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Retirement: On 30 September 2026, Microsoft retired the NVv3-series VM SKUs Standard_NV12s_v3, Standard_NV12hs_v3, Standard_NV24s_v3, Standard_NV24ms_v3, Standard_NV32ms_v3, and Standard_NV48s_v3; if you run any of these VMs, plan to migrate or resize them to supported VM sizes a

Retirement: On 30 September 2026, Microsoft retired the NVv4-series VM SKUs Standard_NV4as_v4, Standard_NV4ahs_v4, Standard_NV8as_v4, Standard_NV8ahs_v4, Standard_NV16as_v4, Standard_NV16ahs_v4, Standard_NV32as_v4, and Standard_NV32ahs_v4; if you run any of these VMs, plan to mig

Preview: AKS adds Ubuntu 26.04 node images via a new Ubuntu2604 Minimal OS SKU for node pools; test package footprint, security posture, and compatibility in non-production node pools before selecting Ubuntu2604 for production clusters.

Announcement: Azure canvases for GitHub Copilot provide interactive, shared workspaces that embed Azure tools, dashboards, cost analysis, and hosted skills into Copilot conversations, so review access, governance, and cost controls before enabling for your teams.

Retirement: Dv3, Dsv3, Ev3, and Esv3 VM series will enter End-of-Life and retire in public cloud Azure regions on 15 November 2029; schedule migrations to supported VM families, update automation, and validate images well before that date.

Retirement: Azure Functions v1 hosting model on Azure Container Apps will be retired on 29 September 2027; after that date existing Functions v1 apps will stop running and processing triggers, so migrate or re-deploy them to a supported hosting model before retirement.

Generally Available: Lasv5 and Laosv5 storage-optimised VMs (5th Gen AMD EPYC Turin) are GA, offering 2-160 vCPUs, 8 GiB memory per vCPU, and 720 GB local NVMe per vCPU, so consider these SKUs for storage-intensive workloads and update deployment templates or size choices accordi

Public Preview: Automatic Zone Placement for Virtual Machine Scale Sets is now in public preview and will automatically choose availability zones for your scale sets based on SKU availability, capacity, and placement requirements, so opt into the preview to stop maintaining manua

Generally Available (GA) in Germany West Central: you can now connect SQL Server instances to Azure Arc to use Azure-based inventory, governance, security, assessment, and licence management, so schedule onboarding for servers you want managed from Azure.

Generally Available (GA) in Italy North: you can now connect SQL Server instances to Azure Arc to use Azure-based inventory, governance, security, assessment, and licence management, so plan onboarding for any Italy North servers you need managed from Azure.

Public preview: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server can now attach Azure Ultra Disk, so test and validate Ultra Disk for I/O-intensive, transaction-heavy PostgreSQL workloads and plan for the performance and cost implications.

Public preview: Microsoft-managed performance monitoring for Azure SQL Database is available, letting you monitor databases without building custom collection scripts or manually correlating telemetry, so evaluate moving observability to the managed monitoring.

Public preview: Performance monitoring for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server now exposes Microsoft-managed telemetry you can query via a telemetry endpoint and offers expanded visualisation options, so integrate the endpoint into your monitoring workflows.

GA: Azure SQL Database Hyperscale Premium adds 160-vCore and 192-vCore SKUs, providing up to 50% more compute capacity,update your capacity planning and select these SKUs when scaling larger workloads.

GA: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server supports cross-tenant customer-managed keys (CMK), allowing encryption with keys in an Azure Key Vault or Managed HSM in a different Microsoft Entra tenant, so update key access, role assignments, and rotation processes.

Public preview: script-based provisioning replaces legacy marketplace images for SQL Server on Linux Azure VMs, so test and migrate your VM deployment pipelines and automation to the new script-based provisioning workflow.

Generally Available: SQL Server on Azure Local Disconnected (ALDO) is now supported for environments that cannot maintain continuous Azure connectivity, so evaluate and deploy ALDO for air-gapped, highly regulated, or remote sites.

Generally Available: SQL Server on Azure Local connected mode lets you run SQL Server on Azure Local infrastructure while using Azure services for centralised management, monitoring, security, and licensing, so plan to connect via Azure Arc and update your operational practices.

Public preview: Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric provides a unified experience for discovering, managing, monitoring, and optimising databases across SQL Server and Azure SQL, so pilot the hub to consolidate discovery and operational workflows.

Generally Available: Database DevOps in SSMS powered by Microsoft.Build.Sql projects is now supported, so start using SQL database projects in SSMS as the local source-of-truth for schema changes and integrate them into your CI/CD pipelines.

Public preview: Azure SQL Hyperscale Serverless now supports auto-pause and auto-resume, so configure idle-time thresholds to pause databases to reduce cost and validate application cold-start behaviour on resume.

Generally Available: SQL Formatter for Visual Studio Code is now available, so install the extension and configure formatting rules to standardise SQL script style across your team.

Generally Available: SQL Migration Agent Skills are available to automate assessment, target selection, migration execution, and post-migration validation, so adopt these reusable AI-powered skills to standardise and speed SQL Server to Azure migrations.

Retirement: Azure Arc-enabled System Center Virtual Machine Manager will be retired on 30 September 2029, so plan and transition to alternative management solutions before the retirement date.

Public preview: you can now migrate directly from Azure Arc to Azure SQL Database, including Hyperscale, from the Azure Arc migration experience (the workflow provisions Database Migration Service and a self-hosted integration runtime), so try the guided flow for Arc-hosted migra

Public preview: Microsoft SQL Agent Skills are available in preview, enable them to get product-specific, more accurate guidance from AI agents when building, operating, or migrating workloads on Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Database container, and SQL Server to Azure migration

Public preview: Long-term retention (LTR) v2 for Azure Database for PostgreSQL moves from logical pg_dump/pg_restore backups to physical snapshot-based backups integrated with Azure Backup Vaults, so plan to test restores and consider migrating LTR policies to v2.

Retirement: Microsoft is retiring all versions of HPC Pack; it enters a one-year retirement period with limited, retirement-only support and End of Support on 27 August 2027, so plan migration and confirm support options before that date.

Retirement: Azure IoT Central will be retired on 20 September 2029; you can continue to use the service until then, but begin transition planning now to migrate devices and solution workloads ahead of the retirement.

GA: Azure NetApp Files large volume breakthrough mode is now generally available, supporting volumes up to 2 PiB and throughput up to 80 GiBps depending on workload characteristics, so test and validate it for extreme HPC or EDA file workloads.

GA: Azure NetApp Files adds a QoS update with cool access on Premium and Ultra service levels,throughput automatically adjusts as data moves to cool storage to balance performance and cost for mixed hot and cool workloads, enable cool access on applicable volumes.

