Microsoft Technology Briefing - February 2026

Join us for this free, one-day event and learn how to become a frontier leader in AI. Gain expert insight from Microsoft leaders, alongside other innovators driving real change. Discover how you can enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, and reshape business processes with the latest AI technology. Walter E. Washington Convention Center - 801 Allen Y. Lew Place NW, Washington, DC 20001.

Join us for this free, one-day event and learn how to become a frontier leader in AI. Gain expert insight from Microsoft leaders, alongside other innovators driving real change. Discover how you can enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, and reshape business processes with the latest AI technology. Avicii Arena, Globentorget 2, Stockholm.

Join us for this free, one-day event and learn how to become a frontier leader in AI. Gain expert insight from Microsoft leaders, alongside other innovators driving real change. Discover how you can enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, and reshape business processes with the latest AI technology.

Join us for this free, one-day event and learn how to become a frontier leader in AI. Gain expert insight from Microsoft leaders, alongside other innovators driving real change. Discover how you can enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, and reshape business processes with the latest AI technology. Lokomotivværkstedet - Otto Busses Vej 5A, 2450 Copenhagen, Denmark.

Your front-row seat to the future of work. Reimagine what's possible for your career, your team, your business - and for work itself. Connect with hundreds of Microsoft executives, subject matter experts, and product makers to unlock solutions that will accelerate your AI transformation...

Join us for this free, one-day event and learn how to become a frontier leader in AI. Gain expert insight from Microsoft leaders, alongside other innovators driving real change. Discover how you can enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, and reshape business processes with the latest AI technology. Veikkaus Arena - Areenankuja 1, 00240 Helsinki.

AI threat modeling helps teams identify misuse, emergent risk, and failure modes in probabilistic and agentic AI systems.

A developer-targeting campaign leveraged malicious Next.js repositories to trigger a covert RCE-to-C2 chain through standard build workflows. The activity demonstrates how staged command-and-control can hide inside routine development tasks.

AI-powered cyberattacks outpace aging SOC tools, and this new guide explains why manual defense fails and how autonomous, expert-led security transforms modern protection.

Read the new maturity-based guide that helps organizations move from fragmented, reactive security practices to a unified exposure management approach that enables proactive defense.

Self-hosted agents execute code with durable credentials and process untrusted input. This creates dual supply chain risk, where skills and external instructions converge in the same runtime. As OpenClaw-like systems enter enterprises, governance and runtime isolation become critical.

New research from Microsoft and Omdia reveals how fragmented tools, manual workflows, and alert overload are pushing SOCs to a breaking point.

Agents are increasingly powerful. With that power comes risk: small misconfigurations, over‑broad sharing, unauthenticated access, and weak orchestration controls can create real exposure. This article consolidates the most common risks we observe and maps each to practical detections with Microsoft Defender, and mitigations in Copilot Studio.

Microsoft Security returns to RSAC Conference to show how Frontier Firms—organizations that are human-led and agent-operated—can stay ahead.

New guide details how a unified, AI ready SIEM platform empowers security leaders to operate at the speed of AI, strengthen resilience, accelerate detection and response, and more.

Read Microsoft's new Cyber Pulse report for straightforward, practical insights and guidance on new cybersecurity risks.

We’re excited to share that source specific filters are now generally available worldwide in Copilot Search 🎉 . This release addresses a longstanding challenge in enterprise search: helping users move seamlessly from broad discovery to precise, actionable results… without friction. Why source specific filters matter Copilot Search works best when users can explore information broadly and then quickly narrow their results.

The User Configuration API is now available in the beta endpoint in Microsoft Graph. Use it to create, read, update, and delete user configuration objects in Exchange Online mail folders.

Today, we’re excited to introduce a new, unified experience that brings Viva Engage communities directly into Microsoft Teams now rolling out in public preview. As organizations strive to strengthen culture and connect distributed teams, we’re making it easier than ever for people to engage with their communities in the flow of work, right alongside chats, channels...

