict, typed outputs at every step. We use PydanticAI to define clear response schemas, wire in tools via dependency injection, and ensure the agent can safely interact with external systems, such as a database, without breaking execution. By […] The post
19/02/2026
The Copilot resource guide to share with your employees
From customers driving Microsoft Copilot adoption, one request we hear a lot is: “Can you send me to a simple starting place?” Now we can. Essential Copilot resource hubs for employees is a trusted, easy-to-share guide that rounds up key Microsoft-owned Copilot learning and support hubs. It's designed to help you speed up Copilot onboarding and get your employees buil...
19/02/2026
Personalize your Message center experience for Windows news
Did you know that you can filter and focus Message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center to prioritize Windows changes? While there's a lot going on in the world of Windows management every day, you don't need to feel overwhelmed. Message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center exists to help keep you and your organization informed of the latest Windows updates, new features, hardening changes, and more. Let's review a few tools that can make it a lot more...
19/02/2026
OneDrive on Mac gets Liquid Glass with an All-New Activity Center
OneDrive on macOS is a core part of the OneDrive ecosystem, designed to deliver a great experience for working with your files directly on your Mac. Over the years, we’ve continued to improve OneDrive for Mac, and we’ve also listened closely to your feedback. We want OneDrive to feel truly native on macOS, with a fast, reliable sync experience you can count on every day.
19/02/2026
Large Mailbox Migration to Exchange Online
Migrating large mailboxes is challenging for enterprise Exchange teams, especially when mailboxes are over 100 GB or contain extensive recoverable items. Using Exchange Messaging Records Management (MRM) to reduce mailbox size before migration can speed up moves to Exchange Online. Why Use MRM Before a Large Mailbox Migration? Many organizations place mailboxes on litigation hold or in-place hold, causing the recoverable items in these mailboxes to grow significantly, often ex...
19/02/2026
Bringing AI fluency to every corner of the organization (even yours!)
The real question is, “Are you fluent enough to lead with it?”Regardless of your role or team, AI is likely already part of your world. In this blog post, the first in a series of three, I share practical tips, including six easy steps, that turn AI from a buzzword into your work GPS. In fact, according to the January 2025 LinkedIn Economic Graph Work Change Report: AI Is Coming to Work, “By 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change, with AI emerging as a catalyst.”
19/02/2026
Accelerate Your UEBA Journey: Introducing the Microsoft Sentinel Behaviors Workbook
In our recent announcement, we introduced the UEBA Behaviors layer - a breakthrough capability that transforms noisy, high-volume security telemetry into clear, human-readable behavioral insights.The Behaviors layer answers the critical question: "Who did what to whom, and why does it matter?" by aggregating and sequencing raw events into normalized, MITRE ATT&CK-mapped behaviors.Today, we announce the Microsoft Sentinel Behaviors Workbook (part of the “UEBA essentials solution” in the content hub) - a purpose-built, interactive analytics workbook that helps you extract maximum value from the Behaviors layer across your investigation, hunting, and detection workflows.
19/02/2026
Three ways to run KQL on Microsoft Sentinel data lake: Interactive, Async, or Jobs
With Microsoft Sentinel data lake, you can run KQL directly on data in the lake, unlocking flexibility for investigations and hunting.We'll explain how these options work in real SOC workflows and guide you in selecting the right KQL execution mode, so you can avoid unnecessary frustration and re-runs.Microsoft Sentinel data lake gives security teams flexibility at scale, when the right query mode is used at the right time.
19/02/2026
Announcing general availability for Microsoft Teams optimization in Amazon WorkSpaces
This release introduces the first-ever Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) optimization for Microsoft Teams on Amazon WorkSpaces for Windows endpoints, delivering a seamless, high-performance collaboration experience.With this release, AWS environments now offer VDI support for Teams, bringing long-requested capabilities to both Personal and Pool Windows WorkSpaces client configurations.Multimedia Offloading: Audio and video processing are now offloaded from the virtual desktop to users’ endpoint devices, resulting in smoother, more responsive calls and meetings.
19/02/2026
Data Quality (DQ) for Standalone Data Assets at Microsoft Purview
A standalone data asset is a dataset that is not linked to any data product.To start measuring and monitoring the data quality of a standalone data asset, first add the asset from the data map to a governance domain.You can also associate a standalone data asset—along with its data quality scores and rules—to a data product.
19/02/2026
The Rise of Agentic BSS in the IQ Era: from Systems of Record to Systems of Outcome
Authors: Rode Kirk and Rick Lievano Telecom Business Support Systems (BSS) are entering their most consequential transformation since digital billing. As networks become programmable, products become composable, and customers expect real‑time, personalized experiences, the traditional BSS stack—designed fo...
19/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 19, 2026
Learn about 240 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
19/02/2026
Monetize your AI apps and agents on Marketplace to realize growth
Ready to stop guessing how to monetize your offer? Skip right to App Advisor Software development companies are building faster than ever. But when it comes to sales, the key to monetization happens early. Monetization, packaging, and operational execution helps determine whether your AI solution becomes a growth engi...
19/02/2026
Azure Database Migration Service Expands to New Azure Regions
As organizations continue to modernize their data estates and migrate to Azure, regional availability plays a critical role in meeting data residency, compliance, and performance requirements. We’re excited to announce the expanded regional availability of Azure Database Migration Service (DMS), making it easier for customers to migrate their databases to Azure closer to where their applications and users reside.Azure Database Migration Service is now generally available in the following Azure regions as part of our latest regional expansion: In these newly available regions, Azure Database Migration Service supports key migration scenarios, including migrations:
19/02/2026
Windows Hello for Business - Registered Methods and Last-used Method
Hi folks – Mike Hildebrand here! Today, I bring you a short post about gaining more awareness of Windows Hello for Business (WHFB) configuration information from across your fleet of Windows PCs. A while back, after being asked by numerous customers for a way to get more details about their WHFB deployment, I published a post about using Entra sign-in log data and a custom Log Analytics Workbook to obtain that information. NOTE: In my 12 days of Christmas blog-a-thon, I posted about creative uses of Intune Proactive Remediations.
19/02/2026
Celebrating Community and Curiosity at Swetugg Stockholm 2026
Every February, Swetugg transforms Stockholm into a vibrant gathering place for developers, architects, cloud practitioners, and community builders from across the Nordics and beyond. The 2026 edition continued that tradition with even more energy, deeper technical conversations, and an unmistakable sense of belonging—one that mirrors the very...
19/02/2026
Agentic Code Fixing with GitHub Copilot SDK and Foundry Local
Introduction AI-powered coding assistants have transformed how developers write and review code. But most of these tools require sending your source code to cloud services, a non-starter for teams working with proprietary codebases, air-gapped environments, or strict compliance requirements. What if you could have an intelligent coding agent that finds bugs, fixes them, runs your tests, and produces PR-ready summaries, all without a single byte leaving your machine? The
19/02/2026
Building HIPAA-Compliant Medical Transcription with Local AI
Building HIPAA-Compliant Medical Transcription with Local AI Introduction Healthcare organizations generate vast amounts of spoken content, patient consultations, research interviews, clinical notes, medical conferences. Transcribing these recordings traditionally requires either manual typing (time-consuming and expensive) or cloud transcription services (creating immediate HIPAA compliance concerns). Every audio file sent to external APIs exposes Protected Health Informati...
19/02/2026
Migrating Workloads from AWS to Azure: A Structured Approach for Cloud Architects
The foundation of a successful migration is maintaining a like-for-like architecture during the transition.A principle often violated in practice: the workload team currently responsible for the workload in AWS and who will ultimately own it in Azure should perform the migration.Read the full series and share it with cloud architects, IT leaders, and DevOps teams in your network who are planning or executing migrations:
19/02/2026
Reactive Incident Response with Azure SRE Agent: From Alert to Resolution in Minutes
SRE Agent portal overview with incident list The Reactive Incident Challenge Your monitoring is solid. Alerts fire when they should. But then what? Alert lands in Teams/PagerDuty On-call engineer wakes up, logs in Starts investigating: "What's broken? Why? How do I fix it?" 20 minutes later, they're still gathering context The alert was fast. The human response? Not so much....
19/02/2026
Zyphra Releases ZUNA: A 380M-Parameter BCI Foundation Model for EEG Data, Advancing Noninvasive Thought-to-Text Development
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are finally having their ‘foundation model’ moment.Zyphra, a research lab focused on large-scale models, recently released ZUNA, a 380M-parameter foundation model specifically for EEG signals.ZUNA is a masked diffusion auto-encoder designed to perform channel infilling and super-resolution for any electrode layout.
19/02/2026
[Tutorial] Building a Visual Document Retrieval Pipeline with ColPali and Late Interaction Scoring
In this tutorial, we build an end-to-end visual document retrieval pipeline using ColPali.We focus on making the setup robust by resolving common dependency conflicts and ensuring the environment stays stable.We render PDF pages as images, embed them using ColPali’s multi-vector representations, and rely on late-interaction scoring to retrieve the most relevant pages for […]
19/02/2026
From "Maybe Next Quarter" to "Running Before Lunch" on Container Apps - Modernizing Legacy .NET App
In early 2025, we wanted to modernize Jon Galloway's MVC Music Store — a classic ASP.NET MVC 5 app running on .NET Framework 4.8 with Entity Framework 6. The goal was straightforward: address vulnerabilities, enable managed identity, and deploy to Azure Container Apps and Azure SQL. No more plaintext connection strings. No more passwords in config files.
18/02/2026
Tavus Launches Phoenix-4: A Gaussian-Diffusion Model Bringing Real-Time Emotional Intelligence And Sub-600ms Latency To Generative Video AI
The ‘uncanny valley’ is the final frontier for generative video. We have seen AI avatars that can talk, but they often lack the soul of human interaction. They suffer from stiff movements and a lack of emotional context. Tavus aims to fix this with the launch of Phoenix-4, a new generative AI model designed for […] The post
18/02/2026
Azure Recognized as an NVIDIA Cloud Exemplar, Setting the Bar for AI Performance in the Cloud
As AI models continue to scale in size and complexity, cloud infrastructure must deliver more than theoretical peak performance. What matters in practice is reliable, end-to-end, workload-level AI performance—where compute, networking, system software, and optimization work together to deliver predictable, repeatable results at scale. This directly translates to business value: efficient full-stack infrastructure accelerates time-to-market, maximizes ROI on GPU and cloud investments, and enab...
18/02/2026
Microsoft 365 Copilot Government Events Are Hitting the Road & Coming to a City Near YOU
Did Someone Say Prompt‑a‑thon?! M365 Copilot Government Events Are Hitting the Road Generative AI is no longer a “future” conversation—it’s happening now across government. And there’s no better way to move from curiosity to confidence than getting hands on with M365 Copilot alongside peers and experts who understand your mission. That’s why we’re excited to bring M365 Copilot Government in‑person experiences to cities...
18/02/2026
Hardware Lab Kit API Updates and New Unreferenced File Check in February Refresh
What’s Changing? The refreshed Windows Hardware Lab Kit (HLK) available starting February 2026 for Windows 11, version 25H2, Windows Server 2025, and Windows 11, version 24H2 will introduce a new check during HLK packaging. If the attached driver pa...
18/02/2026
Navigating the 2025 holiday season: Insights into Azure’s DDoS defense
The holiday season continues to be one of the most demanding periods for online businesses. Traffic surges, higher transaction volumes, and user expectations for seamless digital experiences all converge, making reliability a non-negotiable requirement. For attackers, this same period presents an opportunity: even brief instability can translate into lost revenue, operational disruption, and reputational impact. This year, the most notable shift wasn’t simply the size of attacks, but <...
18/02/2026
Unlocking Document Understanding with Mistral Document AI in Microsoft Foundry
Enterprises today face a familiar yet formidable challenge: mountains of documents -contracts, invoices, reports, forms - remain locked in unstructured formats. Traditional OCR (optical character recognition) captures text, but often struggles with context, layout complexity, or multilingual content. The result? Slow workflows, error-prone manual reviews, and missed insights.
18/02/2026
Google DeepMind Releases Lyria 3: An Advanced Music Generation AI Model that Turns Photos and Text into Custom Tracks with Included Lyrics and Vocals
Google DeepMind is pushing the boundaries of generative AI again. This time, the focus is not on text or images. It is on music. The Google team recently introduced Lyria 3, their most advanced music generation model to date. Lyria 3 represents a significant shift in how machines handle complex audio waveforms and creative intent. […] The post
18/02/2026
Access bug fixes — Versions 2511 through 2601
Version 2511 (Build 19426) Bug Name Issue Fixed Query Design view showed incorrect joins after selecting SQL text When using the Monaco SQL editor with a query containing multiple joins, selecting text in SQL view with Ctrl+A
18/02/2026
Unlocking Document Intelligence with Mistral Document AI in Microsoft Foundry
Enterprises today face a familiar yet formidable challenge: mountains of documents -contracts, invoices, reports, forms - remain locked in unstructured formats. Traditional OCR (optical character recognition) captures text, but often struggles with context, layout complexity, or multilingual content. The result? Slow workflows, error-prone manual reviews, and missed insights.
18/02/2026
Updates to HLK Waiver Management - Coming Soon
The HLK Team is making some updates to how waivers are tracked internally.filters will be published/downloaded in the same way, filters will get applied in the HLK the same way, and manual waivers will be applied to submissions in the same way.However, the IDs of all manual waivers will be updated because of the switch (IDs for waivers with automatic filters will remain the same).
18/02/2026
It's now easier to attain the Microsoft Azure VMware Solution specialization
To expand the specialization opportunity to more partners, Microsoft has removed the Azure VMware Solution (AVS) technical assessment requirement from the Microsoft AVS specialization. This change makes both attaining and renewing the specialization significantly easier for partners. VMware is a leading provid...
18/02/2026
Azure Migrate: Now Supporting Premium SSD V2, Ultra and ZRS Disks as Targets
We are excited to announce that we have added assessment and migration support for Premium SSD v2,
18/02/2026
Unlocking the power of Notebooks with Microsoft Sentinel data lake
Co-authors: Vandana Mahtani, Ashwin Patil Security operations are rapidly evolving, driven by AI and the need for scalable, cost-effective analytics. A key differentiator of the Sentinel data lake is its native integration with Jupyter Notebooks, which brings powerful data science and machine learning capabilities directly into security oper...
18/02/2026
Get started with Elasticsearch MCP server in Azure SRE Agent
Overview The Elasticsearch MCP server enables Azure SRE Agent to interact with your Elasticsearch clusters using natural language. Query your logs, analyze metrics, check cluster health, and troubleshoot issues conversationally. This integration uses Elastic's Agent Builder MCP endpoint, the recommended approach for Elastic 9.2.0+ and Elasticsearch Serverless projects. Key capabilities
18/02/2026
AI-Powered RAN and the Intelligent Edge: Microsoft’s Vision for the Future of Telecom
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly converging with telecommunications infrastructure, promising to transform how networks are built, optimized, and monetized.At Mobile World Congress, Microsoft is sharing a strategic vision for AI in the RAN (AI-RAN) and intelligent edge computing.The push for edge AI in telecom is about extending the power of the cloud out to the network’s edge, closer to where data is generated and consumed.
18/02/2026
Monday Masterclass Season 2 – Week 2: AI Powered Engagement in Viva Engage
AI has officially moved from an interesting add‑on to a core part of how modern organizations communicate and connect.In Week 2 of the Viva Engage Masterclass – AI‑Powered Engagement, we explored what that shift really means for employees, leaders, and communicators—and how Viva Engage is becoming the place where human connection and AI scale together.Week 2 focused on how to amplify your impact with it.
18/02/2026
AI in Action: Meet the 2026 Imagine Cup Semifinalists
Semifinalist teams across both the Launch and Scale paths will receive personalized mentorship, technical guidance, and direct exposure to Microsoft and industry experts.A panel of judges will select the top teams to advance to the Imagine Cup World Championship, where they’ll compete on a global stage.Clear for All is reimagining access to books for blind and visually impaired students by replacing costly Braille production with an inclusive, voice-command reading platform.
18/02/2026
Why Customers Win When SAP Joule and Microsoft Copilot Work Together
SAP and Microsoft have announced and delivered a unified AI experience that allows users to access SAP business processes and Microsoft 365 productivity capabilities without switching contexts or applications.Historically, enterprise work has been fragmented.SAP and Microsoft’s Joule–Copilot integration directly addresses this disconnect by enabling a bi‑directional flow of context and actions across both platforms.
18/02/2026
How Cloud + AI Solutions Empower Nonprofits to Do More with Less
Cloud technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are helping nonprofits overcome these challenges.Together, cloud and AI help nonprofits:Azure enables nonprofits to:
18/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 18, 2026
Learn about 88 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs.Acumens Customer Rebate Management: Acumens Customer Rebate from SBC Dynamics ERP is an app for automating customer rebate processes.Book a half-day workshop with a customer service expert and a solution architect from Softronic for a customization road map.
18/02/2026
A Practical Guide to Azure DDoS Protection Cost Optimization
To protect these resources, Azure offers enhanced DDoS protection capabilities (Network Protection and IP Protection) that customers can apply based on workload exposure and business requirements.Now that you know the main scenarios, the decision tree below can help you determine which SKU best fits your environment based on feature requirements and scale:Use the PowerShell script below to list existing DDoS Protection Plans and associate virtual networks with a consolidated plan.
18/02/2026
Identifying Orphaned Records in Change Tracking Side Tables (Read‑Only Health Check)
When Change Tracking (CT) is enabled, SQL Server (and Azure SQL Database) stores lightweight change metadata so applications can query “what changed since version X?”.This post walks through a read-only T‑SQL script that detects and counts orphaned records across all CT side tables in a database.The script reads the CT retention period from sys.change_tracking_databases:
18/02/2026
SQL MI Private Endpoint in One Picture
Connections only in one direction, from PE to SQL MI and traffic in port 1433When using PE, there’s no need to set up VNET peering or public endpointPE can be created in different Azure tenant
18/02/2026
Google Introduces Jetpack Compose Glimmer: A New Spatial UI Framework Designed Specifically for the Next Generation of AI Glasses
Google is moving beyond the rectangular screen.The result is Jetpack Compose Glimmer, a design system built specifically for display AI glasses.For devs and data scientists, this is a shift from designing for pixels to designing with light.
18/02/2026
Upcoming webinar: Maximize the Cost Efficiency of AI Agents on Azure
That’s exactly what the Maximize the Cost Efficiency of AI Agents on Azure webinar is designed to address.The webinar will provide practical guidance on building and scaling AI agents on Azure with financial discipline in mind.Lee Stott is a Principal Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, working in the Core AI Developer Relations Team.
18/02/2026
Cohere Releases Tiny Aya: A 3B-Parameter Small Language Model that Supports 70 Languages and Runs Locally Even on a Phone
Cohere AI Labs has released Tiny Aya, a family of small language models (SLMs) that redefines multilingual performance.While many models scale by increasing parameters, Tiny Aya uses a 3.35B-parameter architecture to deliver state-of-the-art translation and generation across 70 languages.The release includes 5 models: Tiny Aya Base (pretrained), Tiny Aya Global (balanced instruction-tuned), and […]
18/02/2026
Logic Apps Agentic Workflows with SAP - Part 2: AI Agents
Part 2 focuses on the AI-shaped portion of the destination workflows: how the Logic Apps Agent is configured, how it pulls business rules from SharePoint, and how its outputs are converted into concrete workflow artifacts.In Part 1, the goal was to make the integration deterministic: stable payload shapes, stable response shapes, and predictable error propagation across SAP and Logic Apps. Concretely, Part 1 established:In this solution, the Data Validation Agent runs inside the destination workflow after the inbound SAP payload has been normalized into a single CSV string.
18/02/2026
Logic Apps Agentic Workflows with SAP - Part 1: Infrastructure
When you integrate Azure Logic Apps with SAP, the “hello world” part is usually easy. The part that bites you later is data quality. In SAP-heavy flows, validation isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s what makes the downstream results meaningful. If invalid data slips through, it can get expensive fast: you may create incorrect business documents, trigger follow-up processes, and end up in a cleanup path that’s harder (and more manual) than building validation upfront. And in “all-or-...
18/02/2026
Extending Windows 365 Reserve with Windows 365 Boot
Windows 365 Reserve provides secure, temporary access to a pre-configured Cloud PC when a physical device is unavailable or short-term access is needed, whether due to device loss, delay in issuing devices, or security or technical issues.The user powers on the device, signs in with the familiar Windows 11 login experience, and is instantly connected to their Reserve Cloud PC with all their apps, files, and settings, just like using their original device.Learn more about Windows 365 Reserve and Windows 365 Boot:
18/02/2026
My MVP Story: Nathalie Leenders’ Journey From Salon Chair to Solution Builder
Nathalie Leenders speaking to a room of 900 people at the Power Platform Community ConferenceMVP Nathalie Leenders speaking at the Power Platform Community ConferenceWhether you’re considering a career change, exploring the Power Platform, or quietly wondering if you could ever become an MVP, Nathalie’s advice is the same: don’t be afraid to go for it.
18/02/2026
Partner Case Study | TTEC Digital
TTEC Digital, 2025 Microsoft Dynamics 365 Service Partner of the Year, is helping a leading global airline upgrade its customer support and create standout experiences when travelers need it most: around the clock.As an award-winning Microsoft Solutions Partner, global customer experience (CX) innovator TTEC Digital leverages AI in solution architecture and implementation methodology to reduce complexity, drive operational excellence, and streamline customer experiences.The company’s Microsoft practice focuses on AI Business Solutions and Cloud & AI Platforms, including Microsoft Azure, Copilot, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform.
18/02/2026
Upcoming February 2026 Microsoft 365 Champion Community Call
Join our next community call on February 24, 2026, to learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot features in PowerPoint.The join link will be sent to you in email with your webinar registration confirmation.While our calls are open to everyone, you must be a member of the Microsoft 365 Champion Program in order to access the presentation materials - the access link is in the initial welcome email and the monthly newsletter emails sent the week before the community calls.
17/02/2026
HLK February Refresh Release for Windows 11 Version 25H2 and Windows Server 2025
Microsoft is pleased to announce that a refreshed HLK for Windows 11, version 25H2 and Windows Server 2025 is available starting February 17, 2026.In addition, the refreshed kit includes a new check for unreferenced files. If the attached driver package includes one or more files that were not referenced by an .inf, a new warning will display at the end of packaging. The PackageWriter class in the Microsoft.Windows.Kits.Hardware.ObjectModel.Submission namespace has been updated to provide access to this new information from the HLK API. Please see Attention: HDC is changing the policy on signing unreferenced files in driver packages |The 25H2 RTM HLK is being refreshed, this HLK helps support certifying drivers for Windows 11, version 25H2 and Windows Server 2025. For the following FAQ’s, the 25H2 RTM release will be referenced to as “RTM HLK” and the upcoming release in February 2026 will be referenced as “refresh HLK.
17/02/2026
Attention: HDC is changing the policy on signing unreferenced files in driver packages
Audit your packages for unreferenced files (files not listed in INF sections such as SourceDisksFiles, CatalogFile, or other driver package manifest references.Ensure the driver package only contains the files needed for the functioning of the driver package Note: The February 2026 refresh of the HLK will showcase a warning at package creation time if unreferenced files are found in the driver.
17/02/2026
How Azure SRE Agent Can Investigate Resources in a Private Network
When you configure Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS) with publicNetworkAccessForQuery: Disabled, all public queries to your Log Analytics Workspace are blocked.To enable Azure SRE Agent to query these protected workspaces, deploy Azure Functions inside your VNet as a secure query proxy.Many organizations secure their Log Analytics Workspaces using Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS) with Private Endpoints.
17/02/2026
Join the IT Management and Security in the AI Era Digital Event
We’re excited to invite you to IT Management and Security in the AI Era, on Thursday, February 26th, from 8:00AM to 10:30 AM Pacific.This digital event is designed to help IT and security professionals answer questions with clarity and confidence, grounded in the latest Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities and controls. IT Management and Security in the AI Era brings together insights, demos, and deep dives from Microsoft experts, giving you a practical understanding of how to prepare your environments for Copilot and agents while managing risks responsibly.
17/02/2026
Anthropic Releases Claude 4.6 Sonnet with 1 Million Token Context to Solve Complex Coding and Search for Developers
Today, the company announced Claude 4.6 Sonnet, a model designed to transform how devs and data scientists handle complex logic.Alongside this release comes Improved Web Search with Dynamic Filtering, a feature that uses internal code execution to verify facts in real-time.The post Anthropic Releases Claude 4.6 Sonnet with 1 Million Token Context to Solve Complex Coding and Search for Developers appeared first on MarkTechPost.
