Microsoft Technology Briefing - July 2025

Black Hat USA returns to the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas with a 6-day program. The event will open with four days of specialized cybersecurity Trainings (August 2-5), with courses for all skill levels. Also taking place during Black Hat USA is Summit Day on Tuesday, August 5, followed by the two-day main conference on August 6 & 7 featuring more than 100 selected Briefings, dozens of open-source tool demos in Arsenal, a robust Business Hall, networking and social events, and...

We are delighted to invite you to an exclusive CISO Roundtable hosted by Microsoft on 4 September 2025 in Stockholm, Sweden. This intimate gathering is designed for a select group of our top customers to engage in a forward-looking conversation about the future of cybersecurity in Sweden. You’ll have the unique opportunity to connect directly with Michael Landolt, Microsoft’s EMEA Chief Information Security Officer, who will share strategic insights and lead a candid discussion on emerging...

Join us at the next European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference #FabConEurope! 15-18 Sep 2025 in Vienna, Austria – the largest Microsoft tech conference in Europe. In partnership with Microsoft, the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference is brought to you by the team behind ESPC, Europe’s premier Microsoft 365 Conference and the European Power Platform Conference.

Get ready to dive into the future of AI with our full-day Agent Hack on Azure. This hands-on event is designed for technical teams and IT decision-makers looking to accelerate their AI transformation journey through agentic solutions built on Azure AI Foundry. Location: Microsoft Office, Regeringsgatan 25.

AI and Agents are revolutionizing how organizations operate, far beyond traditional productivity. From enhanced decision making to creating additional value, such as automation, leaders are turning to AI and agentic AI to fill the capacity gap. At the Microsoft Copilot & AI Agents Summit, you will discover the tools and strategies that are empowering businesses to drive transformation today. Location: Microsoft Office, Regeringsgatan 25.

AI and Agents are revolutionizing how organizations operate, far beyond traditional productivity. From enhanced decision making to creating additional value, such as automation, leaders are turning to AI and agentic AI to fill the capacity gap. At the Microsoft Copilot & AI Agents Summit Digital, you will discover the tools and strategies that are empowering businesses to drive transformation today.

This roundtable is designed for the emerging role of Customer Experience and Journey specialists. At Microsoft, we understand the complexity of your mission and have built our platform with your needs in mind since moving to the cloud in 2016. Join us for a day of inspiration and discussion focused on mastering the full customer journey, from the first email open to the final service case, powered by a unified Customer 360 view with zero integration hassle.

GitHub’s two-day developer event celebrating innovation, collaboration, and the boundless potential of AI-powered development.

Ignite possibilities. Get the edge you need to drive impact in the era of AI. Join us to bolster your knowledge, build connections, and explore emerging technologies. San Francisco, Moscone Center, November 18–21, 2025 (optional pre-day November 17).

At just 13 years old, Dylan became the youngest security researcher to collaborate with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). His journey into cybersecurity is inspiring—rooted in curiosity, resilience, and a deep desire to make a difference. Early beginnings: From scratch to security Dylan’s fascination with technology began early. Like many kids, he started with Scratch—a visual programming language for making simple games and animations.

Congratulations to all the researchers recognized in this quarter’s Microsoft Researcher Recognition Program leaderboard! Thank you to everyone for your hard work and continued partnership to secure customers. The top three researchers of the 2025 Q2 Security Researcher Leaderboard are wkai, Brad Schlintz (nmdhkr), and 0x140ce! Check out the full list of researchers recognized this quarter here.

​In this blog you will hear directly from Microsoft’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for Experiences and Devices, Naresh Kannan, about eliminating high-privileged access across all Microsoft 365 applications. This blog is part of an ongoing series where our Deputy CISOs share their thoughts on what is most important in their respective domains.

Employing a Zero Trust strategy is an effective way to modernize security infrastructure to protect against ever evolving security challenges.

Announcing the general availability of Microsoft Security Copilot capabilities for IT with Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Entra, offering AI-powered efficiency and enhanced security for your operations.

The Microsoft Researcher Recognition Program offers public thanks and recognition to security researchers who help protect our customers through discovering and sharing security vulnerabilities under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure. Today, we are excited to recognize this year’s Most Valuable Researchers (MVRs), based on the total number of points earned for each valid report.

