Azure Feeds

GA: Azure Front Door now supports configurable TLS key exchange policies, including hybrid post-quantum key exchange; select a predefined policy for your Front Door endpoints to add post-quantum key exchange while balancing client compatibility.

Generally available: WAF Insights is now built into Application Gateway WAF policies, providing interactive dashboards that combine WAF logs and metrics: access WAF Insights from the WAF policy to investigate blocked requests and WAF events.

Generally Available: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server REST API version 2026-10-01 is now stable; update automation and clients to the 2026-10-01 endpoint to start using expanded maintenance management, immutable backups, and multi-tenant encryption features.

Generally Available: Route maps for Azure Route Server are now available in the Azure public cloud; configure route maps to control inbound and outbound routing across hybrid connections and update Route Server configurations and network policies accordingly.

Public Preview: Azure Firewall now supports application rules (layer 7) for IPv6 HTTP and HTTPS traffic, so update your IPv6 or dual-stack firewall policies and rule sets to author and test application rules for HTTP/HTTPS traffic.

Public preview: you can now create multi-disk, crash-consistent, agent-less restore points for VMs using Premium SSD v2 or Ultra data disks with SCSI controllers, so enable and test these restore points in your VM backup workflows.

Public preview: Application Gateway for Containers adds centralised JWT validation via the AuthPolicy custom resource, so platform teams should create AuthPolicy CRs to validate token signature, issuer, lifetime, and audience using signing keys from a trusted endpoint.

Public preview: Application Gateway for Containers introduces the MCPRoute custom resource to route Model Context Protocol (MCP) traffic, enabling platform teams to publish MCP servers behind stable hostnames and paths while centralising TLS, JWT validation, and Web Application...

Public preview: Application Gateway for Containers now supports private frontends reachable only through approved Azure Private Link private endpoints, so move internal applications, shared services, and cross-cluster traffic onto private frontends to keep traffic off public...

Public preview: Azure Storage Discovery now exposes advanced capacity insights (access patterns, data age, storage tiers, and object size distribution), so you can analyse storage usage to plan tiering, retention, or reclamation.

Public preview: Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance let you lock immutable retention for Point-In-Time Restore (PITR) backups to your configured PITR retention instead of the default 7 days, so enable/configure immutability to meet compliance (for example 35 days).

Generally Available: Azure Site Recovery now supports Virtual Machine Scale Sets with flexible orchestration (VMSS Flex) with improved target configuration and end-to-end recovery workflows, including failover, so update your disaster-recovery runbooks and target settings to...

Preview: Azure Migrate can now discover and assess on-prem NAS shares (Dell PowerScale OneFS and NetApp ONTAP) by connecting the Azure Migrate appliance directly to NAS, deploy the appliance, provide NAS credentials, and run assessments to plan migrations.

Retirement: Microsoft will deprecate the OT security component of Microsoft Defender for IoT with a three-year transition and full deprecation in October 2029, so start planning replacement controls and a migration path well before the deprecation date.

Generally Available: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server now lets you convert existing VNet-integrated servers from delegated-subnet networking to a private endpoint-capable configuration, so update server network settings, DNS, and firewall rules to use private...

Retirement: Azure Fluid Relay will be retired on 2 February 2027 and reach end of availability, so migrate any workloads that depend on the service before that date or expect disruption; the Fluid Framework remains available as open-source.

GA: Azure Storage Actions is now generally available, adding automatic propagation of task-definition updates, execution controls, and case-sensitive matching for automated operations on Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage, so update your task definitions and verify execution...

GA: Azure SQL Database now lets you restart or fail over single databases, Hyperscale databases, and databases in elastic pools directly from the Azure portal, so you can perform restarts or failovers without calling the REST API or support.

GA: Azure Service Bus Premium now supports Geo-Replication on partitioned namespaces, so you can replicate messages and metadata to a secondary Azure region while keeping partitioning throughput benefits; update your DR and region-pairing plans accordingly.

GA: Azure Site Recovery now supports Azure Local, enabling you to protect supported Windows and Linux virtual machines by replicating them to Azure Local; update disaster-recovery runbooks and provisioning to use Azure Local targets.

Public preview: Azure SQL Database now supports database-level user-assigned managed identities (including FIC) in CREATE DATABASE SCOPED CREDENTIAL, enabling per-database authentication to Azure Blob Storage and ADLS Gen2 for external tables and OPENROWSET, so review and...

GA: Large OS Disk Encryption (LOSDE) is now generally available for Azure Confidential VM migrations, so you can migrate larger production workloads with the OS disk encrypted; update migration plans to enable LOSDE and review Microsoft docs for prerequisites and steps.

GA: Azure Front Door Premium WAF now includes an HTTP DDoS ruleset,enable this ruleset in your WAF policy to protect HTTP-layer traffic instead of relying only on IP filters or fixed rate limits, and review policy thresholds accordingly.

GA: Azure MCP Server 3.0 is now generally available, adding expanded Model Context Protocol capabilities for AI agents and developer tools and introducing Infrastructure-as-Code support via Azure Terraform,deploy or upgrade MCP Server 3.0 and update integrations to use the new...

Retirement: The Log Analytics logging destination for Azure Container Apps is now a legacy option, plan and migrate your Container Apps logging to Azure Monitor; existing environments will continue to function but should be scheduled for migration.

Preview: Public preview of Cross-Tenant Restore for Azure Backup lets you restore Azure VM backups into a separate Azure tenant using existing backup copies; test this in non-production and assess tenant-level recovery workflows and governance.

GA: Marketplace private offer enhancements are now generally available, simplifying eligible private-offer configuration and procurement for custom pricing, flexible billing, and contract lengths, so procurement and ISV teams should review the updated private-offer flows and...

GA: Azure Storage account quota now supports up to 1,000 storage accounts with standard endpoints per region, per subscription, up from the previous default of 250, so you can consolidate more storage resources within a single subscription.

Generally Available: Claude model charges deployed via Microsoft Foundry are now included in Azure Cost Management as Foundry resource spend and support resource tagging, so update your cost reports, tag policies, and billing alerts to capture Foundry Claude usage.

GA: Azure Front Door Premium now supports WAF policies at the profile and route level, so you can apply baseline protection across multiple domains and create per-route controls,update your Front Door Premium configurations to use these policies where needed.

Generally Available: Azure Network Watcher VNet flow logs filtering is now GA; configure filters (IP addresses, ports, protocols, encryption state, flow state, and traffic direction) in flow log settings or ARM templates to reduce log volume and capture only relevant traffic.

When deploying Azure Virtual Machines into an Azure landing zone, adapt the VM baseline architecture using the Azure Architecture Center guidance to address landing-zone-specific expectations and changes.

Implement the Architecture Center's proven practices to configure SAP NetWeaver on Windows in Azure for high availability and disaster recovery, and update your deployment to match the guidance.

Read 'Workload identity and access in EKS and AKS' to compare how clusters, nodes, and pods handle identity and access, and pick the appropriate pod identity or IAM approach for your Kubernetes deployments.

Apply the Architecture Center's recommended practices for running SAP S/4HANA on Linux in Azure to achieve high availability, and verify your Linux-based deployment follows those patterns.

Restrict inbound traffic to web apps and function apps by using Azure private endpoints to provide secure cross-tenant access, and update your provider and consumer tenant network configuration accordingly.