17/02/2026
AI with Zero Trust Security
And as AI reshapes both work and the risk landscape, this series will show how Microsoft helps you to implement Zero Trust seamlessly.Today, I’ll start with an overview of the Zero Trust architecture.We’ll look at the vulnerabilities that can arise and the core defenses, both new and existing, that you can deploy to mitigate them.
17/02/2026
OneDrive Office Hours | February 2026
OneDrive Consumer Office Hours are back!February 2026This month's special topic: "File-level Archive" with the Trent Green!
17/02/2026
Agentic Logic Apps Integration with SAP - Part 2: AI Agents
Part 2 focuses on the AI-shaped portion of the destination workflows: how the Logic Apps Agent is configured, how it pulls business rules from SharePoint, and how its outputs are converted into concrete workflow artifacts.Follow a hands-on walkthrough for building an agent workflow and connecting it to an Azure OpenAI deployment (Logic Apps Labs is a good step-by-step reference).The design here is intentionally straightforward: the workflow converts each agent parameter into a first‑class workflow output (via Compose actions and one variable assignment), then binds those values directly into the Office 365 email body.
17/02/2026
Agentic Logic Apps Integration with SAP - Part 1: Infrastructure
In this section I show three practical ways to surface workflow failures back to SAP using the Logic Apps action “Send exception to SAP server”, and the corresponding ABAP patterns used to handle them.If you want more control than the default, you can configure the action to raise a named exception declared in your ABAP function module interface.After the workflow identifies invalid rows (via the Data Validation Agent) and emails a verification summary, it can optionally call a second SAP RFC to save the failed rows as IDocs for later processing.
17/02/2026
Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Microsoft Foundry-Frontier Performance for Scale
Last week, we took a major step forward with the availability of Claude Opus 4.6 in Microsoft Foundry, bringing frontier AI capable of deep reasoning, agentic workflows, and complex decision-making to enterprise developers and builders.Claude Sonnet 4.6 is available today in Microsoft Foundry, and it is designed for teams who want frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work at scale.With stronger financial modeling intelligence and improved spreadsheet capabilities, Sonnet 4.6 is a strong fit for analysis, compliance review, and data summarization workflows where precision and iteration speed matter.
17/02/2026
How to Build an Advanced, Interactive Exploratory Data Analysis Workflow Using PyGWalker and Feature-Engineered Data
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to move beyond static, code-heavy charts and build a genuinely interactive exploratory data analysis workflow directly using PyGWalker.We start by preparing the Titanic dataset for large-scale interactive querying.These analysis-ready engineered features reveal the underlying structure of the data while enabling both detailed row-level exploration and high-level aggregated […]
17/02/2026
Cloudflare Releases Agents SDK v0.5.0 with Rewritten @cloudflare/ai-chat and New Rust-Powered Infire Engine for Optimized Edge Inference Performance
Cloudflare has released the Agents SDK v0.5.0 to address the limitations of stateless serverless functions in AI development.In standard serverless architectures, every LLM call requires rebuilding the session context from scratch, which increases latency and token consumption.The Agents SDK’s latest version (Agents SDK v0.5.0) provides a vertically integrated execution layer where compute, state, […]
17/02/2026
Genesis Mission: How Microsoft & the U.S. Department of Energy Accelerate Scientific
The Genesis Mission brings together the DOE’s 17 National Laboratories, advanced experimental facilities, large‑scale scientific datasets, and next‑generation computing resources into a more integrated scientific discovery platform.Microsoft is working with Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to apply AI in a targeted, responsible way to streamline portions of the nuclear licensing and permitting workflow.Azure Government Secret and Azure Government Top Secret are engineered to meet U.S. government requirements for classified data handling and enable government agencies and national laboratories to adopt cloud and AI technologies for sensitive scientific, energy, and national security missions without compromising security, compliance, or mission assurance.
17/02/2026
Why Protective DNS from Microsoft Marketplace partner Infoblox is foundational for Modern Zero Trust
In this guest blog post, Anant Vadlamani, Vice President of Product Management at Infoblox, discusses the importance of Zero Trust for preemptive security and how enterprises can proactively block threats and enforce secure connectivity across all devices and cloud workloads by adopting Protective DNS and Zero Trust DNS, available in the Microsoft Marketplace.What once seemed like an ambitious framework is becoming the baseline expectation for enterprises. According to Gartner, 63 percent of organizations worldwide have implemented Zero Trust in full or in part. The rationale is simple: The traditional perimeter is gone, cyberattacks are more sophisticated and AI-driven, and breaches are common, despite organizations putting in several “detect and respond” solutions.While organizations are busy securing identities, devices, applications, and networks, many continue to implicitly trust Domain Name System (DNS) — the very foundation of internet connectivity.
17/02/2026
Public Preview: Automatic zone balance for Virtual Machine Scale Sets
We're excited to announce the public preview of automatic zone balance for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets.This new capability helps you maintain zone-resilient workloads with zero manual intervention.Automatic zone balance continuously monitors your scale set and redistributes VMs across availability zones, reducing the risk that a single zone failure disproportionately impacts your applications.
17/02/2026
Introducing library management in Microsoft Defender
Security analysts working with live response in Microsoft Defender often rely on scripts and tools to triage, investigate, and remediate threats.The new library management experience in Defender brings powerful enhancements to how security teams manage scripts and files used in live response.Centralized script and file management – Security teams can now upload, manage, and clean up their entire collection of Live Response scripts and files outside of an active investigation.
17/02/2026
RDP Shortpath (UDP) over Private Link is now generally available
UDP support over Private Link for Azure Virtual Desktop is now generally available.This release enables a direct, high‑performance, UDP‑based RDP connection between AVD session hosts and clients over Azure Private Link using RDP Shortpath for managed networks.Together, these options support customers with strict private network boundaries by allowing RDP traffic over both TCP and UDP transports, using defined private IPs when Private Link is in use.‑based RDP connectivity over Private Link.
17/02/2026
Azure API Management - Unified AI Gateway Design Pattern
As an AI Gateway, Azure API Management enables organizations to implement centralized AI mediation, governance, and developer access control across AI services.This blog post introduces the Unified AI Gateway design pattern, a customer developed architecture pattern designed by Uniper, that builds on API Management’s policy extensibility to create a flexible and maintainable solution for managing AI services across providers, models, and environments. Uniper runs this pattern in production today to optimize AI governance and operational efficiency, enhance the developer experience, and manage AI costs.Note: The Unified AI Gateway described in this post is a customer-implemented design pattern built using Azure API Management policy extensibility.
17/02/2026
Microsoft and Ericsson Advance Enterprise Mobility with Windows 11 and Surface 5G Laptops
The Ericsson Enterprise 5G Connect solution, which has been validated on Microsoft Surface 5G devices, is built on top of enterprise managed cellular connectivity capabilities native to Windows 11.This solution is now being piloted by Ericsson and its preview customers to deliver fast, reliable connectivity to enable AI-driven productivity for today’s mobile workforce—with the manageability enterprises need to operate at scale.Enterprise managed cellular connectivity is a native Windows capability that, when integrated with Microsoft Intune, provides organizations with centralized control and customization of cellular connectivity on Windows 11 PCs.
17/02/2026
Distribute PostgreSQL 18 with Citus 14
The Citus 14.0 release is out and includes PostgreSQL 18 support!The Citus database is an open-source extension of Postgres that brings the power of Postgres to any scale, from a single node to a distributed database cluster.Citus 14.0 introduces support for PostgreSQL 18.
17/02/2026
Your Guide to Microsoft at RSAC™ 2026
AI is accelerating both opportunity and exposure at a pace security leaders haven’t seen before.At RSAC 2026, we’ll show how an AI‑first, end‑to‑end security platform enables you to defend every layer of the AI stack and secure with agentic AI. Read our full guide on making the most of RSAC 2026 Conference. What to experience at RSAC 2026 with Microsoft
17/02/2026
Learn about Iron Mountain's transactable partner solution in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like Iron Mountain deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace.Learn about Iron Mountain's offer below:Iron Mountain InSight DXP: InSight DXP unifies digital and physical information and integrates with core business systems to deliver the single pane of glass view you need for strategic oversight.
17/02/2026
Writing a great session abstract for FabCon & SQLCon
Before you hit submit, run your abstract by a friend. Does it make sense to the technical and/or non-technical? Do the grammar & spelling check out?Does it fit within the character count? Lastly, a few "don'ts"Don't include your name in the abstract if you know the review is done blind.If you can't convey a concept on your own in 400 characters, how can we trust that you can speak on the concept for a full hour?
17/02/2026
Enhancing everyday coordination - Cloudwell - SharePoint Partner Showcase
We are excited to share a new episode on our partner showcase series focused on SharePoint in Microsoft 365.In this brief discussion and demonstration, Chris Alechko, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Cloudwell, and Pat McGown, Co-Founder at Cloudwell and Microsoft MVP, join Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft to showcase how Cloudwell builds secure, native experiences on top of SharePoint and Microsoft 365 using SharePoint Framework (SPFx).By building natively with SPFx, Cloudwell delivers solutions that are secure by design, leverage Microsoft 365 identity and permissions, and feel like a natural extension of SharePoint rather than third-party add-ons.
17/02/2026
Building a Smart Building HVAC Digital Twin with AI Copilot Using Foundry Local
This article demonstrates building a sample smart building digital twin with an AI-powered operations copilot, implemented using DigitalTwin, React, Three.js, and Microsoft Foundry Local.You'll learn how to architect physics-based simulators that model thermal dynamics, implement 3D visualizations of building systems, integrate natural language AI control, and design fault injection systems for testing and training.The complete implementation with simulation engine, 3D visualization, AI copilot, and fault injection system is available at github.com/leestott/DigitalTwin.
17/02/2026
Agoda Open Sources APIAgent to Convert Any REST pr GraphQL API into an MCP Server with Zero Code
Today, travel giant Agoda is tackling this problem head-on.They have officially launched APIAgent, an open-source tool designed to turn any REST or GraphQL API into a Model Context Protocol (MCP) […]The post Agoda Open Sources APIAgent to Convert Any REST pr GraphQL API into an MCP Server with Zero Code appeared first on MarkTechPost.
17/02/2026
How to Build Human-in-the-Loop Plan-and-Execute AI Agents with Explicit User Approval Using LangGraph and Streamlit
In this tutorial, we build a human-in-the-loop travel booking agent that treats the user as a teammate rather than a passive observer.We design the system so the agent first reasons openly by drafting a structured travel plan, then deliberately pauses before taking any action.We expose this proposed plan in a live interface where […]
16/02/2026
Alibaba Qwen Team Releases Qwen3.5-397B MoE Model with 17B Active Parameters and 1M Token Context for AI agents
Alibaba Cloud just updated the open-source landscape.Today, the Qwen team released Qwen3.5, the newest generation of their large language model (LLM) family.The most powerful version is Qwen3.5-397B-A17B.
16/02/2026
Partner Blog | Introducing Partner Marketing Center Pro
Partner Marketing Center Pro is an AI-driven hub that brings key marketing tools into one convenient, intuitive platform. Now, you can run end-to-end marketing campaigns powered by AI, with key features including asset customization, intelligent translation, comprehensive campaign reporting, and an AI assistant that supports you through each step. Partner Marketing Center Pro is developed with modern, AI-powered marketing capabilities designed for you to generate targeted demand, personalize outreach at scale, and move faster from launch to measurable results.Over the coming months, we will continue adding new features that strengthen targeting, streamline execution, and improve performance insights across your campaigns.
16/02/2026
Hello, world.
Agent 365 is the control plane for AI agents.To help organizations take control of agent sprawl, we introduced Microsoft Agent 365 at Microsoft Ignite on November 18, 2025.Watch Nirav Shah and Shilpi_Sinha, Partner Director of Agent 365 deliver a 40-minute technical deep dive followed by Q&A from participants in the Copilot Acceleration Team's CAT AI webinar, "Everything you need to know about Microsoft Agent 365."
16/02/2026
Agents League: Join the Reasoning Agents Track
In a previous blog post, we introduced Agents League, a two‑week AI agent challenge running February 16–27, and gave an overview of the three available tracks.Why Build Reasoning Agents on Microsoft Foundry?Live Coding Battle: Reasoning Agents
16/02/2026
Agentic Code Fixing with GitHub Copilot SDK and Foundry Local
By combining the GitHub Copilot SDK for agent orchestration with Foundry Local for on-device inference, this project creates a fully autonomous coding workflow that operates entirely on your hardware.The agent scans your repository, identifies bugs and code smells, applies fixes, verifies them through your test suite, and generates a comprehensive summary of all changes, completely offline and secure.By running the AI model on-device through Foundry Local and using the GitHub Copilot SDK for orchestration, you get the intelligence of agentic coding workflows with complete data sovereignty.
16/02/2026
Google DeepMind Proposes New Framework for Intelligent AI Delegation to Secure the Emerging Agentic Web for Future Economies
However, most current multi-agent systems rely on brittle, hard-coded heuristics that fail when the environment changes.Google DeepMind researchers have proposed a new solution.The research team argued that for the ‘agentic web’ to scale, agents must move beyond simple […]
16/02/2026
A Coding Implementation to Design a Stateful Tutor Agent with Long-Term Memory, Semantic Recall, and Adaptive Practice Generation
In this tutorial, we build a fully stateful personal tutor agent that moves beyond short-lived chat interactions and learns continuously over time.We design the system to persist user preferences, track weak learning areas, and selectively recall only relevant past context when responding.By combining durable storage, semantic retrieval, and adaptive prompting, we demonstrate how […]
16/02/2026
Moonshot AI Launches Kimi Claw: Native OpenClaw on Kimi.com with 5,000 Community Skills and 40GB Cloud Storage Now
Moonshot AI has officially brought the power of OpenClaw framework directly to the browser.The newly rebranded Kimi Claw is now native to kimi.com, providing developers and data scientists with a persistent, 24/7 AI agent environment.This update moves the project from a local setup to a cloud-native powerhouse.
15/02/2026
Meet ‘Kani-TTS-2’: A 400M Param Open Source Text-to-Speech Model that Runs in 3GB VRAM with Voice Cloning Support
A new open-source contender, Kani-TTS-2, has been released by the team at nineninesix.ai.This model marks a departure from heavy, compute-expensive TTS systems.Instead, it treats audio as a language, delivering high-fidelity speech synthesis with a remarkably small footprint.
15/02/2026
Getting Started with OpenClaw and Connecting It with WhatsApp
OpenClaw is a self-hosted personal AI assistant that runs on your own devices and communicates through the apps you already use—such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, and more.It can answer questions, automate tasks, interact with your files and services, and even speak or listen on supported devices, all while keeping you in control of […]The post Getting Started with OpenClaw and Connecting It with WhatsApp appeared first on MarkTechPost.
15/02/2026
Google AI Introduces the WebMCP to Enable Direct and Structured Website Interactions for New AI Agents
Google is officially turning Chrome into a playground for AI agents.This method is slow, breaks easily, and consumes massive amounts of compute.Google has introduced a better way: the Web […]
15/02/2026
How to Build a Self-Organizing Agent Memory System for Long-Term AI Reasoning
In this tutorial, we build a self-organizing memory system for an agent that goes beyond storing raw conversation history and instead structures interactions into persistent, meaningful knowledge units.We design the system so that reasoning and memory management are clearly separated, allowing a dedicated component to extract, compress, and organize information.The post How to Build a Self-Organizing Agent Memory System for Long-Term AI Reasoning appeared first on MarkTechPost.
14/02/2026
Security Review for Microsoft Edge version 145
We have reviewed the new settings in Microsoft Edge version 145 and determined that there are no additional security settings that require enforcement.The Microsoft Edge version 139 security baseline continues to be our recommended configuration which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit.Microsoft Edge version 145 introduced 11 new Computer and User settings; we have included a spreadsheet listing the new settings to make it easier for you to find.
14/02/2026
Navigating the 2026 holiday season: Insights into Azure’s DDoS defense
We observed a rise in burst style DDoS events—fast-ramping, high-intensity surges distributed across multiple resources, designed to overwhelm packet processing and connection-handling layers before traditional bandwidth metrics show signs of strain.Attack duration is an attacker advantage when defenses rely on humans to notice, diagnose, and react. Design for minute-long spikes: assume attacks will be short, sharp, and high PPS such that your protections should engage automatically. Watch the right signals: alert on PPS spikes and service health (disconnect rates, latency/jitter), not bandwidth alone. To achieve comprehensive protection, implement layered security: deploy Azure DDoS Protection for network-layer (Layers 3 and 4) volumetric mitigation with always-on monitoring, adaptive tuning, telemetry, and alerting; combine it with Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) to defend the application layer (Layer 7) against sophisticated techniques like HTTP floods; and integrate Azure Firewall for additional network perimeter controls.
14/02/2026
Title Plan Update - February 13, 2026
📁February 13, 2026 - Title Plan Now AvailableAccess the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at http://aka.ms/Courseware_Title_Plan to ensure you're always working from the most current version.📌 Reminder: To help you stay informed more quickly and consistently, we’ve moved to a weekly publishing cadence for the title plan.
13/02/2026
Exa AI Introduces Exa Instant: A Sub-200ms Neural Search Engine Designed to Eliminate Bottlenecks for Real-Time Agentic Workflows
In the world of Large Language Models (LLMs), speed is the only feature that matters once accuracy is solved.For an AI agent performing 10 sequential searches to solve a complex task, a 1-second delay per search creates a 10-second lag.The post Exa AI Introduces Exa Instant: A Sub-200ms Neural Search Engine Designed to Eliminate Bottlenecks for Real-Time Agentic Workflows appeared first on MarkTechPost.
13/02/2026
[In-Depth Guide] The Complete CTGAN + SDV Pipeline for High-Fidelity Synthetic Data
In this tutorial, we build a complete, production-grade synthetic data pipeline using CTGAN and the SDV ecosystem.We start from raw mixed-type tabular data and progressively move toward constrained generation, conditional sampling, statistical validation, and downstream utility testing.Rather than stopping at sample generation, we focus on understanding how well synthetic data preserves structure, distributions, […]
13/02/2026
A BizTalk Migration Tool: From Orchestrations to Logic Apps Workflows
The BizTalk Migration Starter is available here: haroldcampos/BizTalkMigrationStarter and consists of four main projects and a test project, each targeting a specific aspect of BizTalk migration:The BTMtoLMLMigrator is a tool that converts BizTalk Maps (.btm files) to the Logic Apps Mapping Language (.lml files).Upload your BizTalk artifacts in the Data directory, and run your tests using the Test explorer.
13/02/2026
DCasv6 and ECasv6 confidential VMs in Azure Government Cloud
Today, we are announcing the launch of the DCasv6 and ECasv6 series of confidential virtual machines (CVMs) in Azure Government.Confidential virtual machines address one of the barriers to multi-tenant cloud adoption: When deployed on Azure Government, Confidential VMs combine physical isolation, sovereign operations, and hardware-enforced cryptographic isolation into a single execution environment.The DCasv6 and ECasv6-series virtual machines built on 4th Generation AMD EPYC™ processors are the first in Azure Government to implement AMD SEV-SNP.
13/02/2026
Partner Blog | Expanded partner benefits are now available: What’s new in February 2026
Expanded partner benefits are now available across the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program.You’ll find a range of meaningful additions designed to empower you to move faster with AI, support security needs, and improve go-to-market execution.Azure credit updates: Azure benefits are being updated across multiple offers, including new additions and increases in value for certain cloud benefits.
13/02/2026
Kyutai Releases Hibiki-Zero: A3B Parameter Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation Model Using GRPO Reinforcement Learning Without Any Word-Level Aligned Data
Kyutai has released Hibiki-Zero, a new model for simultaneous speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) and speech-to-text translation (S2TT).The system translates source speech into a target language in real-time.Unlike previous models, Hibiki-Zero does not require word-level aligned data for training.
13/02/2026
What's new in Viva Insights
As we move further into 2026, we’re excited to announce a variety of new powerful tools and reporting capabilities for Viva Insights that make it easier to understand how your organization's adoption and use of Microsoft 365 Copilot compares to other uses of it both within and outside your company.We’re thrilled to announce the initial rollout of the Agent Dashboard, a powerful new functionality for the Viva Insights web app that provides leaders and analysts with actionable insights into agent adoption.This powerful new Power BI template allows users to learn more about the impact of agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio, and how their deployed across channels in the organization.
13/02/2026
Multi-Geo In-Region Routing General Availability
By default, all inbound anonymous and hybrid email to a Microsoft 365 tenant with Multi-Geo enters Exchange Online in the tenant’s region first and then is relayed within Microsoft’s secure internal network to the email recipient.With In-Region Routing, customers can control the geographic location where inbound email enters Exchange Online for:Multi-Geo In-Region Routing helps ensure that anonymous inbound email and hybrid inbound email enters Exchange Online in the same geography as the recipient user – provided the tenant is properly configured.
13/02/2026
Introducing Security Dashboard for AI (Now in Public Preview)
To address these needs, we are excited to announce the Security Dashboard for AI, previously announced at Microsoft Ignite, is available in public preview. This unified dashboard aggregates posture and real-time risk signals from Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview - enabling users to see left-to-right across purpose-built security tools from within a single pane of glass. The dashboard equips CISOs and AI risk leaders with a governance tool to discover agents and AI apps, track AI posture and drift, and correlate risk signals to investigate and act across their entire AI ecosystem.The Security Dashboard for AI provides leaders with unified AI risk visibility by aggregating security, identity, and data risk across Defender, Entra, Purview into a single interactive dashboard experience.The dashboard also features an AI inventory with comprehensive views to support AI assets discovery, risk assessments, and remediation actions for broad coverage of AI agents, models, MCP servers, and applications. The dashboard provides coverage for all Microsoft AI solutions supported by Entra, Defender and Purview—including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Copilot Studio agents, and Microsoft Foundry applications and agents—as well as third-party AI models, applications, and agents, such as Google Gemini, OpenAI ChatGPT, and MCP servers.
13/02/2026
🚀 AI Toolkit for VS Code — February 2026 Update
Version 0.30.0 is packed with new capabilities that make agent development more discoverable, debuggable, and production-ready—from a brand-new Tool Catalog, to an end-to-end Agent Inspector, to treating evaluations as first-class tests.The new Tool Catalog is a centralized hub for discovering, configuring, and integrating tools into your AI agents.The new Agent Inspector turns agent debugging into a first-class experience inside VS Code.
13/02/2026
Google DeepMind Introduces Aletheia: The AI Agent Moving from Math Competitions to Fully Autonomous Professional Research Discoveries
Google DeepMind team has introduced Aletheia, a specialized AI agent designed to bridge the gap between competition-level math and professional research.While models achieved gold-medal standards at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), research requires navigating vast literature and constructing long-horizon proofs.Aletheia solves this by iteratively generating, verifying, and revising solutions in natural language.
13/02/2026
SSMA Copilot for SAP ASE (Sybase)
However, as modernization accelerates, more customers are actively seeking reliable and automated paths to migrate Sybase workloads to Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL Targets.While Sybase’s T-SQL dialect shares several similarities with Microsoft SQL Server, its procedural code contains deep complexities—extended syntax, non-standard constructs, legacy system tables, and database‑scoped behaviors that often break traditional rule-based converters.To address these challenges, the SQL Migration team is expanding Copilot-based code conversion capabilities to SSMA SAP ASE, following the same intuitive user flow as the Oracle-to-SQL Copilot released earlier.
13/02/2026
How to Align Large Language Models with Human Preferences Using Direct Preference Optimization, QLoRA, and Ultra-Feedback
In this tutorial, we implement an end-to-end Direct Preference Optimization workflow to align a large language model with human preferences without using a reward model.We combine TRL’s DPOTrainer with QLoRA and PEFT to make preference-based alignment feasible on a single Colab GPU.We train directly on the UltraFeedback binarized dataset, where each prompt has […]
13/02/2026
Announcing the 2026 Microsoft 365 Community Conference Keynotes
The Microsoft 365 Community Conference returns to Orlando this April, bringing together thousands of builders, innovators, creators, communicators, admins, architects, MVPs, and product makers for three unforgettable days of learning and community.Building for the future: Microsoft 365, Agents and AI, what's new and what's nextIn this keynote, Charles Lamanna will share how Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Power Apps, and Agent 365 come together to help makers build powerful agents and help IT teams deploy and govern them at scale.