Preview: Azure NetApp Files now supports Microsoft Entra Kerberos authentication for SMB volumes, enabling users with hybrid or cloud-only identities to authenticate through Microsoft Entra ID using cloud-issued Kerberos tickets, so administrators should plan to configure and tes

GA: Azure SQL Database now supports vector search and vector indexes,use the new CREATE VECTOR INDEX and VECTOR_SEARCH T-SQL commands to run approximate nearest neighbour (ANN) searches for semantic and other AI scenarios and update indexing and queries accordingly.

Public preview: Azure SQL Dev Hub provides a central starting point for building applications with Azure SQL, offering guidance to connect from .NET, Python, Node.js, and Java and resources for developing directly or with AI agents, so try the preview and adopt its connection pat

GA: Azure SQL Managed Instance now offers a flexible memory feature to change the amount of memory allocated to your managed instance, so update capacity planning and adjust instance sizing where required.

GA: Azure Extended Zones are now generally available in Luxembourg, so you can deploy small-footprint Azure resources in the Luxembourg extended zone for lower latency and local data residency requirements; update region selections and deployment templates where you need local pr

Public preview: Azure HorizonDB now supports PostgreSQL 18, so provision HorizonDB instances running PostgreSQL 18 to test application compatibility and the new PostgreSQL 18 features on the managed service.

Retirement: Azure Communication Services standalone offerings will be retired on 30 September 2028; these services will no longer be available after that date, so plan to migrate or replace any production dependencies well before then.

GA: Instant Access for application-consistent VM restore points is now generally available, you can begin restoring a disk from a restore point immediately for VMs that use Premium v2 or Ultra disks as data disks; update backup runbooks and IAM permissions accordingly.

Retirement: Support for PowerShell 7.4 ends on 10 November 2026, so transition your workloads (including Azure Function apps) to PowerShell 7.6 before that date, as 7.4 will no longer receive security patches or customer support.

Retirement: Support for .NET 8 and .NET 9 ends on 10 November 2026, so upgrade your apps (including Azure Function apps) to .NET 10 by that date, since .NET 8 and .NET 9 will no longer receive security updates or support.

Retirement: Node.js 22 reaches end of support on 30 April 2027, migrate any Azure Function and App Service apps to Node.js 24 before that date because Node.js 22 will no longer receive security patches or Microsoft customer support (apps will continue to run).

Preview: Flex Nodes for AKS provides a deployment option to connect hybrid and edge worker nodes to an AKS control plane in Azure, offering a single Kubernetes control plane, so evaluate the preview for your node connectivity, provisioning, and management workflows.

GA: Azure Sphere OS 26.09 is available in the Retail feed; internet-connected devices will receive the OS update automatically and there is no SDK change to apply.

Public preview: a guided GitHub Copilot experience in VS Code provides a structured workflow from idea to deployed Azure app instead of free-form chat, try the preview in VS Code to evaluate the new authoring and deployment flow.

Generally available: Azure Functions now supports PowerShell 7.6, so update your Function apps and local development toolchains to 7.6 before deploying to Functions plans.

Add a dedicated health endpoint that performs functional checks and is reachable by external monitoring tools at regular intervals so your monitoring can verify application liveness and readiness.

Deploy Azure Machine Learning inference on AKS with environment isolation, private networking, and a controlled model-promotion pipeline as the baseline for private, production-ready inference platforms.

Use Azure Arc and Flux-based GitOps to build deployment pipelines that push containerised apps to AKS Hybrid and Edge clusters, and configure those pipelines to manage on-premises cluster automation.

When targeting Azure Local or bare-metal, design your AKS deployment to follow the baseline architecture guidance for control plane placement, node sizing, networking, and storage suited to on-premises environments.

Create index tables over fields your queries reference frequently to improve lookup performance and reduce query cost by designing separate index structures and update paths.

Store large message payloads in an external data store and send a compact reference (claim check) through your messaging system, updating consumers to retrieve the payloads via that reference.

Centralise shared functions such as TLS termination and authentication in a gateway so backend services can be simplified and rely on the gateway for those capabilities.

Use the Azure Sandbox to provision an isolated, fully functional environment (virtual networks, virtual machines, databases) for rapid project validation and testing.

Implement materialised views to store prepopulated queryable representations of one or more data stores when source data is not formatted for required queries, improving read performance.

Follow the AKS network troubleshooting steps in the guidance to diagnose and resolve network problems in your AKS clusters and incorporate those steps into your operational runbooks.

Apply the architecture's multilayer approach: combine Azure and Entra ID security services to protect virtual machine access, aligning controls with defence-in-depth, least privilege, and zero-trust principles.

Guidance: a new comparison of Azure vector search services covers capabilities, indexing methods, and integration options so you can pick the vector search service that fits your application requirements.

Follow the Azure Architecture Center guide to convert a hub-and-spoke network to dual-stack IPv4/IPv6, and plan addressing, routing, and security group changes as part of your migration.

Review Microsoft's Ignite 2026 Security guide and plan to attend or watch the sessions and demos that cover the AI-first, end-to-end security platform protecting identities, devices, data, applications, clouds, infrastructure, and AI agents.

azd (Azure Developer CLI) added dependency-aware extension uninstall and versioned extension contracts, top-level infrastructure and service layers in project configuration, deployment-phase concurrency limits, and local-socket transport for external authentication hosts: update

Copilot Code Reviews for Azure Repos (public preview) now offers configurable effort levels to control how much time Copilot spends on a pull request review, along with bug fixes and feature improvements, so set the effort level when creating reviews to balance review depth and l

Operators of internet-facing Zimbra mail servers should implement Microsoft Threat Intelligence's published mitigation guidance and detection recommendations for CVE-2026-73570, and hunt for the indicators of compromise and attack paths described in the report.

Evaluate migrating Elasticsearch-backed search into Azure Cosmos DB's built-in full-text search when your application data already lives in Cosmos DB, to consolidate operational data and search and potentially improve price-performance; use the Azure Cosmos DB Migration Guide for

Use Work IQ Developer Tools (WIQD) to package and register an existing or new plugin, containing skills, MCP servers, or agents, into the Microsoft Copilot plugin registry; import the plugin into WIQD and follow the Copilot packaging workflow.

Cosmos DB mirroring in Microsoft Fabric now supports Virtual Network Data Gateways: provision a gateway inside your VNet to keep public network access disabled during setup and for ongoing replication of private-endpoint secured Cosmos accounts.

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.

Aspire 13.6 persists dashboard telemetry across runs, adds in-dashboard container exec shells, first-party Java and Rust hosting, portable volume paths, and previews Azure Container Apps Sandboxes (preview).

If you use MSP360 RMM or ScreenConnect, audit for unauthorised ScreenConnect deployments and redundant remote-access channels, revoke suspicious MSP360 accounts or sessions, rotate credentials, and enable multi-factor authentication while increasing monitoring for persistence and

GenAI makes trustworthy document extraction more critical: assess whether you need precise, structured outputs (use Azure Document Intelligence) or broader semantic content pipelines and integration (use Azure Content Understanding), then update your ingestion pipeline accordingl

Azure SDK September 2026 release is available; review the release notes, identify which client packages you use, and schedule upgrades to address any security fixes, deprecations, or breaking changes noted.