We are honored to be recognized once again as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection Platforms—our sixth consecutive time. Microsoft was recognized for its completeness of vision and ability to execute, which we believe underscores the effectiveness of Defender for Endpoint in the face of an ever-shifting threat environment.​

Microsoft believes in transparently sharing performance data from Microsoft Defender for Office 365, and other ecosystem providers, to help customers evaluate email security solutions and make decisions to layer for defense in depth.

Microsoft will spotlight its AI-first, end-to-end security platform at Black Hat USA 2025. Read our blog post for details on how to connect with us there and what to expect from our participation.

Revision Change Date 1.0 Information published 07/19/25 2.0 Clarified affected SharePoint product in summary 07/20/25 Added fix availability guidance Provided additional protections guidance regarding: Upgrade SharePoint products to supported versions (if required) Install July 2025 Security Updates Rotate machine keys Updated Microsoft Defender detections and protections section: Documented additional MDE alerts Mapping exposure via Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management Documented...

Microsoft has observed two named Chinese nation-state actors, Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon, exploiting vulnerabilities targeting internet-facing SharePoint servers. In addition, we have observed another China-based threat actor, tracked as Storm-2603, exploiting these vulnerabilities. Microsoft has released new comprehensive security updates for all supported versions of SharePoint Server (Subscription Edition, 2019, and 2016) that protect customers against these new vulnerabilities.

We’re evolving our industry-leading Security Incidents and Event Management solution (SIEM), Microsoft Sentinel, to include a modern, cost-effective data lake. By unifying all your security data, Microsoft Sentinel data lake, in public preview, accelerates AI adoption and drives unparalleled visibility, empowering teams to detect and respond faster. With Sentinel data lake, you’re no longer forced to choose between retaining critical data and staying within budget. ​

Hi everyone, and welcome to the June edition of What’s new in Teams. You might have noticed a different name and picture under the title. I’m Kerry Perez Heffernan, a Director in the Teams team. Pete Daderko, who you know as the previous author of this blog, asked me to take over the honor of sharing the monthly updates with you all. I’m excited to get started!

Rapid advancements in generative AI are unlocking extraordinary opportunities for organizations to reimagine how they work. With Microsoft 365 Copilot, teams are collaborating faster, creating with greater impact, and scaling innovation like never before. We know this kind of transformation brings real complexity. As leaders push forward, they’re also navigating...

AI presents both a once-in-a-generation opportunity and a challenge to help every employee conquer the infinite workday.

Ever imagined OneNote as more than just a place for your notes? What if it could help you organize your thinking, bring together files from across Microsoft 365, and even help you reason through complex tasks and ideas with the power of AI? By bringing Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks to OneNote, we’re redefining how you work in OneNote by turning it into a...

Frontline organizations succeed when the right people are in the right place and the right work gets done—every shift, every day. In Session 4 of Microsoft Frontline Fridays we’ll show how Shifts and the Planner app (Tasks publishing) inside Microsoft Teams replace paper rosters, email chains, and manual check-lists with an integrated, real-time system that...

Welcome to the June 2025 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. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new this month: Copilot Control System: Updated Copilot usage metrics...

Last November, we announced our plan to unify Microsoft Stream and Microsoft Clipchamp to create a seamless video experience in Microsoft 365 . This unified platform combines powerful video editing from Clipchamp with enterprise-grade capabilities from Stream—all under the Clipchamp brand. The brand transition and consolidation of the Microsoft 365 video experience has delivered a modern...

At Microsoft, we believe AI should work for you—not the other way around. That’s why we’re introducing memory in Copilot, a new capability that makes your Copilot smarter, more helpful, and more in tune with how you work. What is memory in Copilot? Memory in Copilot is a new feature that allows Microsoft 365 Copilot to remember key facts about you—like your preferences, working style, and...

As AI agents become central to how we build and interact with modern productivity apps, developers need tools that are flexible, standard-based, and deeply integrated with AI. That’s where the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit MCP Server comes in. This is a local Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that acts as a bridge between your AI coding agents and...

The Microsoft Copilot specialization showcases your expertise providing consulting and professional services around Copilot. The Microsoft Copilot specialization demonstrates your experience and capabilities with Copilot, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, Copilot Studio, and agents. Partners with this specialization can help their customers: Explore AI Advisory Services...

This session will spotlight the Employee Home Experience—a personalized, mobile-first dashboard in Microsoft Teams that brings together everything your frontline teams need in one place: tasks, news, announcements, and company resources. REGISTER HERE FOR ALL FUTURE SESSIONS: aka.ms/frontlinefridays Pick the time that works for...