SharePoint tools are coming to the Work IQ API, letting you surface SharePoint content and invoke SharePoint actions from custom apps and agents via the same workplace intelligence layer that powers Microsoft Copilot, so plan to use Work IQ as your integration point for...

Microsoft observed threat actors using the agentic framework ARTEX to find OAuth application secrets on GitHub and then use compromised OAuth apps to act in tenants: scan repositories and commit history for exposed OAuth secrets, revoke or rotate affected credentials, audit and...

Preview: Power BI reports in OAP-protected workspaces can now query semantic models in other workspaces, but a workspace administrator must explicitly add an OAP exception policy allowing each destination to enable report-to-model connections.

Microsoft Foundry extension for Azure Developer CLI is generally available: install the extension to set up, test, evaluate, and deploy hosted agents and keep agent and deployment configuration alongside your code.

GA: Install or update the Microsoft Foundry extension for Azure Developer CLI to set up, test, evaluate, and deploy hosted agents and keep agent and deployment configuration alongside your code.

Action: spend ~15 minutes completing the 2026 .NET Developer Survey to provide feedback that will shape future .NET investments and surface common developer challenges.

Run the GitHub Copilot Upgrade Agent to modernise your .NET apps for Windows Arm64: it identifies migration blockers, helps plan the porting work, and assists with making code changes you can review and apply.

Microsoft announced a new on-premises security initiative combining guidance, migration pathways, and product investments: review the guidance and migration options and align your on-prem plans to reduce security risk.

Review and apply the November 2026 Microsoft Security recommendations: implement the published configuration and policy changes for AI agent security, least-privilege access, threat protection, and exposure management across your tenants and endpoints.

Preview: Power Query's new experience changes data acquisition so you can find sources before picking a connector, search or browse databases, team-maintained Fabric items, recent sources, or paste existing query logic; test the preview and update discovery workflows.

GA: Azure Traffic Manager linked records let you associate Azure Public DNS record sets directly with Traffic Manager profiles without using CNAMEs to trafficmanager.net, so update DNS provisioning or automation to create linked records to avoid exposing the trafficmanager.net...

Microsoft observed a sharp rise in email-based phishing in Q3 2026, plus recovery of CAPTCHA-gated phishing and increased spoofing of familiar business-service sender domains that exploit security override behaviour: review email protection rules, tighten override processes...

Update any Node.js installations your organisation controls to 22.23.4, 24.22.1, or 26.12.1 to patch DNS, TLS certificate validation, and Brotli decompression vulnerabilities (Brotli can corrupt memory and enable code execution); prioritise runtimes and pipelines that handle...

Foundry Local brings agentic coding to run directly on developer hardware, so you can run agentic coding workflows locally on your device rather than only in hosted environments.

Browser automation and hosted-agent resilience are now GA in Microsoft Foundry, so plan production adoption and update agents; the Copilot harness is in preview (test in dev), and Decisions API plus SDK and chapter-linked Handoff demos have updates to review before upgrading.

Deprecation: Support for low-trust SharePoint add-ins in SharePoint Server Subscription Edition ends 12 January 2027 and the January 2027 public update will disable them by default, so identify affected solutions and plan migration to supported alternatives such as SharePoint...

If you run Microsoft Entra ID SSO in Jira Service Management Data Center (Jira 10.3.26), do not enable Force Azure Login with plugin v1.1.11 because it creates an infinite logout redirect loop, and be aware plugin v1.3.7 upgrades have reported UI functionality regressions.

Complete the SPFx developer survey by 9 December 2026 to provide feedback that will shape future SPFx investments and roadmap priorities (survey highlights include Copilot UX components and community engagement opportunities).

Upgrade to Azure PowerShell Az 16.5.0 if you manage App Service automation: it adds App Service plan controls for asynchronous scaling, PowerShell commands to manage Managed Instance on Azure App Service, Isolated v4 plan support, and updates automation to a newer Microsoft.Web...

Deploy SQL MCP Server without a configuration file by supplying the undocumented DAB_CONNSTRING environment variable, enabling rapid containerised deployment in Docker, Azure Container Apps, ACI, or AKS; set the env var with your connection string before starting the container.

Public Preview: Azure Files adds expanded BCDR data protection to recover from accidental changes, regional disruptions, and ransomware within and across regions; enable the preview on affected storage accounts, update backup and disaster recovery runbooks, and validate...

Agent skills can be delivered as NuGet packages to provide up-to-date library documentation to models, so publish and version your skills as NuGet packages to keep model-facing docs current.

Overlapping CIDRs in Azure Databricks VNet-injected workspaces (for example 10.100.0.0/20) create routing ambiguity, so renumber the compute VNets or remove the need for direct network access to those subnets (use private access instead).

Apply Microsoft Threat Intelligence's detection and investigation guidance to inspect Inno Setup installer sessions, update endpoint and installer telemetry, and add IOC/detection rules for the fake-download campaign using trojanized Inno installers that deliver monetization...

Register for .NET Conf, 10-13 Nov, to follow the .NET 11 launch and attend Microsoft and Community Days so you can capture release notes and plan your upgrade and testing schedule.

Microsoft was named a Leader in Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for AI Agent Management Platforms; review the Gartner report and assess Microsoft's agent management capabilities against alternatives for upcoming procurement, architecture, or DevOps tool decisions.

Reassess plans to build a custom document platform: document requirements from customers, security, and operations often expand scope, so evaluate existing document platforms or managed services to reduce ongoing development, compliance, and operational burden.

Install and configure six Azure plugins for AI agents (AKS operations, Cost Management, Advisor recommendations, Kusto graph analysis, Azure Local, Foundry IQ) using the blog's installation commands and example prompts to add those capabilities to your agent.

DP-420 has been updated to an AI-focused Cosmos DB certification: you can take the exam free at Microsoft Ignite, or claim a 50% discount on the certification test through Data Days, if you want official Cosmos DB/AI credentials.

If you find CredentialAuthenticationController:UnifiedPlatformCredentialChallenge or RiskPhoneVerify:AcmaRiskPhoneVerify in Microsoft Entra ID sign-in logs, treat them as authentication-request identifiers to investigate: consult the latest Entra sign-in log documentation...

Public preview: Azure Migrate can now discover and assess on-premises NAS shares so you can map shares, assign migration targets, and estimate Azure costs before copying data; try the NAS assessment workflow in the preview.

Upgrade to Azure CLI 2.92.0 to restore the appServicePlanId field returned by az webapp show and az webapp list, fixing a regression that broke scripts and queries that identify a web app's App Service plan.

If you disconnected a private GitHub repository from Azure App Service and cannot reconnect it, inspect the repository's deploy keys and remove any existing 2048-bit RSA deploy key (it can block reconnection), then retry connecting.

Prioritise patching and mitigations on the small, high-impact subset of CVEs that real-world attacks concentrate in, by scoring vulnerabilities on exploitation likelihood, exposure, and potential blast radius and adjusting triage and remediation accordingly.

Organise Cosmos DB access around jobs, not people: create job-based roles, separate management permissions from data permissions, and remove blanket owner-level access for developers, operators, analysts, and applications.

Microsoft research describes a SQL Server recovery approach that avoids undoing all in-progress transactions before making the database available, reducing downtime after crashes during very large single-transaction bulk loads,DBAs should read the post to understand the new...

Choose Azure Bicep for new IaC work: it provides cleaner, more readable syntax, compiler diagnostics and type-aware tooling, plus modules for organising and sharing components; ARM templates remain supported so migrate incrementally or convert existing templates.