Read the Power BI September 2026 feature summary for new Copilot and AI experiences, reporting, modeling, connectivity, developer, and mobile updates, and act on the listed deprecations by identifying impacted reports and scheduling remediation.

Storm-3068 demonstrates a compromised identity can be escalated to broader cloud access, so review and harden identities, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud resource permissions and apply the Microsoft Security Blog guidance to reduce blast radius from identity compromise.

Azure NetApp Files now offers a "large volume breakthrough mode" that can nearly double per-volume metadata performance for EDA workloads; re-run your performance tests and consider enabling this mode to fit more concurrent job sets per volume.

Generally available (GA): DiskANN vector index and vector search are now GA in Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance with the always-up-to-date update policy, and SQL database in Microsoft Fabric, so you can store vectors with relational data and run approximate nearest-

Hunt and block RedFlick-related activity: Microsoft observed Star Blizzard using large-scale phishing and accounts on compromised websites to deliver evasive malware, so prioritise detection tuning, phishing protections, and incident-response playbooks.

Azure SQL team is posting live from SQLCon/FabCon Europe 2026 with a roundup of new Microsoft SQL announcements, so read the Azure SQL Dev Corner post to see which features are GA, preview, retired, or require action for your deployments.

Microsoft is shipping Microsoft SQL Agent Skills: import or enable these skills in your AI coding agent so it can understand Azure SQL and generate or configure Azure SQL resources when building apps.

Public preview: Azure Cosmos DB is now supported in Fabric Database Hub, so open Database Hub to discover and monitor every Cosmos DB account you can access and compare their health alongside other Microsoft database engines.

Review the FabCon and SQLCon 2026 announcements from Barcelona to identify Fabric and Microsoft Databases changes related to Microsoft Copilot and Agents, and update your deployment, configuration, and governance plans accordingly.

Public Preview: MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.46 adds a Getting Started page with quick actions, guided walkthroughs, dev container templates, a built-in SQL formatter, and one-click install of Microsoft SQL agent skills for GitHub Copilot, so open the new page and enable the ag

New Blazor AI components let you add streamed content, tool integrations, approvals, shared state, and generative experiences to Blazor apps; evaluate them and plan how to integrate these components into your UI and state management.

GA: SQLAlchemy 2.1 adds built-in support for mssql-python (Microsoft's Python driver for SQL Server); upgrade to SQLAlchemy 2.1 and use the mssql+mssqlpython dialect to connect your ORM or Core apps with mssql-python.

Public preview: Azure SQL Database now supports setting a local time zone at the database or session level via T-SQL (no infrastructure changes required), so update T-SQL or connection logic if your apps depend on DB-local time behaviour.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence details NeedyMantis, a modular post-compromise malware family that uses custom loaders, encrypted archives, and extensible components to maintain long-term access; hunt for those behaviours, update EDR and SIEM detection rules, and rehearse containme

Microsoft has enhanced the Azure Virtual Machine lifecycle policy; review the updated guidance and adjust your VM image, OS support, and retirement planning to align with the published timelines and transitions.

GA: App Service on Azure Stack Hub 26R1 is available, download and apply the 26R1 update to your Azure Stack Hub deployments; it updates the App Service resource provider, application runtimes (including .NET and Java), fixes stalled controller startup, reduces database locking,

If you see repeated Entra ID sign-ins flagged Error 53003 (BlockedByConditionalAccess) with empty Authentication Details, follow the Entra blog's investigation guidance and collect full sign-in logs, Conditional Access evaluation details, and additional diagnostics to determine w

Conditional Access policies may not persistently block mobile Power Apps sign-ins: the device shows an initial 'You cannot access this right now' message but dismissing it can still allow access, so test CA enforcement on mobile and verify with sign-in logs before rollout.

AG-UI Protocol now has a first-class .NET SDK, so .NET services can install the SDK and use Microsoft.Extensions.AI to expose and consume interoperable agent endpoints; update your services to the SDK types and extension points to interoperate with other AG-UI agents.

Investigate your tenant for compromised service principals and prioritise indicators of reconnaissance, resource deletion, and credential access linked to Storm-3168, then apply Microsoft's guidance to contain and remediate affected principals.

The post describes expanded model choice, voice agents, and continuous optimisation to speed agent delivery; review and update your agent architecture and CI/CD to adopt these new options and avoid rebuilding later.

Define and attach an outbound (egress) policy to a Microsoft Foundry hosted agent, inspect agent calls in Audit logs, and use Enforced mode to block and verify allowed and denied destinations.

Review the September 2026 Microsoft Security updates and enable the new controls to discover and control local AI agents, extend Zero Trust to agent traffic, and update SOC processes per the guidance.

Hunt for Storm-2570's consistent post-compromise tools and techniques across Qilin, DragonForce, Anubis, and BERT deployments, and apply the blog's detection and disruption guidance to detect compromises before ransomware is deployed.

Microsoft Foundry Routines are now generally available: you can build automated assistants that monitor work, respond to business events, and run ongoing tasks (e.g., triage GitHub issues or react to Teams messages); review and enable Routines in your Foundry projects to automate

Add a layered, AI-readable documentation structure to your repo: create instruction files, skills, architectural decision records (ADRs), and tests so Copilot and agent workflows can reliably operate against your codebase.

Microsoft will update (rotate) its NuGet author-signing certificate on 23 September 2026; add the new certificate to any trusted signer policies or certificate-fingerprint verification as soon as possible to avoid package signature verification failures.

Register for the Copilot Dev Camp Summit on 30 September 2026 at 08:00 Pacific Time: a new, free quarterly online event for the Copilot Extensibility community covering Microsoft 365 Copilot and related developer topics.

If a test Azure AD tenant fails to delete due to a "license-based subscriptions" error, remove or transfer all license-backed subscriptions from that tenant and sign out or leave the organisation in Teams so it no longer appears in your personal account.

Stop treating resilience as a one-off project and make it a maintained property: implement continuous resilience practices such as regular verification, observability, and updates so your architecture diagram matches real behaviour.

Microsoft is announcing ISOC in Microsoft Defender, a foundation that brings SIEM and threat-protection capabilities together for agentic security, so security teams should assess how ISOC maps to existing SIEM, detection, and response workflows and plan integration work.

When agents perform work, design an agent-first platform instead of retrofitting: plan for agent lifecycle, orchestration, and observability as primary concerns when building workflows and services.

Microsoft Foundry introduces GPT-6 Astra, Sol, and Luna as scalable model options for production agents and high-volume workflows; evaluate these models in Foundry against your performance and scale requirements.