13/02/2026
Modernizing for the AI Era: Accelerating Application Transformation with Agentic Tools
Organizations are entering a new phase of digital transformation where AI is not simply an enhancement—it is a fundamental change in how applications are designed, delivered, and operated.Yet many companies still rely on aging, monolithic, or poorly documented applications that were never built to work in an AI‑driven, cloud‑optimized world.McKinsey estimates that organizations lose up to $85 billion annually due to delayed modernization and accumulated technical debt.⁽¹⁾ Gartner reports that 40% of developer time is consumed maintaining legacy systems instead of building new capabilities.⁽²⁾ IDC notes that up to 66% of IT budgets intended for innovation get diverted to keeping legacy systems alive.⁽³⁾ In the AI era, this drag on innovation has become untenable.
12/02/2026
Azure Landing Zone and compliance for Banks (Indian Banks)
1. Azure Landing Zone for BanksAzure Landing Zone (ALZ) is a predefined, policy-driven cloud foundation that enables banks to securely host regulated workloads while meeting governance, security, audit, and compliance mandates.Centralized identity and access management
12/02/2026
OpenAI Releases a Research Preview of GPT‑5.3-Codex-Spark: A 15x Faster AI Coding Model Delivering Over 1000 Tokens Per Second on Cerebras Hardware
OpenAI just launched a new research preview called GPT-5.3 Codex-Spark.While the standard GPT-5.3 Codex focuses on deep reasoning, Spark is designed for near-instant response times.It is the result of a deep hardware-software integration between OpenAI and Cerebras.
12/02/2026
Cumulative Update #2 for SQL Server 2025 RTM
The 2nd cumulative update release for SQL Server 2025 RTM is now available for download at the Microsoft Downloads site.Starting with SQL Server 2017, we adopted a new modern servicing model.Update Center for Microsoft SQL Server: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/releases/download-and-install-latest-updates
12/02/2026
Azure WAF Compliance with MCP-Driven SRE Agent
Enter the Azure SRE Agent: an AI-powered compliance engine that discovers all resources, assesses them against all 5 WAF pillars AND your organization's specific standards in minutes, then generates exact remediation commands with quantified impact.Azure SRE Agent transforms Azure governance by combining autonomous resource discovery, multi-pillar WAF assessment, and organization-specific compliance enforcement.Open an issue on GitHub or reach out to the Azure SRE team.
12/02/2026
Partner Blog | Simplify and scale operations with the latest technical and API enhancements
That’s why Microsoft is rolling out a set of security, technical, and commerce updates designed to strengthen the partner ecosystem, modernize integrations, and reduce the risk of service disruption.Recent improvements strengthening partner security and reliabilityOver the past few months, we’ve made progress on several technical and API enhancements to support consistent workflows and give partners clear, actionable paths to meeting requirements.
12/02/2026
Is This AGI? Google’s Gemini 3 Deep Think Shatters Humanity’s Last Exam And Hits 84.6% On ARC-AGI-2 Performance Today
Google announced a major update to Gemini 3 Deep Think today.This update is specifically built to accelerate modern science, research, and engineering.It represents a pivot toward a ‘reasoning mode’ that uses internal verification to solve problems that previously required human expert intervention.
12/02/2026
Public Preview Announcement: Empower Real-Time Security with Microsoft Sentinel’s CCF Push Feature
Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of our latest innovation, the Sentinel Codeless Connector Framework (CCF) Push feature.CCF Push addresses a critical need: enabling seamless, automated, and immediate delivery of security data to Sentinel, so teams can respond to threats as they happen.The Obsidian Threat and Activity Feed for Microsoft Sentinel delivers deep visibility into SaaS application activity, helping security teams detect account compromise and insider threats.
12/02/2026
Microsoft Entra Agent ID explained
See every agent in one place, understand what it can access, detect agent sprawl early, and apply least-privilege permissions using the same Microsoft Entra tools you already use for users — without introducing new governance models.That’s where Microsoft Entra Agent ID comes in.Moving to the agent registry, you get visibility for each agent in your tenant and what platform they were built on and whether they have an Agent ID or not.
12/02/2026
Azure Government or Azure Commercial for CJIS 6.0: Choosing Your Compliance Path
Since 2014, United States criminal justice agencies have trusted Microsoft Azure Government to manage Criminal Justice Information (CJI).As first announced with the release of CJIS Security Policy (CJISSECPOL) v5.9.1, agencies have the option to utilize Azure Commercial for CJIS workloads by leveraging advanced technical controls in place of traditional personnel screening.Step 7: Update your SEIP/SSP Since you are using Azure Commercial, your System Security Plan (SSP) must explicitly state that you are using encryption as the compensating control for the lack of vendor personnel screening.
12/02/2026
Partner Blog | Protecting customer trust with fraud prevention and resilience
It is a business risk that can erode customer trust, disrupt operations, and create real financial exposure, including revenue loss or customer churn.Microsoft fraud prevention work underscores the scale of what the ecosystem is facing.According to an August 2025 white paper, Three Lessons from Microsoft’s Fight Against Fraud, the company stopped $4 billion in fraud attempts, blocked around 1.6 million bot sign-ups per hour, and rejected 49,000 fraudulent partnership enrollments.
12/02/2026
You’re invited! Microsoft AI Power Days: Agent-a-thon, February 19, 2026
To help you get started, we invite you to the Microsoft AI Power Days: Agent-a-thon—a global, immersive experience designed to help you build agents, one step at a time.The Agent-a-thon is part of a larger digital event, Microsoft AI Power Days: Building Frontier Firms for the Agentic AI Era — Your Trusted Path to Secure Cloud & AI.Prepare for the live session.
12/02/2026
Release Announcement of SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v10.5
We’re pleased to announce the release of SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v10.5, delivering meaningful improvements across multiple flavours of SSMA to further simplify and de‑risk database modernization to Azure SQL and SQL Server.SSMA v10.5 introduces AI-assisted code conversion powered by Microsoft Copilot for SAP ASE (Sybase)—bringing the same modern Copilot experience already available in SSMA for Oracle to Sybase migrations.With this capability, customers can now use Copilot to accelerate conversion of complex Sybase T‑SQL objects like procedures, functions, triggers, and other database objects to SQL Server and Azure SQL–compatible code.
12/02/2026
MCP-Driven Azure SRE for Databricks
Azure SRE Agent is an AI-powered operations assistant built for incident response and governance.Azure SRE Agent integrates with Azure Databricks through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to provide:Open an issue on GitHub or reach out to the Azure SRE team.
12/02/2026
Get alignment early to build AI apps and agents and sell on Marketplace
According to Microsoft research of Frontier firms: Frontier firms are succeeding because they align business intent, technical design, and security expectations before building AI apps and agents. They don’t treat alignment as a workshop or a slide deck. They treat it as a prerequisite to building agents that actually work, scale, and earn trust. Microsoft helps you adopt this same approach through structured guidance in App Advisor, AI envisioning resources, and practical checklists designed to keep teams aligned from design through deployment.
12/02/2026
How to Manage "Grounding with Bing" Resources Programmatically
This blog shows you how to programmatically manage "Grounding with Bing" resources using Azure Resource Manager (ARM), giving you version-controlled, repeatable deployments that fit into your existing DevOps workflows.In this blog, we are introducing Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to manage "Grounding with Bing" resources using programmatic deployments.Azure Resource Manager (ARM) offers a unified platform for deploying, managing, and monitoring Azure resources, including custom search configurations. Utilizing ARM templates enables you to automate the provisioning and configuration of custom search resources, promoting consistency and repeatability across various environments.
12/02/2026
Kantar reduces storage costs with Microsoft 365 Archive
Kantar, a global leader in marketing data and analytics, is embracing Gen AI to save time, improve quality, and deliver better results to both employees and customers.After moving content to Microsoft 365 and rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot, Kantar faced increasing storage costs.By adopting Microsoft 365 Archive, Kantar has successfully reduced storage costs and improved data quality.
12/02/2026
Celebrating Community Impact at Scale: Workplace Ninja Finland Hosts Its Biggest Live Event Yet
The Workplace Ninja Finland User Group has reached an exciting milestone, hosting its third—and largest—live event since its relaunch two years ago.Bringing together nearly 150 IT professionals, MVPs, and community contributors, the event in November 2025 showcased the growing appetite for in‑person technical learning and reaffirmed Finland's vibrant role in the global Workplace Ninja community.But two years ago, a team of Finnish MVPs and dedicated volunteers reignited the initiative under the global Workplace Ninja brand.
12/02/2026
AI for Communicators celebrates SharePoint’s 25th
SharePoint is celebrating its 25th anniversary and we are bringing some of the latest announcements for communicators.Join us for a forward‑looking conversation on how communications work is evolving, and how SharePoint is helping teams navigate what’s next.If you’re eager to hear the latest on announcement day, be sure to tune in on March 2nd for the SharePoint at 25 birthday event- and get a first look of what's next-aka.ms/SPat25
12/02/2026
Check This Out! (CTO!) Guide (January 2026)
Microsoft Community HubSummary: The January 2026 Azure Arc Server Forum highlighted new machine management features in Azure Compute Hub, updates on Windows Server Hot Patch and its billing, a preview of TPM-based onboarding to Azure Arc, and a recap of major 2025 SQL Server announcements.Summary: The 2025.12.01 release of Azure CycleCloud Workspace for Slurm introduces integrated Prometheus monitoring with managed Grafana dashboards, Entra ID Single Sign-On for secure authentication, support for ARM64 compute nodes, and compatibility with Ubuntu 24.04 and AlmaLinux 9.
12/02/2026
Azure PostgreSQL Lesson #15: Private DNS in Another Subscription Causing Server Deployment Failures
A customer attempted to deploy Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server using private networking (VNet injection + Private DNS).The Virtual Network and Private DNS zone were hosted in a different subscription than the PostgreSQL server.If your PostgreSQL Flexible Server deployment fails with an Internal error in a private network setupcheck resource provider registration across subscriptions before touching networking.
12/02/2026
Deprecation of the -Credential Parameter in Exchange Online PowerShell
The -Credential parameter in Exchange Online PowerShell relies on ROPC, and therefore cannot meet MFA or Conditional Access requirements.To align with MFA enforcement, modern authentication principles, and Microsoft’s broader security standards, support for the -Credential parameter will be removed from new Exchange Online PowerShell versions released after June 2026.After June 2026: new versions of the Exchange Online PowerShell modules released post 2026 will no longer include support for the -Credential parameter.
12/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 12, 2026
Learn about 252 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs.It simplifies managing cyber risks, compliance, and insurance requirements without needing large in-house teams, making enterprise-level protection accessible and cost-effective for organizations with limited security resources.The workshop assesses your current landscape, identifies quick wins, and creates a custom roadmap covering governance, security, and integration.
12/02/2026
Implementing Azure Lighthouse: A Technical Guide for Service Providers and Enterprises
Managing resources across multiple tenants is a common challenge for managed service providers (MSPs) and large enterprises.Microsoft’s Azure Lighthouse addresses the challenge of managing resources across tenants at scale by allowing service providers and customers to delegate access to specific scopes in the customer’s tenant.This article introduces the core architecture and operational model of Azure Lighthouse and provides guidance for implementers along with lesser-known tips to help you succeed.
12/02/2026
SSMA Copilot for SAP ASE (Sybase)
However, as modernization accelerates, more customers are actively seeking reliable and automated paths to migrate Sybase workloads to Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL Targets.While Sybase’s T-SQL dialect shares several similarities with Microsoft SQL Server, its procedural code contains deep complexities—extended syntax, non-standard constructs, legacy system tables, and database‑scoped behaviors that often break traditional rule-based converters.To address these challenges, the SQL Migration team is expanding Copilot-based code conversion capabilities to SSMA SAP ASE, following the same intuitive user flow as the Oracle-to-SQL Copilot released earlier.
12/02/2026
Building a Local Research Desk: Multi-Agent Orchestration
Using Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) for orchestration and Foundry Local for on-device inference, this demo shows how to create a four-agent research pipeline that runs entirely on your hardware, no API keys, no data leaving your network, and complete control over every step.Beyond the research workflow, the web UI includes five interactive demos showcasing different MAF capabilities.With Microsoft Agent Framework for orchestration and Foundry Local for inference, you can build production-quality workflows that run entirely on your hardware.
12/02/2026
Teaching AI Development Through Gamification:
Teaching AI Development Through Gamification: Building an Interactive Learning Platform with Foundry LocalWe'll dive into Foundry Local Learning Adventure, a JavaScript-based game that teaches AI fundamentals through five interactive levels.You'll learn how to create engaging educational experiences, integrate local AI models using Foundry Local, design progressive difficulty curves, and build cross-platform applications that run both in browsers and terminals.
12/02/2026
Securing A Multi-Agent AI Solution Focused on User Context & the Complexities of On-Behalf-Of.
How we built an enterprise-grade multi-agent system that preserves user identity across AI agents and DatabricksWhen building AI-powered applications for the enterprise, a common challenge emerges: how do you maintain user identity and access controls when an AI agent queries backend services on behalf of a user?In this post, I’ll walk through how we solved this challenge for a current enterprise customer by implementing Microsoft Entra ID On-Behalf-Of (OBO) secure flow in a custom multi-agent LangGraph solution, enabling our Databricks Genie agent to query data and the data agent designed to modify or update delta tables, to do so as the authenticated user, while preserving all RBAC policies.
12/02/2026
Securing Multi-Agent AI with User Context: Entra ID OBO for Databricks Genie.
How we built an enterprise-grade multi-agent system that preserves user identity across AI agents and DatabricksWhen building AI-powered applications for the enterprise, a common challenge emerges: how do you maintain user identity and access controls when an AI agent queries backend services on behalf of a user?In this post, I’ll walk through how we solved this challenge for a current enterprise customer by implementing Microsoft Entra ID On-Behalf-Of (OBO) secure flow in a custom multi-agent LangGraph solution, enabling our Databricks Genie agent to query data and the data agent designed to modify or update delta tables, to do so as the authenticated user, while preserving all RBAC policies.
12/02/2026
How to Build a Matryoshka-Optimized Sentence Embedding Model for Ultra-Fast Retrieval with 64-Dimension Truncation
In this tutorial, we fine-tune a Sentence-Transformers embedding model using Matryoshka Representation Learning so that the earliest dimensions of the vector carry the most useful semantic signal.We train with MatryoshkaLoss on triplet data and then validate the key promise of MRL by benchmarking retrieval quality after truncating embeddings to 64, 128, and 256 dimensions.The post How to Build a Matryoshka-Optimized Sentence Embedding Model for Ultra-Fast Retrieval with 64-Dimension Truncation appeared first on MarkTechPost.
12/02/2026
Public Preview: Azure Monitor pipeline transformations
The Azure Monitor pipeline extends the data collection capabilities of Azure Monitor to edge and multi-cloud environments.It enables at-scale data collection (data collection over 100k EPS), and routing of telemetry data before it's sent to the cloud.The pipeline can cache data locally and sync with the cloud when connectivity is restored and route telemetry to Azure Monitor in cases of intermittent connectivity. Learn more about this here - Configure Azure Monitor pipeline - Azure Monitor |
12/02/2026
General Availability: IP Network Firewalls for Azure Managed HSM
We are excited to announce the General Availability of IP Firewalls for Azure Key Vault Managed HSM in all public regions.The feature allows you to authorize a particular service to access your managed HSM through the Managed HSM Firewall by adding its IP address to the Key Vault Managed HSM firewall allowlist.For a full list of the current Managed HSM Trusted Services, see Azure Key Vault Trusted Services.
12/02/2026
Beyond iptables: Scaling AKS Networking with nftables and Project Calico
Last year, Microsoft’s decision to support kube-proxy in nftables mode reflects a broader reality, the traditional iptables model is becoming a structural bottleneck for modern Kubernetes platforms, including managed environments such as AKS.In this blog we are going to use Microsoft’s latest kube-proxy preview features to create a Bring Your Own CNI cluster configured for nftables, and use Project Calico to establish networking and security on it.Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) now includes preview support for running kube-proxy in nftables mode.
11/02/2026
Announcing database instructions and a lot of fixes in SQL Server Management Studio 22.3
In January we released SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22.2.1 and I commented that it might look like a minor release, but it really wasn’t. That’s true for SSMS 22.3 as well, which dropped yesterday (February 10). Read on to learn what’s new and a couple changes that may impact your daily workflow.In this release we also updated to later releases of Microsoft.Data.SqlClient (MDS) and SQL Management Objects (SMO). While these updates are invisible and foundational to core SSMS functionality, they are quite impactful to components like third-party extensions that have dependencies on them. We are aware that SSMS 22.3 does not work when certain third-party extensions are installed, and we are following up with extension owners based on feedback items that have already been opened.In the event that you ever need to rollback to a previous release, you can do that from the Visual Studio Installer. From the SSMS 22 entry in the VS Installer, select More > Rollback to previous version. If you happen to uninstall SSMS entirely, you can find previous versions on the Release History page. While you can install different major versions of SSMS side by side (e.g. SSMS 21.6 and 22.3), you can only install one version of SSMS 22 GA on your machine.
11/02/2026
Microsoft Tech Community Release Notes – 26.01
We’re excited to share the latest updates to the Microsoft Tech Community!This release focuses on improving User Group management, along with a collection of behind‑the‑scenes updates and bug fixes designed to make everyday interactions on the platform smoother and more reliable.These enhancements also lay the groundwork for future discoverability and filtering improvements across the platform.Expanded Group Hub metadata fields
11/02/2026
News to Know – Volume 3, Edition 2, February 2026
In March, we will kick off the Dynamic Topics private preview with a small group of customers.Viva Glint is introducing integration with Organizational Data in Microsoft 365, providing an enterprise‑grade approach to connecting people data across Viva experiences.Viva Customer Connection Program is now the Employee Experience Customer Connection program
11/02/2026
International Day of Women & Girls in Science: Where Barriers Fall and Breakthroughs Rise
When women aren’t better represented in science, the world loses the breakthroughs we need most. Today, women make up just 35% of STEM graduates and only one‑third of researchers, while 122 million girls around the world are still out of school — a staggering amount of unrealized potential.On the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we’re honoring the organizations showing what’s possible when those barriers fall.When women lead, innovation accelerates, equity expands, and the future opens wider for all of us.
11/02/2026
How to Build an Atomic-Agents RAG Pipeline with Typed Schemas, Dynamic Context Injection, and Agent Chaining
In this tutorial, we build an advanced, end-to-end learning pipeline around Atomic-Agents by wiring together typed agent interfaces, structured prompting, and a compact retrieval layer that grounds outputs in real project documentation.Also, we demonstrate how to plan retrieval, retrieve relevant context, inject it dynamically into an answering agent, and run an interactive loop that […]The post How to Build an Atomic-Agents RAG Pipeline with Typed Schemas, Dynamic Context Injection, and Agent Chaining appeared first on MarkTechPost.
11/02/2026
Windows 365 now supported in New Zealand North
Today I’m pleased to announce that Windows 365 is now available in the New Zealand North region, bringing Cloud PCs even closer to our customers around the world. With this expansion, organizations in and around New Zealand can benefit from lower latency, improved performance, and local data residency, all delivered through our trusted Microsoft Cloud.Because Microsoft manages the networking for you, choosing the Australasia geography where New Zealand North has been added to lets the service optimize Cloud PC placement automatically for performance and resilience.Start provisioning in the new region and give your organization the performance and resiliency benefits immediately.
11/02/2026
Deploying Custom Models with Microsoft Olive and Foundry Local
Optimize your model with Olive, serve with Foundry Local or a custom server.It handles ONNX conversion, graph optimization, and quantization in a single command.You now have end-to-end skills for building production SLM applications: understanding the landscape, local development with Foundry Local, agentic applications with function calling, multi-agent architectures, model optimization with Olive, and deploying custom models to the edge.
11/02/2026
Celebrate International Day of Women and Girls in Science with help from Copilot
February 11, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, is about more than recognizing past achievements.Designing a mentorship program to support women in ITCreating pathways for girls in science and technology
11/02/2026
Meet Victor Addae
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.The Microsoft Student Ambassadors program has been a defining milestone in my growth as an aspiring AI, cloud, and data professional.
11/02/2026
What’s new in Microsoft Sentinel: February 2026
The Microsoft 365 Copilot connector brings Microsoft 365 Copilot audit logs and activity data into Sentinel, giving security teams visibility into how Microsoft 365 Copilot is being used across their organization.Microsoft is modernizing data connectors by shifting from Azure Function based connectors to the codeless connector framework (CCF).Deadline to migrate the Sentinel experience from Azure to Defender extended to March 2027
11/02/2026
Meet Tauqeer Ahmad
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.The Microsoft Student Ambassadors program has been a game-changer for my career and personal growth.
11/02/2026
From Local MCP Server to Hosted Web Agent: App Service Observability, Part 2
In Part 1, we introduced the App Service Observability MCP Server — a proof-of-concept that lets GitHub Copilot (and other AI assistants) query your App Service logs, analyze errors, and help debug issues through natural language.That version runs locally alongside your IDE, and it's great for individual developers who want to investigate their apps without leaving VS Code.In this post, we'll show how we took the same set of MCP tools and wrapped them in a hosted web application — deployed to Azure App Service with a chat UI and a built-in Azure OpenAI agent.
11/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 11, 2026
Learn about 87 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs.Accion Labs - Value-Based Care as a Service: Value-Based Care as a Service is a Microsoft Azure-based healthcare model prioritizing patient outcomes and cost efficiency.CARE integration with ECM Smart Connect streamlines document management in Dynamics 365 Business Central.
11/02/2026
Sertifiointiviikot tulevat Maaliskuussa
Microsoftin Certification Week -tapahtumat tarjoavat kumppaneille erinomaisen mahdollisuuden vahvistaa osaamista, kuroa umpeen osaamisvajeita ja vauhdittaa liiketoimintaa – joustavasti verkossa.Maaliskuun aikana järjestettävät englanninkieliset Certification Weekit keskittyvät erityisesti Cloud & AI Platformiin, Securityyn sekä AI Business Solutions -ratkaisuihin.Kun olet mukana vähintään 80% tunneista ja labroista, niin saat ILMAISEN vouncherin varsinaiseen sertifiointitenttiin.
11/02/2026
Accelerating SCOM to Azure Monitor Migrations with Automated Analysis and ARM Template Generation
Accelerating SCOM to Azure Monitor Migrations with Automated Analysis and ARM Template GenerationWith Azure Monitor increasingly becoming the destination platform, many organizations face a familiar challenge: migrating from System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).The community-driven SCOM to Azure Monitor Migration Tool accepts Management Pack XML files and produces several outputs designed to accelerate migration planning and execution.
11/02/2026
Agents League: Two Weeks, Three Tracks, One Challenge
We're inviting all developers to join Agents League, running February 16-27.It's a two-week challenge where you'll build AI agents using production-ready tools, learn from live coding sessions, and get feedback directly from Microsoft product teams.Agents League starts on February 16th and runs through Feburary 27th.
11/02/2026
NVIDIA Researchers Introduce KVTC Transform Coding Pipeline to Compress Key-Value Caches by 20x for Efficient LLM Serving
Serving Large Language Models (LLMs) at scale is a massive engineering challenge because of Key-Value (KV) cache management.As models grow in size and reasoning capability, the KV cache footprint increases and becomes a major bottleneck for throughput and latency.For modern Transformers, this cache can occupy multiple gigabytes.
11/02/2026
Meet Sandro Speth
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.The Microsoft Student Ambassadors program strengthened my resume by providing me with practical experience in modern technologies, community engagement, and technical leadership.
11/02/2026
Meet Nirajan Acharya
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.Through Student Ambassadors, I gained real leadership experience by conducting awareness sessions, giving free training to students, and working on impactful community projects, turning my resume into a reflection of meaningful contribution rather than just technical achievements.
11/02/2026
Meet Megha Vishwakarma
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.The Microsoft Student Ambassadors program has played a pivotal role in shaping my growth, both personally and professionally.
11/02/2026
Meet Dominik Skowron
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.How has being part of the Microsoft Student Ambassadors community helped you connect with other tech enthusiasts and expand your global network?
11/02/2026
Meet Beatriz Tavernaro Cardoso
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.Having access to Microsoft’s tools and resources played a central role in my development as an AI-focused developer.
11/02/2026
Meet Alejandra Perez
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.As I advanced, I received invitations to speak at the Student Summit and Microsoft Reactor, and the program inspired me to apply for the GitHub Campus Experts program.
11/02/2026
Meet Abayomi Abiodun
This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest level attainable, and have recently graduated from university.Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they are up to now.Being part of the Microsoft Student Ambassadors community has been one of the most transformational experiences of my tech journey.