Remove the malicious Claude Code-branded extension and follow Microsoft's posted detection and remediation guidance to identify and remove its persistent SSH backdoor and any related persistence mechanisms.

Preview: azd adds preview service-deployment dry-runs and a Container Apps express deploy target; you can remove stored environment values and use extension-defined infrastructure providers in generated pipelines, extension APIs now have stable contracts, and provisioning adds...

If you are deciding whether to treat Azure SQL Database Hyperscale as a distributed SQL system, read this post to understand its architecture and the practical implications for scaling, high availability, and workload suitability before you choose.

Review and harden Teams support workflows to prevent impersonation, audit AD CS certificate templates and issuance paths, and enable detection of authentication-relay and Kerberos abuse that can lead to remote access and malicious runtime execution.

Use the Intune at Microsoft Ignite 2026 guide to find sessions and labs, meet the product teams, and start planning organisational questions and actions for managing and protecting endpoints across Windows, macOS, and mobile.

Action: Intune now includes a security baseline for Windows 365 for Agents Cloud PCs,review and deploy the baseline to ensure required device settings are present before agent tasks run.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence reports North Korean threat actors are expanding their use of AI across attack chains, so update detection, telemetry, hunting, and incident response playbooks for AI-assisted tactics and faster operational tempo, and ingest Microsoft Threat...

IDC named Microsoft a Leader in the 2026 Worldwide Modern Endpoint Security for Enterprises assessment, so include Microsoft Endpoint Security in your vendor shortlist and map its capabilities against your detection, management, and compliance requirements during your...

Azure Cloud HSM now emits hardware-originated audit logs; collect and forward these verifiable logs to your SIEM or compliance store for monitoring, compliance reporting, and forensic investigations.

Syncfusion is contributing a free, open-source Blazor component toolkit, plus framework and developer tooling contributions, so review the new toolkit and consider integrating or testing it in your Blazor projects and CI pipelines.

When upgrading from PostgreSQL to SQL, expect operational statistics and monitoring behaviour to differ, so plan to review and adapt your monitoring, baselines, and alerting per source database before cutover.

Microsoft introduced the Copilot harness in Foundry Agent Service, adding a supported execution harness and shared agent execution foundation with controls; if you run Foundry agents, review the new harness option and its controls for deployment and governance.

CISOs should implement identity and data guardrails for AI and agent workloads, and modernise detection, threat hunting, and incident response to address AI-powered attacks and agent-specific risks.

October 2026 Azure SDK release updates Azure Core authentication APIs, adds managed identity client improvements for Python and Java, and promotes the Cosmos DB Rust libraries to stable (GA); upgrade the relevant SDK packages to pick up the new auth and identity behaviour.

SharePoint Embedded is a cloud-based, API-only document management platform that lets you bring Microsoft 365 content capabilities into custom apps, so update your architecture and integrate its APIs to embed documents, metadata, and AI-ready content workflows.

Give each AI/code task its own disposable Azure Cosmos DB database in CI (use the Cosmos DB Emulator), seed known data, run agent tests in isolation, and merge only the reviewed code changes, not the test database state.

Copilot UX components are generally available (GA) with SPFx 1.24: upgrade or target SPFx 1.24 to embed interactive dashboards, forms, and business actions directly into Microsoft Copilot using your existing web code.

After rebuilding Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access v2 and reinstalling the Private Network Connector, check for leftover or unexpected Private Access rules and confirm Quick Access only lists the intended TCP destinations (ports 80, 445, 9000) and the correct connector group...

Preview (release candidate): Azure DevOps Server RC (26H2) is available to download; it brings features from the hosted service plus security and quality improvements, and supports direct upgrades from any Team Foundation Server version.

Decide and act: either replace ADFS federation with your third-party provider to keep third-party first-factor plus passkey and push support, or use Entra staged rollout with EAM (which does not support third-party first-factor) and enable the system browser setting.

Infragistics has contributed free, open-source Blazor UI components, new .NET 11 analyzers, and developer tooling you can now add to your projects and CI/IDE setups, so review and integrate the components and analyzers into your build and editor toolchain.

Use Azure Cosmos DB Shell to connect to the local Cosmos DB emulator from the terminal to inspect FleetCharge documents, run queries, and perform point-reads on depot partitions.

Microsoft and Snowflake have committed to Apache Ossie (incubating), a vendor-neutral standard for exchanging semantic metadata across analytics, AI, and BI; teams should track Ossie for upcoming semantic interoperability between Fabric, Microsoft Databases, and Snowflake.

Azure AI Speech LLM 09-2026 expands locale coverage and improves multilingual speech quality and latency; test locale-specific prompts, benchmark latency and accuracy in your deployment regions, and update speech testing and deployment configs where behaviour changes occur.

Read the Microsoft Azure Blog post "Scale reservoir uncertainty analysis with agile reservoir modelling" for practical guidance on scaling subsurface uncertainty analysis and integrating agile reservoir modelling into your workflows.

Autoruns 1.0 is available for Linux, Process Explorer 1.0 for macOS, and other Sysinternals ports and updates (jcd 1.1, listent 1.1, ProcDump 3.6), so download the appropriate releases to diagnose boot, startup, and process issues on Linux and macOS.

Mixed Reality Link now supports streaming your Windows desktop to Meta Quest 3 or 3S headsets over USB, so use the wired option when Wi-Fi is congested, unavailable, or blocked by public networks.

Moonshot AI's Kimi K3.1 Pro is now available in Microsoft Foundry, providing an open-weight, multimodal model with text and image understanding and up to a 1 million-token context window for agentic workloads.

Private preview: ACR Connected Registry on Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes can use a user-assigned managed identity to authenticate synchronisation through Microsoft Entra ID, letting teams manage repository access via Azure RBAC instead of shared secrets.

Microsoft Foundry introduced fal multimodal capabilities for video and image workflows, enabling multi-model pipelines that combine image and video generation to meet different quality, motion, control, and cost requirements.

Partners should update their business and go-to-market plans to include AI skills, offerings, and investments, following Jay McBain's analysis that AI will reshape the industry over the next 20 years and create growth opportunities.

Azure Policy can now evaluate the caller's identity at request time, enabling policies that control both what changes are allowed and who is allowed to make them, so author or update policies with identity conditions to enforce real-time governance.

Public preview: Reserve auto-deprovisioning for Cloud PCs is now in public preview; October updates also include session continuity for Windows 365 Flex, external identity and redirection controls, new Intune Cloud PC settings, and Azure Government connectivity improvements.

Microsoft announced a new on-premises security initiative focused on server workloads that will provide guidance, migration assistance, and product investments to help reduce on-prem risk, so review the forthcoming guidance and migration options for your critical servers.

Assess your PostgreSQL deployment for high connection counts and read-intensive workload bottlenecks, and apply the configuration and operational recommendations in the blog to reduce slow queries and excessive resource use.

The Higher Education AI Champion (HEDAC) Community is now open: higher-education faculty, staff, IT, researchers, and leaders can join to get onboarding, ready-to-use prompts, monthly expert calls, and a peer network to support campus AI adoption.

Microsoft Ignite 2026 runs 17-20 Nov in San Francisco and online: register, plan which Microsoft Entra sessions to attend, and check in at any of the five eligible Entra sessions to enter the prize draw.

If your team uses Power Automate and SharePoint, implement the tutorial to build an AI Builder invoice-extraction workflow that validates invoices against SharePoint purchase-order data and routes approved items to reviewers.

