Microsoft Technology Briefing - August 2026

The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) looks forward to hosting BlueHat Asia 2026! We are excited to officially announce our September 17-18 conference in Singapore.

Join us for a practical, hands-on hackathon focused on Inventory planning and Trend forecasting with multiagent systems. 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. This will include both our AI platform, data-platform and GitHub. Location: Microsoft Office, Regeringsgatan 25 Läs mer om Agentic AI Hack...

Välkommen till en exklusiv rundabordsdiskussion för säkerhetsledare där vi tillsammans utforskar hur AI-agenter förändrar synen på styrning, säkerhet och ansvarstagande. AI-agenter går snabbt från pilotprojekt till att bli en integrerad del av verksamheten. Samtidigt uppstår nya frågor kring tillit, kontroll, identitetshantering och regulatoriskt ansvar.

GitHub’s flagship developer event uniting humans, agents, and the world’s code to build what’s next. October 28–29 / San Francisco, CA. in-person & virtual.

This event series brings the flagship European Fabric Community Conference (FabCon) to your local community. Through a tailored experience you will get to listen to, and meet, local technical leaders and product experts to help you implement the latest data, analytics, and AI innovations that drive your competitive edge. The event will also provide you with the latest advancements in real-time data solutions with Microsoft Fabric.

Explore the latest innovations, hear practical insights, and build skills you can apply right away. Microsoft Ignite is at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, November 17–20, 2026, with an optional pre-day on November 16. The online event is November 17–19, 2026.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence provides analysis of a ClickFix campaign that uses fake CAPTCHA prompts, DLL sideloading, and a reverse tunnel, with detections and hunting guidance.

This month’s updates provide new capabilities to help organizations gain insights into agent activity, expand security coverage across supported environments, and enhance security management across their environments.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence examines attacks on exposed AI workloads, including LiteLLM gateway exploitation, credential harvesting, persistence, and cryptomining activity.

Organizations need protection that operates in the gap between discovery and remediation.

Microsoft is named a visionary leader in the 2026 Frost Radar for Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, recognized for unified runtime security with Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

Help employees find the right people faster with Assistant relationship data Executive assistants in an organization play a critical role in coordinating schedules, communication, and executive operations. However, assistant information is often stored in HR systems or business applications and is not easily discoverable across day-to-day...

In yesterday’s earnings call, we shared that Microsoft 365 Copilot has surpassed 30 million paid seats, with net seat adds more than doubling quarter over quarter.

Welcome to the July 2026 edition of What's New in Microsoft 365 Copilot! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements to keep Microsoft 365 customers up to date with Copilot features that help your users be more productive and efficient in the apps they use every day. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new this month...

Software is shifting from apps built for people to agents that can reason over context and act on someone’s behalf. Microsoft 365 Copilot put that shift in front of hundreds of millions of users, and Work IQ gave agents a production-ready intelligence layer to build on. What’s been missing is the path in between: getting...

We want to inform the community that the Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot feature described in this post, More control over web grounding with Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot , has been rolled back at this time. We understand the importance of this capability and are actively evaluating next steps. We will share additional updates with the community as soon as more information becomes available. Thank you for your patience and continued feedback.

I hope everyone is having a great summer - July has flown by. As we head into the second half of the year, we're continuing to innovate in Teams to help people collaborate with people and AI to get work done more efficiently. This month's updates bring together new ways to stay informed, simplify everyday tasks, and put AI to work across more scenarios and roles.

The tools that run a business rarely live in one place. For a small business owner, that means stepping out of the document you're writing to search for an attorney, digging through a folder for the LLC paperwork you half-remember filing, or pausing a client deliverable to figure out if a contract clause is enforceable. Every one of those detours pulls you out of the work you were doing to go chase down something that should've been a quick answer.

Most of us are familiar with one-to-one agent chats: private, direct interactions where rules are relatively simple. With only you and the agent, each moment has clear intent. You can ask follow-up questions, pause, or restart without worrying about how each exchange affects anyone else. Collaboration in groups works differently. Every message competes for attention,

Add your READMEs, wikis, logs, and transcripts to your notebook Your most useful project knowledge does not always live in a polished document. It might be captured in a README, project wiki, system log, meeting transcript, research export, or a simple text file. Copilot Notebooks can now use Markdown (.md), rich text format (.rtf) and plain text (.txt) files as references—helping you bring more of the content your work runs on into one focused workspace.

