Microsoft Technology Briefing - July 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.

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.

Learn why KuppingerCole named Microsoft a Leader in its Leadership Compass: Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms report.

A macOS ClickFix campaign shifted tactics from openly serving infostealer lures to hiding them behind a browser-fingerprinting gate. The change makes malicious infrastructure harder to detect while giving defenders new hunting opportunities.

A credential-stealing worm hidden in more than 400 compromised npm packages automatically spread across software ecosystems by republishing malicious updates. This analysis details the attack chain, affected environments, and practical guidance for detection, hunting, and remediation.

Microsoft expands its Zero Trust for AI strategy to enhance security for AI and DevSecOps environments with new tools and guidance.

Microsoft Defender automatically isolated a compromised QNET endpoint in 128 seconds, stopping a multi-stage attack before the payload could persist or spread.

Storm-2945, a sub-cluster of the Russian threat actor Midnight Blizzard, has been observed compromising the sign-in portals of hospitality-related organizations such as hotels since May 2026 in order to deliver malware to travelers and steal credentials in an operation we call CaptiveCrunch.

This month’s updates help security and IT teams secure their AI environments, use AI to defend, and strengthen the foundations that AI-powered operations depend on.

Learn how better questions, trusted AI, and human judgment help security leaders make confident decisions and build resilient systems.

The physics of cybersecurity are changing. Introducing security's new cyber stack: Project Perception.

Microsoft's External Red Team Alliance (EXTRA) is a global AI security initiative designed to advance AI safety research and red teaming. By partnering with universities, researchers, and regional experts, EXTRA helps identify emerging AI risks, improve security testing, and strengthen the resilience of frontier AI systems.

Remote Event Receivers in SharePoint Online are retiring. Starting July 1, 2027, all remote event receivers will stop firing events, including those registered using Microsoft Entra applications.

It's hard to believe May is over already! You may have noticed this edition of What's new in Teams is landing a few days later than usual — that's intentional. We're publishing alongside Microsoft Build , our annual developer conference where we showcase the latest in AI, agents, and the tools that help developers. It's one of the most energizing weeks of the year, full of announcements...

Mailbox requirement set 1.16 is now generally available for Outlook add-ins. This release reflects our continued investment in closing the gap between COM/VSTO and web add-ins, with a focus on message and information security. Mailbox 1.16 introduces APIs and platform updates that enable your add-in to: Decrypt protected messages and attachments in an event-based workflow.

Welcome to the June 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: User capabilities: General availability for Copilot Cowork Expanded citations...

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 intelligent call delegation as an AI-powered experience that can answer your incoming Teams calls and schedule follow-up appointments on your behalf.

The way we work with AI is evolving rapidly, and so is the way organizations manage and scale those experiences. If you're exploring Copilot Cowork , navigating Copilot Credits , or looking for guidance on consumption-based AI experiences, you won't want to miss our upcoming live event. 🎙️ Live AMA: Understanding Copilot Cowork and Managing Copilot Credits...

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.

**UPDATE** Please see new announcement here: Update: Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot | Microsoft Community Hub We are excited to announce Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new web search control that gives organizations more choice over which external web sources can be used to ground Copilot responses. As customers bring Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat (Copilot)...

Thirty days. Twenty-five users. One clear path to AI. For small and medium-sized businesses, AI is no longer a someday conversation, it's a right-now decision. SMB customers aren't asking whether AI matters anymore; they're asking how to put it to work in ways that are practical, fast, and secure. The hard part isn't interest. It's the starting line.

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...

Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service—our eighth consecutive year with this recognition. We’re also excited to share that we are again positioned highest on the evaluation's Ability to Execute axis and furthest on the Completeness of Vision axis. *Figure 1: Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service Microsoft Teams is the AI-powered platform for work, and we’re grateful to the hundreds of millions of...