Microsoft expanded sovereign AI with Foundry Local on Azure Local, enabling organisations to run AI models, agents, and applications in customer-controlled, disconnected, or regulated environments via Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes with local inference, model management, GPU...

Route summarization in Azure Route Server lets you control which prefixes are learned and advertised at VNet edges for ExpressRoute, Azure VPN Gateway, and SD-WAN, so review your Route Server policies and update summarization settings to limit propagated routes.

Region expansion: as of 1 October 2026, Microsoft expanded 5-year commercial protection plan options for eligible Surface devices to additional commercial markets, so organisations can now buy longer protection terms to match extended device lifecycles.

Microsoft launched the Project Perception Community, presenting a coordinated, multi-agent security approach (red, blue, and green agents) for security teams to evaluate as a way to surface risk, investigate threats, and improve defensive workflows while keeping people in...

You can designate a separate Microsoft Fabric capacity for Copilot usage and assign users or groups so eligible Copilot usage is billed to that designated capacity while the workspace and its underlying workloads remain on their existing capacity.

Microsoft Ignite is scheduled for 17-20 November 2026 in San Francisco and online; if you plan to attend, register for the physical or digital pass to catch SharePoint and OneDrive sessions showing how they act as the knowledge platform for Copilot and agents.

If you will attend Microsoft Ignite (17-20 November 2026, San Francisco or online), expect SharePoint and OneDrive sessions demonstrating their role as the knowledge platform for Copilot and agents, and register for the event or digital pass.

Security fix available: update Azure Sphere SDK to version 26.06.1 to address risks related to the compromised eMudhra intermediate CA keys that could be used to impersonate TLS endpoints.

Discover and classify AI agents as non-human identities and secure them: inventory agents, the credentials they hold, and their data access, then apply controls across people, AI applications, and hosting platforms per Microsoft's guidance.

Public preview: Microsoft Entra Conditional Access policy plans are now available to define access intent once and enforce it consistently across identities, reducing the need to manage dozens of individual policies,evaluate the preview to simplify enterprise-scale access...

Investec scaled cloud and AI adoption across about 8,000 employees by emphasising a learning culture and people-first upskilling, so leaders planning large-scale adoption should assess their learning culture and structured upskilling programmes.

Pricing change: Azure CSP promotions go live 2 November, partners must review the promotions readiness guide and FAQ, use the sandbox and Microsoft Learn, and prepare Partner Center and billing/reconciliation processes to activate offers.

Register for Microsoft Entra deep-dive webinars on 15-17 December to receive practical, post-Ignite guidance for implementing the latest Entra identity and network access announcements.

If you own AI cost or FinOps, attend Microsoft Ignite FinOps for AI (17-20 November, San Francisco or online) to learn practical techniques to plan, control, and optimise AI spend via keynotes, breakouts, demos, and hands-on labs.

Add the MCP operations layer to your Azure VM image pipeline (Part 2) to expose controlled build status, validation evidence, and optional pipeline queueing; the article includes runnable implementation and step-by-step wiring for Azure DevOps and Azure Compute Gallery.

When you need to traverse complex paths and patterns across connected data in OneLake, choose Microsoft Fabric Graph as the engine for relationship and path queries rather than a vector database, and design your data model accordingly.

Deploy Traefik as your AKS ingress by installing the Traefik Helm chart and CRDs, ensuring you have a user node pool for ingress workloads, an internal LB subnet, kubectl and Helm access, and Kubernetes permissions to create Deployments, Services, Secrets, and CRDs.

Register for Microsoft Ignite 2026 (Nov 17-20, Moscone Center or online) and plan your agenda to include partner programming, starting with the Frontier Transformation Partner keynote, to target sessions that inform your customers and projects.

If you manage Windows Server, register for the Windows Server pre-day workshop (PREB20) on Nov 16 to see demos and early previews of the next Windows Server release, covering local AI, security, Hyper-V, Active Directory, networking, and storage.

Security leaders should update risk and response plans for the AI-driven compression of attack timelines and increased automation called out in the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2026; use the CISO cheat sheet to prioritise mitigations and detection workstreams.

To get service-side auto-labeling approved, prepare artefacts that answer Access, Proof, Reversibility, and Scale, run bounded simulations and classification-only tests, implement explicit approval gates, and publish a tested rollback runbook before turning it on.

Plan for Windows Update certificate expiries in May and June 2027: validate that devices will recieve replacement certificates via monthly updates and identify any endpoints that need additional IT remediation ahead of expiry.

Copilot for US Government now delivers advanced Frontier Intelligence models cleared for GCC, GCC High, and DoD clouds and integrates natively into productivity apps, so review compliance, enablement, and deployment plans for your government tenancy.

Avoid the common Azure Local deployment failures by delaying irreversible decisions, involving the right stakeholders during scoping and design, and following the article's checklist of people, timing, and validation steps before you commit to hardware or topology.

If you run mission-critical workloads, configure and monitor Azure Failure Prediction and Detection (AFPD) telemetry and notifications and integrate AFPD's proactive mitigation guidance into your incident response to reduce hardware-related interruptions.

When processing high-volume market feeds such as Nasdaq Level 2, pre-filter and pre-process data with conventional code before calling Azure OpenAI to reduce token consumption and operating cost.

Use the CCOF implementation on GitHub (not a Microsoft product) to give developers Claude Code while enforcing identity, model access, budgets, and private networking via Azure API Management, and deploy to one user first before scaling.

Public preview: enable SharePoint tools in Work IQ to add 60+ native SharePoint operations via the Work IQ MCP server so Copilots and agents can find, create, organise, and share SharePoint content (tools are also rolling out to Copilot Studio).

Upgrade to mssql-python 1.17.0 to get reliability fixes: bulkcopy works after package upgrades with correct UTF-8 handling and destination validation, connection pools recover from dead connections, multi-statement batches report correct row counts, and Timestamp() follows PEP...

Microsoft published new ransomware recovery guidance for Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance on Microsoft Learn; incorporate the prepare, contain, restore, validate, and harden steps into your incident response and recovery plans for these services.

Hosting and hybrid cloud partners should assess rising costs, licensing shifts, and platform risk and evaluate the phased hosting modernisation path with Microsoft Adaptive Cloud described in the blog to expand service value and AI readiness.

Use Microsoft-Decision-1 on Microsoft Foundry to return structured decision outputs (yes/no, probability, or single-choice) so your package upgrade advisor can act immediately on model responses without extra text interpretation.

Outlook Search ranking, resilience, and the feedback loop are being changed; if you operate Outlook at scale, monitor search results and submit problematic queries and example messages through Microsoft feedback channels so the team can tune behaviour for your users.

October 2026 Windows Server security updates (KB5126646, KB5126655, KB5126651) have known issues that cause BITS-based content-transfer workflows to fail with HTTP 500 during VM deployments in SCVMM 2019/2022/2025, and on AMD hosts cause host and cluster refresh to fail with a...

Microsoft Marketplace published 291 new offers on 24-28 Sep 2026; if you buy or trial solutions via Marketplace, review the new listings for potential software, AI apps, or agents that match your procurement or deployment needs.

Case study: Meridian 24 used Microsoft Copilot-based tooling to build a bilingual, half-hourly news podcast and single-page web player,review the implementation if you plan to automate multi-language news generation and delivery.

Follow the walkthrough to build an on-device Voice Notes notebook on a Raspberry Pi using Microsoft Foundry Local for local transcription and summarisation, useful for teaching audio processing, model lifecycle, and responsible AI on constrained hardware.