Microsoft 365 Backup can help strengthen your organization’s native safety net; it’s built directly into the platform you already trust, designed to recover your Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive data fast when it matters most. It can be used through the Microsoft 365 admin center, and via partner applications built on the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform . Here are 10 things that you should know before you enable it. 1.

Coding where context lives and collaboration happens The best prompt may be the conversation your team has already had or is currently having. Until now, using a coding agent often meant paying context and coordination taxes. Developers had to leave the discussion, open another tool, and reconstruct the problem in a lengthy prompt: what happened, what the team decided, which constraints matter, and what needs to be built.

SPFx 1.24 Beta 3 is now available, React 18 support is coming in 1.24, and a new Copilot Components preview program opens for customers and partners.

We’re excited to announce expansion of the Dataverse plugin across additional coding agent marketplaces, meeting developers where they already work. The plugin is now available for OpenAI and Codex.

Prompt Columns allows organizations to embed AI directly into business tables, without writing a single line of code. With Prompt Columns, you define natural language prompts once, and AI automatically generates insights, classifications, summaries, and recommendations that are persisted directly in your data.

The Dynamics 365 Customer Service MCP Server is now generally available, enabling MCP-compatible AI clients to securely access customer service data, cases, knowledge, and workflows through a standardized connection model. Organizations can extend customer service capabilities across AI experiences while maintaining existing governance and security controls.

Microsoft Entra Agent ID and Dataverse agent users offer a new identity foundation. Together, they help organizations give each agent a dedicated identity for accessing Dataverse, assign appropriate security roles, and maintain visibility into the agent’s activity.

Building modern apps Generally available: the data grid modern control — a fluent UI grid with search, sorting, selection, and rich column types The data grid modern control is now generally available for canvas apps. Built on fluent UI, data grid gives makers a high-performance, data-dense view of tabular data with a built-in search experience.

Supplier Engagement, now in public preview for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, helps organizations streamline supplier onboarding, lifecycle management, and collaboration from a centralized workspace. Built on Microsoft Power Platform, it provides trusted supplier data, global vendor management, and self-service supplier experiences while keeping transactions connected to ERP processes.

Since introducing Server Logic in Power Pages, our focus has remained consistent: help you bring business logic closer to the experiences you build, while keeping it secure, reusable, and easy to manage at scale. In the past, developers working with Liquid in Power Pages were limited to a predefined set of platform-provided objects.

Access Microsoft Business Process Catalog diagrams directly in the Dynamics 365 Implementation Portal to align stakeholders and improve implementation planning.

Introducing Shift Rotation Policies in Dynamics 365 Workforce Management, a new capability that automates rotating schedules, improves operational consistency, and reduces manual scheduling effort...

Cross-Legal-Entity Fulfillment Optimization in Dynamics 365 enables organizations to source inventory across participating legal entities, automate intercompany transactions, and improve fulfillment decisions with Distributed Order Management.

Supplier Engagement in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps organizations connect supplier experiences, procurement operations, and business data while creating a stronger foundation for AI and agentic business processes.

Learn how the move from release wave announcements to the AI at Work roadmap creates a single destination to discover, track, and plan innovations.

Microsoft announces the opening of its fourth datacenter region in India, India South Central, with campuses in Hyderabad, Telangana. The region will provide customers with local, secure, state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure designed with AI readiness as...

Managing Kubernetes resources across multiple clusters can require significant manual effort to apply updates and maintain consistency. Resource placement in Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager is now generally available and enables platform and application te...

Managing ingress routing while adopting newer Kubernetes standards can require balancing modernization efforts with existing deployments. Application Routing with Gateway API is now generally available on AKS, bringing the Kubernetes Gateway API to ingres...

Batch rule updates are now generally available for Azure Front Door Standard and Premium. This capability enables customers to add, update, delete, or reorder multiple rules in a rule set as a coordinated operation, ensuring that all changes are applied t...

Pre-upgrade validation checks are now generally available for Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server, helping you proactively validate major version upgrade (MVU) readiness before initiating the actual upgrade process. With the general availability...

We’re excited to announce the GA of Live Resize for shared Premium SSD v2 (Pv2) and Ultra data disks. This feature allows you to dynamically expand the storage capacity of your disks without any disruption to your applications. To optimize costs, you can...

New customers can now get started with Azure SRE Agent through a 30-day trial experience. During the trial, customers can create SRE Agents and connect them to your operational tools and data sources, and explore capabilities at their own pace without bas...