11/02/2026
Google AI Introduces Natively Adaptive Interfaces (NAI): An Agentic Multimodal Accessibility Framework Built on Gemini for Adaptive UI Design
Google Research is proposing a new way to build accessible software with Natively Adaptive Interfaces (NAI), an agentic framework where a multimodal AI agent becomes the primary user interface and adapts the application in real time to each user’s abilities and context.Instead of shipping a fixed UI and adding accessibility as a separate layer, […]The post Google AI Introduces Natively Adaptive Interfaces (NAI): An Agentic Multimodal Accessibility Framework Built on Gemini for Adaptive UI Design appeared first on MarkTechPost.
11/02/2026
February update: What’s New in Azure for Partners
New secure migration partner investments available for Microsoft Defender for Cloud: InfraDB-specialized and Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP) partners with the Solutions Partner for Security designation are now eligible for workshop incentives to help drive Defender for Cloud in migration and modernization projects. Access helpful resources on the new Cloud Security Envisioning Workshop.Join us on March 10, 2026, for an exclusive partner preview of the upcoming Microsoft Azure Summit: Migrate & Modernize with Agentic AI event. You’ll get early access to key messages, product announcements, and breakout themes, plus insight into how these updates translate into concrete partner opportunities.Microsoft-in-a-Day workshops: The Microsoft-in-a-Day workshops are a powerful business development opportunity to position yourself as a subject matter expert on Fabric and Power BI, engage with new customers directly, and grow your pipeline of opportunities. Learn more about how to get started.
10/02/2026
How to Design Complex Deep Learning Tensor Pipelines Using Einops with Vision, Attention, and Multimodal Examples
In this tutorial, we walk through advanced usage of Einops to express complex tensor transformations in a clear, readable, and mathematically precise way.We demonstrate how rearrange, reduce, repeat, einsum, and pack/unpack let us reshape, aggregate, and combine tensors without relying on error-prone manual dimension handling.The post How to Design Complex Deep Learning Tensor Pipelines Using Einops with Vision, Attention, and Multimodal Examples appeared first on MarkTechPost.
10/02/2026
Introducing the Viva Engage Track at the 2026 Microsoft 365 Conference
Whether you’re trying to cut through the noise, connect leaders with employees, or bring clarity to AI-driven change, the role of the modern communicator is evolving fast.At this year’s M365 Community Conference, we’re excited to bring you the Viva Engage Track — a focused learning path designed to help communicators, HR leaders, IT partners, and community champions build connected, informed, and high‑performing workplaces.Across three days, this track walks you through the full modern comms lifecycle — strategy, storytelling, measurement, deployment, AI readiness, and community activation.The deeper native integration of Viva Engage inside Microsoft Teams -making communities, events, campaigns, and storylines feel seamless across devices and workstyles.
10/02/2026
Lake-Only Ingestion for Microsoft Defender Advanced Hunting Tables is Now Generally Available
Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability (GA) of lake‑only ingestion for Microsoft XDR Advanced Hunting tables into Microsoft Sentinel Data Lake.This release enables lake‑only ingestion for Advanced Hunting data from:To enable Advanced Hunting tables for Sentinel data lake ingestion:
10/02/2026
Partner Blog | Cloud & AI Platforms, Part 5: Innovating with Azure AI apps and agents.
Across industries, AI is reshaping how applications are designed, built, and delivered. We are witnessing the shift from point solutions to systems, with Copilots and agents that can reason, act, and collaborate across workflows.That shift is creating both urgency and opportunity for partners. At the same time, organizations are rapidly moving from prebuilt generative AI apps toward customized or custom-built solutions, with IDC projecting that shift from 40% today to 70% in the next 24 months.
10/02/2026
What to know about Windows 11, version 26H1
Windows 11, version 26H1 is a targeted release that supports some of the new device innovations coming in 2026.Windows 11, version 26H1 will only be available on new devices with select new silicon as they come to market in early 2026.Devices running Windows 11, version 26H1 will not be able to update to the next annual feature update in the second half of 2026.
10/02/2026
Released: February 2026 Exchange Server Security Updates
Microsoft has released Security Updates (SUs) for vulnerabilities found in:Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE)Customers who enrolled in the Extended Security Update (ESU) program are eligible to receive the February 2025 security updates for Exchange Server 2016 and 2019.
10/02/2026
No Skype for Business Server Security Updates for February 2026
We have therefore decided that until the end of this Skype for Business 2015 and 2019 ESU period (April 2026) we will make an explicit update related announcement even if we DO NOT release anything for that particular month. There are no security releases for any version of Skype for Business Server in February 2026, for customers with SfB 2015/SfB 2019 ESU, or SfB SE.The Skype for Business Team
10/02/2026
Partner Case Study | HRIZONS EX
Employee surveys have become a cornerstone of modern workforce strategy, offering organizations a direct line to employee sentiment and a powerful lever for change.When Microsoft transitioned away from first-party services for the employee survey solution Microsoft Viva Glint, HRIZONS EX became one of the first authorized consultancies to support customers through the shift.Their consulting-as-a-service model provides ongoing strategic support metered to an organization’s unique needs rather than a one-size-fits-all, one-time implementation—which made them an ideal fit for a leading global skin care company.
10/02/2026
AlphaLife Sciences powers regulatory-compliant AI workflows with PostgreSQL on Azure
At Microsoft Ignite, AlphaLife Sciences CEO and Founder Sharon Chen shared how her team is building an AI-powered content authoring platform on top of Azure Database for PostgreSQL, designed specifically for the demands of regulated life sciences workflows. She also explained why the team is excited about Azure HorizonDB as a new PostgreSQL service that is built to meet the needs of modern enterprise workloads. This post explores how AlphaLife Sciences uses PostgreSQL as more than a data store. It’s a semantic foundation for compliant, auditable AI agents.At the core of AlphaLife Sciences’ platform is Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
10/02/2026
Strengthen your cloud security expertise with new AI security training
To help meet that need, we’re releasing a wave of new and updated Microsoft Learn offerings this month, designed to help you secure AI workloads, modernize incident response, strengthen identity governance, optimize security operations across the Microsoft Cloud, and more.New Microsoft Applied Skills: Secure AI Solutions in the CloudMicrosoft Applied Skills: Secure AI Solutions in the Cloud validates your ability to secure AI workloads across Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Foundry.
10/02/2026
Research Drop: Fighting AI Slop with Meta-Cognition around AI
When employees aren’t intentional or thoughtful with their AI use, it can drive quality issues and increase “workslop,” and 60% of employees report skipping accuracy checks.AI use without intentional habits can degrade quality, erode trust, and even harm team performance.Concerningly, our research shows that 60% of employees skip accuracy checks when using AI, which accelerates the AI slop prevalence.
10/02/2026
Alibaba Open-Sources Zvec: An Embedded Vector Database Bringing SQLite-like Simplicity and High-Performance On-Device RAG to Edge Applications
Alibaba Tongyi Lab research team released ‘Zvec’, an open source, in-process vector database that targets edge and on-device retrieval workloads.It is positioned as ‘the SQLite of vector databases’ because it runs as a library inside your application and does not require any external service or daemon.It is designed for retrieval augmented generation (RAG), […]
10/02/2026
My MVP Story: How a 12+ Year MVP Veteran Sparked a Nationwide AI Movement in Vietnam
This mission later led me to co-found Master Learning Hub Academy, a Microsoft Global Training Partner in Vietnam dedicated to helping learners and organizations master Microsoft technologies in meaningful ways.In early 2025, my team and I at Master Learning Hub Academy launched AI Fridays 2025, a free, six-week nationwide learning series designed to make Microsoft AI more approachable and practical for everyone.Trong Manh Nguyen is a Microsoft MVP in Cloud & Datacenter Management and the Training Director and Co-founder of Master Learning Hub Academy, a Microsoft Global Training Partner in Vietnam.
10/02/2026
10 Nonprofit Technology Myths Debunked: What Cloud + AI Really Mean for Your Mission
Cloud technology and AI can help.They reduce busywork, strengthen security, and free your team to focus on what matters.Here are the 10 biggest nonprofit technology myths debunked.
10/02/2026
Update: Changing the Account Name Entity Mapping in Microsoft Sentinel
The upcoming update introduces more consistent and predictable entity data across analytics, incidents, and automation by standardizing how the Account Name property is populated when using UPN‑based mappings in analytic rules.Going forward, Account Name property will consistently contain only the UPN prefix, with new dedicated fields added for the full UPN and UPN suffix.Logic App Playbook and SecurityAlert table receives:
10/02/2026
Adding AI Personality to Browser Games
This article demonstrates exactly that: integrating AI-powered dynamic commentary into a browser game using Spaceinvaders-FoundryLocal, vanilla JavaScript, and Microsoft Foundry Local.You'll learn how to integrate local AI into client-side games, design AI personality systems that enhance rather than distract, implement context-aware commentary generation, and architect optional AI features that don't break core gameplay when unavailable.The complete implementation with game engine, AI integration, backend proxy, and deployment instructions is available at github.com/leestott/Spaceinvaders-FoundryLocal.
10/02/2026
How to Set Up Claude Code with Microsoft Foundry Models on macOS
Here is how you can set up Claude Code to run locally on macOS while leveraging the stability of models deployed on Microsoft Foundry.You need an active Azure subscription where the Microsoft Foundry environment is initialized.You can start using Claude Code locally, powered entirely by the model deployment running in your Microsoft Foundry environment.
10/02/2026
Customer review: Maplytics delivers strong value through smart location visualization
Inogic's Maplytics, an app published to Microsoft Marketplace, integrates Microsoft Azure and Bing Maps geolocation features into Microsoft Dynamics 365, Dataverse, Power Pages, and Power Apps, empowering field, sales, and service teams to make faster, smarter, location-driven decisions.Maplytics enables smart location visualization by plotting car shops, repair centers, and service stations on interactive maps with customizable pushpins.How is customer service and support for Maplytics?
10/02/2026
How to Build a Privacy-Preserving Federated Pipeline to Fine-Tune Large Language Models with LoRA Using Flower and PEFT
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to federate fine-tuning of a large language model using LoRA without ever centralizing private text data.We simulate multiple organizations as virtual clients and show how each client adapts a shared base model locally while exchanging only lightweight LoRA adapter parameters.By combining Flower’s federated learning simulation engine with […]
10/02/2026
Azure Arc Jumpstart Template for Hybrid Logic Apps Deployment
Today I’m sharing a new Azure Arc Jumpstart template (Jumpstart Drop) that implements a hybrid deployment for Azure Logic Apps (Standard) on Azure Arc-enabled AKS cluster which enables deployment with a single command that sets up a complete, working environment for testing your scenarios.Hybrid deployment model allows you to run Logic Apps workloads on your own infrastructure, providing you with the option to host your integration solutions on premises, in a private cloud, or even in a third-party public cloud.You can find more information in this article:Set up your own infrastructure for Standard logic app workflows - Azure Logic Apps |
10/02/2026
Announcing Application Insights SDK 3.x for .NET
Today, we’re excited to take the next step on that journey with a major release of the Application Insights SDK 3.x for .NET.With Application Insights SDK 3.x, developers can migrate to OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation with dramatically less effort.The new SDK automatically routes your classic Application Insights Track* APIs calls through a new mapping layer that emits OpenTelemetry signals under the hood.
10/02/2026
Secure DNS with DoH: Public Preview for Windows DNS Server
Today we’re opening the public preview of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) for Windows DNS Server, bringing encrypted, authenticated DNS to the heart of your on‑premises network.IETF introduced two standards for encrypting DNS:The public preview of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is included in the February 10th 2026 update of Windows Server 2025 and is disabled by default.
09/02/2026
Fueling New Experiences in Microsoft 365 Copilot with Expanded Copilot Connectors Catalog
Copilot connectors help unify that fragmented data by securely extending Microsoft 365 Copilot to external systems.Going into 2026, across all enterprise AI tools, Microsoft has one of the fastest growing and most extensive connector ecosystems with over 100 Copilot connectors and counting.This month, we’re thrilled to announce the General Availability of 35 new Copilot connectors built by Microsoft to meet your external data needs.
09/02/2026
Microsoft AI Proposes OrbitalBrain: Enabling Distributed Machine Learning in Space with Inter-Satellite Links and Constellation-Aware Resource Optimization Strategies
Earth observation (EO) constellations capture huge volumes of high-resolution imagery every day, but most of it never reaches the ground in time for model training.Downlink bandwidth is the main bottleneck.Images can sit on orbit for days while ground models train on partial and delayed data.
09/02/2026
Partner Blog | Simplify and scale operations with the latest technical and API enhancements
To support this shift, Microsoft is delivering a set of security‑first, API‑driven, and commerce‑aligned technical updates across Partner Center and related platforms.These changes are designed to reduce risk, improve resilience, and simplify how partners integrate with Microsoft platforms—all while supporting more consistent, scalable operations across customer lifecycle scenarios.Recent enhancements strengthening partner security and reliability
09/02/2026
Now in Foundry: Qwen3-Coder-Next, Qwen3-ASR-1.7B, Z-Image
This week's spotlight features three models from that demonstrate enterprise-grade AI across the full scope of modalities.From low latency coding agents to state-of-the-art multilingual speech recognition and foundation-quality image generation, these models showcase the breadth of innovation happening in open-source AI.This week's Model Mondays edition highlights Qwen3-Coder-Next, an 80B MoE model that activates only 3B parameters while delivering coding agent capabilities with 256k context;
09/02/2026
From signal to strategy: Closing attack paths with identity intelligence
In the first half of 2025 alone, identity-based attacks surged more than 32% and its estimated that 97% of them are password focused.Today we are excited to share more about how Microsoft Defender can help security professionals proactively understand how identity-related risks, like leaked credentials, relate back to critical assets, helping security professionals proactively close potential entry points before they can be exploited.Understanding leaked credentials and attack paths:
09/02/2026
Windows Admin Center Architectural Changes
Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode is a new experience that helps you manage your virtualization infrastructure across your Hyper-V clusters, storage (SAN, NAS, and HCI), and networking configurations.In our last blog, we introduced Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode (vMode) and laid out the concepts of modes.Windows Admin Center has evolved to support both server administration and virtualization roles.
09/02/2026
What’s new in FinOps toolkit 13 – January 2026
This release focuses on stability and usability improvements across FinOps hubs, Power BI reports, and Azure Optimization Engine with a few key additions, like configuring Key Vault purge protection when deploying FinOps hubs and support for format and compression when creating Cost Management exports via PowerShell.In case you haven’t heard, the FinOps toolkit is an open-source collection of tools and resources that help you learn, adopt, and implement FinOps in the Microsoft Cloud.To support this momentum, I’m also working on a set of premium, paid services designed to help organizations deploy, customize, and scale the FinOps toolkit with confidence.
09/02/2026
Azure SQL’s Native JSON Type: Optimized for Performance
Instead of saving JSON as raw text, Azure SQL can store it in a binary representation that’s optimized for fast reads, efficient in-place updates, and compact storage.JSON data is stored in a native binary format, not as plain textTo measure the performance impact of migrating JSON from nvarchar/varchar to the native JSON binary type, a test environment was set up with six tables on Azure SQL Database (General Purpose, Gen5, 2 vCores).
09/02/2026
SQLDBControlPlaneFirstPartyApp explained
The SQLDBControlPlaneFirstPartyApp is an internal Azure application used by the Azure SQL Database control plane to synchronize resource state between the SQL engine and Azure Resource Manager (ARM).For example, the “Azure SQL Database” application is a First Party App that enables Azure AD authentication and other identity-related features for Azure SQL Database.Disable sign-in to the SQLDBControlPlaneFirstPartyApp app
09/02/2026
Choosing the Right Model in GitHub Copilot: A Practical Guide for Developers
GitHub Copilot now supports multiple AI models, each optimized for different workflows, from quick edits to deep debugging to multi-step agentic tasks that generate or modify code across your entire repository.but only if we know how to choose the right model at the right time.This is written from the perspective of real-world customer conversations, GitHub Copilot demos, and enterprise adoption journeys
09/02/2026
Build an AI-Powered Space Invaders Game
Build an AI-Powered Space Invaders Game: Integrating LLMs into HTML5 Games with Microsoft Foundry LocalIn this tutorial, we'll explore how to create an HTML5 game with integrated Large Language Model (LLM) features using Microsoft Foundry Local.The combination of GitHub Copilot CLI for development assistance and Foundry Local for runtime AI gives you powerful tools to bring intelligent applications to life.
09/02/2026
Meet OAT: The New Action Tokenizer Bringing LLM-Style Scaling and Flexible, Anytime Inference to the Robotics World
Robots are entering their GPT-3 era.For years, researchers have tried to train robots using the same autoregressive (AR) models that power large language models (LLMs).If a model can predict the next word in a sentence, it should be able to predict the next move for a robotic arm.
09/02/2026
A Coding Implementation to Establish Rigorous Prompt Versioning and Regression Testing Workflows for Large Language Models using MLflow
In this tutorial, we show how we treat prompts as first-class, versioned artifacts and apply rigorous regression testing to large language model behavior using MLflow.We design an evaluation pipeline that logs prompt versions, prompt diffs, model outputs, and multiple quality metrics in a fully reproducible manner.By combining classical text metrics with semantic similarity […]
09/02/2026
CRL & AIA Publishing Guidance (Practical PKI Part 2)
In this blog post, we will be covering CRL and AIA publishing guidance with a focus on the Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) offline root Certificate Authority (CA).In Part 2 of our series, we will focus on the certificate revocation list (CRL) and authority information access (AIA) extensions with an example of manual maintenance on an offline root certificate authority (CA).IETF RFC 3280 defines the Authority Information Access (AIA) extension as “how to access CA information and services for the issuer of the certificate in which the extension appears.”
09/02/2026
ByteDance Releases Protenix-v1: A New Open-Source Model Achieving AF3-Level Performance in Biomolecular Structure Prediction
How close can an open model get to AlphaFold3-level accuracy when it matches training data, model scale and inference budget?ByteDance has introduced Protenix-v1, a comprehensive AlphaFold3 (AF3) reproduction for biomolecular structure prediction, released with code and model parameters under Apache 2.0.The model targets AF3-level performance across protein, DNA, RNA and ligand structures while […]
08/02/2026
How to Design Production-Grade Mock Data Pipelines Using Polyfactory with Dataclasses, Pydantic, Attrs, and Nested Models
In this tutorial, we walk through an advanced, end-to-end exploration of Polyfactory, focusing on how we can generate rich, realistic mock data directly from Python type hints.We start by setting up the environment and progressively build factories for data classes, Pydantic models, and attrs-based classes, while demonstrating customization, overrides, calculated fields, and the generation […]The post How to Design Production-Grade Mock Data Pipelines Using Polyfactory with Dataclasses, Pydantic, Attrs, and Nested Models appeared first on MarkTechPost.
08/02/2026
Smart Pipelines Orchestration: Designing Predictable Data Platforms on Shared Spark
In Azure Synapse, Spark pools are commonly shared across pipelines to optimize cost and utilization.This post describes an orchestration pattern that makes priority explicit, allowing critical workloads to run predictably on shared Spark compute without modifying Spark code, configuration, or cluster capacity.Orchestrating data movement and transformation in Azure Data Factory - Training |
08/02/2026
Google AI Introduces PaperBanana: An Agentic Framework that Automates Publication Ready Methodology Diagrams and Statistical Plots
Generating publication-ready illustrations is a labor-intensive bottleneck in the research workflow.A research team from Google and Peking University introduce new framework called ‘PaperBanana‘ which is changing that by using a multi-agent system to automate high-quality academic diagrams […]The post Google AI Introduces PaperBanana: An Agentic Framework that Automates Publication Ready Methodology Diagrams and Statistical Plots appeared first on MarkTechPost.
07/02/2026
How to Build a Production-Grade Agentic AI System with Hybrid Retrieval, Provenance-First Citations, Repair Loops, and Episodic Memory
In this tutorial, we build an ultra-advanced agentic AI workflow that behaves like a production-grade research and reasoning system rather than a single prompt call.We ingest real web sources asynchronously, split them into provenance-tracked chunks, and run hybrid retrieval using both TF-IDF (sparse) and OpenAI embeddings (dense), then fuse results for higher recall and […]The post How to Build a Production-Grade Agentic AI System with Hybrid Retrieval, Provenance-First Citations, Repair Loops, and Episodic Memory appeared first on MarkTechPost.
07/02/2026
NVIDIA AI releases C-RADIOv4 vision backbone unifying SigLIP2, DINOv3, SAM3 for classification, dense prediction, segmentation workloads at scale
NVIDIA’s C-RADIOv4 is a new agglomerative vision backbone that distills three strong teacher models, SigLIP2-g-384, DINOv3-7B, and SAM3, into a single student encoder.It extends the AM-RADIO and RADIOv2.5 line, keeping similar computational cost while improving […]The post NVIDIA AI releases C-RADIOv4 vision backbone unifying SigLIP2, DINOv3, SAM3 for classification, dense prediction, segmentation workloads at scale appeared first on MarkTechPost.
07/02/2026
Microsoft Global Community Initiative Newsletter (Jan/Feb)
MGCI Regional Leader Applications are Now Open!We are now accepting applications to become a Regional Leader for the Microsoft Community!Looking for amazing women speakers in the Microsoft ecosystem? 💜 The Microsoft Solutions Women in Tech speaker directory on Sessionize is a go‑to resource for community leaders and event organizers.
06/02/2026
Announcing Microsoft Azure Network Adapter (MANA) support for Existing VM SKUs
In February 2026, Azure will be deploying the Microsoft Azure Network Adapter (MANA) for existing VM Size Families. The intent is to provide the benefits of new server hardware to customers of existing VM SKUs as they work towards migrating to newer SKUs.To determine whether your VMs are impacted and what actions (if any) you should take, start with MANA support for existing VM SKUs.This article provides additional information about which VM Sizes are eligible to be deployed on the new MANA-enabled hardware, what actions (if any) you should take, and how to determine if the workload has been deployed on MANA-enabled hardware.
06/02/2026
Title Plan Update - February 6, 2026
📁February 6, 2026 - Title Plan Now AvailableAccess the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at http://aka.ms/Courseware_Title_Plan to ensure you're always working from the most current version.📌 Reminder: To help you stay informed more quickly and consistently, we’ve moved to a weekly publishing cadence for the title plan.
06/02/2026
A Coding, Data-Driven Guide to Measuring, Visualizing, and Enforcing Cognitive Complexity in Python Projects Using complexipy
In this tutorial, we build an end-to-end cognitive complexity analysis workflow using complexipy.We start by measuring complexity directly from raw code strings, then scale the same analysis to individual files and an entire project directory.Along the way, we generate machine-readable reports, normalize them into structured DataFrames, and visualize complexity distributions to understand how […]
06/02/2026
Waymo Introduces the Waymo World Model: A New Frontier Simulator Model for Autonomous Driving and Built on Top of Genie 3
Waymo is introducing the Waymo World Model, a frontier generative model that drives its next generation of autonomous driving simulation.The system is built on top of Genie 3, Google DeepMind’s general-purpose world model, and adapts it to produce photorealistic, controllable, multi-sensor driving scenes at scale.Waymo already reports nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles […]
06/02/2026
Compliance Meets AI: What’s New in Insider Risk Management for Copilot
That’s exactly why our latest Compliance Meets AI session, “What’s New – Insider Risk Management for Copilot,” focused on how organizations can confidently secure data in an increasingly agent-driven world.In this session, Kevin Uy walked through what’s new (and what’s next) in Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management, with a strong spotlight on Copilot, AI agents, and Security Copilot integration.From real-world risk scenarios to live demos, this was a practical deep dive into protecting your organization while still empowering innovation.
06/02/2026
Mirrored Azure SQL Database Not Replicating: Running but No Data
This blog walks through a real-world troubleshooting scenario where mirroring looked healthy on the surface, but replication never started. This article discusses Mirrored Azure SQL Database Not Replicating in Microsoft Fabric scenario.Microsoft Fabric Mirrored Databases from Azure SQL Database - Microsoft Fabric |
06/02/2026
Strategic Data Replication Enhances a Single Source of Truth Architecture for Analytics & AI
Strategic Data Replication is not Many Sources of Truth, and can be complimentary to a Single Source of Truth architectural design.Even in a highly regulated Healthcare data ecosystem, strategic replication can maintain a compliant source of truth as part of a larger strategy to scale and control costs.The concepts of single source of truth, data replication, data redundancy, and data duplication are often convoluted and can lead to misunderstandings that result in poorly performing and unnecessarily expensive architectures.I've published a new video that attempts to unwind the problem.