Change: Azure Arc SQL Server migration now supports Arc-registered SQL Server instances without installing the Arc agent, letting you start migrations for servers that cannot host an agent.

Use the Azure SRE Agent to investigate Azure bill changes by tracing month-to-month spend to subscriptions, resources, and Azure Advisor optimisation recommendations so you can prioritise remediation actions.

Update Mixed Reality Link on PC and the Windows App on Meta Quest to the November 2026 releases to get fixes for faster initial connections, improved pairing recovery, and better audio and app stability.

Deprecation: the Internet Explorer-based Web Browser Control in Microsoft Access is planned for deprecation on 2027-05-18 (version 2705) and 2027-05-11 for Access LTSC 2024,identify affected forms and migrate controls to the Edge Browser Control now.

New offering: Global Secure Access now combines Private Access and Internet Access into a single purchasable SASE product, so review consolidated policy and procurement options to cover users, devices, and AI agents.

Nominations open: submit candidates for the FastTrack Recognized Solution Architects programme to get recognition for solution architects working on Power Platform and Dynamics 365 and to access exclusive collaboration opportunities.

Title Plan update: due to technical difficulties with the 30 Oct plan, use the 9 Oct Title Plan for the URL Creation Tool tab until the issue is resolved, and note the Title Plan will now publish weekly.

Talent leaders: redesign first-year development to prioritise structured evaluation, frequent feedback, and judgement-building activities rather than first-draft production, because AI makes draft creation easier.

GA: Azure Service Bus Premium now supports Geo-Replication on partitioned namespaces, so you can combine partitioning throughput with replication of messages and metadata to a secondary region; consider this for workloads that need more than 16 messaging units.

Read the November 2026 Logic Apps Aviators newsletter for product group and community updates, including a profile of Ace Aviator Steef-Jan Wiggers and discussion of architecture building blocks.

Coming soon: an IT-controlled locked-down learning-only mode for Copilot Chat that always lands students in Study and Learn, prevents dismissing or switching agents, and still allows students to add their own files; admins will be able to enforce this mode.

Start a focused 90-day agent governance plan to establish foundations for policies, access controls, and data governance for AI agents, rather than waiting for a multi-year transformation.

Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access is now available to purchase as a single offering that combines Private Access and Internet Access, so consolidate secure access policy and procurement for internet, SaaS, cloud, and on-prem apps.

Preview: Azure portal now supports flex nodes for AKS, letting you create flex node pools and onboard supported user-managed VMs or on-prem/edge servers as worker nodes to extend clusters without adding another Kubernetes control plane.

Insert a decision-check step that queries Microsoft-Decision-1 to approve or decline an agent's proposed action (closed outputs such as yes/no or A/B/C), and enforce the model's verdict before executing the action to reduce unsafe behaviour.

Switch to ephemeral, repository-scoped GitHub Actions runners on Azure Container Apps that scale-from-zero via KEDA Event Jobs and use GitHub App authentication, GitHub OIDC for secretless deployments, and managed identity plus private endpoint Key Vault access.

GA: The GitHub app for Microsoft Teams is now generally available; install and configure the app in your Teams tenant so teams can file issues and review work without leaving Teams.

Retirement: three beginner courses (AB-6003, AB-6004, AB-7011) will retire on 29 January 2027; if you rely on these courses, replan your learning paths now since no replacements are listed.

Copilot update (October 2026): Home navigation, projects, Workspaces, Autopilot, role-based plugins, Outlook and Planner enhancements, and a task catalog are rolling out,review these changes with admins and update training and governance as needed.

Pricing change: Microsoft announced usage-based billing will be on by default for new Microsoft 365 Copilot customers, so update your licensing and cost forecasts for Copilot Cowork rollouts.

New feature: Voice Agent in Foundry Agent Service lets you combine Foundry IQ, Personal Voice, and a custom photo avatar to create a branded voice-and-avatar agent in minutes via the Foundry portal.

GA: Cross-tenant delegated access in Microsoft Sentinel is now generally available so you can run security operations across tenants with least privilege; also evaluate the ASIM EmailEvent schema, new SAP analytics rule, and Unified Data Management updates.

Breaking lifecycle change/retirement: SharePoint Agents are moving from the .agent file model into the Microsoft 365 agent platform, with phase one starting mid-November and .agent experiences retired after March 2027,plan governance and migrations now.

Guidance: Microsoft is positioning SharePoint as the primary knowledge platform for Copilot, so audit and improve content quality, ownership, deduplication, and permissions before enabling Copilot on organisational content.

New monitoring recommendation: Azure Advisor will analyze Azure Arc-enabled servers and issue reliability recommendations when machines have extended disconnections, so enable Advisor and act on its connectivity recommendations to keep Arc management healthy.

Enforce least privilege for AI agents in Microsoft Foundry by assigning the smallest Azure RBAC identities per tool, using narrow tool contracts and connection configuration, and adding runtime policy plus an audit decision trail that logs every allow or deny.

When designing AI apps or agents on Azure, explicitly decide how the app retrieves information, calls tools, handles user identity, moderates content, evaluates results, and recovers from failed dependencies, combining Foundry model endpoints and other Azure building blocks as...

For inference in Microsoft Foundry, compare hosted model options by who hosts and processes requests, provider terms, and how much of the serving stack your team must operate, then pick the option that meets your control and compliance needs.

Decide whether to use an existing model, fine-tune, or train a new one, and choose Foundry, Azure Machine Learning, or another hosting approach based on who operates the model and how your application will consume it (API vs self-hosted).

Select Azure Machine Learning, Foundry fine-tuning, Azure Databricks, Microsoft Fabric Data Science, or Anyscale by mapping which parts of training and serving you want the platform to manage and how much customisation and compute control your team requires.

If you must run open-weight models, serve high volume, or choose GPU type and scheduler, run on Azure infrastructure and pick the VM family, Kubernetes runtime, scheduler, network, and storage that match your control and operational readiness.

Implement departmental chargeback in Azure Cost Management to assign AI spend to the responsible business units, giving each unit visibility for budgeting and financial accountability as AI usage scales across teams.

Use a Decision API to route Work IQ queries to fetch, retrieve, or ask before execution and validate results to cut latency,tests showed fetch at ~1.3s versus ask at 20-25s for the same answers.

Breaking change: Cuba cancelled the scheduled fall DST rollback, so clocks will not be set back on 1 November 2026 and Cuba will maintain daylight saving time until 7 November 2027,update time-sensitive systems and timezone data accordingly.

Plan to attend regional community events such as Scottish Summit to meet peers, learn practical AI skills, and support colleagues getting started, because practitioners continue to use in-person events for hands-on learning and networking.

If you plan to attend Microsoft Ignite 2026 in person, register now to access partner-only programming (including the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program booth and dedicated partner sessions); online attendees should use the session scheduler and on-demand keynotes.

Change: the Azure Stack HCI specialization is being renamed to Azure Local for Hybrid & Sovereign Private Cloud,check Partner Center for the updated specialization requirements to keep your credential current.

Security teams: OneDrive and SharePoint URL probes can enumerate user principal names (UPNs), and those probes do not appear in Microsoft Entra sign-in logs or Microsoft Purview, so update detection and incident response to account for this limited visibility.

Guidance: read Part 1 of the three-part series for a practical framework to secure AI in Microsoft 365 Government (GCC High) while meeting NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC requirements.