Today’s organizational challenges and growing complexity can make it difficult to create meaningful connections with audiences, whether engaging employees or reaching a dispersed customer base. Having the right tools to navigate the demands of large-scale communication for digital and hybrid events is critical to achieving business objectives.

As frontline teams face increasing demands and rapid change, the ability to access the right information at the right moment is more critical than ever. For this reason, we’re excited to introduce Frontline Agent, now available in Public Preview. This purpose-built, persona-tuned AI assistant is designed to help frontline workers across industries like retail, healthcare, manufacturing...

Copilot connectors extend Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Search to your external business systems. They bring line of business content—like ServiceNow, Confluence etc data—into Microsoft Graph so it can be safely discovered inside M365 Copilot and Agent experiences while honoring your existing permissions. Content ingested through Copilot connectors...

The Microsoft 365 Community Conference returns to Orlando this April, bringing together thousands of builders, innovators, creators, communicators, admins, architects, MVPs, and product makers for three unforgettable days of learning and community. This year’s theme, “A Beacon for Builders, Innovators & Icons of Intelligent Work,” celebrates the people shaping the AI‑powered future — and the keynote lineup reflects exactly that.

Microsoft Sovereign Cloud's expansion of capabilities includes Azure Local disconnected operations, Microsoft 365 Local disconnected, and Microsoft Foundry addition of large model and modern infrastructure capabilities.

We move towards spring 2026 with strong momentum across the SharePoint Framework and an increasing sense of excitement across the ecosystem. SPFx continues to be a foundational platform for building intelligent, secure, and scalable experiences across Microsoft 365, with adoption growing and feedback from customers and partners directly shaping our priorities. Following the December release...

Welcome to the February edition of What’s new in Microsoft Teams. This month’s updates are all about helping you stay in flow: getting the most useful information to you faster, and reducing a few everyday frictions. Take custom meeting recap templates: now you can choose from a few different preset formats, or prompt Copilot to shape your AI-generated notes to match your work style .

At Microsoft, we empower organizations to achieve more through intelligent communication, inclusive collaboration, and connected workplace experiences. Our customers are looking for scaled, widespread access to powerful tools that enable workforces to interact and communicate with more intelligence and precision. To facilitate that, we’re announcing Teams licensing updates that make it easier for customers to unlock their full communication and collaboration potential.

Welcome to the February 2026 edition of What's New in Microsoft 365 Copilot! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements to keep Microsoft 365 admins up to date with Copilot features that help your users be more productive and efficient in the apps they use every day. Also new this month—the Microsoft Agent 365 blog and discussion space on Microsoft Tech Community.

Today, we’re excited to announce that the new usage page in the Power Platform admin center (PPAC) is available in public preview! This release delivers a modern, centralized way to understand how Microsoft Power Apps, Power Automate, and Copilot Studio are being used across your organization, empowering administrators with the reliable insights they need to...

Agentic AI in Dynamics 365 Sales reduces manual CRM work by turning unstructured information into actionable insights, helping sellers capture data faster, explore pipeline trends with natural language, and focus more on meaningful selling.

From procurement and production to fulfillment and customer satisfaction, inventory-to-deliver impacts every aspect of the supply chain.

Answering machine detection, SIP call outcomes, and predictive dialing are now available for proactive voice scenarios.

Introducing the Multimodal Agent Score (MAS)—a unified, absolute measure of end‑to‑end conversational quality designed for AI agents operating across modalities. MAS is grounded in a simple observation: every service interaction, whether handled by a human or an AI agent, progresses through three fundamental stages. First, the agent must understand the input, accurately interpreting content, intent, and contextual signals.

Quality Evaluation Agent in in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 is an AI-led evaluation framework that empowers teams to deliver consistent, scalable quality oversight and automate quality evaluations across customer interactions.

We’re excited to announce that code apps in Power Apps are now generally available, empowering developers and IT alike at a moment when organizations are building more custom applications than ever.