This post was updated on 7/24 to correct the web domain in a graphic. Imagine a world where finding the information you need is as effortless as asking a question. Today, we’re excited to announce general availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot Search - search that transforms the way you access knowledge. In today's fast-paced digital landscape, the sheer volume of data can be overwhelming.

Managing multiple websites across environments can be overwhelming, especially when trying to stay on top of expiring sites, performance gaps, and security configurations. This is where the Action Center in Power Pages Home comes in. It offers a streamlined, centralized experience to help makers and site owners take timely and effective action across environments. What...

DLP (Data Loss Prevention) for Power Automate enables administrators to manage data access from both cloud and desktop Power Automate flows, as well as agent flows in Copilot Studio. Administrators configure Data policies to permit or restrict connectors and actions from being accessed by flows. We are thrilled to announce a series of recent enhancements...

Power Pages now offers support for Single-Page Applications (SPA), empowering developers to build modern, dynamic web experiences on the platform. With this new capability, developers can seamlessly integrate React-based, component-driven frontends into Power Pages, while taking advantage of AI-assisted tools like GitHub Copilot. This enhancement streamlines pro-code development workflows and unlocks advanced customization, all while maintaining the security and scalability of the Power Pages...

As AI becomes integral to business workflows, the Dataverse Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server offers a foundational approach to integrating large language models with enterprise data. Whether you’re building with Microsoft Copilot Studio, Claude desktop, or GitHub Copilot in VS Code, the Dataverse MCP Server unlocks a new level of integration between AI and data.

AI-powered Development Check out the latest updates in this month’s Power Apps Pulse! This month we’re giving you tools to share plans with your project stakeholders, we’ve added a maker setting to tailor your authoring experience, and we want *your* feedback about User Defined Functions and User Defined Types! Take a look at these updates...

One year ago, Microsoft launched its Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution, powered by AI. This is built on top of the existing Dynamics 365 Customer Service capabilities. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the Desktop companion application (DCA) to further seamlessly allow service representatives and customers to speak more reliably and efficiently.

In customer service, efficient workload distribution is vital for high customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Unified routing capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Contact Center help organizations continuously fine-tune their operations. Least active routing assigns work items based on when service representatives finish their last conversation. Initially used for voice channels, this...

In today’s fast-moving world, it’s not enough to just hear what customers say—you need to understand what they really mean. Whether they’re talking to a voice agent (IVR) or chatting with a virtual agent, it’s important that the technology behind the scenes can truly understand them. That’s where Natural Language Understanding (NLU) comes in. It...

Historically, Power Platform has empowered administrators through the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC). This UX-first experience offered a seamless, intuitive interface for managing environments, automating everyday tasks, and discovering new capabilities within the platform. Today, we’re taking a bold step forward. We’re transforming Power Platform into an API-first ecosystem—where every feature in PPAC is backed...

The 2025 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Copilot offerings introduces new capabilities that help organizations harness the potential of AI.

In today’s retail landscape, payments have evolved into a strategic inflection point—where customer expectations, brand trust, and operational efficiency converge. No longer just the final step in a transaction, payments shape the overall customer experience and directly influence conversion, satisfaction, and loyalty. As consumers engage across physical stores, mobile apps, and digital platforms, they demand...

IRS 1099 reporting in the U.S. is undergoing a significant transformation with Microsoft introducing a new standalone IRS Forms app in Business Central. This new approach replaces the traditional method of using preprinted forms with an electronic filing system designed to improve compliance and simplify technical processes.

Azure Accelerate is a simplified offering designed to fuel transformation with experts and investments across the cloud and AI journey.

Azure Virtual Network Manager IP address management feature, a feature designed to enhance your network management, is generally available. In complex network environments, managing IP addresses effectively is essential. This feature centralizes IP planni...

Microsoft has announced the General Availability of Azure FXv2-series Virtual Machines (VMs), which are powered by the 5th Generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8573C processor. These VMs offer significant improvements in CPU performance, memory capacity, and...

Azure File Sync now offers two dedicated, built-in RBAC roles, designed to enhance security and operational efficiency for businesses managing file synchronization across on-premises and cloud environments. These new roles, Azure File Sync Administrator a...

Announcing the public preview of Deep Research in Azure AI Foundry—an API and SDK-based offering of OpenAI’s advanced agentic research capability.

Azure Backup now supports migration to the enhanced policy for Azure VM backups using standard policy. The migration of VM backups to enhanced policy enables you to schedule multiple backups per day (up to every 4 hours), retain snapshots for longer durat...