06/02/2026
Kimi-K2.5 Now in Microsoft Foundry
Kimi K-2.5 is now available in Microsoft Foundry Kimi K2.5, Moonshot AI’s next generation multimodal and agentic model, is now available in Microsoft Foundry.This new release delivers major advances in vision language integration, agentic execution, scaling efficiency, and multimodal coding workflows.
06/02/2026
Azure Blob Tiering: Clarity, Truths, and Practical Guidance for Architects
“Cold tier is slower to restore than Hot.”This article clarifies these points, explains how Azure Blob Storage behaves at scale, and provides a reference architecture for large backup repositories.Azure Blob Storage separates availability from cost using four access tiers:
06/02/2026
Chat with Your App Service Logs Using GitHub Copilot
We've built a proof-of-concept MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that exposes App Service observability tools directly to AI assistants like GitHub Copilot in VS Code.It can be accessed from your preferred IDE like VS Code, or directly in your CLI such as GitHub Copilot CLI or Claude Code.This is a proof-of-concept demonstrating what an App Service AI observability tool could look like.
06/02/2026
Choosing the Right Intelligence Layer for Your Application
One of the most common questions developers ask when planning AI-powered applications is: "Should I use the GitHub Copilot SDK or the Microsoft Agent Framework?" It's a natural question, both technologies let you add an intelligence layer to your apps, both come from Microsoft's ecosystem, and both deal with AI agents.The short answer is this: the Copilot SDK puts Copilot inside your app, while the Agent Framework lets you build your app out of agents.When deciding between the Copilot SDK and the Agent Framework, or both, consider these questions about your application.
06/02/2026
Unlock outbound traffic insights with Azure StandardV2 NAT Gateway flow logs
StandardV2 NAT Gateway is the next evolution of outbound connectivity in Azure.This blog will focus on how enabling StandardV2 NAT Gateway flow logs can be beneficial for your team along with some tips to get the most out of the data.The following query will generate a table and chart of the total packets sent per minute from your source IP to the destination IP through your NAT gateway in the last 24 hours.
06/02/2026
Proactive Resiliency in Azure for Specialized Workload i.e. Citrix VDI on Azure Design Framework.
In this post, I’ll share my perspective on designing cloud architectures for near-zero downtime.We’ll explore how adopting multi-region strategies and other best practices can dramatically improve reliability.The discussion will be technically and architecturally driven covering key decisions around network architecture, data replication, user experience continuity, and cost management but also touch on the business angle of why this matters.
06/02/2026
Centralized cluster performance metrics with ReFrame HPC and Azure Log Analytics
This is where the combination of ReFrame HPC, a powerful and feature rich testing framework, and Azure Log Analytics can help improve confidence and assurance in the performance and accuracy of a system. Here we will look at how to configure ReFrame HPC specifically for Azure: Deploying the required Azure resources, running a test and capturing the results in Log Analytics for analysis.By standardizing on the combination of ReFrame HPC and Azure Log Analytics for testing and reporting of performance data across our clusters, whether Slurm based, Azure CycleCloud or existing on-prem clusters, you can gain unprecendented visibility and confidence in the systems you manage and the codes you deploy that were previously hard to obtain.
06/02/2026
From Zero to 16 Games in 2 Hours
From Zero to 16 Games in 2 Hours: Teaching Prompt Engineering to Students with GitHub Copilot CLIInstead, we witnessed something remarkable: 16 fully functional HTML5 games created in under two hours, all from students with varying programming experience.By teaching students to communicate clearly with AI, we transformed a traditional coding workshop into a rapid prototyping session that exceeded everyone's expectations.
06/02/2026
Complete Guide to Deploying OpenClaw on Azure Windows 11 Virtual Machine
Deploying OpenClaw on an Azure virtual machine instead of your personal computer offers significant security benefits:This deployment script uses Azure CLI to automate the installation of OpenClaw and its dependencies on a Windows 11 virtual machine.Add Node.js and npm global paths to the system PATH environment variable:
06/02/2026
Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.6 With 1M Context, Agentic Coding, Adaptive Reasoning Controls, and Expanded Safety Tooling Capabilities
Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4.6, its most capable model to date, focused on long-context reasoning, agentic coding, and high-value knowledge work.The model builds on Claude Opus 4.5 and is now available on claude.ai, the Claude API, and major cloud providers under the ID claude-opus-4-6.The post Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.6 With 1M Context, Agentic Coding, Adaptive Reasoning Controls, and Expanded Safety Tooling Capabilities appeared first on MarkTechPost.
05/02/2026
Get started with Dynatrace MCP server in Azure SRE Agent
Dynatrace provides a hosted MCP server that enables Azure SRE Agent to interact with the Dynatrace observability platform via SSE (Server-Sent Events) transport.Query logs, investigate problems, analyze security vulnerabilities, and execute DQL (Dynatrace Query Language), and generate timeseries forecasts directly from your SRE Agent conversations.Create a Platform Token
05/02/2026
Join us at SQLCon 2026
SQLCon 2026, the premier Microsoft SQL Community Conference, is co-located with the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference (FabCon) from March 16-20, 2026! Register today!This year, your Azure Data Community worlds collide, bringing the SQL and Fabric communities together for a brand-new experience.Unforgettable experiences: Join us for both keynotes at the State Farm Arena and celebrate at the legendary attendee party at the Georgia Aquarium.
05/02/2026
Introducing Copilot Connector Checker
Copilot connector content powers other Microsoft 365 intelligent experiences like Microsoft Search, Context IQ and AgentsWhat is the Copilot Connector Checker?The Copilot Connector Checker is a lightweight, self‑service tool that helps you quickly validate your third‑party prerequisites before configuring a connector.
05/02/2026
OpenAI Just Launched GPT-5.3-Codex: A Faster Agentic Coding Model Unifying Frontier Code Performance And Professional Reasoning Into One System
OpenAI has just introduced GPT-5.3-Codex, a new agentic coding model that extends Codex from writing and reviewing code to handling a broad range of work on a computer.The model combines the frontier coding performance of GPT-5.2-Codex with the reasoning and professional knowledge capabilities of GPT-5.2 into a single system, and it runs 25% faster […]The post OpenAI Just Launched GPT-5.3-Codex: A Faster Agentic Coding Model Unifying Frontier Code Performance And Professional Reasoning Into One System appeared first on MarkTechPost.
05/02/2026
February update: What's new in AI Business Solutions for Partners
For a limited time, save up to 35% with these Microsoft 365 Copilot Business promotional offers available to all Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners until March 31, 2026, on annual commitments (monthly or annual billing).15% off Microsoft 365 Copilot Business for 1–300 seats ($18/user/month*)Promo Extended! Strengthen data security for Copilot at a lower cost with Microsoft Purview Suite for Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is available at 50% off through June 30, 2026, to support enterprise organizations in reducing costs and strengthen data security.
05/02/2026
EP 35 | Business Central Data Migration Without Chaos
That’s exactly how host, Anthony Carrano with Dunamis Marketing, opened a recent episode of IAMCP Profiles in Partnership episode “Ledger Migrator: Automating Financial Migration for Business Central Partners,” featuring Ledger Migrator founders Robert Papier and Gerry Allan.In this post, we’ll break down the most useful insights from the conversation and show how Ledger Migrator’s approach is becoming a real advantage for partners.Ledger Migrator allows partners to transfer complete financial history—not just opening balances—so customers move to Business Central with full data continuity.
05/02/2026
More logical navigation through Word documents for screen readers
I’m happy to announce a new setting in Microsoft Word for Windows that allows you to use the up and down arrow keys to move through all the content in your document based on the logical reading order.More logical navigation through Word documents for screen readersThis change is available to Word for Windows users running Version 2603 (Build 19727.20000) or later.
05/02/2026
Frontline Agent: An Out-of-the-Box AI Assistant for Every Frontline Teammate
For this reason, we’re excited to introduce Frontline Agent, now available in Public Preview.This purpose-built, persona-tuned AI assistant is designed to help frontline workers across industries like retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and hospitality find information quickly, stay caught up, and coordinate work with confidence.Frontline Agent is available out-of-the-box in Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as in the Microsoft Teams chat rail.
05/02/2026
General Availability of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Graph API for E3 Customers
As of December 1st, 2025, the Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Graph API Standard hit General Availability (GA).It provides a programmatic way to manage eDiscovery cases, searches, holds, and exports for organizations that have only M365 E3 licenses.To enable investigators to authenticate and use the eDiscovery cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph API PowerShell module; the Microsoft Graph Command Line Tools enterprise app must be added to Entra ID and the appropriate Graph API permissions consented to.
05/02/2026
How to Build Production-Grade Data Validation Pipelines Using Pandera, Typed Schemas, and Composable DataFrame Contracts
Schemas, and Composable DataFrame ContractsIn this tutorial, we demonstrate how to build robust, production-grade data validation pipelines using Pandera with typed DataFrame models.We start by simulating realistic, imperfect transactional data and progressively enforce strict schema constraints, column-level rules, and cross-column business logic using declarative checks.We show how lazy validation helps us surface multiple […]
05/02/2026
Building Secure, Enterprise Ready AI Agents with Purview SDK and Agent Framework
At Microsoft Ignite, we announced the public preview of Purview integration with the Agent Framework SDK—making it easier to build AI agents that are secure, compliant, and enterprise‑ready from day one.AI agents are quickly moving from demos to production.Purview SDK brings Microsoft’s enterprise data security and compliance directly into the agent runtime, so governance travels with the agent—not after it.
05/02/2026
What's New in Microsoft Intune – January 2026
In this blog post, I’ll highlight the recent capabilities that I’m personally excited about.Today, many organizations customize app deployments outside Intune using PowerShell scripts to handle prerequisite checks, post-install steps, dependencies, and registry updates.It means app deployment gets faster, customization gets easier, and teams in highly regulated industries like finance and healthcare can use the script to enforce compliance steps as part of the app installation process.
05/02/2026
EPAM is fast-tracking AI readiness with Microsoft Credentials
By combining Microsoft Certifications and Microsoft Applied Skills with its own skill-building programs, EPAM is helping employees validate their technical expertise and demonstrate real-world proficiency with Microsoft technologies.EPAM is reducing onboarding time by nearly half, shrinking the ramp-up time from three and a half months to just two.Applied Skills help new engineers get project‑ready faster and retain knowledge better, freeing managers to focus on strategic client work.
05/02/2026
How Sales Development Agent Helps Teams Scale Outbound Outreach Without Sacrificing Quality
Enterprise sales organizations face a persistent challenge: scaling outbound operations while maintaining message quality, brand consistency, and conversion performance.The Sales Development Agent (SDA) addresses this gap through a fundamentally different approach. Rather than relying on sellers to manually handle repetitive qualification and early-stage outreach, SDA consistently executes your defined playbook at scale, freeing your team to focus on what they do best: building relationships and closing deals with pre-qualified, high-intent prospects. We’ve recently announced the Microsoft Sales Bench, a new collection of evaluation benchmarks designed to assess the performance of AI-powered sales agents across real-world scenarios.
05/02/2026
January 2026 Recap: Azure Database for PostgreSQL
A new Ansible module is now available with support for the latest GA REST API features, enabling customers to automate provisioning and management of Azure Database for PostgreSQL resources.We have released updated SDKs for Go, Java, JavaScript, .NET, and Python, built on the latest GA REST API (2025‑08‑01).Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server now supports a broader set of resiliency and lifecycle management capabilities on Premium SSD v2, enabling production‑grade PostgreSQL deployments with improved durability, availability, and operational flexibility.
05/02/2026
MVPs Global Student Innovation: Sprint to Imagine Cup 2026
Microsoft MVPs played a pivotal role in igniting student creativity through Sprint to Imagine Cup 2026 engagements.These community-driven sessions brought Agentic AI, Azure AI, and Copilot Studio directly to universities and developer communities across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.What began as local sprints evolved into a global movement democratizing innovation and empowering thousands of students to build their first AI-powered solutions.
05/02/2026
Exchange Online EWS, Your Time is Almost Up
Exchange Web Services (EWS) is approaching end of service in Exchange Online.In 2023, we announced that EWS will be disabled in Exchange Online in October 2026.Today we’re announcing we will use a phased, admin controllable disablement plan that starts in October 2026 and concludes with a complete shutdown of EWS in 2027.
05/02/2026
Observability in Generative AI: Building Trust with Systematic Evaluation in Microsoft Foundry
Evaluators are specialized tools used to assess the behavior of generative AI models, applications, and agents.By embedding evaluation and monitoring across model selection, preproduction testing, and production operation, Microsoft Foundry enables teams to make trust measurable and maintain high standards of quality, safety, and reliability as AI systems scale.Transparency Note for Safety Evaluations: Microsoft Foundry risk and safety evaluations (preview) Transparency Note - Microsoft Foundry |
05/02/2026
Build an AI app or agent faster to sell on Marketplace with App Advisor
When paired with focused build and alignment checklists, App Advisor helps you ship faster and prepare your solution for the Marketplace from day one.The Create an Agent MVP in 30 Days checklist turns Microsoft Foundry best practices into an actionable build plan. It’s organized around the same well-architected pillars, making it easy to move from design to implementation without losing alignment.See the difference when you build with the proven framework of Microsoft Foundry and selling well-architected apps and agents in Marketplace.
05/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 5, 2026
Learn about 172 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs.CluedIn combines automated data management capabilities with governance to produce consistent, high-quality, trusted data outputs across the enterprise.Bytello can be accessed by voice, signature, social account, or QR code, and data is isolated in a secure, account-specific space, separate from other users.
05/02/2026
SDC Academy live Webcast and Recordings
We’re excited to introduce our live webcast series,designed to help Software Development Companies (SDCs) succeed by providing consolidated resources and expert-led sessions.Marketplace Hero for Software Development Companies - Thursday, February 12, 2026 15:00 - 16:00 Berlin Time - Registration Link
05/02/2026
Automating Azure OpenAI/Foundry Model Lifecycle Management
It scans your Azure subscriptions, finds every OpenAI and AI Foundry deployment, pulls actual usage data from Azure Monitor, and flags models that are about to retire.Full documentation, parameters, and examples are in the [README](https://github.com/anishek-microsoft/foundry_model_audit).Deploy the script as an Azure Function with a timer trigger.
05/02/2026
AKS Tenant Migration: Considerations and Approach
When an Azure subscription is shifted between directories (Azure AD tenants), the Azure Container Registry (ACR) cannot be directly transferred in its current state.This blog outlines the necessary steps to transition the ACR from one tenant to another tenant.Assign the User Managed Identity contributor permissions on source ACR in source tenant
05/02/2026
An AI led SDLC: Building an End-to-End Agentic Software Development Lifecycle with Azure and GitHub.
Suddenly, AI tools and agents are picking up more and more of today’s complicated and advanced tasks.In 2025, GitHub released the open-source Spec Kit: a tool that enables the goal of placing a specification at the centre of the engineering process.Talking of coding agents, GitHub Copilot’s coding agent is an autonom
05/02/2026
Building engaging forms with SharePoint - Plumsail - SharePoint Partner Showcase
Plumsail builds solutions for the Microsoft 365 and SharePoint ecosystem, including custom form tools, a ticketing system, an organizational chart, and document generation capabilities.The session showcases and demonstrates the capabilities of Plumsail Forms, a custom solution for creating modern and fully customizable forms for SharePoint Online, that combines two connected products: Forms for SharePoint for internal processes and Public Web Forms for secure data collection from external users. By building natively on the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), Plumsail's solutions function as integral parts of Microsoft 365, inheriting native Entry security and data residency within the customer tenant.
05/02/2026
Writing Effective Prompts for Testing Scenarios: AI Assisted Quality Engineering
Across enterprises, quality engineering teams are actively shifting from manual-heavy testing approaches to AI-first QA, where tools like GitHub Copilot participate throughout the SDLC—from requirement analysis to regression triage.They use AI to “generate test cases” or “write automation,” but struggle with inconsistent outputs, shallow coverage, and trust issues.This blog moves past basic prompting tips to cover QA practices, focusing on effective prompt design and common pitfalls.
05/02/2026
Agents League: Build, Learn, and Level Up Your AI Skills
We're inviting the next generation of developers to join Agents League, running February 16-27.It's a two-week challenge where you'll build AI agents using production-ready tools, learn from live coding sessions, and get feedback directly from Microsoft product teams.Agents League starts on February 16th and runs through February 27th.
05/02/2026
Mistral AI Launches Voxtral Transcribe 2: Pairing Batch Diarization And Open Realtime ASR For Multilingual Production Workloads At Scale
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is becoming a core building block for AI products, from meeting tools to voice agents.Mistral’s new Voxtral Transcribe 2 family targets this space with 2 models that split cleanly into batch and realtime use cases, while keeping cost, latency, and deployment constraints in focus.The release includes: Both models are […]
05/02/2026
Mitä Microsoft Partner of the Year merkitsee asiakkaillemme ja mitä AI-first tarkoittaa Vivictalle?
Vivictan rooli Microsoft-kumppanina on yhdistää asiakkaan liiketoimintatavoitteet, Microsoftin teknologia ja käytännön toteutusosaaminen.AI-first tarkoittaa Vivictalle sitä, että tekoäly on luonteva osa ratkaisuja alusta alkaen – turvallisesti ja vastuullisesti.Rakennamme tekoälyagentteja osaksi liiketoimintaprosesseja: asiakaspalveluun, taloushallinnon rutiineihin ja kenttähuoltoon.
05/02/2026
NVIDIA AI Release VibeTensor: An AI Generated Deep Learning Runtime Built End to End by Coding Agents Programmatically
NVIDIA has released VIBETENSOR, an open-source research system software stack for deep learning.VIBETENSOR is generated by LLM-powered coding agents under high-level human guidance.The system asks a concrete question: can coding agents generate a coherent deep learning runtime that spans Python and JavaScript APIs down to C++ runtime components and CUDA memory management and […]
05/02/2026
Marketplace Partner Digest
Welcome to the February edition of the Marketplace Partner Digest. This month’s roundup brings together the most important Microsoft Marketplace updates, program changes, and partner‑focused resources to help you strengthen your co‑sell motions, optimize your listings, and accelerate revenue through Microsoft Marketplace.⚙️The skilling requirements for the Microsoft Azure VMware Solution specialization will change in January 2026.
05/02/2026
Join Microsoft as we share more on Maia 200 in the Bay Area
In the next major step in our AI Infrastructure evolution, last week we introduced Maia 200, a breakthrough inference accelerator engineered to dramatically improve the economics of AI token generation.Microsoft engineering leaders will be showcasing our latest silicon innovation in San Francisco this month.Microsoft has submitted a technical whitepaper around Maia 200 as part of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC).
04/02/2026
Coming Soon! SC‑5009 Instructor-led Training
Announcing SC‑5009: Secure AI solutions in the cloud using Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft EntraThis new ILT is scheduled to be released on March 27, 2026.This course will bring together cloud security and identity content to help learners prepare for the Secure AI Solutions in the Cloud Applied Skills assessment and deepen their Microsoft Entra skills for real‑world scenarios.
04/02/2026
How to Build Efficient Agentic Reasoning Systems by Dynamically Pruning Multiple Chain-of-Thought Paths Without Losing Accuracy
In this tutorial, we implement an agentic chain-of-thought pruning framework that generates multiple reasoning paths in parallel and dynamically reduces them using consensus signals and early stopping.We focus on improving reasoning efficiency by reducing unnecessary token usage while preserving answer correctness, demonstrating that self-consistency and lightweight graph-based agreement can serve as effective proxies for […]The post How to Build Efficient Agentic Reasoning Systems by Dynamically Pruning Multiple Chain-of-Thought Paths Without Losing Accuracy appeared first on MarkTechPost.
04/02/2026
Driving Global SMB Impact Through AI Powered, Partner Led Digital Sales
Join Siew Hoon Goh, General Manager of Microsoft’s Global Vendor Digital Sales (VDS) organization, as she shares how VDS is transforming SMB engagement through digitally‑scaled, partner‑centric sales motions that deliver impact worldwide.Under her leadership, VDS has become a core engine in Microsoft’s SMB strategy—driving significant YoY revenue growth, pioneering AI‑forward sales capabilities, and strengthening global alignment across Americas, EMEA, and Asia.In this session, Siew Hoon Goh will explore:
04/02/2026
Zero Trust with Azure Firewall, Azure DDoS Protection and Azure WAF: A practical use case
It is within this context that combining the use of Azure Firewall, Azure DDoS Protection and Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) services to secure Web Applications while protecting the network perimeter becomes important.Defense-in-depth: Why Azure WAF, Azure DDoS Protection and Azure Firewall are essential for Zero TrustIn these sections ahead, we examine the common network and application-layer attack vectors that target modern web applications and illustrate how Azure WAF, Azure DDoS protection, and Azure Firewall, when layered strategically, work in tandem to mitigate these threats.
04/02/2026
ZoomIt v10.0, Sysmon 1.5 for Linux, Sigcheck v2.91, RAMMap v1.62, and RDCMan v3.12
This update to Sysmon for Linux, a tool that monitors and logs system activity including process lifetime, network connections, file system writes, and more, adds EbpfEvent for monitoring Linux EBPF program loading.This update to RAMMap, an advanced physical memory usage analysis utility for Windows, fixes a display bug for file streams containing non-printable characters.This update to RDCMan, a tool for managing and connecting to Remote Desktop sessions, fixes IPv6 parsing, and fixes a double click bug.
04/02/2026
How Nonprofits Can Strengthen Cybersecurity with Small Steps (That Make a Big Difference)
Discover tailored events and training opportunities designed to help you maximize your impact and strengthen your organization’s security posture.Learn how to configure SIEM and SOAR capabilities in Microsoft Sentinel to strengthen your security operations.Explore how Microsoft Security Copilot combines generative AI with Microsoft’s security tools to help analysts investigate incidents and automate tasks.
04/02/2026
Google Introduces Agentic Vision in Gemini 3 Flash for Active Image Understanding
Frontier multimodal models usually process an image in a single pass.Google’s new Agentic Vision capability in Gemini 3 Flash changes this by turning image understanding into an active, tool using loop grounded in visual […]The post Google Introduces Agentic Vision in Gemini 3 Flash for Active Image Understanding appeared first on MarkTechPost.
04/02/2026
Azure Automated Virtual Machine Recovery: Minimizing Downtime
Azure Automated VM Recovery requires no setup or configuration.Automated VM recovery is essential to keeping cloud services resilient, reliable, and interruption-free.Over the past 18 months, this solution has cut average VM downtime by more than half, significantly enhancing reliability and customer experience.
04/02/2026
Join a Partner Project Ready Workshop to turn your expertise into impact
With a new year just beginning, now is the time to build the skills that power key roles across your organization.Make skilling a priority to turn expertise into real business impact across AI, cloud, and security skill sets.Check out the upcoming Project Ready Workshops for AI Business Solutions, Cloud & AI Platforms, and Security.
04/02/2026
Serverless GPU Tutorial: Build an AI Image Generator with Azure Functions on Container Apps
In this tutorial, we'll show you how to build one using Azure Functions running on Azure Container Apps with serverless GPUs.We're going to create an API that turns text descriptions into images using Stable Diffusion.Part 4: Create the Container App with Azure Functions
04/02/2026
Azure Virtual Desktop is now available in US Gov Texas in Azure Government
Today Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is now available in the USGov Texas region of Azure Government, providing customers with an additional region for deploying secure and flexible virtual desktop environments that support a broad range of mission needs.Azure Virtual Desktop is continually improving to offer secure, dependable, and high-quality experiences on Azure Government.Customers can now create host pools in the USGov Texas region, helping reduce connection latency and improving how quickly users can access and interact with their Azure Virtual Desktop environments.
04/02/2026
Introducing the EMEA SDC Academy: A Centralized Hub for Deep Technical Enablement
Software Development Companies (SDCs) across EMEA are building faster, smarter, and more scalable solutions than ever before.To support this momentum, we’re excited to introduce the SDC Academy - a new technical content hub designed to help SDCs accelerate innovation and bring high‑quality solutions to market.This blog and webinar series brings together expert‑led deep dives, architectural guidance, and applied best practices across the Microsoft ecosystem, including Azure, AI, Marketplace, and multi‑tenant design patterns.
04/02/2026
How AI Is Transforming Performance Testing
Yet, in today’s world of distributed microservices, unpredictable user behaviour, and global-scale cloud environments, traditional performance testing methods are struggling to keep up.Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI) — not as another industry buzzword, but as a real enabler of smarter, faster, and more predictive performance testing.From smarter workload generation to advanced anomaly detection and predictive modelling, AI shifts testing from reactive validation to proactive optimization.
04/02/2026
Export Your ML Model in ONNX Format
When building machine learning models, training is only half the journey.
