Microsoft Technology Briefing - April 2026

Vill du ligga steget före i den snabba teknikutvecklingen? Missa inte chansen att ta del av de allra senaste nyheterna inom Copilot och agenter! Vi har nöjet att bjuda in dig till detta webinar som fokuserar på de senaste nyheterna inom agenter.

Varmt välkommen till Microsoft Pre-day på Vitalis – en heldag för beslutsfattare och innovationsledare inom svensk sjukvård. Under dagen fördjupar vi oss i hur teknik och AI kan bli strategiska resurser för att vi ska kunna bygga en mer motståndskraftig, jämlik och trygg vård tillsammans. Location: Svenska Mässan, Mässans gata...

Join us for a practical, hands-on hackathon focused on Predictive Maintenance for Manufacturing companies. You’ll work through real-world challenges, collaborate with peers, and learn from Microsoft specialists. Focus on how to use agents to actually update a core process. Location: World of Volvo, Lyckholms Torg 1, Gothenburg Läs mer om Microsoft Agentic AI Hack...

Välkommen till ett rundabordssamtal som samlar ledare inom offentlig sektor för dialog kring säkerhet, digital suveränitet och innovation. Vi inleder dagen med en gemensam livesändning med Microsoft Security R&D och fortsätter därefter på plats med förtroendefulla samtal, reflektion och nätverkande. Location: Microsofts Huvudkontor, Regeringsgatan 25 Läs mer om Microsoft Security...

Microsoft Sovereign Cloud Day Sverige samlar ledare och innovatörer för att accelerera digital suveränitet, motståndskraft och innovation i Sverige – med särskilt fokus på behoven hos svenska organisationer. Location: Microsofts Huvudkontor, Regeringsgatan 25 Läs mer om Microsoft Sovereign Cloud Day Sverige...

Microsoft Sovereign Cloud Day Sverige samlar ledare och innovatörer för att accelerera digital suveränitet, motståndskraft och innovation i Sverige – med särskilt fokus på behoven hos svenska organisationer.

At Microsoft Build, you'll go deep on real code, real systems, and real workflows with the teams building and scaling AI. Two days. Hands-on sessions. No fluff. June 2–3, 2026 / San Francisco and online.

Read how Microsoft is partnering with Anthropic and broader industry to use leading models, paired with our platforms and expertise, to turn AI-driven discovery into protection at scale.

The shift to remote and hybrid work since the pandemic expanded global hiring and accelerated digital onboarding, increasing reliance on online identity verification and remote access.

How Microsoft secures Dynamics 365 and Power Platform by removing credentials, reducing attack surfaces, and using platform engineering to block opportunistic threats.

Threat actors are abusing external Microsoft Teams collaboration to impersonate IT helpdesk staff and convince users to grant remote access. Once inside, attackers can abuse legitimate tools and standard admin protocols to move laterally and exfiltrate data while appearing as routine IT support—activity Microsoft Defender helps detect across Teams, endpoint, and identity telemetry.

Domain compromise accelerates fast. Predictive shielding slowed it down. This real-world attack shows how exposure-based containment stopped credential abuse and broke the threat actor's momentum.

Learn how to build a comprehensive cryptographic inventory and strengthen quantum‑safe readiness using Microsoft Security tools, best‑practice lifecycle models, and partner solutions.

The Microsoft Defender Security Research Team uncovered a sophisticated macOS intrusion campaign attributed to the North Korean threat actor Sapphire Sleet that abuses user driven execution and social engineering to bypass macOS security protections and steal credentials, cryptocurrency assets, and sensitive data.

AI changes how incidents unfold and how we respond. Learn which IR practices still apply and where new telemetry, tools, and skills are needed.

In the SOC of the future, autonomous defense moves at machine speed, agents add context and coordination, and humans focus on judgment, risk, and outcomes.

Microsoft Incident Response – Detection and Response Team (DART) researchers observed an emerging, financially motivated threat actor, tracked as Storm-2755, compromising Canadian employee accounts to gain unauthorized access to employee profiles and divert salary payments to attacker-controlled accounts.