Preview: Programmed Training is now in public preview in Microsoft Foundry,use the Python API and Fine-Tuning Sessions SDK to author custom training recipes with serverless GPUs; preview supports LoRA for Qwen3.8-27B, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, gpt-oss-120b, and Muse-Glimmer-30B.

General availability: Mistral Large 4 is now GA from Mistral, and Microsoft will make the model available through Microsoft Foundry in the coming days,plan for Foundry deployment if you need this open-weight model for sovereign or low-latency scenarios.

Change: Voice agents in Microsoft Foundry and the Voice Live API now support SIP trunks, so you can route phone calls directly to AI voice agents through your existing telephony infrastructure for lower-latency voice interactions.

General availability: Microsoft Defender can now discover local AI agents (coding assistants, command-line agents, desktop apps, and agentic development environments), giving security teams visibility into which agents run, where they run, and which users run them.

Microsoft updated Viva Engage notifications to be faster, more transparent, and more relevant; communicators and admins should review notification targeting and delivery settings to ensure announcements reach intended audiences without excess noise.

Defence guidance: Microsoft Defender for Linux is prioritising runtime detection of modern attacker behaviour, continuous testing against realistic attacks, and adaptive learning to keep protection effective as AI-operated attacks evolve.

Microsoft Entra introduces Conditional Access plans and rules to centralise shared scope and conditions, and provides a migration tool that pulls shared conditions up to the plan while keeping current policies enforced until you cut over,plan and test policy-to-plan migrations.

Apply the AKS Pod Scheduling Demystified guidance: follow the filtering, scoring, binding, and runtime diagnostics and the suggested investigation and mitigation steps to diagnose uneven pod placement and prevent pods piling onto a single node.

When combining GitHub Copilot, Canvas Apps Authoring MCP, and Playwright MCP, assign Copilot to interpret requirements and orchestrate the workflow while letting the MCP tools perform implementation tasks, and adapt your authoring process so each tool has a distinct role.

Treat AI agent identities like user identities: extend your existing identity controls and reduce standing privileges because AI increases risks from automated phishing, credential theft, and privilege escalation.

Store SAP ABAP-to-HANA authentication secrets (X.509 client certificates or passwords) in Azure Key Vault Managed HSM to remove portable credentials from systems and reduce the risk of credential theft.

Use Microsoft Foundry Agent Service managed memory stores with item-level controls, default TTL, and remember-or-forget operations to hold user-profile, chat-summary, and procedural memory while explicitly excluding credentials and other sensitive data.

Update to the redesigned SharePoint mobile app to get a unified start experience that surfaces your sites, files, news, and people, aligning the mobile Discover experience with the web.

Microsoft Marketplace published 331 new offers (Sept 19-23, 2026), covering cloud solutions, SaaS, AI apps, and agents,review the new listings to find tools you can trial or procure for your environment.

When upgrading OS images for Azure CycleCloud Slurm nodes, update the VM Scale Set model first and follow the article's Manual upgrade mode steps, because reimaging instances without changing the VMSS model will rebuild them from the old image.

Attend the Azure Managed Redis breakout and hands-on sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2026 to get practical guidance and resources for building and scaling Redis-backed applications.

CSP partners: run the guided 25-user trial for Microsoft 365 Copilot Business to convert SMB pilots into broader deployments while enforcing security, governance, and cost controls.

Microsoft expanded Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace benefits: Marketplace publishers should check App Advisor's Unlock benefits step to claim new Azure sponsorship milestones and increased cost and adoption supports.

Test your tooling and applications against hybrid post-quantum TLS configurations (for example secp384r1-ML-KEM-1024), because larger PQC keys and signatures can break software assumptions and cause failures.

Outbound IP behaviour changed in Azure API Management Standard v2 and Premium v2: for predictable source IPs you must explicitly design outbound connectivity (for example attach a NAT Gateway) rather than relying on classic-tier dedicated outbound IPs.

Prepare for Canada 2026 time zone changes: follow Microsoft's guidance to update admin and user settings for Microsoft 365 calendars, apply the Edge/WebView2 update for Teams Rooms on Windows, and watch the product guidance pages for other workloads.

Use Microsoft Intune custom compliance with the NIST macOS Security Compliance Project (mSCP) artefacts (discovery script and JSON) to create macOS device compliance policies and establish a security baseline.

Microsoft now contributes to Postgres in nine different ways (beyond Azure Database for PostgreSQL), including conferences, blog posts, talks, and open-source work; consult Microsoft's Postgres resources when planning Postgres on Azure.

Public preview: install the Logic Apps Standard az CLI extension (az logicapp) to create, configure, run, and diagnose Logic Apps Standard projects locally from your terminal.

Microsoft Sentinel now supports 500+ connectors: review the expanded connector catalogue and integrate additional data sources into Sentinel for detection, investigation, and response.

Microsoft launched Glint Labs, a new People Science hub, and published the 'Next Generation of Employee Listening' research report plus the Analyze tool, so HR and people teams can access these AI-powered research resources.

General availability: Microsoft Pro Badge is now GA, a credential that verifies proficiency demonstrated through real, everyday product use without a separate test, providing a current, verified signal of skills.

Microsoft Entra now delivers advanced AI-driven identity detection and response capabilities that detect anomalies earlier, accelerate investigations, and apply dynamic enforcement against threats like MFA fatigue, token hijacking, and credential replay.

General availability: Automatic Agent Upgrade for Azure Connected Machine (Azure Arc) is now GA; enable it to have Microsoft roll out Connected Machine agent updates in regional batches during off-peak hours instead of manually deploying each new agent version.

Commvault and Luware have published transactable offers in Microsoft Marketplace, allowing customers to purchase their services directly through the marketplace (for example, Commvault Cloud - Microsoft Azure Native ISV Service).

Microsoft is advising partners to position Microsoft 365 Business Premium opportunities as security conversations that prioritise AI-ready adoption, advanced attack protection, and data protection to build recurring managed services.

Out-of-tree MANA driver announced: you can install the MANA OOT driver to run Azure Accelerated Networking on supported Linux LTS kernels without upgrading the kernel, so plan driver deployment on VMs that must stay on your distro kernel.

Planned expansion: Oracle intends to bring Oracle AI Database@Azure to Azure Government Cloud (seeking FedRAMP Class D) and announced sovereign controls (EU Data Boundary, Azure Policy) plus Proximity Placement Group support, so factor these upcoming options into your...

Oracle Azure Resource Provider now supports the EU Data Boundary and Azure Policy for Oracle AI Database@Azure, so use these sovereign controls to enforce EU/EFTA data residency and deployment policy compliance.

GA: Proximity Placement Group integration is now generally available for Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure in Oracle AI Database@Azure, enable PPGs when deploying supported Azure VMs to place them close to Oracle-managed Exadata for lower latency.

PowerPoint Live adds light, dark, and high contrast themes, up/down arrow slide navigation, and a resizable Notes pane; update presenter guidance and accessibility settings to reflect the new UI options.

GA: Windows CLAT is now generally available, configure or enable CLAT on Windows clients so IPv4-only applications continue to work over IPv6-only networks using the 464XLAT client-side translation model.

Partner action: build managed services, repeatable offerings, and IP that help SMBs embed and manage AI securely, so you can convert AI adoption into measurable outcomes and recurring revenue.