Use Change Analysis in Azure Resource Graph as your first troubleshooting step: it shows what changed, when it happened, who made the change, and which client or tool performed it so you can quickly pinpoint recent configuration changes affecting VPNs, routing, firewalls, VMs, or

Create memory dumps from your C# application to capture runtime state for debugging: follow the .NET Blog walkthrough to add dump generation to your diagnostic workflow and collect dumps for analysis.

Claude Opus 5.5 is now available in Microsoft Foundry, so you can run long-running coding and knowledge-work sessions inside Foundry using this model.

Microsoft Lighthouse accepts only Security Groups, and Microsoft 365 (unified) groups cannot nest Security groups (nor vice versa), so you cannot use a single unified/365 group for both purposes, create or synchronise a separate Security Group for Lighthouse membership.

Persist LangChain Deep Agents' durable filesystem state to Azure Blob Storage by configuring the agent runtime to use Blob Storage as the backend, so agents keep state across runs and support complex, multi-step workflows.

Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, with partners, disrupted EvilTokens' infrastructure that powered AI-assisted device code phishing and token theft; review device code consent/auth logs for suspicious activity, revoke or rotate exposed tokens or compromised app registrations, and

Entra External ID's email OTP send event currently sets requestType to "signIn" for all flows, so do not rely on requestType to distinguish user actions in custom authentication extensions and use other event properties or update your event handling.

When migrating from PostgreSQL to SQL Server, review and map timestamp and timestamptz to the appropriate SQL Server types (datetime2, datetimeoffset) because differences in precision, time zone handling, offsets, and storage can change behaviour and require schema or code update

Azure Cosmos DB now provides the first GitHub Spec Kit database extension to codify design decisions (partition keys, access patterns, client configuration) alongside your code,add it to your repo to record those choices.

Proposal: a DCWL design is being explored for Microsoft Teams to reduce repeated natural-language processing in meetings, chat, and Copilot scenarios, so track the proposal if you operate Teams-integrated text-processing workloads.

Microsoft is running Cybersecurity Awareness Month with role-based learning on AI Skills Navigator, expert sessions, and free events; review the available learning paths and join events to improve security practices relevant to your role.

Use the Assessment & Optimization Workbench local web application to pull Azure billing and Databricks compute data, select workspaces and dates, run analyses, and visualise costs and workload hotspots to prioritise optimisation work.

Download the updated interactive Microsoft Purview reference architecture for classification and labeling from GitHub to review how the new public previews make it possible to scale auto-labeling across your estate.

Microsoft 365 Champions launched a Champion Stories programme to collect filmed Copilot adoption case studies; submit your organisation's Copilot adoption story at aka.ms/ChampionStory to be considered for publication.

Microsoft Intune Settings Catalog now provides day-zero support for Windows 11, version 26H2 validated policy settings (rolling out globally); check your Intune tenant's Settings Catalog and author or update policies to adopt 26H2 features.

GPT-6.1 Sol is now generally available in Microsoft Foundry; evaluate it for production agents to compare capability and cost against earlier GPT-6 series models and consider testing migrations or new agent deployments.

Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric is now in public preview, centralising inventory, health, performance, security, and optimisation insights so you can consolidate database signals and follow guided actions to remediate issues.

Savings plan and reservation recommendations are now available at management group scope in the Azure Portal and via REST API, so evaluate and apply commitments across your organisational hierarchy to increase coverage and savings.

Auto-pause and auto-resume for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale Serverless is in public preview; enable it for new or existing Hyperscale Serverless databases to pause compute during idle periods (storage billing continues) and reduce costs.

Azure SRE Agent Plugins now support Azure DevOps repositories as plugin marketplaces, so point agents at your Azure DevOps repo to install and pin plugins without mirroring to GitHub.

Collect end-to-end execution traces (prompts, model responses, tool calls, latency, token usage, errors) alongside repeatable evaluation scores (task completion, tool-call accuracy, groundedness, safety) so you can diagnose agent failures rather than relying on scores alone.

Intune adds staged app and policy rollouts to reduce deployment risk, a consolidated device investigation view for troubleshooting, and expanded advanced management capabilities for more government organisations, so review your rollout stages and troubleshooting workflows.

If you certify hardware for Windows 11, continue using the existing WHCP baseline and Windows 11, version 25H2 certification process,Microsoft will not introduce a separate WHCP designation, HLK kit, or submission path for version 26H2.

GA: Azure Lasv5 and Laosv5 local-storage-optimised VMs (5th Gen AMD EPYC) are now generally available,consider them for storage-heavy workloads that require high local NVMe capacity, throughput, I/O performance, and improved networking.

Install System Center 2022 Update Rollup 4 to get targeted fixes and compatibility improvements, notably Virtual Machine Manager support for newer Linux guests (RHEL 10, Oracle Linux 10, Rocky Linux 10, Debian 13, SUSE Linux 15, OpenEuler 24.03) and improved VM deployment and net

Use the new SQL Migration Agent Skills (AI-powered) to guide assessment, compatibility checks, destination selection, sizing, migration planning, execution, and validation across your SQL Server migration workflow.

Download the Windows 11, version 26H2 security baseline from the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit, test and customise the updated settings in your environment, noting changes such as the Ready Print driver ranking now configured as Enabled.

Windows 11, version 26H2 is Generally Available and is delivered as a lightweight enablement package to eligible devices running 25H2 or 24H2,plan deployment of the enablement package to move devices with minimal disruption.

GA: Dell PowerScale for Azure (Dell managed) is now generally available as an Azure-native, fully managed PowerScale service,you can provision, manage, and pay for PowerScale through Azure for enterprise NAS workloads.

Insiders of Excel for Windows and Mac get new Copilot model choices (Grok via Frontier, Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, OpenAI GPT-6 Astra) plus UI updates such as lists and nested arrays in cells, naming a table at creation, and centre across selection in the merge cell menu.

Implement the Tech Community pattern to send email from an AKS pod without adding SMTP credentials, shared mailbox passwords, or long-lived app secrets; follow the guide to remove stored secrets from your pod email flow.

New Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch include a coordinated camera module, image signal processor, and on-device AI that maintain clarity and natural colour as lighting changes, so include these devices in procurement and test imaging and driver behaviour for video-c

Available now: Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace is launched; partners should enrol to access consolidated resources for publishing, becoming transactable, aligning with Microsoft sellers, and accelerating marketplace monetisation.

Hardware Dev Center now lets ARM system makers request approval to deliver a specific System Manifest version during Windows OOBE, enabling devices to hit an approved driver and firmware baseline for a reliable first-run experience.

Review the September Azure partner update: Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace is available now, and the bulletin lists upcoming CSP promotions, AI agent skilling, co-sell training, and the Frontier Transformation Engineer badge with resources to prepare.

Available now: Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5.5 is in Microsoft Foundry; teams can upgrade to Sonnet 5.5 for improved coding and knowledge-work quality, faster responses, and lower cost per task for many workloads.

If you have assembly videos, evaluate using multimodal GenAI on Azure to automate conversion of raw footage into reviewable, illustrated work instructions and reduce manual documentation effort.