Welcome once again to everyone in our Microsoft Tech Community! We’re glad you’ve joined us to check out a fresh lineup of Teams features designed to keep you productive, secure, and connected. Before we dive in, mark your calendars: the Microsoft 365 Community Conference is coming up in April! Join us to learn the new ways Teams and Copilot help you stay in the flow of work. And now to the main event: new Teams capabilities! This month's updates have something for everyone.

Learn what’s new in Copilot Studio: Multi-agent systems are now generally available, plus recent updates to the Prompt Editor and governance controls.

Agents bring rich, app powered UI experiences directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot chat, via MCP Apps or the OpenAI Apps SDK. Read about what customers and partners are building.

As Copilot becomes a daily workflow for more teams, IT and security leaders need clear, practical controls to deploy and manage confidently—without slowing down adoption or compromising governance. Let's take a closer look at the new enhancements providing built-in security, management, and governance controls to help give you greater visibility and control over your Copilot deployment.

Today, we are introducing new Copilot in Word capabilities for legal, finance, and compliance professionals doing high stakes, and detail intensive work. Whether reviewing contracts or finalizing policy documents, Copilot can track changes when an audit trail is needed. This release supports the way professionals work, where document integrity is non-negotiable.

Microsoft 365 Copilot can now bring your go-to apps directly into the conversation, which closes the gap between AI-powered insight and real, in-app action.

Research Drop in Brief: Most AI measurements focus on adoption, but adoption alone doesn't tell us whether AI is actually changing how work feels and functions. RIVA (Realized Individual Value of AI) captures what usage metrics miss: whether AI is meaningfully improving employees' work quality, speed, decision-making, and stress at the individual level.

Today we're expanding model choice in Microsoft 365 Copilot with the addition of Anthropic's latest model—Claude Opus 4.7—now available in Copilot Cowork (Frontier) and Copilot Studio early release cycle environments , and rolling out to Copilot in Excel. Opus 4.7 is designed to be faster and more precise, with improved ability to select the right tool for the task.

As AI becomes embedded in everyday work, governance shifts from being a back‑office function to a strategic enabler. Organizations that succeed with Copilot and agents aren’t just moving fast ( 70% of early Copilot users said they were more productive) – they are prepared, resilient, and deliberate in balancing AI-driven innovation with security and relevance.

Incoming calls don’t wait for a break in your day. Whether you’re leading a meeting or juggling back-to-back commitments, every new call creates the same dilemma: answer and risk losing momentum, or ignore it and risk missing something important. We're excited to announce that Microsoft 365 Copilot can now help answer your incoming Teams calls and schedule follow-up appointments on your behalf.

From first draft to final polish, Copilot acts as a true collaborator, taking action while you stay in control.

Today, we’re expanding what Microsoft 365 Copilot can do with GPT-5.5 Thinking and ChatGPT Images 2.0 bringing stronger support for deeper analysis, multi-step work, and visual creation. GPT-5.5 Thinking is now available in Copilot Studio early release cycle environments as GPT-5.5 Reasoning and is rolling out across Microsoft 365 Copilot in Copilot Chat, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. ChatGPT Images 2.0 is rolling out to Copilot in PowerPoint and coming soon to Copilot Chat.

If governance is just a list of things people can’t do, that’s not governance—it's a backlog of workarounds waiting to happen.

We’re pleased to announce that server logic in Power Pages is now generally available (GA). This release marks a major milestone, delivering native server-side capabilities with the maturity, governance, and extensibility required to support enterprise-grade production workloads. First introduced in preview, Server logic was designed to simplify how makers and developers implement server-side operations.

Building enterprise solutions is shifting from writing code to directing AI agents. Instead of stitching together APIs, CLIs, and scripts, developers are increasingly describing intent and letting agents execute. For enterprise platforms like Dataverse, this creates a new requirement: they must be operable by agents, not just by humans. Today we’re releasing Dataverse Skills —

Make smarter, faster, and more confident quote decisions—right where you work. Project quoting has always required a careful balance—aligning profitability with competitiveness, staffing strategies with delivery costs, and customer expectations with business outcomes. But evaluating these trade-offs hasn’t always been easy. It often means jumping between tools, manually recalculating numbers, and relying on assumptions to guide critical decisions.