04/02/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: February 4, 2026
1099 Per-Line Control for Dynamics 365 Business Central: Evergrowth Consulting’s 1099 Per-Line Control module for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central lets organizations assign 1099 amounts at the line-item level during purchase entry, improving accuracy and auditability while eliminating year-end reconciliations and manual adjustments.Available for U.S. users, the solution supports SOX and NI 52-109 compliance and requires Microsoft IRS Forms activation. AKQUINET 365 Notes: AKQUINET 365 Notes enhances Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with intelligent, context-based notifications during document processing.Designed for customers who need to modernize their infrastructure while meeting stringent government security requirements, this service from Arctic IT will move your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management from the Commercial Cloud to the U.S. Government Community Cloud (GCC/GCC High) for streamlined compliance.
04/02/2026
AI AGENT RACE FINLAND 2026 käynnistyy!
Nominoinnin tulee perustua todelliseen asiakastarpeeseen, jossa tekoälyagentti on käytössä tuotannossa tai selkeästi siirtymässä tuotantoon.Voittajat ja muut parhaat asiakastoteutukset julkaistaan ja juhlistetaan 28.4.2026 Microsoft AI Tour -tapahtuman lavalla. AI Agent Race 2026 on kutsu kumppaneille siirtyä agenttimoodiin – rakentaa, ottaa käyttöön ja osoittaa, miten tekoälyagentit tuottavat todellista ja kestävää arvoa asiakkaille.
04/02/2026
ImportExportJobError, SQL72012, SQL72014, SQL72045.
When trying to Import .bacpac file via Azure Portal, it fails with below error:The DAC framework hit a hard error and failed due to conflicts with existing system objects in the target database.Import a BACPAC File to Create a Database in Azure SQL Database - Azure SQL Database & Azure SQL Managed Instance |
04/02/2026
Building with Azure OpenAI Sora: A Complete Guide to AI Video Generation
In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore how to integrate both Sora 1 and Sora 2 models from Azure OpenAI Service into a production web application.We'll cover API integration, request body parameters, cost analysis, limitations, and the key differences between using Azure AI Foundry endpoints versus OpenAI's native API.This blog post is based on real-world implementation experience building LemonGrab, my AI video generation platform that integrates both Sora 1 and Sora 2 through Azure AI Foundry.
04/02/2026
Rethinking Documentation Translation: Treating Translations as Versioned Software Assets
I am the maintainer of Co-op Translator,an open-source tool for automating multilingual documentation translation,used across multiple large documentation repositories, includingMicrosoft’s For Beginners series.In large documentation repositories, translation problems rarely fail loudly.They fail quietly, and they accumulate over time.Translations are treated as versioned software assets, not static outputs.
04/02/2026
Azure CLI Windows MSI Upgrade Issue: Root Cause, Mitigation, and Performance Improvements
Azure CLI on Windows MSI Upgrade IssueAbout six months ago, some Windows users experienced an Azure CLI crash after upgrading via the MSI installer from Azure CLI 2.76.0 (or earlier) to 2.77.0 (or later).The MSI upgrade process for Azure CLI on Windows has been significantly improved.
04/02/2026
A Coding Implementation to Train Safety-Critical Reinforcement Learning Agents Offline Using Conservative Q-Learning with d3rlpy and Fixed Historical Data
In this tutorial, we build a safety-critical reinforcement learning pipeline that learns entirely from fixed, offline data rather than live exploration.We design a custom environment, generate a behavior dataset from a constrained policy, and then train both a Behavior Cloning baseline and a Conservative Q-Learning agent using d3rlpy.The post A Coding Implementation to Train Safety-Critical Reinforcement Learning Agents Offline Using Conservative Q-Learning with d3rlpy and Fixed Historical Data appeared first on MarkTechPost.
04/02/2026
Inside CodeMash 2026: A Geek Family Reunion (Powered by Microsoft MVPs)
Microsoft MVP meet-up at the CodeMash 2026 conferenceThis year, Microsoft MVPs covered cloud, AI, security, data, and developer tools - and also gave back through volunteer leadership, from helping with speaker/session selection to supporting safety and inclusion.CodeMash is built for builders - and the MVP sessions leaned hard into practical, hands-on takeaways - from AI and cloud to security, data, and developer productivity.
04/02/2026
The Microsoft Copilot Data Connector for Microsoft Sentinel is Now in Public Preview
We are happy to announce a new data connector that is available the public: the Microsoft Copilot data connector for Microsoft Sentinel.The new Microsoft Copilot data connector will allow for audit logs and activities generated by different offerings of Copilot to be ingested into Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Sentinel data lake.The connector is available for all customers within Microsoft Sentinel, but will only ingest data for environments that have access to Copilot licenses and SCUs as the activities rely on Copilot being used.
03/02/2026
The Agentic SOC Era: How Sentinel MCP Enables Autonomous Security Reasoning
Security teams already have access to enormous volumes of telemetry across identity, endpoint, network, and cloud. The real challenge isn’t collecting more data. It’s turning that data into faster decisions and better protection. This is where AI changes the game.
03/02/2026
Qwen Team Releases Qwen3-Coder-Next: An Open-Weight Language Model Designed Specifically for Coding Agents and Local Development
Qwen team has just released Qwen3-Coder-Next, an open-weight language model designed for coding agents and local development. It sits on top of the Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B backbone. The model uses a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with hybrid attention. It has 80B total parameters, but only 3B parameters are activated per token. The goal is to match the […] The post
03/02/2026
How to Build Advanced Quantum Algorithms Using Qrisp with Grover Search, Quantum Phase Estimation, and QAOA
In this tutorial, we present an advanced, hands-on tutorial that demonstrates how we use Qrisp to build and execute non-trivial quantum algorithms. We walk through core Qrisp abstractions for quantum data, construct entangled states, and then progressively implement Grover’s search with automatic uncomputation, Quantum Phase Estimation, and a full QAOA workflow for the MaxCut problem. […] The post
03/02/2026
Reference Architecture for Highly Available Multi-Region Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Introduction Cloud-native applications often support critical business functions and are expected to stay available even when parts of the platform fail. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) already provides strong availability features within a single region, such as availability zones and a managed control plane. However, a regional outage is still a scenari...
03/02/2026
Architecting an Azure AI Hub-and-Spoke Landing Zone for Multi-Tenant Enterprises
A large enterprise customer adopting AI at scale typically needs three non‑negotiables in its AI foundation: End‑to‑end tenant isolation across network, identity, compute, and data Secure, governed traffic flow from users to AI services Transparent chargeback/showback for shared AI and platform services At the same time, the platform must enable rapid onboarding of new tenants or applications and s...
03/02/2026
Extending Defender’s AI Threat Protection to Microsoft Foundry Agents
AI is moving from responses to actions In our previous announcement, we introduced new threat protection capabilities for custom AI applications, helping organizations detect prompt injections, jailbreak attempts, sensitive data exposure, and other AI-specific risks. But the AI landsca...
03/02/2026
Agents in OneDrive Now Generally Available: Your AI Assistant Built with Your Own Content
If you’ve ever wished Copilot could remember the context of a project, understand the documents your team already relies on, or answer repeat questions without retracing your steps, Agents in OneDrive were built for you. Rather than asking Copilot the same questions across individual files, you can now create an Agent that understands an entire set of documents, project plans, specs, meeting notes, research, or decks, and responds with answers grounded in your content. What is ...
03/02/2026
Partner Blog | Unlocking the profitability multiplier: Maximizing revenue with Microsoft Marketplace
As organizations look to build their AI-first strategies, Microsoft partners are central to turning that ambition into customer outcomes and advancing frontier transformation. Customers are asking for guidance on how to right-size their cloud and AI investments to maximize impact without compromising on security or governance. At the same time, expectations are rising—software companies need mechanisms to scale their software and shorten time-to-value while channel partners need to curate AI ...
03/02/2026
Partner Case Study | Mead Johnson Nutrition
In the race to innovate, global enterprises aren’t usually held back by a lack of ideas but rather by the friction hidden in their data. Legacy SAP systems, siloed data storage environments, and inconsistent data structures can quietly slow operations, including reporting, forecasting, compliance, and even cutting-edge AI adoption. This friction can be especially acute in the retail life sciences and consumer health sectors, where any new products must adhere to strict standards of saf...
03/02/2026
Cloud forensics: Forensic readiness and incident response in Azure Virtual Desktop
Co-authors: Dan Weinstock and Christoph Dreymann Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) has rapidly become a core tool for enabling remote work at scale. Consequently, it’s also emerging as a target for threat actors. Recent Microsoft Incident Response engagements show that threat actors are exploiting AVD deployments for lateral movement and persistence. By hijacking legitimate AVD user accounts, they gain what is essentially a trusted “endpoint” inside the network without hav...
03/02/2026
Admin tasks in Microsoft Intune: Centralized control today, AI-ready for tomorrow
IT admins make daily, quiet decisions that determine whether an organization stays secure, compliant, and productive. They review privilege requests, security remediation actions, and high-impact configuration changes across multiple consoles. Given the growing breadth of their daily responsibilities, scattered decision points could lead to slower response times, increased risks, and make audit readiness harder to maintain.
03/02/2026
Short month survival guide: Planning, checklists, and calendar wins with Copilot
February may be the shortest month of the year, but it doesn’t have to be the least productive. With Microsoft 365 Copilot, you can turn tight timelines into big wins by planning smarter, streamlining tasks, and reclaiming your calendar. Here’s how to make every day count in February. Plan smarter with Copilot When time is limited, planning becomes your superpower. Copilot can help you create a roadmap that prioritizes what matters most. Copilot prompt:
03/02/2026
Retina 1.0 Is Now Available
We are excited to announce the first major release of Retina - a significant milestone for the project. This version brings along many new features, enhancements and bug fixes. The Retina maintainer team would like to thank all contributors, community members, and early adopters who helped make this 1.0 release possible. What is Retina? Retina is an open-source, Kubernetes network o...
03/02/2026
What’s New in Microsoft Teams | January 2026 – ISE Edition
Welcome to 2026! This first ’What’s new in Teams’ of the year is a “2-in-1” edition. We’re not only introducing the usual monthly range of new features and capabilities designed to enhance your Teams experience, we’re also shining a spotlight on the Teams features that will be showcased at the Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) 2026 conference in Barcelona, Spain. ISE brings together technology leaders, partners, and customers from around the world, making it the perfect venue to demonstr...
03/02/2026
Microsoft Teams events: A new unified experience makes it easier to discover, create, and manage events
Today’s organizational challenges and growing complexity can make it difficult to create meaningful connections with audiences, whether engaging employees or reaching a dispersed customer base. Having the right tools to navigate the demands of large-scale communication for digital and hybrid events is critical to achieving business objectives. We are excited to introduce the new Teams events experience designed to simplify how events are discov...
03/02/2026
Retiring Teams live events: The next chapter for events at scale in Microsoft Teams
Today, we’re announcing the retirement of Microsoft Teams live events and the associated Microsoft Graph APIs used to create Teams live events. This change will go into effect June 30, 2026, as part of our ongoing effort to continue to modernize our event experiences and deliver a more powerful and flexible solution for large-scale communications. While Teams live events will no longer be available to schedule after the retirement date...
03/02/2026
Jamf Software and Opsera offer transactable solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like Jamf Software and Opsera deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace. Learn about these offers below:
03/02/2026
Monthly news - February 2026
Microsoft DefenderMonthly news - February 2026 Edition This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month across our Defender products. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from January 2026. Defender for Cloud has its own Monthly News post, have a look
03/02/2026
MDEP at ISE 2026: A New Era for Enterprise Devices
At Microsoft, after years of building operating systems, Android apps and devices, and supporting customers who depend on robust, secure platforms in shared spaces, one thing has become clear: Enterprises need an enterprise‑grade Android platform. The Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP) is an enterprise‑grade software platform designed to meet the highest standards of security, reliability, ease of deployment, and innovation. Built on the robust foundation of the AOSP, MDEP prov...
03/02/2026
Alternatives After the Deprecation of the Azure SQL Migration Extension in Azure Data Studio
The Azure SQL Migration extension for Azure Data Studio is being deprecated and will be retired by February 28, 2026. As part of our unified and streamlined migration strategy for Azure SQL, we are consolidating all migration experiences into a consistent, scalable platform. If you are currently using the Azure SQL Migration extensio...
03/02/2026
How to Build Safe Natural Language-Driven APIs
TL;DR Building production natural language APIs requires separating semantic parsing from execution. Use LLMs to translate user text into canonical structured requests (via schemas), then execute those requests deterministically. Key patterns: schema completion for clarification, confidence gates to prevent sil...
03/02/2026
The Perfect Fusion of GitHub Copilot SDK and Cloud Native
In today's rapidly evolving AI landscape, we've witnessed the transformation from simple chatbots to sophisticated agent systems. As a developer and technology evangelist, I've observed an emerging trend—it's not about making AI omnipotent, but about enabling each AI Agent to achieve excellence in specific domains. Today, I want to share an exciting technology stack: GitHub Copilot SDK (a development toolkit that embeds production-grade agent engines i...
03/02/2026
How to Build Multi-Layered LLM Safety Filters to Defend Against Adaptive, Paraphrased, and Adversarial Prompt Attacks
In this tutorial, we build a robust, multi-layered safety filter designed to defend large language models against adaptive and paraphrased attacks. We combine semantic similarity analysis, rule-based pattern detection, LLM-driven intent classification, and anomaly detection to create a defense system that relies on no single point of failure. Also, we demonstrate how practical, production-style safety […] The post
03/02/2026
Support tip: Resolve device noncompliance with Mobile Threat Defense partner apps
Using a Mobile Threat Defense (MTD) solution, such as Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, with Microsoft Intune helps keep your organization’s resources protected and allows you to block devices that aren’t compliant with your organization’s policies. When an MTD detects a threat or determines that a device is noncompliant the device user will see one of two types of messages indicating: Install and activate partner app: The device needs the [MTD ...
02/02/2026
Virtualization Mode Unlocked
Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode is a new experience that helps you manage your virtualization infrastructure across your Hyper-V clusters, storage (SAN, NAS, and HCI), and networking configurations. Download Now in Public Preview! When searching for a new virtualization platform, one...
02/02/2026
Part 3: Build custom email security reports with Power BI and workbooks in Microsoft Sentinel
TL;DR: We're releasing a brand-new Power BI template for email security reporting and a major update (v3) to the Microsoft Sentinel workbook. Both solutions share the same rich visuals and insights. Choose Power BI for quick deployment without Sentinel, or the Sentinel workbook for extended data retention and multi-tenant scenarios. Get started in minutes with either option. Introduction Security teams in both small and large organizations tr...
02/02/2026
Windows news you can use: January 2026
Welcome to the January 2026 Windows news you can use, including new capabilities in Windows Backup for Organizations and Windows 365. Coming up on February 5, there will be another Secure Boot AMA, so please tune in to get answers to your questions. Then, on Mondays in March, join us for deep dives, AMAs, and more at Microsoft Technical Takeoff for Windows and Microsoft Intune. Check ou...
02/02/2026
Google Releases Conductor: a context driven Gemini CLI extension that stores knowledge as Markdown and orchestrates agentic workflows
Google has introduced Conductor, an open source preview extension for Gemini CLI that turns AI code generation into a structured, context driven workflow. Conductor stores product knowledge, technical decisions, and work plans as versioned Markdown inside the repository, then drives Gemini agents from those files instead of ad hoc chat prompts. From chat based coding […] The post
02/02/2026
How We Built an AI Operations Agent Using MCP Servers and Dynamic Tool Routing
In this post, we’re going to tackle a massive challenge in the agent space: Safety and Visibility. We are going to build a practical demo that connects two distinct MCP servers to a single agent service using the Microsoft Agents SDK and Azure OpenAI. To top it off, we’ll wrap it all in a lightweight web UI (AG-UI) that streams text, traces tool calls, and—crucially—gates state-changing actions behind ...
02/02/2026
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Customer Newsletter
What's new in Defender for Cloud? Now in public preview, Microsoft Security Private Link allows for private connectivity between Defender for Cloud and your workloads. For more information, see our public documentation<...
02/02/2026
Stand out as an authority on cloud sovereignty with the Digital Sovereignty specialization
The Digital Sovereignty specialization is designed to drive meaningful business outcomes. It differentiates your organization as a sovereign cloud leader, building trust with customers in compliance-heavy regions. It also opens access to high-value projects in regulated industries such as government, defense, banking, and healthcare. The Digital Sovereignty...
02/02/2026
Streamlined Moderation Approvals, Now in All Outlook Clients
Introduction Email Moderation in Exchange Online ensures messages that need human review don’t slip through. Today’s workflow, however, can be constraining and confusing: To approve or reject messages moderators must use Outlook clients that support voting buttons (not all of them do, e.g. Outlook Mobile), and they may receive multiple app...
02/02/2026
The Statistical Cost of Zero Padding in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)
What is Zero Padding Zero padding is a technique used in convolutional neural networks where additional pixels with a value of zero are added around the borders of an image. This allows convolutional kernels to slide over edge pixels and helps control how much the spatial dimensions of the feature map shrink after convolution. Padding […] The post The Stat...
02/02/2026
Turning Nonprofit Data Into Real Mission Power
Nonprofits today are surrounded by more data than ever before — but turning that information into real mission impact is still a challenge for many organizations. When data lives in disconnected systems or isn’t being used to its full potential, it becomes a barrier instead of a strength. With a thoughtful, mission‑aligned data strategy, however, data can become one of the most powerful tools your organization has. Harnessing Your Data to Drive Nonprofit Mission Success
02/02/2026
Tune in, skill up: Windows at Tech Takeoff 2026
Four Mondays. Dozens of Windows and Windows‑in‑the‑cloud deep dives. One perfect chance to skill up. Microsoft Technical Takeoff is back for 2026—and if you're focused on Windows, Windows 365, or Azure Virtual Desktop, this year's lineup is packed with practical demos, real‑world insights, and direct access to engineering teams to help you deploy faster, recover smarter, protect better, and optimize with confidence.<...
02/02/2026
IP Co-Sell best practices: What high performing SDCs do to accelerate Microsoft Marketplace success
Barbara Treviño (BT) is Director of Strategic Partnerships & Alliances at Labra. She is a seasoned partnership leader with more than a decade of experience across sales, partner operations, alliances, enablement, programs, and cloud marketplace go-to-market. ______________________...
02/02/2026
What is trending in Hugging Face on Microsoft Foundry? Feb, 2, 2026
Open‑source AI is moving fast, with important breakthroughs in reasoning, agentic systems, multimodality, and efficiency emerging every day. Hugging Face has been a leading platform where researchers, startups, and developers share and discover new models. Microsoft Foundry brings these trending Hugging Face models into a production‑ready experience, where developers can explore, evaluate, and deploy them within their Azure environment. Our weekly Model Monday’s series highlights Hugging Face...
02/02/2026
Serverless Workspaces are generally available in Azure Databricks
Recently, we announced that Serverless Workspaces in public preview. Today, we are excited to share that Serverless Workspaces are generally available in Azure Databricks....
02/02/2026
What's in store for Intune at Microsoft Technical Takeoff 2026
It’s almost time for Microsoft Technical Takeoff, our month‑long digital skilling event designed to help IT admins and technical decision-makers go deeper with Windows, Microsoft Intune, and Windows 365. Every Monday in March, you’ll get fresh technical content, hands‑on guidance, and direct engagement with the engineering teams who build the products you use every day.
02/02/2026
UEBA Solution Power Boost: Practical Tools for Anomaly Detection
We are unveiling a major enhancement of Microsoft Sentinel’s UEBA Essentials solution. This update includes expanded multi-cloud anomaly detection queries across Azure, AWS, GCP, and Okta, as well as new queries leveraging the anomalies table. These enhancements allow users to rapidly identify high-risk anomalies, establish long-term baselines, align patterns with MITRE ATT&CK, highlight complex malicious IP activities, and generate comprehensive anomalous activity profiles for any user w...
02/02/2026
Make math inclusive for everyone with Microsoft 365
Hi, Insiders! I’m Peter Wu, a Principal Software Engineer on the PowerPoint team. Last fall, I shared many improvements to math in Microsoft 365, and I’m back this semester with even more. Make math inclus...
02/02/2026
Introducing communities in Teams: Unifying company communication and connection
Today, we’re excited to introduce a new, unified experience that brings Viva Engage communities directly into Microsoft Teams now rolling out in public preview. As organizations strive to strengthen culture and connect distributed teams, we’re making it easier than ever for people to engage with their communities in the flow of work, right alongside chats, channels, and meetings. Communities power learning, dialogue, and engagement across the organization. They enable modern, two‑way c...
02/02/2026
Manage and reduce storage growth in Microsoft 365 with Orchestry
Storage overages in Microsoft 365 rarely come from a single misstep or event —they build up quietly over time —version history accumulating in active libraries, inactive content lingering long after projects end, and legacy sites that were migrated as-is and never revisited. Because the growth is gradual, many organizations only notice the issue when a storage alert appears in the admin center. Microsoft 365 now offers more ways to manage where content lives and new way...
02/02/2026
Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter - February 2026
In this issue: Ace Aviator of the Month News from our product group News from our community Ace Aviator of the Month February 2026’s Ace Aviator:
02/02/2026
AI‑Powered Performance Test Analysis using GHCP
Problem StatementPerformance testing teams often face significant challenges in comparing JMeter test results across environments or test runs.Manual comparison and analysis of multiple result files is time-consuming, error-prone, and lacks actionable insights. SolutionAn AI-powered solution leveraging GHCP has been developed to address the identified challenge. This sol...
02/02/2026
Hardening Spring Boot Health Probes on AKS: How to Prevent Restart Storms Before They Start
Overview Transient platform degradations can turn into outages if health probes are overly strict or wired to the wrong endpoint. In this case study, multiple incidents were reported in which many Spring Boot pods restarted in a short time window on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), contributing to visible downtime. A key lesson is that probing the consolidated /actuator/health endpoint can amplify blast radius: if any health contributor degrades, the overall endpoint can report...
02/02/2026
Unable to configure Audit settings for Azure SQL.
While configuring Auditing settings for Azure SQL, the deployment may fail and following error is encountered: Failed to save Auditing settings for server. The client has permission to perform action 'Microsoft.OperationalInsights/workspaces/sharedKeys/action' on scope '/subscriptions/SubID-ABC/resourceGroups/ResourceGroupName/providers/Microsoft.Sql/servers/ServerName/databases/master/providers/microsoft.insig...
02/02/2026
A Beginner’s Reading List for Large Language Models for 2026
The large language models (LLMs) hype wave shows no sign of fading anytime soon: after all, LLMs keep reinventing themselves at a rapid pace and transforming the industry as a whole.
02/02/2026
TLS 1.3 in SQL Server 2025: What It Really Changes for Security
Why TLS 1.3 matters TLS (Transport Layer Security) is the protocol that encrypts traffic between clients and servers. For many years, most SQL Server environments have relied on TLS 1.2, which dates back to 2008.
02/02/2026
Benchmarking Local AI Models
Introduction Selecting the right AI model for your application requires more than reading benchmark leaderboards. Published benchmarks measure academic capabilities, question answering, reasoning, coding, but your application has specific requirements: latency budgets, hardware constraints, quality thresholds. How do you know if Phi-4 provides acceptable quality for your document summarization use case? Will Qwen2.5-0.5B meet your 100ms response time requirement? Does your edge devic...
02/02/2026
NVIDIA AI Brings Nemotron-3-Nano-30B to NVFP4 with Quantization Aware Distillation (QAD) for Efficient Reasoning Inference
NVIDIA has released Nemotron-Nano-3-30B-A3B-NVFP4, a production checkpoint that runs a 30B parameter reasoning model in 4 bit NVFP4 format while keeping accuracy close to its BF16 baseline. The model combines a hybrid Mamba2 Transformer Mixture of Experts architecture with a Quantization Aware Distillation (QAD) recipe designed specifically for NVFP4 deployment. Overall, it is an ultra-efficient […] The post
02/02/2026
How to Build Memory-Driven AI Agents with Short-Term, Long-Term, and Episodic Memory
In this tutorial, we build a memory-engineering layer for an AI agent that separates short-term working context from long-term vector memory and episodic traces. We implement semantic storage using embeddings and FAISS for fast similarity search, and we add episodic memory that captures what worked, what failed, and why, so the agent can reuse successful […] The post
02/02/2026
A Coding and Experimental Analysis of Decentralized Federated Learning with Gossip Protocols and Differential Privacy
In this tutorial, we explore how federated learning behaves when the traditional centralized aggregation server is removed and replaced with a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer gossip mechanism. We implement both centralized FedAvg and decentralized Gossip Federated Learning from scratch and introduce client-side differential privacy by injecting calibrated noise into local model updates. By running controlled experiments […] The post
02/02/2026
Multiple secondaries for Azure SQL Database failover groups (Public Preview)
Azure SQL Database failover groups are a business continuity capability that helps you manage geo-replication and coordinated failover of one or more databases from a primary Azure SQL logical server to a secondary logical server in another region. A key benefit is automatic endpoint redirection: your application can keep using the same listener endpoints, and connections are routed to the current primary after a geo-failover. Unt...