Available now: the Azure Policy Linter is open source on GitHub; run the CLI linter when authoring policy definitions to surface known issues, gotchas, and recommended patterns before you assign policies to your environment.

When rolling out Agent Builder, apply change-management practices: focus on awareness, measure confidence and value, and create conditions that encourage new workflows so adoption extends beyond a handful of licensed experimenters.

Public preview: Azure SQL Database now supports configuring a database-level local time zone and per-session T-SQL overrides, letting applications use current local date and time without adding explicit conversions (UTC remains the default).

General availability starting 28 Sep 2026: Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical adds higher transaction log throughput and Flexible memory on Premium-series hardware, allowing you to increase memory independently of vCores for better performance.

Apply different rate-limiting strategies based on agent execution pattern: keep low latency for chat agents with minimal throttling, batch or quota background tasks, provision burst-handling for event-driven loads, and cap multi-agent concurrency with token and request budgets, b

Automate WHOIS-derived pivots at scale by integrating MDTI with Microsoft Graph to enrich registrant emails, creation dates, registrars, and nameservers across large domain lists instead of relying on manual lookups.

When connecting Azure AI Foundry deployments to OpenCode, test the model endpoint directly to reproduce errors and use model-supported parameters (for example, replace max_tokens with max_completion_tokens) to resolve 'Unsupported parameter' failures.

Quantise GridSFM models for local deployment so field engineers can run AC optimal power flow surrogate models offline, avoid sending telemetry off-site, and remove dependency on cloud connectivity in low-connectivity substations.

Build or export 'System One' decision models (Jev-style) as ONNX artefacts with Mobius so you can run fast, structured decision models locally without relying on string-generation outputs.

Manage Purview DLP Sensitive Service Domain Groups with PowerShell: retrieve the tenant policy, add URL entries only when absent, validate the change, commit it, and verify the final configuration to make updates repeatable and reviewable.

Enable Resale Enabled Offers (REO) in Microsoft Marketplace and configure the App Advisor step for negotiated deals so eligible channel partners can resell your offer in specified markets.

Review and, if needed, customise AKS CoreDNS upstream selection and health-check behaviour: AKS CoreDNS picks a starting upstream, treats missing replies differently from error replies, and LocalDNS can alter the first-hop, so run the article's repeatable tests and update the Cor

Migration guidance announced (23 Sep 2026): plan to adopt Azure IoT Hub certificate management and Microsoft Fabric operations agent for modernised IoT Central solutions, or continue using IoT Central unchanged until 20 Sep 2029.

Recording available: watch the Microsoft SAP Partner Community Call (23 Sep) to update your SAP on Azure practice on AI-led modernization opportunities and SAP on Microsoft Azure Specialization eligibility and readiness.

Pricing change: Copilot pricing is evolving to combine a per-user Copilot user subscription licence for Everyday AI with usage-based charges for higher-cost, agentic experiences, so review licences and budgets for expected usage-based costs.

Title Plan now available and moving to a weekly publishing cadence, check http://aka.ms/Courseware_Title_Plan and update your instructor-led training materials to the latest version.

New blog Part 1 explains Azure Container Apps Dedicated profile cost, scaling behaviour, and object hierarchy,read it before sizing or budgeting ACA dedicated workloads (Consumption profile costs are not covered here).

GA: SharePoint AI innovations are now generally available and power the new Copilot app and agents, so reorganise and enrich SharePoint content to improve Copilot responses (Microsoft observed ~17 percentage point improvement).

New Copilot app announced with expanded capabilities (three new areas including Home), review the updated app features and adjust your partner integrations, customisations, and go-to-market plans accordingly.

Adopt a maintainer mindset when using LLM-generated code: focus on review, integration, testing, and ongoing maintenance of AI-produced patches rather than treating code generation as a finished artefact.

GVB Geomatics and Zoviz published transact-capable offers in Microsoft Marketplace, so you can now buy Nebula Cloud Studio (SaaS) and Zoviz directly through the Marketplace rather than arranging separate partner billing.

Microsoft published an AI at Work playlist in the AI Skills Navigator that starts on Monday, September 28, intended to help you choose and adopt the Copilot mode and agent patterns that match your role and workflows.

Microsoft introduced FinOps for AI capabilities and guidance to help teams control AI spend, measure value, and optimise investments, so assign cross-functional FinOps roles and evaluate these capabilities against your AI cost and attribution needs.

When building local inference with Foundry in Rust, start with a narrow spike that verifies SDK initialization, catalog visibility, model alias resolution, model artifact caching/loading, and token streaming before embedding into a server, agent, or RAG pipeline.

If you enabled Azure Immutable Storage (WORM) or retention policies, Azure will prevent deletion of protected data and related storage resources until policies are removed or retention periods expire, so check immutability and version retention settings before attempting deletion

Update to Microsoft Access Version 2609 (Build 16.0.20430.20092) to receive fixes for truncated label captions at certain zoom levels, incorrect VBA Zoom property values, and mislocated Edit List Items buttons at non-100% zoom.

Focus on pre-event community work: plan contributor coordination, run engagement activities before attendees arrive, and document logistics to increase participation and reduce on-site friction.

Microsoft Intune now provides day-zero support in the settings catalog for Apple OS 27 and includes new DDM configurations and settings, so update your Intune policies and test OS 27 device profiles as you roll out the new Apple release.

Apply the Azure SRE Agent best-practice guide (based on agent scoring and production telemetry) to configure agents for better performance; review the suggested settings and telemetry differences between top and poor performing agents.

Bicep CLI v0.47.16 added an experimental bicep docs generate command that writes a README.md beside a module describing resources, parameters, types, outputs, and usage examples, so update the CLI and run it to auto-generate module documentation.

No immediate Azure action required: this IBC reflection describes industry trends (AI-generated content, short-form video, live immersive tech) that may affect media workflows, so monitor vendor APIs, content licensing, and rights management updates.

Microsoft is introducing voice agents in Foundry; if you build agents, plan for voice UX, real-time audio I/O, latency and privacy requirements, and update your agent design and test plans to include spoken interactions.

Change your incident triage sequence: in the first 60 seconds stop noisy actions, scope the outage precisely (what "down" means), then correlate signals before launching deeper investigations or rollbacks.

Public preview: Insights in Foundry analyses agent traces to surface recurring or unknown behaviour and explain likely causes,enable the preview if you run production agents to find issues beyond predefined evaluations.

Oracle AI Database@Azure now provides a native Azure experience for Oracle GoldenGate so you can provision and manage GoldenGate via the Azure portal and APIs, configure cross-database/cloud connections, and ingest GoldenGate metrics into Microsoft Fabric.

Experimental feature: Bicep CLI v0.47.16+ adds bicep docs generate, which writes a README.md from a Bicep module (resources, parameters, types, outputs, examples); upgrade and run the command to auto-document modules or customise templates for repo-wide docs.