Bring your Power Apps into Microsoft 365 Copilot. In public preview, makers can enable conversational access to model-driven app data with Grids and Forms, with Custom Tools coming soon.

We’ve shipped a big round of updates to Agent Academy. Two new sections, a completely redone site experience, and more missions on the way. Here’s what’s changed. Quick recap for anyone new Agent Academy is a free, open-source curriculum for learning how to build agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio. Since launching in August 2025, it...

We are excited to announce that Power Platform Monitor alerts for apps, agents, and flows are now generally available! Monitor alerts meet the reliability and maturity standards required for general availability, following sustained investments to improve quality.

Power Apps Generally available: custom theming for model-driven apps Custom theming for model-driven apps using the modern, refreshed look is now generally available. This capability lets organizations align their model-driven apps with company branding by customizing colors, fonts, and app header styling using the Microsoft Fluent 2 design system.

Explore new Power Apps updates that introduce Copilot, app skills, and agents to apps, extending intelligence to the AI surfaces where work happens.

In contact centers, a voice conversation does not end when the call disconnects. That’s when critical work begins – logging outcomes, updating systems, triggering workflows, and ensuring compliance. Yet today, post-call actions are often delayed, inconsistent, or dependent on manual or external processes. With caller hang-up event support in Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Copilot Studio, we are changing that.

We’re introducing three new skills for the Power Pages agentic code plugin for GitHub Copilot and Claude Code CLI that together unlock a missing capability in AI‑assisted site building: server‑side logic.

At Hannover Messe 2026, Microsoft is showcasing how agentic ERP with Copilot, agents and Dynamics 365 helps manufacturers replan faster, make better production tradeoffs, and meet or exceed customer service SLAs.

Azure IaaS provides foundational capabilities across compute, storage, and networking to help organizations stay resilient.

Azure Data Box now supports ingestion of data into Azure Files Provisioned v2 storage accounts. Azure Files Provisioned v2 is a billing model where customers provision and pay for specific capacity, IOPS, and throughput values; giving greater flexibility...

Azure Data Box now automatically generates a downloadable Secure Erasure Certificate for every completed order, providing verification that all data on the device has been securely erased in accordance with NIST 800-88 Revision 2 standards. The certific...

Microsoft is named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ for Sovereign Cloud Platforms, recognizing Microsoft Sovereign Cloud leadership in evolving sovereignty needs.

Azure File Sync enables seamless tiering of data from on-premises Windows Servers to Azure Files for hybrid use cases and simplified migration. It also enables you to leverage the performance, flexibility and compatibility of your on-premises File Server...

By continuously optimizing data placement, smart tier ensures your storage costs are aligned with actual usage.

Capacity Autoscaling support is now generally available on Elastic SAN. Customers can avoid the constraints of overprovisioning and manual capacity management by setting a policy to automatically expand SAN Capacity based on usage. Autoscaling provides th...

Cascading read replicas are now generally available in Azure Database for PostgreSQL, giving you greater flexibility to scale read‑intensive workloads. You can now create read replicas from existing ones, creating up to 30 across two levels of replication...

Azure Elastic SAN now supports CRC-32C checksum verification when enabled on the client side for connections to Elastic SAN volumes. You can enable CRC protection when creating an Elastic SAN or enable it on an existing Elastic SAN. Elastic SAN also offer...

Foundry Toolkit for VS Code is now generally available and provides VS Code tooling for Microsoft Agent Framework, including agent creation from templates or via GitHub Copilot, local test/debug with visualization and traces, and direct deployment to Foun...

WireGuard in‑transit encryption is now generally available for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters using Azure CNI powered by Cilium and Advanced Container Networking Services (ACNS). This capability enables transparent, node‑level encryption for inte...

Foundry Agent Service now supports bring‑your‑own‑model scenarios, allowing agents to use AI models deployed and managed outside of Foundry, including models hosted behind enterprise AI gateways such as Azure API Management. This enables organizations to...

Get practical strategies and best practices to help you plan, design, and manage AI investments for sustainable value and efficiency.