31/01/2026
Robbyant Open Sources LingBot World: a Real Time World Model for Interactive Simulation and Embodied AI
Robbyant, the embodied AI unit inside Ant Group, has open sourced LingBot-World, a large scale world model that turns video generation into an interactive simulator for embodied agents, autonomous driving and games. The system is designed to render controllable environments with high visual fidelity, strong dynamics and long temporal horizons, while staying responsive enough for […] The post
31/01/2026
Title Plan Update - January 30, 2026
📁January 30, 2026 - Title Plan Now Available Access the latest Instructor-Led Training (ILT) updates anytime at
30/01/2026
AI2 Releases SERA, Soft Verified Coding Agents Built with Supervised Training Only for Practical Repository Level Automation Workflows
Allen Institute for AI (AI2) Researchers introduce SERA, Soft Verified Efficient Repository Agents, as a coding agent family that aims to match much larger closed systems using only supervised training and synthetic trajectories. What is SERA? SERA is the first release in AI2’s Open Coding Agents series. The flagship model, SERA-32B, is built on the […] The post
30/01/2026
A Coding Implementation to Training, Optimizing, Evaluating, and Interpreting Knowledge Graph Embeddings with PyKEEN
In this tutorial, we walk through an end-to-end, advanced workflow for knowledge graph embeddings using PyKEEN, actively exploring how modern embedding models are trained, evaluated, optimized, and interpreted in practice. We start by understanding the structure of a real knowledge graph dataset, then systematically train and compare multiple embedding models, tune their hyperparameters, and analyze […] The post
30/01/2026
February update: What's new in Security for Partners
Navigate to News and Announcements, Incentives and Offers, Skilling and Events, Go-To-Market,
30/01/2026
Architecting Trust: A NIST-Based Security Governance Framework for AI Agents
Architecting Trust: A NIST-Based Security Governance Framework for AI Agents The "Agentic Era" has arrived. We are moving from chatbots that simply talk to agents that act—triggering APIs, querying databases, and managing their own long-term memory. But with this agency comes unprecedented risk. How do we ensure these autonomous entities remain secure, compliant, and predictable? In this post, Umesh Nagdev and Abhi Singh, showcase a Security Governanc...
30/01/2026
Azure Local LENS workbook—deep insights at scale, in minutes
Azure Local at scale needs fleet-level visibility As Azure Local deployments grow from a handful of instances to hundreds (or even thousands), the operational questions change. You’re no longer troubleshooting a single environment—you’re looking for patterns across your entire fleet: Which sites are trending with a specific health issue? Where are workload deployments increasing over time, do we have enough capacity available? Wh...
30/01/2026
SQL + AI: Get ready for a fun new experience, launching next week!
The SQL community is leveling up! We’re launching a lightweight, beginner friendly SQL + AI contest designed to spark awareness of SQL Server 2025’s new AI capabilities—from connecting to an AI model, to generating embeddings, to exploring what’s possible when natural language intelligence meets your database.&n...
30/01/2026
Multiple secondaries for failover groups is now in public preview
Failover groups for Azure SQL Database is a business continuity solution that lets you manage the replication and failover of databases to another Azure SQL logical server. With failover groups, you get automatic endpoint redirection, so you don't have to change the connection string for your application after a geo-failover—connections are automatically routed to the current primary. Until now, Azure SQL failover groups have only supported one secondary. We're excited to a...
30/01/2026
Education: A year in review with AI-powered learning tools
Hi Insiders! Our mission continues to focus on promoting equitable and successful learning outcomes for all students. Last year, we made updates to our products and services to further impact our goal, whether it was providing new AI experiences for educators and students to spark their curiosity and master crucial skills or enhancing accessibility and security features for a safe and inclusive school environment. Let’s look back at some of 2025’s biggest achievements with Micro...
30/01/2026
What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot | January 2026
Welcome to the January 2026 edition of What's New in Microsoft 365 Copilot! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements to keep Microsoft 365 admins up to date with Copilot features that help your users be more productive and efficient in the apps they use every day. This month we have a special announcement to share: we’ve refreshed the Microsoft 365 Roadmap to make it easier...
30/01/2026
Conditional Access for Canvas Apps with Entra
In today's Power Platform landscape, administrators have a tough task securing the ever-increasing inventory of Canvas Apps across their tenant. Canvas apps often connect to sensitive data, run on a variety of devices, and serve diverse groups of users. That is why Conditional Access has become one of the most powerful tools in an admin’s toolkit, giving you fine grained control over how, where, and under what conditions users can access your apps.
30/01/2026
Export and import for Azure SQL database with a sequence
A few scenarios where sequencing is useful: Generating Unique Identifiers: When you need a unique sequential number for each new row (e.g., order numbers, invoice numbers). Unlike identity columns, sequences can be shared across multiple tables. Custom Auto-Increment Logic: When auto-increment needs to be independent of a specific table. When multiple tables need to use the same numbering ...
30/01/2026
Microsoft Unveils Maia 200, An FP4 and FP8 Optimized AI Inference Accelerator for Azure Datacenters
Maia 200 is Microsoft’s new in house AI accelerator designed for inference in Azure datacenters. It targets the cost of token generation for large language models and other reasoning workloads by combining narrow precision compute, a dense on chip memory hierarchy and an Ethernet based scale up fabric. Why Microsoft built a dedicated inference chip? […] The post
30/01/2026
DeepSeek AI Releases DeepSeek-OCR 2 with Causal Visual Flow Encoder for Layout Aware Document Understanding
DeepSeek AI released DeepSeek-OCR 2, an open source document OCR and understanding system that restructures its vision encoder to read pages in a causal order that is closer to how humans scan complex documents. The key component is DeepEncoder V2, a language model style transformer that converts a 2D page into a 1D sequence of […] The post
30/01/2026
Splitting single-tenant Microsoft Defender XDR Sentinel logs in multiple company scenarios
Introduction Let’s consider a scenario in which a parent holding company – Contoso Group – owns two different companies – Contoso Beverages and Contoso Food – and uses a single, shared, multi-domain Entra ID tenant for all the Contoso Group companies. Contoso Group is licensing Entra ID P2 and Microsoft Defender XDR, but each company runs its own Security Operations Center, with its own SIEM (Microsoft Sentinel). While it is trivial to segregate resource logs that are s...
30/01/2026
A Coding Deep Dive into Differentiable Computer Vision with Kornia Using Geometry Optimization, LoFTR Matching, and GPU Augmentations
We implement an advanced, end-to-end Kornia tutorial and demonstrate how modern, differentiable computer vision can be built entirely in PyTorch. We start by constructing GPU-accelerated, synchronized augmentation pipelines for images, masks, and keypoints, then move into differentiable geometry by optimizing a homography directly through gradient descent. We also show how learned feature matching with LoFTR […] The post
30/01/2026
Minimum Usage in Azure App Testing
Load testing is most effective when it closely mirrors real-world usage and when test infrastructure is used efficiently. We recently launched AI-assisted load test authoring which enables mirroring real-world usage. Today, we are taking another step for the efficient use of test infrastructure. Behind every load test run, there is dedicate...
30/01/2026
Introduction to Copilot Role Stories
AI is becoming a core part of how people across every industry get work done. From marketers creating content faster, to clinicians improving patient care, to insurance teams automating claims and authorizations, Microsoft Copilot and AI Agents are helping people focus on what matters most. In Role Stories we walk through real-world scenarios in specific industries and job roles that show how Copilot boosts productivity, reduces manual work, and helps teams deliver bet...
30/01/2026
Unlocking the power of Partner Center reporting: Why these insights matter for Marketplace success
For publishers in the Microsoft commercial marketplace, having the right data at the right time is essential. Understanding how customers engage with your offers, how revenue flows through billing and payout cycles, and how subscriptions or usage evolve over time directly influences your go‑to‑market decisions, financial planning, and customer management strategies. During a recent Microsoft webinar focused on Partner Center reporting,
30/01/2026
🦞 Deploy MoltBot to Azure Container Apps: Your 24/7 AI Assistant in 30 Minutes
🚀 The Quick Version: Create a Discord bot, clone the repo, run azd up, invite bot to server, start chatting. Total time: ~25 minutes. Total cost: ~$40-60/month. Why Azure Container Apps over other options? ✅ Managed Identity - No credentials in config files ✅ Built-in Secrets - API keys never exposed in logs ✅ Automatic HTTPS - Fre...
30/01/2026
Ant Group Releases LingBot-VLA, A Vision Language Action Foundation Model For Real World Robot Manipulation
How do you build a single vision language action model that can control many different dual arm robots in the real world? LingBot-VLA is Ant Group Robbyant’s new Vision Language Action foundation model that targets practical robot manipulation in the real world. It is trained on about 20,000 hours of teleoperated bimanual data collected from 9 […] The post
30/01/2026
Announcing the Microsoft 365 Community Conference 2026
Your front row seat to the future of intelligent work The Microsoft 365 Community Conference is back April 21–23, 2026, at Loews Sapphire Falls and Loews Royal Pacific Resort in Orlando, Florida. This year’s theme — a beacon for builders, innovators, and icons of intelligent work — reflects the momentum across Microsoft 365 and Copilot as we enter a new era of AI‑powered productivity. Across three days, attendees will...
29/01/2026
🌍✨ We’re Now Accepting Applications for MGCI Regional Leaders!
The Microsoft Global Community Initiative (MGCI) is now accepting applications for our next cohort of Regional Leaders - volunteer community champions who help shape, support, and amplify Microsoft technical communities worldwide. 💡 Why Become a MGCI Regional Leader?
29/01/2026
Advancing Windows security: Disabling NTLM by default
Windows is moving toward a more secure authentication model by phasing out New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM) in favor of stronger, Kerberos‑based alternatives. Let’s look at enhanced auditing and upcoming tools to help prepare your organization for disabling NTLM by default. The evolution of Windows authentication
29/01/2026
Discover why to build AI apps and agents with Microsoft and sell through Marketplace
Customer demand for AI is accelerating fast. And your company's AI app or agent should be there to meet it. In this fiscal year, Microsoft has already seen 2x growth in customers purchasing AI products through Microsoft Marketplace, while also being the largest catalog of AI apps and agents in the industry.
29/01/2026
Interested in Being a Guest on the Microsoft Security Podcast at RSA?
Going to RSA? We’re recording short, 15-minute Microsoft Security podcast conversations live at the conference- focused on real-world practitioner experience. No pitches, no slides, no marketing. Just an honest conversation about what you’re seeing, what’s changed, and what you’d tell a peer. If you’re doing the work and want to share your perspective, we’d love to hear from you. Take the survey to let us know you a...
29/01/2026
Supporting ChatGPT on PostgreSQL in Azure
Affan Dar, Vice President of Engineering, PostgreSQL at Microsoft Adam Prout, Partner Architect, PostgreSQL at Microsoft Panagiotis (Panos) Antonopoulos, Distinguished Engineer, PostgreSQL at Microsoft Th...
29/01/2026
Excel as a Literate Computation Surface for AI
[This article was originally published by Sumit Chauhan on LinkedIn.] AI systems perform robust computation, but their outputs are typically dissociated from the structure of the computation itself. Answers are delivered as fluent summaries, scripts, or static artifacts. Explanations may accompa...
29/01/2026
Tech for Good in Action: Accessibility, AI, and Expanding Our Community Impact
Accessibility is not a niche topic. It is a fundamental aspect of inclusive technology, and a shared responsibility for everyone who builds, teaches, and communicates about tech. This message was at the heart of a recent Global Skills session that brought together Microsoft MVPs and community leaders to explore how technology, AI, and communication can be used as powerful tools for social good.
29/01/2026
From SOP Overload to Simple Answers: Building Q&A Agents With SharePoint Online + Agent Builder
Turning SOPs Into Simple Q&A Agents is possibly one of the fastest wins for public‑sector teams. Take the SOPs and guidance you already have, upload them to SharePoint Online (what's that? they're already there? I know!). Then, create an agent using nothing but descriptive natural language. No code. No connectors. No fuss. (Disclaimer: these claims are the author's personal boasts, not all use cases or requirements will match this example and therefore these statements are no...
29/01/2026
Beyond the Chatbox: Generative UI, AG-UI, and the Stack Behind Agent-Driven Interfaces
Most AI applications still showcase the model as a chat box. That interface is simple, but it hides what agents are actually doing, such as planning steps, calling tools, and updating state. Generative UI is about letting the agent drive real interface elements, for example tables, charts, forms, and progress indicators, so the experience feels […] The post
29/01/2026
Azure NetApp Files Elastic ZRS service level - File Storage High Availability Made Easy
Table of Contents Abstract Introduction Why it matters How it works What are we enabling? <...
29/01/2026
Production-grade API Gateway patterns for Microsoft Foundry
Most startup teams start with the simplest thing that can work. One or two apps call Microsoft Foundry model endpoints directly, traffic is predictable, and “routing” is just a config value in the app. The gateway pattern becomes necessary when Foundry stops being “an integration” and becomes “a shared platform”. That shift shows up in a few reliable signals: You do not fully con...
29/01/2026
New content types supported in multi-tenant content distribution
Onboard new tenants and maintain a consistent security baseline We’re excited to announce a set of new content types that are now supported by the multi-tenant content distribution capability in the Defender portal: You can now distribute analytics rules, automation rules, workbooks, and alert tuning built in rules. What is content distribution? Content distribution is a powerful multi-tenant feature that enables scalable management of security content across tenants....
29/01/2026
SharePoint Showcase: Automation updates for smarter workflows & business processes
The way work gets done continues to evolve. Across organizations, everyday tasks are moving beyond manual handoffs toward intelligent, connected workflows where AI helps coordinate activity and people focus on outcomes. In this month’s SharePoint Showcase, we’re spotlighting updates that make business process automation simpler, more flexible, and more closely aligned where you work. Creating automation now lives right where work happens for SharePoint files, lists, and pages enabling ...
29/01/2026
Microsoft Graph User Configuration API (preview) - now available
We wanted to post a quick note that on the Microsoft 365 Developer Blog, a new post was published discussing availability of the preview of Microsoft Graph User Configuration API. This is important to all of our customers and partners utilizing Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online today. As we have mentioned previously, EWS in Exchange Online is
29/01/2026
UPDATE: New timeline for transitioning Sentinel experience to Defender portal
We’re sharing an important update to help Microsoft Sentinel customers and partners plan a smooth transition to the Microsoft Defender portal. In July 2025, we announced that Microsoft Sentinel SIEM customers would have to transition from the Azure portal experience to the Defender portal by July 1, 2026. Since then, we’ve seen a large percentage of our customers adopt the new experience, however, we’ve heard consistent feedback from customers and partners—particularly those managing S...
29/01/2026
Monday Masterclass Season 2 – Week 1: Beyond the Basics in Viva Engage
We hear repeatedly how valuable it is to have a space dedicated to practical guidance, real world examples, and direct access to product experts. Monday Masterclass Season 2 builds on the essentials while introducing capabilities that help organizations scale their employee communications and community strategy with confidence. This year’s program includes four live ...
29/01/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: January 29, 2026
Learn about 227 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
29/01/2026
7 Important Considerations Before Deploying Agentic AI in Production
The promise of agentic AI is compelling: autonomous systems that reason, plan, and execute complex tasks with minimal human intervention.
29/01/2026
Exploring Traffic Manager Integration for External DNS
When you deploy externally accessible applications into Kubernetes, there is usually a requirement for creating some DNS records pointing to these applications, to allow your users to resolve them. Rather than manually creating these DNS records, there are tools that will do this work for you, one of which is External DNS. External DNS can watch your Kubernetes resource configuration for s...
29/01/2026
Building Interactive Agent UIs with AG-UI and Microsoft Agent Framework
Introduction Picture this: You've built an AI agent that analyzes financial data. A user uploads a quarterly report and asks: "What are the top three expense categories?" Behind the scenes, your agent parses the spreadsheet, aggregates thousands of rows, and generates visualizations. All in 20 seconds. But the user? They see a loading spinner. Nothing else. No "reading file" message, no "analyzin...
29/01/2026
Google DeepMind Unveils AlphaGenome: A Unified Sequence-to-Function Model Using Hybrid Transformers and U-Nets to Decode the Human Genome
Google DeepMind is expanding its biological toolkit beyond the world of protein folding. After the success of AlphaFold, the Google’s research team has introduced AlphaGenome. This is a unified deep learning model designed for sequence to function genomics. This represents a major shift in how we model the human genome. AlphaGenome does not treat DNA […] The post
29/01/2026
Azure PostgreSQL Lesson Learned #14: Hitting the Max Storage Limits Blocking Further Scale‑Up
Co‑authored with HaiderZ-MSFT Case Overview A customer attempted to increase storage for their Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server but was unable to exceed 32 TiB. Investigation confirmed that the server was deployed in a region where the maximum supported storage...
29/01/2026
Alibaba Introduces Qwen3-Max-Thinking, a Test Time Scaled Reasoning Model with Native Tool Use Powering Agentic Workloads
Qwen3-Max-Thinking is Alibaba’s new flagship reasoning model. It does not only scale parameters, it also changes how inference is done, with explicit control over thinking depth and built in tools for search, memory, and code execution. Model scale, data, and deployment Qwen3-Max-Thinking is a trillion-parameter MoE flagship LLM pretrained on 36T tokens and built on […] The post
29/01/2026
How to Design Self-Reflective Dual-Agent Governance Systems with Constitutional AI for Secure and Compliant Financial Operations
In this tutorial, we implement a dual-agent governance system that applies Constitutional AI principles to financial operations. We demonstrate how we separate execution and oversight by pairing a Worker Agent that performs financial actions with an Auditor Agent that enforces policy, safety, and compliance. By encoding governance rules directly into a formal constitution and combining […] The post
29/01/2026
Introducing Unit Test Agent Profiles for Logic Apps & Data Maps
I did some experimentation this week with GitHub Copilot custom agents and custom prompts. The result was a couple of agents to help with creation of unit tests for Logic Apps Standard workflows and data maps. These agent profiles are designed to keep test artifacts consistent and maintainable by separating discovery, specification, data generation, and implementation. Specifications serve as the single source of truth; generated code and data follow...
28/01/2026
From Ingress to Gateway API: A pragmatic path forward (and why it matters now)
If you operate Kubernetes at scale, you've felt it: "Ingress YAML sprawl", annotation archaeology, and the creeping sense that your edge configuration is one upstream change away from becoming fragile. Over the last couple of years, the Kubernetes networking community has been steadily moving toward a clearer, more expressive model for north-south traffic management: Gateway API. That shift has accelerated recently for a v...
28/01/2026
ICYMI | How Microsoft is empowering Frontier Transformation with Intelligence + Trust
At Microsoft Ignite in November, we introduced Frontier Transformation — a holistic reimagining of business aligning AI with human ambition to help organizations achieve their highest aspirations and growth potential. While AI Transformation centered on efficiency and productivity, Frontier Transformation challenges us to do more for humanity by democratizing intelligence to unlock creativity and innovation for or...
28/01/2026
MBZUAI Releases K2 Think V2: A Fully Sovereign 70B Reasoning Model For Math, Code, And Science
Can a fully sovereign open reasoning model match state of the art systems when every part of its training pipeline is transparent. Researchers from Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) release K2 Think V2, a fully sovereign reasoning model designed to test how far open and fully documented pipelines can push long horizon […] The post
28/01/2026
Microsoft Sentinel and Dataverse Integration
Integrating Microsoft Sentinel with Microsoft Dataverse brings advanced, unified security monitoring to your Power Platform environments. Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)...
28/01/2026
Trust DigiCert Global Root G2 Certificate Authority to Avoid Exchange Online Email Disruption
To avoid mail flow disruption between your organization and Exchange Online, organizations that send or receive email to or from Exchange Online must ensure that their servers and clients trust the DigiCert Global Root G2 Certificate Authority and its subordinate CAs before April 30, 2026. You can find a comprehensive list of the root and subordinate certificate authority chain in the
28/01/2026
Automated Test Framework - Missing Tests in Test Explorer
Have your tests created using the Logic Apps Standard Automated Test Framework disappeared from the Test Explorer in VS Code all of a sudden? The answer is a mismatch between the MSTest versions used. A recent update in the C# DevKit extension changed the minimum requirements for the MSTest library - it now requires the minimum of 3.7.*. The project scaffolding created byt the Logic Apps Standard extension uses 3.0.2 The good news is that you can fix this by just changing packag...
28/01/2026
Announcing General Availability of RDP Shortpath Configuration via GPO and Microsoft Intune
We are pleased to announce the general availability (GA) of centralized RDP Shortpath configuration using Microsoft Intune and Group Policy (GPO). This update gives IT administrators a unified, policy-driven way to control which RDP Shortpath modes (Managed, Public/STUN, Public/TURN) are enabled across Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) session hosts and Windows 365 Cloud P...
28/01/2026
Your Data, Your Choices: Understanding Microsoft’s Privacy Commitments
Today, we celebrate National Data Privacy Day. At Microsoft, privacy is more than a legal requirement, it’s a foundation for customer trust and a core part of how products and services are built. As digital life expands and technologies like artificial intelligence play a bigger role in everyday tasks, we continue to invest deeply in privacy, transparency, and responsible innovation. Learn more about
28/01/2026
Upcoming Conditional Access change: Improved enforcement for policies with resource exclusions
In alignment with Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative, we are taking the following proactive security measures for defense-in-depth. Please review the changes and take any required actions to prepare. What is changing? Today
28/01/2026
New in Microsoft Marketplace: January 28, 2026
Learn about 180 new offers that went live in Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, and buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business needs. Get it now in our marketplace
28/01/2026
Microsoft-kumppaneiden menestystarinoita Suomessa käsittelevä blogipostaus-sarja käynnistyy!
Keväällä 2026 käynnistyy kumppanifoorumin blogisarja, jossa esitellään Microsoft-kumppaneiden menestystarinoita. Sarja alkaa Partner of the Year 2025 -voittajalla Vivictalla. Nostamme esiin voittajien tarinoita sekä konkreettisia esimerkkejä ratkaisuista ja innovaatioista, jotka tuottavat mitattavaa arvoa asiakkaille ja vahvistavat ekosysteemin kehitystä Suomessa. POTYA 2025 -voittajat edustavat suomalaisten kumppaneiden osaamista ja yhteistyön ...
28/01/2026
GitHub Copilot SDK and Hybrid AI in Practice: Automating README to PPT Transformation
Introduction In today's rapidly evolving AI landscape, developers often face a critical choice: should we use powerful cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) that require internet connectivity, or lightweight Small Language Models (SLMs) that run locally but have limited capabilities? The answer isn't either-or—it's hybrid models—combining the strengths of both to create AI solutions that are secure, efficient, and powerful. This article explores hybrid mode...
28/01/2026
Tencent Hunyuan Releases HPC-Ops: A High Performance LLM Inference Operator Library
Tencent Hunyuan has open sourced HPC-Ops, a production grade operator library for large language model inference architecture devices. HPC-Ops focuses on low level CUDA kernels for core operators such as Attention, Grouped GEMM, and Fused MoE, and exposes them through a compact-C and Python API for integration into existing inference stacks. HPC-Ops runs in large […] The post
28/01/2026
Conditional Access for Agent Identities in Microsoft Entra
AI agents are rapidly becoming part of everyday enterprise operations summarizing incidents, analyzing logs, orchestrating workflows, or even acting as digital colleagues. As organizations adopt these intelligent automations, securing them becomes just as important as securing human identities. Microsoft Entra introduces Agent Identities and extends Conditional Access to them but with very limited controls compared to traditional users and workload ide...
28/01/2026
What's New in Excel (January 2026)
Happy New Year, and welcome to the January 2026 update! We’re excited to share that Agent Mode in Excel is now generally available in Excel on Windows and is rolling out to Excel on Mac over the coming days. This month also brings the general availability of the full Power Query experience in Excel for the web. In addition, Windows Insider users can access new import functions and descriptive error cards, and Office Scripts now supports saving and emailing files as a PDF across all platforms<...
28/01/2026
Compliance Meets AI: DLP for Copilot Is Better Than Ever.