Azure SRE Agent VNet Integration is now generally available. VNet integration enables Azure SRE Agent to operate within your existing network controls, including Network Security Groups (NSGs), private DNS, and firewall policies, etc. With VNet support, t...

Azure Bastion integration with Azure Kubernetes Service is now generally available. Customers can establish a secure tunnel from their local machine through Azure Bastion to an AKS cluster API server. The integration enables customers to use standard Kube...

Azure Bastion shareable link expiration is now generally available. When creating a shareable link, administrators can specify the date and time when the link should expire. After the configured expiration time, the link can no longer be used to connect t...

Overview:Azure VM Image Builder is now generally available in Azure Government, China North 3, Azure Government Secret, and Azure Government Top Secret.You can now use the same managed image-building service across your sovereign and air-gapped environmen...

The Azure Files Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) now supports workload identity for pod-level authentication to SMB file shares. Previously, managed identity support in AKS enabled workloads to mount Azure Files w...

Compare managed PostgreSQL vs. self-hosted PostgreSQL across cost, control, security, resilience, scalability, and operational effort.

Join Microsoft Fabric and SQL Community Conference 2026 in Barcelona to explore SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, developer productivity tools, and the future of AI-powered data platforms.

Microsoft Foundry gives you four levers that act on every request, before a single line of agent logic changes.

Cloud-native platforms are becoming the foundation for AI transformation. Discover how Microsoft's Azure application platform helps organizations modernize, innovate, and operate AI-powered applications at scale.

Learn how AI cost management helps organizations move from AI pilots to measurable ROI through greater visibility, governance, and optimization.

The August 2026 release of the on-premises data gateway is version 3000.330. The new August 2026 release of the on-premises data gateway (version 3000.330) continues our commitment to delivering secure, reliable, and manageable connectivity between on-premises data sources and Microsoft Fabric services. This release includes improvements focused on gateway manageability, operational visibility, enterprise governance, and platform reliability, helping organizations manage their gateway...

Welcome to the fifth post in our Business Events, Fabric Events, and Azure Events series for Microsoft Fabric. This series takes you from foundational event-driven concepts to practical implementation patterns that help teams turn meaningful business moments into trusted signals, decisions, and actions across Fabric.

Welcome to the August 2026 Fabric update! Microsoft Fabric continues to evolve with new capabilities that help organizations build, manage, and scale their data and AI solutions more efficiently. This month's updates introduce enhancements across Fabric Platform, OneLake, Data Engineering, Conversational Analytics, Data Warehouse, Real-Time Intelligence, and Data Factory.

IDENTITY columns in Fabric Data Warehouse are now generally available. Since preview , thousands of customers have adopted IDENTITY columns to simplify data warehouse design, reduce custom key-generation logic, and make it easier to build scalable dimensional models in Microsoft Fabric. IDENTITY columns automatically generate unique numeric values when rows are inserted into a table.

Twenty sessions. Four days. One short link! The Microsoft SQL product team is heading to Barcelona for SQLCon Europe 2026, September 28 to October 1, co-located with FabCon Europe. The people building SQL Server, Azure SQL, and SQL database in Fabric are presenting what's new and the roadmap, and then sticking around to answer your questions and discuss your ideas and problems-to-solve. Bookmark this or remember to URL to find it later: aka.

Not every question deserves the same amount of thought. Renaming a variable isn’t the same as debugging a memory leak, and they don’t need the same level of thinking. So why should your model treat them the same way every time? Starting in Visual Studio 18.9 Insiders 2, it doesn’t have to. Supported models now come with a thinking...

Grounding an assistant in runbooks is straightforward. The harder part begins when the model proposes an action that requires authorization. An operations assistant needs stronger controls as soon as it can act. Answering “which runbook covers this alert” is a search problem. Opening an incident from that same conversation is a control-plane problem, and that...

If you’ve been looking for a practical way to build Azure skills, Cloud Academy (a QA company) gives Visual Studio subscribers hands-on learning that fits into busy schedules. Whether you’re new to Azure, expanding your cloud expertise, working towards certifications or preparing for more advanced projects, this benefit helps you learn by doing. What you’ll find in Cloud Academy The Cloud Academy benefit gives Visual Studio subscribers a flexible...

If you’re juggling multiple Copilot sessions, use the My work pane to track what's in flight, what's done, and what's next.

An update on the August 17 outage and the steps we're taking to improve reliability.

Today I will modernize a .NET Framework application to .NET 10 using the GitHub Copilot modernization tooling built-in to Visual Studio. The tooling helps us upgrade applications running on legacy versions of .NET and also migrate them to Azure. Today we’re going to focus on the upgrade portion. And, the tooling will do...