Azure Firewall now supports ingestion-time transformation of logs in Log Analytics, enabling selective logging and advanced filtering. Why it matters: For customers using Log Analytics to analyse firewall logs, the cost of log ingestion and storage itself...

A Search Job is an asynchronous query that runs on any data in your Log Analytics workspace, including data from the long-term retention period, making the results available for further queries in a new Analytics table within your workspace. We’ve recent...

Azure Managed Lustre now supports Virtual Network (VNet) Encryption, enabling encryption of data in transit between Azure Managed Lustre and client virtual machines. This feature helps customers meet compliance requirements for data confidentiality in reg...

Announcing the general availability of Summary rules in Log Analytics. Summary rules let you summarize high-ingestion-rate streams across Analytics, Basic, or Auxiliary plans, providing robust analysis, dashboarding, and long-term reporting experiences on...

Kubernetes network solutions are challenging to plan due to rapidly evolving business needs. AKS users often face difficulties balancing simplicity, security, and scalability, while environmental changes further increase management costs. Many AKS users n...

Following our 2024 announcement to modernize Azure Resource Manager throttling, we are announcing that Azure Resource Manager will be bringing parity between public and sovereign clouds by the end of 2026. This update will ensure that the same throttling...

Forrester Research shows how Azure helps enterprises scale generative AI securely, overcoming infrastructure and compliance challenges to unlock real business value.

Azure Accelerate is a simplified offering designed to fuel transformation with experts and investments across the cloud and AI journey.

Choosing Azure Databricks can streamline your entire data lifecycle within a single, scalable environment.

We’re excited to announce a new migration experience in Azure Arc to simplify and accelerate SQL Server migration. This new experience, now in preview, is powered by Azure Database Migration Service.

Overview Microsoft Fabric is officially sunsetting Default Semantic Models. This change is part of our ongoing efforts to simplify and improve the manageability, deployment, and governance of Fabric items such as warehouse, lakehouse, SQL database, and mirrored databases. Why the Change? Default Semantic Models were initially designed to provide a lightweight, out-of-the-box experience—automatically generating models …

Copy Job is now the preferred solution in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory for simplified data movement, whether you’re moving data across clouds, from on-premises systems, or between different services. With robust support for both batch and incremental copying, it offers the flexibility to tackle a wide range of scenarios with ease. We continuously improve Copy …

The Microsoft Fabric tooling ecosystem has evolved in recent months as both the Fabric CLI and the Terraform Provider for Microsoft Fabric have become generally available, providing new opportunities for automating Fabric Administration tasks for those already experienced with Terraform for declarative deployment of infrastructure as code. This short blog series will provide practical guidance …

Additional authors: Joanne Wong The preview of the integration between Fabric data agents and Microsoft Copilot Studio is now available, introducing a robust capability that enables agents to interoperate seamlessly across tools. This enhancement is designed to streamline the development, deployment, and scaling of intelligent agents across enterprise data environments, reinforcing automation and extensibility within …

Celebrating Enhanced Flexibility in the WDK Sample We’re thrilled to announce a major step forward for the Workload Development Kit (WDK): developers can now transform our workload sample into their favorite programming languages. Whether you prefer Python, Java, Node.js, or Go, we’ve made it easier to start building innovative workloads with the tools and languages …

Last month we introduced the SQL analytics endpoint Metadata Sync REST API in preview, and we’re excited to announce that this API is now Generally available (GA). With this API you can programmatically trigger a refresh of your SQL analytics endpoint to keep tables in sync with any changes made in your lakehouse, native and mirrored databases, …

How Contoso uses MQTT sensors, public weather feeds and Fabric Real-Time Intelligence to monitor smart buildings. Jointly authored by Alicia Li and Arindam Chatterjee Why Real-Time Stream Processing Matters In the age of AI, as organizations embrace intelligent systems and data-driven decision-making, the ability to act on data the moment it arrives is unlocking new …

Welcome to the July 2025 edition of the Fabric Influencers Spotlight, a recurring monthly post here to shine a bright light on the places on the internet where Microsoft MVPs & Fabric Super Users are doing some amazing work on all aspects of Microsoft Fabric. The Microsoft Fabric Community team has created the Fabric Influencers Spotlight to …

While the promise of AI continues to generate momentum, many organizations face a familiar challenge: getting AI projects beyond the prototype phase. According to Gartner, only 30% of AI initiatives make it into production, and RAND reports that up to 80% fail to deliver expected outcomes. The problem isn’t model quality — it’s platform readiness. To deliver AI successfully, you need...