Discover how cloud cost optimization adapts in the age of AI, with best practices for managing spend, improving efficiency, and maximizing value.

In our previous post, Operationalizing Agentic Applications with Microsoft Fabric, we focused on a core challenge teams encounter once an agentic application moves beyond a proof of concept: operational reality. Specifically, how do you observe, govern, evaluate, and analyze what agents are doing once they interact with real users, data, and business processes at scale? …

Something fundamental is changing in how developers interact with data platforms. Not a feature update, not a UI refresh, but a shift in the interface itself.

Azure Accelerate for Databases helps organizations modernize their databases and build AI-ready capabilities.

Empowering customers with enhanced security and control. This milestone marks a significant step forward in empowering our customers to take control of their data security and compliance needs within the Eventhouse platform. With CMK, you can manage your own encryption keys, providing an added layer of security and flexibility. This feature allows you to meet …

Workspace outbound access protection (OAP) is widely accessible for Data Factory workloads—including Pipelines, Copy Job, and Dataflows—as well as for Mirrored Databases such as Mirrored SQL Database and Mirrored Snowflake. Key benefits Enhanced outbound security: By leveraging OAP rules, organizations can ensure that the Data Factory items from the protected workspace can …

Expanded preview access for Microsoft Discovery brings new enterprise-grade, agentic AI capabilities for research and development teams.

In today’s data-driven world, the ability to capture and act on data changes in real time is a competitive necessity. From financial services processing millions of transactions per second to e-commerce platforms tracking inventory and customer behavior, real-time data streaming has become the backbone of modern decision-making—and nowhere is this more critical …

Machine learning teams need more than a great model — they need a reliable way to move that model from experimentation to production. Cross-workspace logging for MLflow in Microsoft Fabric, is a capability that enables you to build end-to-end MLOps workflows using the standard MLflow APIs you already know. Figure: Animated gif of Log ML …

As enterprises adopt OneLake as their unified data lake for analytics, securing how external services access data in OneLake becomes increasingly important—especially in environments where public internet access must be tightly controlled. Today, we’re introducing resource instance rules for OneLake in preview. This new capability allows workspace admins to explicitly allow inbound access from trusted …

Nested folders, shortcut transformations, subfolder processing, OneLake, shortcuts, Lakehouse Data lakes rarely come in flat structures. In practice, data is organized across multi-level folder hierarchies, partitioned by date, region, source system, or business unit. Previously, shortcut transformations processed files at a single folder level, requiring users to set up separate transforms for each subdirectory. Moving …

If you work in field engineering, you know the scenario. A customer is deploying AKS in a regulated environment. They hit an issue during node bootstrapping. They want to know exactly what happens when a node joins the cluster, which components run in which order, and whether the behaviour they’re seeing is expected. The question...

Bookmarks in Visual Studio have always been a simple, reliable feature. Many developers use them regularly, and over the years we’ve heard consistent feedback from those users. Bookmarks were useful, but there were a few core gaps that kept them from being as effective and relevant as they could be. Navigation was one of the...

Make Visual Studio floating windows work perfectly with PowerToys FancyZones. Flip one option to get independent windows, better snapping, and less friction.

AI agents are quickly moving from experiments to production‑critical components of modern applications. But while many teams know how to build agents, far fewer are confident they’re hosting them on the right foundation. Most organizations start by deploying agents the same way they deploy microservices—containers, functions, or app services. That approach works initially. But as...

We’re sharing recent policy updates that developers should know about, updating our Transparency Center with the full year of 2025 data, and looking to what’s ahead.

We’ve all been there: a bug report lands in your inbox with a title like “App crashes sometimes” and zero reproduction steps. Your morning, which was supposed to be spent building new features, is now a forensic investigation. You’re setting scattershot breakpoints, staring at the call stack, and trying to guess what the original reporter was thinking. Debugging isn’t just about fixing code; it’s about reducing uncertainty.

See how we created an emoji list generator during the Rubber Duck Thursday stream.

The open source Git project just released Git 2.54. Here is GitHub’s look at some of the most interesting features and changes introduced since last time.

We're making these changes to ensure a reliable and predictable experience for existing customers.