Defender provides Detections and Insights reporting templates as Microsoft Sentinel workbooks or Power BI reports to see, investigate, and measure email and collaboration attacks across channels; deploy those templates to centralise investigations and track defence effectiveness.

If you deploy multi-agent systems with hosted agents and the Azure Developer CLI, add release verifications that prove every region runs the exact tested agent version, correct settings, and validated business outcomes after rollout.

Retirement: Database watcher for Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and elastic pools is retiring and will not go to GA; migrate your monitoring to Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric to retain telemetry without managing a separate monitoring data store.

The ABAP Cloud SDK for Azure is now open source: ABAP developers can call Azure REST APIs using the SDK's layered HTTP pipeline, pluggable Microsoft Entra ID credentials, typed exceptions, and strongly typed clients instead of hand-rolling if_web_http_client calls.

Zero Trust requires network-level visibility in addition to identity: integrate session and network telemetry (session traffic, device posture, and non-federated SaaS access) with identity controls so you can detect session hijack, degraded posture, and risky traffic during...

MAI-Image-2.6 and MAI-Image-2.6-Flash are now generally available in Microsoft Foundry, so teams can adopt these GA image models for faster, more precise image generation workflows in production.

Mekorma Payment Hub and cortave Platform are now transact-capable offers in Microsoft Marketplace, allowing direct purchase of these partner solutions (for example, Mekorma integrates with Dynamics 365 Business Central for automated AP workflows).

Excel (October 2026) adds table naming at creation on Windows, five new Copilot capabilities for data import, cleaning, and repeatable workflows, and exposes new Copilot model options including GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 for users to choose.

Microsoft Marketplace published 232 new offers on September 16-18, 2026: review the marketplace catalogue for newly available apps and services you can trial or procure to meet project requirements.

If an Azure SQL scale operation remains IN_PROGRESS or CANCEL_IN_PROGRESS, do not assume CDC is the cause: diagnose transaction-log growth, CDC capture latency, replication/log-truncation state, and long-running transactions before changing configuration.

When Change Tracking metadata grows, follow the safe playbook: determine whether cleanup is slow, blocked, or operating as configured by checking the background cleanup mechanism, transaction activity, and retention settings before applying fixes.

Treat brief Azure SQL service reconfiguration interruptions as expected failure modes: implement retry logic and resilient connection handling so applications recover from transient disconnects in seconds rather than remaining unavailable for hours.

If a Synapse pipeline activity to Azure SQL jumps from minutes to hours, investigate SQL-side waits (memory pressure, blocking, increased IO, or execution plan changes) and pipeline data changes rather than assuming a simple CPU slowdown.

GitHub can post repository notifications into Teams channels, group chats, or private chats and, when you reply and @mention GitHub, Copilot will act on the linked issue or pull request to reproduce bugs, run tests, implement fixes, and prepare pull requests; adjust your team...

This is a technical research paper on deploying ChatGPT-style UIs on IIS over agents and MCP servers; treat it as educational material only, do not use it as production guidance, and consult your organisation's development standards, enterprise architecture, security, and...

Register for ESPC Microsoft 365 and AI Conference (30 Nov-3 Dec 2026, RAI Amsterdam) if you want in-person opportunities to meet product experts, Microsoft MVPs, and community meetups that can help you solve Microsoft 365 and AI adoption challenges.

SharePoint Publish is introduced as the new, central hub for corporate communicators to create, distribute, and measure organisational communications, so update your content workflows and training to use Publish instead of disparate tools.

Design agent memory as four coordinated capabilities: Remember, Retrieve, Revalidate, and Forget, split responsibilities across the agent, an application policy layer, a platform/memory service, and the owning data systems, and add identity checks, policy gates, failure...

Qwen3.8-27B can run locally on a Lenovo Yoga 9n with NVIDIA RTX Spark N1X and 64 GB unified memory, holding a 262,144-token context and delivering ~44.7 tokens/s single-request and ~27 tokens/s under sustained agent load, so size hardware, power, and Azure Monitor integration...

General availability: GPT-6.1 Terra is now GA in Microsoft Foundry, so you can deploy it for visual-reasoning and computer-use agent workloads while using Foundry's identity, networking, governance, data handling, evaluation, and compliance controls.

Preview expansion: Starting in November, the Frontier program will include eligible public preview features for the new Outlook for Windows, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams, so admins can enable a single Frontier setting to give testers one place to try upcoming Microsoft 365...

Proofpoint's Core Email Protection API solution has joined the Microsoft Defender ICES vendor ecosystem, so plan integration testing if you operate Defender with Proofpoint to maintain layered email security and compliance.

Partners: read the October Cloud & AI Platforms partner newsletter for actionable updates, including new PostgreSQL on Azure capabilities, SMB Azure AI go-to-market guidance, and updated incentives and skilling opportunities to grow your practice.

Use VirtualMetric AI to analyse and troubleshoot DataStream pipeline components when Microsoft Sentinel appears healthy but telemetry or logs are missing, because a single pipeline component failure can disrupt telemetry without obvious SIEM errors.

No Azure action required: this is a personal review of the entry-level Surface Pro 12-inch aimed at travellers, not an announcement, retirement, or change to any Azure service you need to act on.

If you run multiple coding agents against one repo, adopt per-file lanes that agents must claim, assign agents a bounded set of work items, and implement an explicit messaging/sync protocol between agents to avoid conflicting edits.

Configure Foundry IQ to use Azure AI Search as the retrieval layer and Azure Blob Storage as the document store when building a text AI agent in Microsoft Foundry, following the post's step-by-step setup and connection guidance.

GitHub Enterprise Cloud supports unaffiliated users and you can automate their removal using the remove enterprise member GraphQL API, so update or create automation that calls that API to clean unaffiliated accounts.

Pilot a PRAISE-style preceptorship (PReceptorship for AI-augmented Software Engineering): pair early-career engineers with mentors and hands-on AI-augmented coding tasks to build judgement, skills, and confidence, and listen to the Hanselman interview for practical guidance.

Follow the step-by-step walkthrough to create and test your first Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent (a PMO-analyst example that reads project data), and apply the guide to set up and validate an Agent in your tenant.

Adopt the Active Cyber Program (ACP) to assess SME cybersecurity using its 11 domains, 74 controls, 0-3 scoring, five maturity levels, and six knock-out controls, noting ACP is not a substitute for ISO-27001 or proof of NIS2 conformity.

Instruction files are advisory, not enforcement: when building coding agents add enforced rules, hooks, or runtime guards to control agent behaviour instead of relying on instructions alone.

MXC (Microsoft eXecution Containers) contains agent and agent processes on your local machine with granular policy controls, evaluate the MXC repo and whiteboard from the video to set up containment and flag agentic processes.

Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC) provides local containment for AI agents and the code they create, evaluate MXC (repo linked in the overview) as a way to isolate and control agent behaviour during local testing.

Shorten and chunk external-facing docs, internal runbooks, training, and meetings into skimmable summaries with clear action items and examples, because social media habits and faster AI-driven information flows are reducing attention for long-form content.

If you run multi-agent or model-orchestration workflows, audit them for chains where a smaller, unconstrained model can prompt a more capable model to perform refused actions, and add guardrails such as strict routing policies, input/output validation, and monitoring.

Enable GitHub Advanced Security's AI Applications Scanning to detect prompt-injection patterns in pull requests, configure repository settings as needed, and triage findings before merging.