Apps, agents and Copilot Public preview: M365 Copilot chat in model-driven apps Copilot chat is now available directly inside apps built with Power Apps, bringing the intelligence of Microsoft 365 Copilot into the flow of business processes.

Companies that want AI to meaningfully change how they operate need the people who are doing the work every day to be able to shape the systems they rely on.

See how new updates to computer‑using agents improve UI automation with secure credentials, detailed monitoring, and scalable Cloud PC capacity.

We’re pleased to introduce the public preview of the Power Pages plugin for GitHub Copilot CLI and Claude Code. With this plugin, you simply describe the site you want in natural language. The plugin takes care of everything else, from project scaffolding and Dataverse setup to API integrations, permissions, and deployment.

This release delivers quality and reliability improvements across nine modern controls in canvas apps, including Combo Box, Text Input, and Date Picker. Focused on real‑world performance, consistent behavior, and production readiness, these updates strengthen the foundation makers rely on as canvas apps evolve alongside AI.

Azure Databricks Agent Bricks knowledge assistant empowers you to create, deploy, and manage AI agents directly within the Azure Databricks platform, using unified data and AI capabilities. This feature simplifies agent development by providing prebuilt c...

The general purpose Dasv7 and Dalsv7, memory-optimized Easv7, and compute-optimized Fasv7, Falsv7, Famsv7 VMs, are now generally available with and without local disk support. These VMs are available in the following Azure regions: Australia East, Central...

From GitHub Copilot AI assistance to built-in model management, Azure is helping devs and enterprises unlock the full potential of PostgreSQL.

Introducing Supervisor Agent, now Generally Available in Azure Databricks. Supervisor Agent is part of the Azure Databricks Agent Bricks Platform. Supervisor Agent brings a breakthrough in agentic intelligence—using a dynamic supervisor pattern that under...

While today’s cloud delivers extraordinary flexibility, the rapid growth of modern applications and AI workloads has introduced levels of scale and complexity that traditional operations were not designed for.

Kubernetes version 1.34 is now generally available for AKS. This release introduces 58 upstream enhancements, including 23 Stable features, 22 Beta features, and 13 Alpha features.These enhancements help technical practitioners improve cluster operations,

Modern cloud systems are expected to deliver more than uptime. Customers expect consistent performance, the ability to withstand disruption, and confidence that recovery is predictable and intentional.

Azure Functions support for .NET 10 is generally available, enabling production use of the latest .NET runtime for serverless applications. This support was introduced as part of the Azure Functions Ignite 2025 updates. .NET 10 is supported using the iso...

Budget Bytes is a new series is designed to inspire developers to build affordable, production-quality AI applications on Azure with a budget of $25 or less.

In late-February 2026, the following updates and enhancements were made to Azure SQL: Introducing Search Database Objects in the MSSQL extension for Visual Studio Code. Instantly find tables, views, functions, and procedures with full scripti...

Azure Premium SSD v2 is now available in a third Availability Zone in New Zealand North. Azure Premium SSD v2 disk, a next-generation general-purpose block storage option for Azure virtual machines, offers sub-millisecond latencies and exceptional price...

The DCesv6, DCedsv6, ECesv6, and ECedsv6 series are Azure’s next generation of confidential Virtual Machines (VMs) based on 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors with Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel® TDX). These new confidential VMs help organizations to...

With Claude Opus 4.6 now available in Microsoft Foundry, developers can delegate complex tasks end‑to‑end and trust the AI to execute independently in production.

The SQL community is gathering in Atlanta this March for the first‑ever SQLCon, co‑located with FabCon, the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, March 16-20.

As the demand for AI and data-intensive computing is on the rise, the need for efficient and reliable power delivery is critical.