Partners should expand readiness across sales, technical, and delivery teams: plan role-specific training, build design and deployment experience, and create repeatable processes for securing, governing, and scaling customer AI projects.

Use Access form properties Link Master Fields and Link Child Fields to create cascading combo boxes and list boxes without VBA,set the master control and matching child field so Access auto-refreshes and filters the dependent control.

When designing for Azure OpenAI, treat token flow as the core cost, latency, and throughput control: map token movement in your architecture, optimise prompts and chunking, and verify against current pricing to avoid billing surprises.

Insiders Beta: Excel now supports lists and nested arrays in a single cell, so test storing multiple related values (owners, tags, locations) in-cell and update formulas, filters, and downstream ETL to handle arrays.

Preview: Excel (Windows and Mac Beta channels) now supports lists, arrays, and nested arrays in a single cell; test and update data imports, formulas, filters, and automation to handle cell-level lists and maintain compatibility with older Excel builds.

Windows now exposes a common haptics framework with predefined waveforms used across Surface pen, touchpad, and mouse; integrate the framework APIs to add consistent tactile feedback that complements visual and audio signals.

Action required when migrating from the deprecated Data Collector API to Log Ingestion: chunk payloads to under 1MB (Log Ingestion limit) because Data Collector allowed up to 30MB, otherwise HTTP actions and the preview Log Ingestion connector will fail.

Event recap: M365 Twin Cities 2026 summarises hands-on sessions on Microsoft 365, AI, Copilot, and Power Platform,review the posted session materials to apply the practical guidance shared at the event.

Follow Part 2 to deploy your MCP server to Azure, register and connect it with Copilot Studio, and configure authentication and security so the team can use MCP tools instead of running them only locally.

Follow Part 1 to build and run a basic MCP server locally (server.py and vmcp.py) to expose a get_vm_inventory tool and validate behaviour before you deploy it to Azure.

When building agentic systems that act on real systems, combine MCP, Microsoft Foundry hosted agents, and Microsoft Entra authentication so deterministic application code retains final approval and inventory-mutation authority while agents gather evidence.

For on-premises health RAG projects, design the boundary so health records, prompts, embeddings, retrieved evidence, model outputs, and telemetry remain entirely on premises and avoid cloud inference or data egress.

Breaking change: Azure Service Bus will stop accepting the Service Bus Messaging Protocol (SBMP) on 30 Sep 2026,apply the BizTalk Server 2020 hotfix (requires Cumulative Update 6 baseline) to switch the SB-Messaging adapter to the Azure.Messaging.ServiceBus AMQP implementation an

Join the live AMA on 25 Sep 2026 (1:30-2:00pm ET) or post questions in the Discord to get expert advice on which AI agent behaviours to prioritise and how to optimise instructions, tools, skills, and model choices.

Register for Microsoft Ignite and build your agenda now, sessions fill quickly and deliver practical technical and business guidance from the people building Microsoft technologies.

Windows Insiders in the Experimental channel can now set camera, microphone, and location permissions per desktop app, so review and configure app-by-app privacy controls in Settings.

Microsoft published the Catalyst video series showcasing Azure and NVIDIA-powered AI infrastructure customer stories (for example Tomorrow.io); watch the series to see real-world architecture and operational patterns.

ESPC 2026 will run in Amsterdam from 30 November to 3 December 2026; if you rely on Microsoft 365, AI, or Copilot content, block the dates and monitor registration and session announcements.

Breaking change: starting 12 January 2027, Max CPC will be removed for new non-portfolio campaigns using Target CPA, Target ROAS, Max Conversions, Max Conversion Value, or Max Clicks,attempts to create or update such campaigns with Max CPC will fail and the API will return an exp

Microsoft announced on 23 September 2026 an Integrated Security Operations Center in Microsoft Defender; security teams should review the offering to plan how to consolidate protection, operations, data, and workflows.

GA: Azure Container Apps Sandboxes is now generally available, providing hardware-isolated microVMs with per-sandbox resource and access controls, sub-second startup, and multi-tenant isolation for running untrusted code.

Microsoft Defender updated case management to support adaptable work models with configurable ownership, context aggregation, automation, and tracking, so security teams should map their processes and configure the new workflows.

GA: Azure Container Apps Express is now generally available; use it to deploy container images to production with instant provisioning, sub-second startup, and scale-from-zero.

Copilot Agent Builder generates agents from a single prompt, lets you teach Skills, test agents in Preview, set exact permissions, monitor real usage, and publish to your organisation's Agent Store,use it to create and manage repeatable agent workflows.

Microsoft published research showing Microsoft Discovery applied to environmental virome analysis and wastewater-based community health monitoring; public health and research teams should review the methodology and findings for surveillance workflows.

159 new offers went live in Microsoft Marketplace (14-17 Aug 2026); evaluate BC2Fab AI Insights if you need AI-prepared Power BI reports inside Dynamics 365 Business Central, note it runs on your Azure OpenAI resources and is available in English and German.

When building agent systems with Microsoft Foundry, adopt multi-agent orchestration patterns to decide which agent should act, what context to share, when work is complete, and where human approval is required, and review Foundry's conductor/section patterns before design.

Use Microsoft Foundry Hosted Agents with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Azure Container Apps to bridge prototype-to-production gaps,follow the Fibey Field Ops walkthrough for concrete deployment, authorization, debugging, and recovery decisions.

Azure Local provides multiple storage architectures: choose Hyperconverged Infrastructure (Storage Spaces Direct), SAN-preserving options, or independently scalable storage based on your workload I/O, scale, and legacy SAN requirements.

Microsoft Copilot is rolling out Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Chat, Cowork, and Copilot Studio, so update your Copilot testing, model-selection policies, and compliance controls for those apps.

AKS announced new capabilities to isolate AI workloads, assemble the componentry agentic applications need, and improve capacity management for GPU-backed inference and shifting data paths; review the features and plan updates to cluster topology, node pools, and scheduling.

Use @drasi/lib to embed a change-driven, in-process continuous-query engine in Node.js services and replace polling loops with immediate reactions to complex data variations across multiple sources.

Use managed connectors in Azure Functions to access about 1,700 connectors (Microsoft 365, Teams, Dataverse, SharePoint, OneDrive, and third-party) via connector triggers and typed connector clients, removing the need to write webhook registration code or manage OAuth tokens, so

Resource guide updated 22 Sep 2026: follow the beginner exercise to trial Microsoft AI for organising notes, preparing presentations, or finding information, and use the governance section when planning a rollout to align with your organisation's guardrails.

Claude Opus 5.5 is now available in Microsoft Foundry, so use Opus 5.5 for longer-running coding, multi-step agents, and extended knowledge work that require sustained context and state across tasks.

HLS in Practice (Sep 2026) curates Healthcare and Life Sciences AI updates from 24 Aug-22 Sep and labels readiness items; consult it to prioritise clinical workflow, business app, and governance changes for your team.