Announcing the public preview of Deep Research in Azure AI Foundry—an API and SDK-based offering of OpenAI’s advanced agentic research capability.

We obsessively track our steps, heart rate, and sleep – but what about our mental state? 🧠 Most of us navigate life blind to how stress, focus, and cognitive overload show up in our physiology. Tools to help capture cognitive indicators can help us change how we think, feel and act in high stress situations for the better.

Explore how you can set Copilot coding agent up for success with custom instruction and Copilot setup steps.

That idea you've been sitting on? The domain you bought at 2AM? A silly or serious side project? This summer, we invite you to build it — for the joy, for the vibes, For the Love of Code 🧡

Strengthen your repositories against actions workflow injections — one of the most common vulnerabilities.

Open source software is critical infrastructure, but it’s underfunded. With a new feasibility study, GitHub’s developer policy team is building a coalition of policymakers and industry to close the maintenance funding gap.

Flash enables rapid detection of issues originating from the Azure platform, helping teams respond quickly to infrastructure-related disruptions.

How using GitHub’s free inference API can make your AI-powered open source software more accessible.

Build a custom Azure DevOps extension that eliminates the complexity of JWT generation and token management, enabling powerful automation and enhanced security controls.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables AI agents to connect to external tools and data sources without having to implement API-specific connectors. Whether you’re extracting key data from invoices, summarizing support tickets, or searching for code snippets across a large codebase, MCP provides a standardized way to connect LLMs with the context they need.

Customers are looking to modernize their application on cloud and ask us for guidance on which Azure container services to choose. Should you choose A or B container services or A+B container services? Some choose both (A + B) or use A or B approach. Instead of trying to force fit applications on a container...

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service is helping our Human Resources team reinvent how they support our employees here at Microsoft. The built-in, AI-powered capabilities of Dynamics 365 Customer Service are dropping support resolution times, injecting intelligent automation into our support workflow, improving the support experience for our employees, and raising the bar for AI-powered...

In a global organization, it’s easy for crucial communications to miss the mark as they disperse across international teams. Communications from core corporate teams like Security, HR, or Employee Listening might suffer from fragmentation and poor localization. Employees might tune out centralized messaging due to the volume of campaigns. And local communicators might feel overburdened...

We’re using agent-based AI capabilities supported by a continuous improvement (CI) mindset and a comprehensive approach to security to redefine how we meet the support needs of our employees here at Microsoft. How are we doing this? We—Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization—are using autonomous AI agents built on platforms such as Microsoft Copilot Studio...

Microsoft is enhancing research and analytics with AI for investment banks, asset management firms, and financial data and analytics providers.

Microsoft Digital stories The pace and intensity of work today is faster than ever, and tools like Microsoft Outlook are evolving quickly to help us keep up, including the coming addition of one new Outlook feature—Prioritize My Inbox—that has the potential to revolutionize how we interact with our inboxes thanks to the integration of Microsoft...

The Cloud Native team at Azure is working to make AI on Kubernetes more cost-effective and approachable for a broader range of users.

You can now interactively debug Hyperlight guest micro-VMs. Attach the GNU Debugger at runtime to step through the code.

AI and digital twins help CPG brands scale content, cut costs, and personalize experiences—transforming marketing workflows and accelerating innovation.

Microsoft Digital stories Like many large organizations, our support team develops thousands of troubleshooting guides, self-help resources, knowledge base articles, and process documents to guide our support engineers in helping customers with technical issues. As we have grown over the years here at Microsoft, and with the continuous release of new products and features, these...

AI’s rapid evolution is reshaping how work gets done, and that means it’s also transforming the job market. The Adecco Group , a global leader in workforce solutions that supports more than 100,000 companies in over 60 countries and regions, understands firsthand the increasing demand for AI skills. The company recognizes a clear need to skill up for and adopt AI pervasively.

Microsoft Digital stories When you’re rolling Microsoft 365 Copilot out for your organization, there’s plenty to consider. What are your priority scenarios? Who should lead your adoption efforts? What’s the best way to help employees learn to use it? But there’s another important question you should ask: How can you make it fun? Within Microsoft...

Microsoft Digital stories Providing technical support at an enterprise of our size here at Microsoft is a constant balancing act between speed, quality, and scalability. Systems grow more complex, user expectations continue to rise, and traditional support models often struggle to keep up. Beyond the usual apps and systems everyone uses, many of our employees...