OneDrive and SharePoint (ODSP) shortcuts let you use your existing Microsoft 365 files directly in OneLake without copying or moving them. This gives analytics, BI, and AI workloads a unified, governed view of both structured data and documents. This eliminates duplication and silos while enabling powerful scenarios like combining spreadsheets with Lakehouse data, indexing documents for AI, and optionally transforming files …

ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) is a widely adopted standard that enables client applications to connect to and work with data from databases and big data platforms. The Microsoft ODBC Driver for Microsoft Fabric Data Engineering (Preview) – an enterprise-grade connector that brings powerful, secure, reliable and flexible Spark SQL connectivity to your .NET, Python, and …

Introduction In today’s data landscape, as organizations scale their analytical workloads, the demand for faster, more cost-efficient computation continues to rise. Apache Spark has long been the backbone of largescale data processing with its in‑memory processing and powerful APIs, but today’s workloads demand even better performance. Microsoft Fabric addresses this challenge with the Native Execution …

How much time do you spend navigating to the same data sources when building dataflows? Data preparation is an iterative process—you often return to the same sources as you refine your dataflows, add new transformations, or create similar workflows. If you find yourself repeatedly connecting to the same tables, files, or databases, the Recent data …

Most data estates are not single platform, and that is not a problem. The challenge is what usually comes next: extra copies, extra pipelines, extra refresh schedules, and endless debates about which version is the truth. Today, we are introducing OneLake catalog federation (Beta) in Azure Databricks Lakehouse Federation, which simplifies multi-engine analytics by enabling …

If you’ve been on X (formerly Twitter) the past two weeks, you’ve probably seen or at least felt the shockwaves. Matt Shumer, CEO of HyperWrite and co-founder of OthersideAI, published a 5,000-word essay titled “Something Big Is Happening” that has now been viewed over 73 million times. In it, he compares this moment in AI …

SQL Pool Insights is a powerful new monitoring capability in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse designed to give you actionable insights into SQL pool performance and resource utilization. This feature is part of the Query Insights (QI) schema, extending the monitoring experience customers already know and love. SQL Pool Insights addresses a long-standing customer need: understanding whether your pools are …

Why process database changes in real-time Modern applications don’t just store data—they react to it. Orders are placed, inventory levels change, prices are updated. Each of these changes can be a signal that something needs to happen now: update a dashboard, trigger a workflow, or feed an operational application. That is why many organizations are …

Welcome to the February 2026 Microsoft Fabric update! This month brings a wide range of enhancements across the Fabric platform—from improvements to the OneLake Catalog and developer experiences, to meaningful updates in Data Engineering, Data Factory, Real‑Time Intelligence, and more. Whether you’re building, operating, or scaling solutions in Fabric, there’s plenty here to explore. And …

If you use editor productivity extensions for Visual Studio 2026, there’s good news—they can now load faster! Extension developers with existing MEF-based editor productivity extensions should read this blog to learn about recent changes and how they might be affected. We introduced VisualStudio.Extensibility to simplify the creation of Visual Studio extensions for developers. Previously, handling threads in VSSDK-based extensions...

We are currently living through the “fragmentation phase” of the AI revolution. If you’re a developer, you know the drill: You have Claude Code open for reasoning. You have ChatGPT open for logic checks. Then you drop into your terminal to actually build the thing—manually copy-pasting context between three different windows. We call this the...

Refactoring at scale is a time-consuming and error-prone process for developers. In large codebases, developers have relied on manual searches and incremental edits across multiple files to accomplish these tasks. Modern development workflows depend on fast and accurate code navigation to avoid these pitfalls. When developers refactor existing code, explore unfamiliar areas of a large...

In January, we experienced two incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.

Discover GitHub Agentic Workflows, now in technical preview. Build automations using coding agents in GitHub Actions to handle triage, documentation, code quality, and more.

Let’s dig into the 2025’s open source data on GitHub to see what we can learn about the future.

Agents in Visual Studio now go beyond a single general-purpose assistant. We’re shipping a set of curated preset agents that tap into deep IDE capabilities; debugging, profiling, testing alongside a framework for building your own custom agents tailored to how your team works. Built in agents Each preset agent is designed around a specific developer...

Most multi-agent workflow failures come down to missing structure, not model capability. Learn the three engineering patterns that make agent systems reliable.