Re-evaluate your agent operating model now: define how much authority agents receive, who owns them, how they are monitored, and lifecycle rules before assigning multi-step work to production agents.

Treat agent governance as a distinct practise: maintain an inventory of agents, assign owners, control what systems and data they can access, track operating costs and health, and monitor for changes in an agent's risk profile as your estate grows.

Dapple and Azure are expanding access to specialised GPU infrastructure, so design training and inference workloads with topology in mind and plan for coordinated communication across nodes rather than focusing only on raw GPU count.

Consider Azure KARS for building multi-runtime AI agent infrastructure so agents can operate across different runtimes and non-developers can run agent-driven workflows, and plan for runtime isolation, auditing, and deployment processes.

Do not rely solely on schema validity for AI components: add application-level validation, separate decision authority from model outputs, and handle probabilistic behaviour when integrating models into IoT or larger systems.

Multiparty private offer (MPO) is now available in Japan on Microsoft Marketplace, so ISVs and channel partners should evaluate MPO for multiparty deals and to expand channel-led sales.

Generally available: Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 7.1.0 fixes a range of issues around connection failures, retries, transactions, pooling, streaming, encryption, and newer SQL Server data types, upgrade your applications to 7.1.0 to get more predictable connection and transaction b

Microsoft published a new Microsoft Tech Community blog series for managed service providers (authored by Bryan Irwin) that will deliver practical, MSP-focused operational guidance on configuration, security, and licensing,follow the series for updates.

Microsoft Graph Data Connect for SharePoint now fully populates read-locked and archived sites in the Sites dataset (previously they appeared as partial rows), so update your queries, ETL mappings, and downstream joins to expect the full set of standard fields and values.

Azure Sphere OS 26.09 is available in the Retail feed: internet-connected devices will auto-update to a kernel migration from Linux 5.10 to 6.1 (this is the final major kernel update before Azure Sphere retirement in 2031), no SDK or functional changes required.

Virtual nodes on Azure Container Instances attach ACI as serverless Kubernetes nodes to your AKS cluster so pods can run on ACI for burst capacity without node management or capacity planning; evaluate virtual nodes for AKS burst scenarios.

Generally available: Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance is GA; if you manage multiple tenants, plan to deploy it to gain cross-tenant visibility, apply consistent policies, and reduce shadow-tenant risk, and join the webinars to learn deployment steps.

Generally available: Azure API Management now includes a send-service-bus-message policy so you can expose an HTTP API that sends messages directly to Service Bus queues or topics without an intermediary translator service, configure the policy to add an async boundary to your AP

Microsoft updated Defender Experts MDR (including Defender Experts Hunting) to provide more proactive investigations and earlier awareness of suspicious activity; security teams using the service should review the updated capabilities and adjust monitoring and response playbooks.

Foundry Models' model router (with RouteLab testing) lets you route requests in real time across models to balance cost, latency, and response quality, so adopt the router and use RouteLab to test routing rules before production.

Elastic has released a serverless Elasticsearch Vector Database on Azure with native portal integrations, enabling you to deploy semantic search and RAG without managing a search cluster.

Demonstrates a fully local RAG assistant built with Microsoft Foundry Local, running retrieval and model inference on the same machine and embedding structured records locally (all-MiniL in the example).

When evaluating text-to-image models, stop cherry-picking prompts and use standardized benchmarks, automated judge pipelines, and comprehensive metrics to get reliable comparisons.

Reservation exchange rules for Azure commitments are changing ahead of February 2027, so review whether to commit via reservations or savings plans now because your ability to exchange reservations will be reduced.

The latest Mixed Reality Link release lets Windows use your headset's built-in microphone and cameras directly, so update Mixed Reality Link and adjust Windows or Teams audio/video settings if you want headset mic and camera input.

From 18 Sep 2026 the Instructor-Led Training Title Plan is published weekly at http://aka.ms/Courseware_Title_Plan, check that URL regularly to ensure your ILT materials and course lists are using the latest title plan.

No product changes or action items are listed in the Agentic Azure Insights 19 October community video; watch the recording for any implementation details or follow-up links.

Do not treat "a human should check it" as an adequate security control for agentic or autonomous systems; update your threat models, approval gating, and auditing because MSRC's Low rating for a Security Copilot prompt injection relied on downstream human or automation approval,

Final post in the Windows 365 series explains using Windows 365 Link with Intune, so review and update your Intune device configuration and compliance policies to ensure Cloud PC linking and management work as intended.

Microsoft Intune service release 2609 (September 2026) adds new Android Enterprise capabilities; review the official Intune 2609 release notes, test policy and app configurations on representative devices, and stage deployment before broad rollout.

Watch the Cybersecurity Mittendrin episode on Microsoft Purview to learn concrete controls and configurations for protecting enterprise data and AI prompts, and use the episode's GitHub links for hands-on workshops and artefacts.

No Azure action required: Scott Hanselman's Hanselminutes episode interviews Michio Kaku about the concept of sending billions of nanoscale starships, listen if you want background on nanoscale spacecraft concepts.

Retirement: Microsoft has retired the AI-900 exam and replaced it with AI-901, so update your certification study plans, training materials, and scheduled exam targets to align with the AI-901 objectives.

Apply a managed-comment pattern for AI-generated PR reviews: tag commenter identity, assign severity levels, attach evidence links, and gate merges on resolved high-severity findings to reduce noise and make reviews actionable.

Use Enterprise Live Migrations to move Azure DevOps repositories to GitHub without imposing a repository freeze: evaluate this live-migration approach, run pre-migration checks, and validate repo integrity after cutover.

Audit your agent-based tooling against the OWASP Top 10 for agents and implement mitigations such as stricter permissions, input validation, and sandboxing to reduce the risk of agent exploitation.

Configure your Azure DevOps pipelines to run dependency scanning and forward scan results into Microsoft Defender for Cloud using the guide, so dependency vulnerabilities appear in Defender for Cloud alerts and reports.

Fixed: Autopilot Device Preparation no longer starts BitLocker early and will respect devices configured for XTS-AES-256 instead of falling back to the default XTS-AES-128; check devices that were encrypted with 128-bit earlier.

ACA Sandboxes are now available to host your agent workloads on the same isolation infrastructure Microsoft uses; consult https://sandboxes.azure.com and the companion whiteboard for setup, and configure microVM-based container agents, egress proxy, lifecycle controls, pricing, a

ACA Sandboxes are now available to host agentic workloads on the same infrastructure Microsoft uses; start at https://sandboxes.azure.com to create isolated microVM-based sandboxes for container agents and configure egress and lifecycle settings.

Intune now uses push notifications to trigger faster delivery of required Win32 apps to online devices, so expect installs to start sooner and verify devices can receive Intune push messages and that the Intune Management Extension is healthy if deployments are delayed.

Gregor Suttie's post explains what the Festive Tech Calendar 2026 is and how to take part; read it if you plan to participate or contribute content.