These are the lessons we learned evaluating LLMs for real-world secret scanning.

A few months ago, we introduced a new guided agentic workflow in the Visual Studio Debugger Agent designed to help you move from a bug report to a verified fix without spending your morning guessing where to begin. If you missed that announcement, check out Stop Hunting Bugs: Meet the New Visual Studio Debugger Agent...

Managing library updates can be tedious at times. Learn how the GitHub Copilot app can handle this type of repetitive task.

VSLive! @ Microsoft HQ 2026 was one of the most energizing VSLive! events I’ve attended. What stood out was the level of engagement over five days of learning and conversation from July 27 through July 31. Developers came ready to dig into the future of Visual Studio, .NET, and AI-assisted software development, and many Microsoft engineers and product managers were there to have those conversations directly. If you weren’t able to...

OpenClaw is the fastest-growing project in GitHub history. Peter Steinberger and several maintainers share what they learned in the project's first six months.

How to read this article This article picks up where my January piece left off. My catch phrase is still the same: “only believe what you can validate”. This article is about validation. If you are new to agentic AI (in modernization contexts), I would highly recommend reading The Realities of Application Modernization with Agentic...

As AI moves deeper into mission-critical work, organizations need trusted administrators who can govern access, secure data, monitor services, and keep Microsoft 365 AI experiences running at enterprise scale. Show you’re ready with new Exam AB-650 (beta). AI-powered productivity is no longer just...

Throughout this past fiscal year, customers across every industry and segment moved from AI experimentation to deploying AI for real-world business outcomes. They unlocked innovation and created new opportunities for growth.

Read how SCBX used a structured skilling plan with Trainocate to strengthen AI literacy, support role-based adoption, and help teams reduce time spent on repetitive work. Founded in 2021, SCB X Public Company Limited (SCBX) aimed to modernize its Siam Commercial Bank into a regional fintech conglomerate. By early 2026, SCBX had solidified its role as the...

Across Microsoft, our product teams rely on lab environments to develop, test, validate, and troubleshoot products before they reach customers. These labs are typically made up of virtual machines (VMs) that can be quickly deployed and scaled as needed. At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we now offer Managed Cloud Labs (formerly known as...

Read about Pro Badges, AI-driven Certifications, and Applied Skills, where learning meets today’s work. And find out how training service providers helped 153,000 learners develop AI skills. This has been a big season for Microsoft Credentials. With the introduction of Microsoft Pro Badges, a growing portfolio of AI-focused Microsoft Certifications, and expanded Microsoft Applied Skills offerings, we’re continuing to evolve how skills are built, validated, and recognized, closer to practical...

Most workdays don’t fall apart because employees lack ideas. Instead, challenges arise between intention and execution. What employees need is a way to set executional engines in motion so they can focus on higher-level work, stepping in only when necessary. At Microsoft, we’ve been working to close that gap with a new kind of agent:

Discover how organizations use AI to personalize engagement, strengthen relationships, and deliver more responsive experiences at scale.

As a young woman forging an IT career in Romania, Adelina Radoi faced plenty of doubt and bias. She heard questions about her nationality, her gender, her age, and even her height. But Radoi didn’t let it faze her. Even though she grew up without a computer in her home and studied criminal law in...

As AI agents become more sophisticated and autonomous, large enterprises like ours face a fundamental challenge: How do you enable powerful new AI experiences among your employees without compromising security, governance, or operational control? That was the guiding mantra behind an ambitious cross-company effort involving our team in Microsoft Digital—the company’s IT organization—and a number...

There’s a moment in almost every organization’s AI journey when experimentation gives way to something more difficult: Deciding which tool to rely on to build mission-critical agentic systems. These mainline systems operate across teams, connect to governed data, and accomplish real tasks for your workforce. At Microsoft, we’re developing a growing agent ecosystem that offers...

In a global organization such as Microsoft—with more than 220,000 employees connecting and working together from offices and remote workspaces scattered around the world—we enable our workers to stay productive from almost anywhere, on a wide range of devices. At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we provide our employees with that flexibility while helping...

Start with a question for the Learning Agent in Copilot and get recommendations from AI Skills Navigator, helping you find the right next step whenever you need to learn something new. Matt Erni is Product Manager at Microsoft working across Learning Agent and AI Skills Navigator to bring relevant skilling into the flow of work. Learning new AI skills has never been more important for individuals and organizations alike.