This month’s Visual Studio update continues our focus on helping you move faster and stay in flow, with practical improvements across AI assistance, debugging, testing, and modernization. Building on the momentum from January’s editor updates, the February release brings smarter diagnostics and targeted support for real world development scenarios, from WinForms maintenance to C++ modernization.

If you want to skip the explain and get started super quick with adoption + impact insights, use gh-devlake to deploy a GitHub Copilot impact dashboard in a few CLI commands. So! You’ve rolled out GitHub Copilot to your engineering teams. You’ve got the built-in dashboards. You know how many seats are assigned, what the...

GitHub Copilot coding agent now includes a model picker, self-review, built-in security scanning, custom agents, and CLI handoff. Here's what's new and how to use it.

A hands-on guide to using GitHub Copilot CLI to move from intent to reviewable changes, and how that work flows naturally into your IDE and GitHub.

Small meeting rooms have long been overlooked in the modern workplace—they get heavy use, but always seem to be too costly to invest in improving at scale. Until now. To address this challenge, the Microsoft Teams product group worked with Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, to create Microsoft Teams Rooms Express Install for compact...

Running an IT operation at a global scale is a daunting task, even for Microsoft. Comprised of millions of connected devices and virtual networks, our complex IT infrastructure places high demands on our staff and resources worldwide. That’s where the promise of AI transformation comes in. We at Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, have...

Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot: Our guide for leaders Generative AI has captured the world’s attention, and businesses are taking notice. According to our annual Microsoft Work Trends report, 70% of people would delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workloads. Engage with our experts! Customers or Microsoft account team representatives from...

Microsoft is a global company, with more than 200,000 employees working in offices around the world. The working conditions and rights of those employees are governed by the laws that apply to that country or region. In parts of Europe and elsewhere, relationships with our employees are governed by works councils. These councils play a...

Since its launch in 2023, Microsoft 365 Copilot has evolved from a single AI assistant into a full squad of powerful AI sidekicks, including chat, search, agents and many more. And with the introduction of agents, Copilot can now also act on your behalf—agents extend the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot beyond conversation, giving you...

When we gave our Microsoft 365 Copilot agents a simple way to connect to tools and data with Model Context Protocol (MCP), the work spoke for itself. Answers got sharper. Delivery sped up. New patterns of development emerged across teams working with Copilot agents. That ease of communication, however, comes with a responsibility: Protect the...

At Microsoft, we manage a large, diverse device estate, with more than 1 million devices in use by employees and teams across our global corporate network. For years, we stitched together insights across multiple tools, wrote custom queries, and maintained fragile reports just to answer basic questions. This approach slowed investigations and delayed patch targeting.

Generative AI technology is creating unprecedented opportunities to improve your business efficiency, fuel innovation, and gain a competitive edge. Given these benefits, equipping your workforce with the skills to effectively use AI-powered tools is a high priority. At the same time, the rapid evolution of AI technology, along with the potential impacts on your established processes, means that matching people with the right skills requires a deliberate approach.

AI is driving measurable ROI for telecoms, with Microsoft showcasing new capabilities and unified intelligence at MWC 2026.

See how financial institutions are using AI agents to reduce friction, resolve disputes faster, streamline onboarding, and deliver secure, intelligent customer experiences at scale.

Some Microsoft employee groups can’t afford to be visible. For years, we supported email‑based communities internally here at Microsoft whose very existence depends on anonymity. These include employee resource groups, confidential project teams, and other sensitive audiences where simply revealing who belongs can create real‑world risk. Traditional distribution groups make membership discoverable by default. Owners...

February 2026 brings major updates to Microsoft Credentials—four new Microsoft Certifications and six new Microsoft Applied Skills now generally available (GA). Designed to help you keep your skills current in today’s AI-powered workplace, they demonstrate the AI abilities that employers need in not only technical but also business roles. In this roundup, we cover what’s new, what’s changing, and what’s coming up.