This post is the first in a 3-part series: Foundations (this post) Start shipping (context engineering, MCP servers, orchestration) App modernization (Java, .NET, PHP, microservices) Bookmark this post for quick reference as you start exploring Agentic DevOps. It will be updated as the 3 parts become available. Getting started with Agentic DevOps Agentic DevOps is...

~1,900 lines of Python. Zero dependencies. Saves you an hour a day. GitHub → · pip install auto-memory Now give Copilot CLI enhanced context recall. Point it at deploy/install.md and let it cook. 🍳 Are you tired of using the slash /compact command every 10 min? The Context Window Is a Lie Every AI coding agent ships with...

Starting June 1, your Copilot usage will consume GitHub AI Credits.

Learn all about vibe coding, no experience required, and get inspired by real-world success. Alfredo Ramirez is Vice President of Revenue Strategy at Microsoft, where his team runs sales planning, performance management, and commercial transformation across the Microsoft global sales organization. Many of the most impactful tools my team uses today weren’t built by engineers.

Actionable guidance for building AI leadership skills—drawn from real customer conversations. Chris Henley is a Microsoft Trainer, part of a community of professionals at Microsoft Global Skilling, working with customer and partner leaders to help them build the skills required to drive their organization’s AI strategy. Where AI conversations are shifting for leaders...

Find out what it takes to build AI skills with confidence, individually and as a team. Kavitha Radhakrishnan is a General Manager in Microsoft Global Skilling, where she leads the teams creating AI‑first, learner‑centered experiences that help people and teams build skills they can apply at work. Sunday night.

When NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announces that the New York Jets are “officially on the clock” during this month’s NFL Draft, the franchise will have an opportunity to reshape its roster by choosing some of the best college talent available. And with four picks at the time of this writing – including No. 2 overall – within the first 44 selections, the need to add...

Join the reimagined Student Ambassadors program to learn and lead. Experiment with AI, drive projects that solve real problems, and earn recognition for the impact you make. For more than two decades, the Microsoft Student Ambassadors program has helped student-developers from around the world build practical technical and leadership skills—skills that have helped open doors for hundreds of thousands of students, sparked their confidence, and turned curiosity into careers.

Across industries, we are witnessing a fundamental shift. At Microsoft, we're seeing this shift play out firsthand as we work with thousands of organizations. This post is the first in a series on industry Frontier Transformation exploring how AI is driving growth and reshaping innovation across various industries.

AI isn’t just changing jobs descriptions, it’s redefining how work gets done across every industry, role, and skill level. From marketing to manufacturing, AI is reshaping workflows, speeding up decisions, and opening entirely new career paths. And the impact is massive. According to the World Economic Forum The Future of Jobs Report 2025 , advances in AI and tech could create 78 million new jobs by 2030 .

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we shape and propel many of our groundbreaking products through our role as the company’s Customer Zero—and we want to tell that story. At this year’s Microsoft 365 Community Conference (April 21-23 in Orlando, Florida), we’re hosting a variety of sessions focused on change management, AI adoption, and...

Learn about recent improvements to playlists, skilling sessions, partner discovery, and credentials, based on what learners and team leaders told us they need to build skills with confidence. Priya Vaidyanathan is a Director of Product Management at Microsoft, where she leads the product management teams that are building AI Skills Navigator. AI Skills Navigator exists to help people and teams build confidence with AI skills, through clear paths, practical learning, and guidance that fits real..

Building agents for real-world workflows takes more than prompts. Show you are ready to design and manage secure, enterprise‑ready agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio with Exam AB-620 (beta). As organizations shift from early AI experiments to deploying agents in real business workflows, the need for builders who can create dependable, production‑ready agents is growing quickly.

Indoor building maps matter the moment accurate location data become important to solving an issue in facilities. Imagine a facilities service technician responding to a high‑priority heating issue. The service ticket has the right building, floor and space, but no clear indication of where in the space the problem exactly is—this can be a particularly...

What’s your work style? Here at Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’ve identified four major “work identities,” or ways of working. Or, as we sometimes like to call them: The Fantastic Four! Everyone has a work style. Find the one that matches yours, and we’ll show you the Microsoft 365 apps and Copilot features...