Run the automated benchmark tool from Tom Wechsler's repositories to download GGUF language models from Hugging Face and precisely measure raw processing and text-generation throughput in tokens per second on your CPU or NVIDIA GPU.

Follow Rudy Ooms' guidance to trigger required (non-blocking) Win32 app installations immediately after Windows Autopilot's Enrollment Status Page (ESP) completes so those apps start installing as users reach the desktop.

The author published a small WPF Markdown editor with live preview and documents two runtime bugs and implementation notes you should review before building or running a similar local WPF editor.

Watch John Savill's 25 Sep 2026 Azure Weekly Update video if you run MdsV4/Msv4 VMs or use PowerShell with Azure Functions, and incorporate any announced configuration or compatibility changes into your VM and Functions deployments.

This is non-Azure content (Scott Hanselman YouTube short about ray guns), so there is no Azure product change or action for practitioners to take.

No Azure action required: this is a community video where Michio Kaku recounts building a particle accelerator at home, so treat it as community interest content and do not plan any operational changes or migrations based on it.

When learning new technologies, use a 'learn just enough' approach: decide the minimal knowledge required for the task and set a clear stopping criterion so you can start delivering rather than endlessly researching.

Deploying or evaluating open-weight AI models: be aware guardrails can be removed and Mark Russinovich's Fool's Gold defence proposes training models to return convincing but intentionally flawed outputs when protections are bypassed, so include this attack scenario in your threa

Preview: AKS Flex Nodes enable attaching your own compute to a managed AKS cluster,read the AKS documentation and test the preview if you need node-level control for specific workloads.

Install the signaldiff CLI and add it to your CI to crawl your sitemap, check on-page SEO and crawl health (titles, meta descriptions, redirects, and slow responses), compare a run with a baseline (often the previous deploy), and pass the report to coding agents like Copilot, Cur

When conducting a virtualization review, assess Azure Local and Microsoft Sovereign Private Cloud as a platform and operating model rather than just a hypervisor: include platform-level capabilities, integration, governance, lifecycle, and feature-parity impacts in your decision

Run Tom Wechsler's Python test system from the linked GitHub repos to benchmark local AI models and pick the best trade-off between accuracy, inference speed, and resource use for automatic support-ticket sorting.

Two sessions at Cloud & AI Summit 2026 (30 Sep to 2 Oct, St. Charles, Missouri) will cover multi-cloud architecture and operations, and container security with Docker Scout and Azure Container Registry; attend if you manage multi-cloud or container security.

Host Dynamics 365 document storage in your own data centre using storage you control (example: Nextcloud) and enforce each user's access at the storage layer rather than in the app, so update your document-management configuration and storage access controls accordingly.

Azure Virtual Network Routing Appliance offers a hub-and-spoke routing alternative to VNet peering for transitive routing and centralised control, review whether to replace multiple peerings with this appliance for easier route management.

Intune Device App Inventory Agent now reacts to application changes instead of waiting the four-hour harvest cycle, reducing app inventory latency to about five minutes, so update reporting and remediation schedules to reflect near-real-time data.

John Savill's video collects practical lessons on AI adoption, model choice, trust, human+AI workflows, and organisational change; there is no direct Azure product change to apply, treat it as guidance for planning AI initiatives.

GitHub Actions OIDC is moving to immutable subject claims, so update your Microsoft Entra federated identity credentials to match the new subject claim format to avoid authentication failures.

Jeroen Burgerhout announced he will speak at Workplace Ninja India 2026, so plan to join the session if you follow his Azure/Intune content.

Bicep now includes an experimental docs generate command with Scriban templates to turn modules into Markdown documentation,use bicep docs generate to produce and customise module docs.

This course page is work in progress and not yet released, so there is nothing to act on today; the 'Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC' course is finished and available.

This knowledge-check page is work in progress and not yet released; no action is required today.

The "Pitfals from the field" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Prove equivalence end to end" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Migrate credentials" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Reboots and cross-node coordination" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Own the enforcement schedule" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Map LCM features to Microsoft DSC" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Introduction to replacing the LCM" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Summary" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Knowledge check" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Path D: Going native" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

Preview (work in progress): the 'Rewrite AppEnvironment as a class' course page is not released yet, so no migration action to take now, subscribe on the source page to be notified when the lesson is published.

Preview (work in progress): the 'Path C: From script-based to class-based' lesson is not yet released; subscribe on the source page to get notified when the guidance for moving script-based DSC to class-based arrives.

Preview (work in progress): the 'Convert a MOF file' lesson is not published yet, so hold off on any MOF conversion work from this course until it is released; subscribe for a notification when it goes live.

Preview (work in progress): the 'Path B: Import your compiled MOFs' page is not available yet, no action required until the lesson is published, subscribe on the source to be alerted.

Preview (work in progress): the 'Adapt the legacy configuration' lesson is not released yet; subscribe on the source page to be notified when guidance for adapting legacy DSC configurations is published.

Preview (work in progress): the 'Path A: Adapt in place' lesson is not published, so do not change your in-place adaptation plans based on this page until it is released, subscribe to receive the release notice.

Video published: Episode 73 covers Microsoft Purview, explaining why data protection should be part of your security architecture and enterprise risk management, watch the episode for practical Purview and DLP guidance.

Article published: 'Introduction to migration configurations and resources' is available, read it to understand how migration configurations and resources are organised and what to plan for during migration.

Article published: the 'Summary' page collects the key takeaways from the course material, review it to confirm the main migration decisions and steps the course presents.

Knowledge check available: an interactive quiz lets you test your understanding of DSC resource adapter behaviour (for example differences between Microsoft.Adapter/WindowsPowerShell and Microsoft.Adapter/PowerShell), use it to validate migration readiness.

Read the article to choose the right migration path for your estate and use it to decide which migration approach to plan and schedule next.

Speaker session at JNUC 2026 covers securing Azure and AKS with Jamf Connect ZTNA and Jamf Trust, so if you manage Azure/AKS with Jamf, plan to attend or watch the recording for implementation patterns and configuration details.

A Pluralsight course on integrating AI agents in enterprise systems is coming as part of a new Agentic AI Integration path, so schedule time to take the course when it publishes to learn practical integration patterns.

Follow the guidance in this article to build and inventory your Bindery estate so you have an actionable asset list before any migration or refactor work.

Use the article's recommendations to inventory your existing environment now, creating a baseline of configurations and artefacts you can reference during migration or remediation.

Before migrating PowerShell DSC, evaluate whether you actually need to move: DSC 5.1 and the LCM still work, so document motivations and risks and only migrate when the benefits outweigh maintaining the existing setup.

If you have an existing PowerShell DSC estate, read this practical introduction to migrating from DSC to understand how to handle real-world artefacts, folders, and legacy configurations before you start.

Speaker at Afrofest Tech Day on 18 September will present 'AI The Bigger Picture', so if you are nearby and want a broad perspective on AI in industry, consider attending the session.