Last week we hosted Session 2 of our “Compliance Meets AI” series, and the focus couldn’t be more timely: Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Microsoft 365 Copilot. The conversation was practical, candid, and packed with real-world guidance for organizations navigating AI adoption responsibly. If you missed it, no worries we have you covered. You can view the recording below.
28/01/2026
Making AI Apps Enterprise-Ready with Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Foundry
Building AI apps is easy. Shipping them to production is not. Microsoft Foundry lets developers bring powerful AI apps and agents to production in days. But managing safety, security, and compliance for each one quickly becomes the real bottleneck. Every enterprise AI project hits the same wall: security reviews, data classification, audit trails, DLP policies, retention requirements. Teams spend months building custom logging pipelines and governance systems that never quite keep up w...
28/01/2026
Moonshot AI Releases Kimi K2.5: An Open Source Visual Agentic Intelligence Model with Native Swarm Execution
Moonshot AI has released Kimi K2.5 as an open source visual agentic intelligence model. It combines a large Mixture of Experts language backbone, a native vision encoder, and a parallel multi agent system called Agent Swarm. The model targets coding, multimodal reasoning, and deep web research with strong benchmark results on agentic, vision, and coding […] The post
27/01/2026
The Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode preview build has been updated!
At Ignite last year, we announced Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode (vMode), a purpose-built experience to help you easily manage on-premises Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization at scale – across multiple hosts and clusters – while effortlessly bridging your environment with Azure Arc for a true hyb...
27/01/2026
Announcing General Availability of Azure Da/Ea/Fasv7-series VMs based on AMD ‘Turin’ processors
Today, Microsoft is announcing the general availability of Azure’s new AMD based Virtual Machines (VMs) powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC™ (Turin) processors. These VMs include general-purpose (Dasv7, Dalsv7), memory-optimized (Easv7), and compute-optimized (Fasv7, Falsv7, Famsv7) series, available with or without local disks. Azure’s latest AMD based VMs offer faster CPU performance, greater scalability, and flexible configurations, making them the ideal choice for high perfor...
27/01/2026
SAP + Microsoft 365: A Unified AI Experience That Works Where You Work
Coauthors: Angel Zhu, Senior Product Manager, M365 Copilot Agent Ecosystem and Christoph Ruehle, Principal Product Manager, Joule/SAP Business AI at SAP We’ve all experienced it: you’re reviewing data, a message pings, an email comes in, and suddenly you’re juggling inboxes, chats, and screens just to finish one workflow. Those small interruptions feel routine — yet employees switch between apps over 1,200 times per day, adding up to weeks of lost productivity ea...
27/01/2026
Microsoft Hero: How Community Sparked a Global Movement
By guest blogger Saeid Dahl. Introduction There comes a moment when numbers stop being just metrics and start telling a story. After more than 160 live sessions over the past two years, thousands of hours of shared learning, and a global audience that has grown to over 7,000 members and subscribers, we felt compell...
27/01/2026
DSGym Offers a Reusable Container Based Substrate for Building and Benchmarking Data Science Agents
Data science agents should inspect datasets, design workflows, run code, and return verifiable answers, not just autocomplete Pandas code. DSGym, introduced by researchers from Stanford University, Together AI, Duke University, and Harvard University, is a framework that evaluates and trains such agents across more than 1,000 data science challenges with expert curated ground truth and […] The post
27/01/2026
Enhance AI Productivity with Designed for Surface Accessories
In today’s workplaces, productivity thrives when technology helps people work smarter and with less friction. AI tools designed to support the way people think, create, and solve problems can help users move through tasks with greater confidence and clarity. But productivity and great AI experiences often benefit from more than compute power. Designed for Surface (DfS) accessories ...
27/01/2026
Updated Exchange Online SMTP AUTH Basic Authentication Deprecation Timeline
We understand that many customers continue to face real challenges modernizing legacy email workflows and need sufficient time to adopt viable, secure alternatives. Based on customer feedback and visibility into adoption progress, we are refining the
27/01/2026
How Tree-KG Enables Hierarchical Knowledge Graphs for Contextual Navigation and Explainable Multi-Hop Reasoning Beyond Traditional RAG
In this tutorial, we implement Tree-KG, an advanced hierarchical knowledge graph system that goes beyond traditional retrieval-augmented generation by combining semantic embeddings with explicit graph structure. We show how we can organize knowledge in a tree-like hierarchy that mirrors how humans learn, from broad domains to fine-grained concepts, and then reason across this structure using […] The post
27/01/2026
Microsoft Industrial AI Partner Guide: Choosing the Right Data Expertise for Every Stage
As organizations scale Industrial AI, the challenge shifts from technology selection to deciding who should lead which part of the journey -- and when. Which partners should establish secure connectivity? Who enables production grade, AI ready industrial data? When do systems integrators step in to scale globally? This Partner Guide helps customers navigate these decisions with clarity and confidence: Identify which partners align to...
27/01/2026
Partner Case Study | Heathrow Scientific
Heathrow Scientific, an innovative manufacturer and distributor of laboratory equipment, wanted to transform its finance and purchasing operations by migrating from its on-premises reporting system to a cloud-based solution. The company collaborated with Microsoft partner Western Computer to consolidate financial and business data in Dynamics 365 Business Central, incorporating the visualization tools of Power BI to track key performance metrics. Heathrow’s digital transformatio...
27/01/2026
Silicon to Systems: How Microsoft Engineers AI Infrastructure from the Ground Up
Every Copilot prompt or Microsoft Teams call runs on infrastructure most users never see. Behind these experiences across general purpose compute and AI is a purpose-built, end-to-end hardware and software system engineered specifically for modern AI workloads. Microsoft’s investment in custom silicon and systems is designed to enable infrastructure optimized for performance, power-efficiency, and cost. In Silicon to Systems, Microsoft leaders and engineers walk through how cu...
27/01/2026
General availability of source specific filters in Copilot Search
We’re excited to share that source specific filters are now generally available worldwide in Copilot Search 🎉. This release addresses a longstanding challenge in enterprise search: helping users move seamlessly from broad discovery ...
27/01/2026
Upcoming M365 Copilot Government Roadshow Dates
There’s never been a more exciting time to explore what Microsoft 365 Copilot and agentic AI can do for your organization. To help you build momentum, sharpen skills, and accelerate real adoption, we’re rolling out a series of immersive, hands‑on experiences across multiple cities. These sessions are designed to help teams move beyond the basics and start building high‑impact solutions that transform the way they work. Below is an overview of three upcoming events—each offering deep te...
27/01/2026
Enterprise Adoption Guide: Microsoft Dev Box
Audience: Platform Engineering, Cloud Architects, Security Teams, and Developer Leads Purpose: A practical, opinionated guide to plan, implement, and scale Microsoft Dev Box—covering decisions, trade‑offs, and best practices for real‑world enterprise adoption. Why This Guide Exists Developer onboarding and environment consistency are critical for productivity. Traditional approaches—manual laptop setup, dependency mismatches, and restrictive security—slow teams down and...
27/01/2026
Advance Your SOC Skills with the Power of Microsoft Sentinel data lake and graph
Microsoft Sentinel has evolved beyond a traditional SIEM into a unified, AI-ready security platform that brings data, analytics, intelligence, and automation together. At the core are Microsoft Sentinel data lake and Microsoft Sentinel graph: data lake enables long-term retention and high-scale analytics, and graph adds entity relationships to speed investigations. We have updated skilling to reflect these changes, so defenders can build the right hands-on skills faster.1...
27/01/2026
Agent Mode in Excel is now generally available on desktop
Agent Mode in Excel, part of Microsoft 365 Copilot, is now generally available on Windows, with Mac rolling out over the coming days — extending access beyond Excel for the web, which launched in ...
27/01/2026
The 3 Invisible Risks Every LLM App Faces (And How to Guard Against Them)
Building a chatbot prototype takes hours.
27/01/2026
Transforming Retry-After Headers in Azure APIM: A Step-by-Step Guide
In this blog post, you'll learn how to customize the Retry-After response header in Azure API Management (APIM) rate-limiting policies, enhancing your API's flexibility and user experience. While it does not delve into the specifics of the rate-limit or rate-limit-by-key policies, it provides a practical guide for altering the Retry-After header. For detailed information on the rate-limit policy, please visit
27/01/2026
In Summa, synvert ClearPeaks, and Asignet offer transactable solutions in Microsoft Marketplace
Microsoft partners like In Summa, synvert ClearPeaks, and Asignet deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Microsoft Marketplace. Learn about these offers below:
27/01/2026
Moving Forward: Alternatives After Azure Data Studio - Azure SQL Migration Extension Deprecation
If you're currently using the Azure SQL Migration extension, this blog will guide you through recommended alternatives for every phase of your migration—whether you are moving to Azure SQL Managed Instance, SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, or Azure SQL Database. What's happening to Azure SQL Migration extension in ADS? Azure SQL Migration extension in Azure Data Studio officially retires on February 28, 2026 along with Azure Data Studio. This change aims to ...
27/01/2026
Enable auditing to identify Change Tracking history table drops using Extended Events (Azure SQL Db)
When Change Tracking is enabled, the system-maintained history table dbo.MSChange_tracking_history is a key place to look for cleanup progress and errors. For example, Microsoft’s troubleshooting guidance for Change Tracking auto-cleanup explicitly references querying the history table to validate whether cleanup is running and whether there are cleanup errors. In real-world environments, teams sometimes observe that dbo.MSChange_tracking_history
27/01/2026
The Hidden Memory Architecture of LLMs
Your LLM is not running out of intelligence. It is often hitting context and runtime memory limits. I’m Hazem Ali — Microsoft AI MVP, Distinguished AI and ML Engineer /...
27/01/2026
Azure Arc for SQL Server: Executive Summary for Enterprise Clients
The Azure Connected Machine Agent is the foundation of Azure Arc.With the SQL Server extension active, configure monitoring capabilities.Begin with a pilot deployment on a non production SQL Server to validate network connectivity and familiarize your team with the Azure Arc experience.
27/01/2026
Unifying Scattered Observability Data from Dynatrace + Azure for Self-Healing with SRE Agent
What if an AI agent could unify data from third-party observability platforms with Azure deployment history and act on it automatically—every week, before users even notice?Using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), you can connect external observability platforms like Dynatrace directly to your agent.It correlates Dynatrace log analysis with Azure Container Apps deployment history, generates correlation charts, and executes rollbacks when confidence is high.
27/01/2026
“Automating Export of Microsoft Sentinel Analytic Rules mapped to MITRE Tactics & Techniques”
1. Introduction In modern Security Operations Centers (SOCs), mapping detections to the MITRE ATT&CK framework is critical. MITRE ATT&CK provides a structured, globally recognized model of adversary behavior, categorized into Tactics (goals) and Techniques (methods). Microsoft Sentinel analytic rules frequently include MITRE mappings, but viewing or exporting these at scale isn’t straightforward within the portal. Security teams ofte...
27/01/2026
When and why startups add a Gateway in front of Microsoft Foundry
Note: This post focuses on when and why startups begin adopting a gateway in front of Microsoft Foundry. In a follow-up article, we’ll go into a technical deep dive, covering design decisions, operational tradeoffs, latency considerations, observability, and patterns used in production-scale environments. Most teams don’t hit scaling challenges with Microsoft Foundry on day one. ...
27/01/2026
How a Haystack-Powered Multi-Agent System Detects Incidents, Investigates Metrics and Logs, and Produces Production-Grade Incident Reviews End-to-End
In this tutorial, we design this implementation to demonstrate how Haystack enables building advanced, agentic AI systems that go far beyond toy examples while remaining fully runnable. We focus on a cohesive, end-to-end setup that highlights orchestration, stateful decision-making, tool execution, and structured control flow, demonstrating how complex agent behavior can be cleanly expressed. We […] The post
27/01/2026
Building a Reliable Real Time Data Pipeline with Microsoft Fabric
The Two Pillars That Determine Success Data Quality Cannot Be an Afterthought The most common mistake we see is treating data quality as something to address after the pipeline is running. This approach creates technical debt that compounds over time and erodes trust in your data. Your CDC pipeline will ingest millions of events daily. Without proper validation at each layer, small issues become major problems. A single source system changing a column from integer to ...
27/01/2026
How SRE Agent Pulls Logs from Grafana and Creates Jira Tickets Without Native Integrations
Your tools. Your workflows. SRE Agent adapts. SRE Agent natively integrates with PagerDuty, ServiceNow, and Azure Monitor. But your team might use Jira for incident tracking. Grafana for dashboards. Loki for logs. Prometheus for metrics. These aren't natively supported. That doesn't matter. SRE Agent supports MCP, the Model Context Protocol. Any MCP-compatible server extends the agent's capabilities. Connect your Grafana instance. Connect your Jira...
27/01/2026
Compliance Meets AI 2026 Kickoff: DSPM for AI
🚀 Compliance Meets AI 2026 Kickoff: DSPM for AI What a great way to kick off the Compliance Meets AI 2026 series! For the first session we took a deep dive into Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI and explored how organizations can govern, protect, and gain visibility into generative AI usage—without slowing innovation. If you missed the session, don't worry you can watch the recording here
26/01/2026
Celebrating Community Manager Appreciation Day - January 26
Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day, and I want to take a moment to shine a bright, well‑deserved spotlight on the people who ensure our communities feel supported, informed, inspired, and connected: our Community Managers. In the Microsoft ecosystem, community managers do far more than answer questions or keep conversations flowing. They are the bridge between customers and product teams. They elevate voices. They create belonging. They h...
26/01/2026
When and why startups add a Gateway in front of Azure AI Foundry
Most teams don’t hit scaling challenges with Azure AI Foundry on day one. Early on, things are simple. One or two applications call Foundry directly. Traffic is predictable. Model experimentation moves fast. Everything works, and there’s no reason to add extra layers. Then adoption grows. More applications start calling the same models. Traffic becomes spiky. Teams want better v...
26/01/2026
5 Essential Digital Skills Every Nonprofit Needs for 2026 and Beyond
With small teams and big missions, capacity comes from skills, not just software licenses. The right skill stack compounds value across your programs, fundraising, operations, and partnerships. Below are the five essential digital skills (plus starter steps you can take this month). Data Literacy — Turning Information into Insight Data powers everything from fundraising decisions to program outcomes.Every ...
26/01/2026
Introducing the Azure Static Web Apps Skill for GitHub Copilot
From "Built" to "Deployed" in Minutes You've just finished building something great: A marketing landing page for your startup A portfolio site showcasing your work A documentation site for your open-source project An e-commerce storefront built with Next.js An internal dashboard for your team A blog with your latest content
26/01/2026
A New Habit for a New Era | Make “Mastering AI” Your New Year’s Resolution
New Year’s is all about fresh starts—and this year, nothing offers more potential than AI. So, make a resolution that will transform both your personal and professional life: learn to use AI effectively. Just as regular exercise strengthens your body, making AI a daily habit will transform how you work - unlocking new opportunities and giving you more time to focus on what matters most. The key is consistency: make it a habit to ask, “How can AI help ...
26/01/2026
What is going on with RC4 in Kerberos?
Howdy everyone! The cat is out of the bag when it comes to Microsoft’s forward outlook on RC4 usage in Kerberos. In the past few months, we have published the following.
26/01/2026
Windows 365 now supported in Brazil South
Today, we’re pleased to announce that Windows 365 is now available in the Brazil South region. Organizations can now provision Cloud PCs closer to their users in Brazil and across South America, helping reduce latency and support regional data residency requirements. With this update, Brazil South joins the list of su...
26/01/2026
Partner Blog | January 2026 skilling kickoff: Turn readiness into growth
A new year is a natural planning moment. Partners are navigating various pressures and opportunities, including fast-moving AI, shifting cloud workloads, rising security expectations, and data becoming a bigger part of every solution motion. In that environment, skilling can’t be treated as an optional add-on. It’s a core business priority that supports what partners care about most: winning wo...
26/01/2026
Wireshark walkthrough: observing an Azure SQL Database TDS connection on the wire
One of the most effective ways to truly understand how Azure SQL Database connectivity works is to observe the connection at the packet level. A short Wireshark capture clearly shows the interaction between TCP, TLS, TDS, and the Azure SQL gateway / redirect flow. This section walks through what you should expect to see in a healthy Azure SQL Database connection. 1. Captur...
26/01/2026
Azure SQL Database and the TDS protocol: how it works (networking + protocol deep dive)
If you’ve ever opened a packet capture for an Azure SQL Database connection, you’ve seen a very “SQL-shaped” conversation riding on top of TCP: Tabular Data Stream (TDS). TDS is the application-layer request/response protocol used by SQL clients to talk to SQL Server family services—including Azure SQL Database. It’s the on-the-wire format that carries login/authentication, encryption negotiation,
26/01/2026
Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations is now generally available
Every data security investigation starts with the same question: What data security risks are buried in this data? Exposed credentials in thousands of files across a data estate. Evidence of fraud hidden in vendor communications. Sensitive documents accidentally shared to a large group. Finding these risks manually — reviewing content file by file, message by message — is no longer viable when organizations are managing 220 zettabytes of data
26/01/2026
Leveling Up Your Machine Learning: What To Do After Andrew Ng’s Course
Finishing Andrew Ng's machine learning course
26/01/2026
Accelerating Microsoft 365 Copilot Adoption with Automated Readiness Assessment
Note: This playbook is designed for Microsoft partners operating within the AI Business Solutions commercial solution area to support their customers with the adoption journey of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The Copilot Readiness Challenge...
26/01/2026
Driving DevSecOps Standards: Microsoft’s Role in Shaping NIST SP 1800-44 Volume B
We are grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) SP 1800-44 Volume B – DevSecOps Architecture. This publication represents a significant step forward in defining a reference architecture for secure software development, and we appreciate the collaborative efforts of all involved. Security is woven throughout the development lifecycle, addressing challenges such as open-source risk, s...
26/01/2026
Building a TOTP Authenticator App on Azure Functions and Azure Key Vault
Two-factor authentication (2FA) has become a cornerstone of modern digital security, serving as a crucial defense against unauthorized access and account compromises. While many organizations rely on popular authenticator apps like Microsoft Authenticator, there's significant value in understanding how to build and customize your own TOTP (Time-based One-Time Password) solution. This becomes particularly relevant for those requiring specific customizations, enhanced security controls, or seam...
26/01/2026
Deep dive into the Maia 200 architecture
Maia 200 is a breakthrough inference architecture engineered to dramatically shift the economics of large-scale token generation. As Microsoft’s first silicon and system platform optimized specifically for AI inference, Maia 200 is built for modern reasoning and large language models, delivering the most efficient performance per dollar of any inference system deployed in Azure and ...
26/01/2026
Where Partners Build and Scale: Partner-Built Security Copilot Agents in Security Store
At Microsoft, we believe that security is a team sport. That’s why we are committed to meeting customers where they are, integrating with the solutions they already use to ensure that everyone can take advantage of the agentic capabilities of Security Copilot. And it’s not just an idea—it’s a reality. We’re excited to share why partners such as BlueVoyant, OneTrust, and Tanium chose to build agents with Security Copilot—and the value this brings to their customers. By watching t...
26/01/2026
NVIDIA Revolutionizes Climate Tech with ‘Earth-2’: The World’s First Fully Open Accelerated AI Weather Stack
For decades, predicting the weather has been the exclusive domain of massive government supercomputers running complex physics-based equations. NVIDIA has shattered that barrier with the release of the Earth-2 family of open models and tools for AI weather and climate prediction accessible to virtually anyone, from tech startups to national meteorological agencies. In a move […] The post
26/01/2026
New in Excel for the web: The full Power Query experience
We’ve reached yet another milestone in Excel for the web: The full Power Query user experience is now generally available, including the import wizard and Power Query Editor.After we released the ability to refresh Power Query data from authenticated data sources, we were able to unlock the ability to complete the full user journey of importing data and editing it using Power Query.Connect to the data source.
26/01/2026
GitHub Copilot + SQL Server: Understanding the Security Analyzer
What problem is this trying to solve? Many security issues in applications come from the database layer: poorly written queries, dynamic SQL, or code that exposes more data than it should. These problems are often hard to spot, especially in large or older codebases. The MSSQL extension for VS Code (v1.37+) now integrates GitHub Copilot with a dedicated chat participant:
26/01/2026
Building Agents with GitHub Copilot SDK: A Practical Guide to Automated Tech Update Tracking
Introduction In the rapidly evolving tech landscape, staying on top of key project updates is crucial. This article explores how to leverage GitHub's newly released Copilot SDK to build intelligent agent systems, featuring a practical case study on automating daily update tracking and analysis for Microsoft's Agent Framework. GitHub Copilot SDK: Embedding AI Capabilities into Any Application SDK Overview On January 22, 2026, GitHub of...
26/01/2026
Créer votre première application avec PowerApps
De nos jours, créer une application n’est plus réservés uniquement qu’aux développeurs. Avec Microsoft Power Apps, tout le monde peut concevoir des applications d’entreprise professionnelles sans écrire une seule ligne de code. C’es la magie qu’on appelle le low-code / no-code. On peut construire une application en quelques minutes, gérer des données sur Excel, SharePoint ou Dataverse et aussi générer automatiquement l’application à partir d’une simple description avec...
26/01/2026
Engineering a Local-First Agentic Podcast Studio: A Deep Dive into Multi-Agent Orchestration
The transition from standalone Large Language Models (LLMs) to Agentic Orchestration marks the next frontier in AI development. We are moving away from simple "prompt-and-response" cycles toward a paradigm where specialized, autonomous units—AI Agents—collaborate to solve complex, multi-step problems. As a Technology Evangelist, my focus is on building these production-grade systems entirely on the edge, ensuring privacy, speed, and cost-effici...
26/01/2026
What is Clawdbot? How a Local First Agent Stack Turns Chats into Real Automations
Clawdbot is an open source personal AI assistant that you run on your own hardware. It connects large language models from providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI to real tools such as messaging apps, files, shell, browser and smart home devices, while keeping the orchestration layer under your control. The interesting part is not that […] The post Wh...
26/01/2026
StepFun AI Introduce Step-DeepResearch: A Cost-Effective Deep Research Agent Model Built Around Atomic Capabilities
StepFun has introduced Step-DeepResearch, a 32B parameter end to end deep research agent that aims to turn web search into actual research workflows with long horizon reasoning, tool use and structured reporting. The model is built on Qwen2.5 32B-Base and is trained to act as a single agent that plans, explores sources, verifies evidence and […] The post
25/01/2026
A Coding Implementation to Automating LLM Quality Assurance with DeepEval, Custom Retrievers, and LLM-as-a-Judge Metrics
We initiate this tutorial by configuring a high-performance evaluation environment, specifically focused on integrating the DeepEval framework to bring unit-testing rigor to our LLM applications. By bridging the gap between raw retrieval and final generation, we implement a system that treats model outputs as testable code and uses LLM-as-a-judge metrics to quantify performance. We move […] The post
25/01/2026
How Machine Learning and Semantic Embeddings Reorder CVE Vulnerabilities Beyond Raw CVSS Scores
In this tutorial, we build an AI-assisted vulnerability scanner that goes beyond static CVSS scoring and instead learns to prioritize vulnerabilities using semantic understanding and machine learning. We treat vulnerability descriptions as rich linguistic artifacts, embed them using modern sentence transformers, and combine these representations with structural metadata to produce a data-driven priority score. Also, […] The post
24/01/2026
Supercharging SharePoint Metadata with the Knowledge Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Organizations adopting Microsoft 365 Copilot are quickly realizing that great AI outcomes depend on great data foundations. But for many teams, keeping SharePoint content well‑structured, tagged, and optimized for search has always been a challenge. Enter Knowledge Agent (Preview) - now included with Microsoft 365 Copilot (premium) - a powerful new capability that automates metadata enrichment inside SharePoint. In just a few minutes, it can transform ...
23/01/2026
GitHub Releases Copilot-SDK to Embed Its Agentic Runtime in Any App
GitHub has opened up the internal agent runtime that powers GitHub Copilot CLI and exposed it as a programmable SDK. The GitHub Copilot-SDK, now in technical preview, lets you embed the same agentic execution loop into any application so the agent can plan, invoke tools, edit files, and run commands as part of your own […] The post GitHub Releases Copilot-SDK to ...
23/01/2026
Course Retirement Announcement: AZ-1010 and MS-4007
The following instructor‑led courses are scheduled to retire. You can find all past and upcoming retirements here: Course retirement | Microsoft Learn. Please note that it may take some time for newly announced courses to appear on the page. MS-4007: Microsoft 365 Copilot user Enablement Specialist
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.