If a single DevOps laptop enabled a $6.3B, multi-chain theft, immediately harden any developer or CI/CD workstation that holds deployment credentials: isolate and rebuild compromised machines, rotate credentials and secrets, enforce MFA and hardware-backed keys, and move...

Enable Key Vault soft delete and purge protection, configure RBAC-based access controls, and implement just-in-time access for secrets, keys, and certificates to reduce accidental deletions and limit standing privileges.

Decide and document clear boundaries between what your coding agents do and what remains a human responsibility: adopt the four ways work should return to a human and enforce the list of actions agents must never perform autonomously.

Follow the AI-901 video to deploy your first model with Microsoft Foundry, define system instructions, and send conversation inputs so you can reproduce a working chat-app workflow and improve prompt outcomes.

If you are evaluating GitHub Copilot Fusion, test its 'effort' model-routing option and benchmark your own prompts against GitHub's reported quality and cost trade-offs, then pick the routing that meets your latency, quality, and cost targets.

Preview: AKS now has health-aware upgrade gates, install the aks-preview CLI extension and use --enable-upgrade-gate or --disable-upgrade-gate on aks create and aks upgrade commands to have AKS evaluate monitoring health signals and pause or block upgrades accordingly.

Thomas Maurer will present on Sovereign Cloud and AI at Microsoft Ignite 2026; if your organisation must meet data-residency, regulatory, or digital-resilience requirements (for example banks, public sector, manufacturers), plan to attend his session for practical guidance on...

Choose Copilot Chat for quick, ad-hoc Q&A and short interactions, and choose Copilot Cowork when you want to hand over an entire task to the assistant for ongoing collaboration; align your team workflow to the chosen interaction model.

Microsoft Intune Service Release 2610 (October 2026) includes Android Enterprise changes: read the Intune 2610 Android Enterprise release notes, test any changed device policies and app configurations in a lab, and schedule a staged rollout to production.

GitHub Universe 2026 is announced; the post offers a single-page dashboard that consolidates the 40 changelog posts so you can scan and prioritise the event's updates instead of reading every changelog.

Review and strengthen your organisation's governance for GitHub, Copilot CLI, and Agents: verify access controls, policy coverage, and audit logging for AI-assisted code generation and agent workflows.

Configure and manage authentication methods in Microsoft Entra ID by choosing from 'something you know', 'something you have', or 'something you are', and prioritise passwordless (device possession plus biometric) to remove passwords.

Turn on and configure Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM) to enforce just-in-time (JIT) elevation for privileged roles across your Microsoft cloud tenant, and stop relying on permanently assigned Global Administrator accounts used during greenfield work.

Pilot an agentic AI workflow: designate one human engineer as the 'steerer' to set goals and approvals, run several coding agents to carry out tasks, and add a visible board showing agent ownership and items awaiting your decision so you can define handoffs and review points.

If you build semantic search with Azure AI Search, compare whole-document embeddings versus selective text embeddings for your datasets by running representative queries and cost/performance measurements to decide which embedding granularity to index.

The October 2026 Microsoft AI update video (John Savill) summarises recent Microsoft AI announcements and discusses trustworthy scaling and how organisational changes drive the largest employee productivity gains, with timestamps in the description for each topic.

Apply recommendations from Will Velida's Agent Security Update 5: use the Agent Governance Toolkit and Microsoft Entra Agent ID to mitigate OWASP Top 10 risks for agents, and review your agent governance controls accordingly.

Adopt Microsoft Foundry in your .NET projects to orchestrate multi-agent workflows with Semantic Kernel and use A2A and MCP patterns to integrate Azure AI for scalable, production-ready agent-driven applications.

Consider adopting git worktrees to check out multiple branches into separate working directories, reducing the need for extra full clones and simplifying cross-branch development and testing workflows.

Use the provided Vagrantfile and Ansible playbook to run Ansible during VM provisioning for an automated local test environment, clone the linked GitHub repos and adapt the playbooks and inventory to your configuration.

Moving a blog from WordPress to Hugo on GitHub Pages: export your WordPress content, convert it to Hugo format, choose or adapt a Hugo theme, configure SEO, RSS, and redirects, and use GitHub Copilot to help convert posts and templates.

GitHub Next recommends treating AI agents as planning tools rather than one-off prompts, so evaluate agent-based workflows, pilot an agent-driven planning pipeline on a small project, and update team processes and CI/CD templates where it helps.

Review the 30 Oct 2026 weekly update video for an ACA logging destination change, Confidential VM LOSDE details, new VNet Flow Log filtering options, and AFD updates that may require you to adjust logging, flow filters, or VM configuration.

If you use Microsoft 365 Copilot, try Copilot Cowork by handing it a complete artefact so it can carry out multi-step work (rather than single prompts); follow the Getting Started guide to configure your Cowork workflow and test summarising and drafting tasks.

Pluralsight course published: a 60-minute course showing the author's patterns for integrating AI agents across multiple tool calls in enterprise systems, enrol to get practical guidance beyond single-tool demos.

Run the community grading approach in Gregor Suttie's 'RateMyAzureFirewall: Grading Azure Firewalls from A to F' to evaluate your Azure Firewall configurations and prioritise remediation of any gaps found.

Build the EmployeeWorks ToolSmith plugin by creating Connectors to store the travel system base address and authentication, adding HTTP actions for booking and cancellation APIs, defining a conversational process to identify the booking and request confirmation, and using Slots...

Use the free Cheap Watts electricity cost calculator to estimate running costs for tumble dryers, ovens, heaters, and EV chargers, and feed those estimates into your energy-cost forecasts.

If you use GitHub Copilot in VS Code, read Gregor Suttie's Universe 2026 summary to identify any VS Code Copilot extension, settings, or workflow changes you must update or test in your environment.

GitHub Agentic Workflows publishes an Agentics Sample Pack and Issue Triage examples; fetch the sample pack to inspect and adapt the issue-triage workflow templates for your repositories.

PRAISE (PReceptorship) from CMU and Microsoft introduces a mentored, hands-on programme to train developers to work with AI-written code; incorporate structured mentorship, judgement training, and practical AI code projects into your onboarding or upskilling plans.

No official product change announced: this community video provides a practical walkthrough of Microsoft security solutions and their AI intersections, with chapters on MDASH, Perception, Defender ISOC, Foundation, Secure your AI, and DART, watch for an operational orientation.

Review your servers' logs from 17 October for signs of PHP2Shell activity and apply the episode's concrete mitigations for Out-of-Memory and use-after-free exploitation, using the linked GitHub workshop for step-by-step hardening and detection checks.

If you build accessible AI features, test Microsoft's Seeing AI app as a reference to study real-world OCR, scene description, and speech output behaviour and use its outputs to inform your app's accessibility integration.

Reestimate legacy modernisation costs and timelines now: account for reduced developer coding time from AI-assisted tools, update TCO, staffing plans, and re-evaluate whether rewrite, refactor, or augmentation is the right migration path.

Run the free Active Cyber Program (ACP) self-assessment app to evaluate your organisation's cyber maturity with 71 practical controls across 11 domains and identify critical security gaps to prioritise remediation.

When building EmployeeWorks plugins with ToolSmith: expose tool endpoints via MCP servers (an open standard), add Enterprise Search for company knowledge like travel policies, and implement an agentic loop so the model can call tools for live lookups or cancellations.

Creating an Intune STIG Audit baseline runs a read-only assessment of current device settings rather than enforcing configurations, so create the baseline, review the audit reports for non-compliant settings, and implement remediations via separate configuration profiles or...