Latest Dataverse improvements: expanding the plugin across more coding agent marketplaces, connecting agents to more tools through MCP, certifying partner MCPs for trusted adoption, and bringing internal MCPs under enterprise governance.

Discover the latest Dynamics 365 Field Service Schedule Board enhancements designed to help schedulers work faster. Explore Move To, Reassign To, Map View, week numbers, and partial cancellation capabilities that simplify scheduling and improve operational flexibility.

We’re excited to introduce the public preview of Native Dataverse Authorization (Enhanced Authorization) in Power Pages. This release brings a significant advancement in how external user access is secured and managed. Authorization is now enforced directly within Dataverse, providing stronger security, improved visibility, and more precise control while keeping the maker experience unchanged.

Microsoft is expanding scheduling choices in Dynamics 365 Field Service with the Solvares VISITOUR accelerator. The solution adds advanced scheduling optimization, predictive route planning, and continuous intraday re-optimization for complex field service operations.

Service Agent extends Dynamics 365 Customer Service beyond traditional assistance by enabling AI-powered actions across cases, knowledge, email, and workflow management in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Customers expect a single, continuous relationship with your brand. One where every interaction feels informed and connected.

AI agents are only as capable as the tools, skills, and information they can reach. In sales, the intelligence that drives great decisions—buying signals, conversation insights, market and account context—often lives outside the customer relationships management (CRM). Getting it into the flow of work has traditionally meant costly integrations or data-duplication projects only the largest companies could sustain.

Securing a Power Pages site often requires configuring authentication, authorization, permissions, and application security settings across multiple experiences. Whether you’re troubleshooting a sign-in issue, reviewing access permissions, or hardening your site’s security posture, finding the right configuration can be time-consuming and requires deep platform knowledge.

Instead of integrating AI around enterprise resource planning (ERP), organizations can bring agents into the flow of work, where business decisions and transactions already happen.

Business Central provides a modern cloud ERP foundation that helps organizations streamline operations, improve visibility, support AI-powered productivity, and build on a platform that continues to evolve.

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.

Dataverse Native Authorization Model for Power Pages How mapped identities, security roles, and record filters move external-user authorization closer to the data. We’re introducing a major update to the Power Pages security model: authorization for external users is now enforced natively in Dataverse. Customers can opt in to this feature as they transition to the...

Azure Files combines familiar file access with built-in performance, data protection, security, and Azure service integration.

As organizations modernize infrastructure, migrate mission-critical workloads, build cloud-native applications, and scale AI—cost efficiency remains a foundational principle of cloud architectures.

Microsoft Foundry brings Toolboxes to GA, providing a unified endpoint to invoke the most-used tools in prompt agents and callable outside of prompt agents. Today every agent team hand-assembles its own tool list to solve the same tasks, with no shared ar...

In public preview, Microsoft Foundry now offers tracing for the Microsoft Agent Framework in both Python and .NET, helping developers observe how agents reason, call tools, and interact with models during execution. This release is part of the broader hos...

Microsoft Foundry is now introducing Agent Framework, a unified multi-agent orchestration SDK for C# and Python. This release consolidates patterns previously spread across AutoGen and Semantic Kernel, giving developers a consistent set of abstractions fo...

Microsoft Agent Framework reaches general availability for Agent Harness, the production runtime for agents built with the framework. Customers running pilots on the preview harness can now move the same agent code into production with backwards compatibi...

Azure Virtual Network routing appliance is now generally available. It delivers private connectivity across virtual networks, using specialized hardware for low latency, high throughput, and better performance than virtual machines. Key benefits and funct...

Azure Firewall explicit proxy is now generally available. Explicit proxy enables customers to configure applications and browsers to send HTTP and HTTPS traffic directly to Azure Firewall using proxy settings, providing an alternative to route-based traff...

Unity AI Gateway is now generally available on Azure Databricks. Unity AI Gateway provides centralized governance for AI models, agents, tools, and MCP services, helping organizations monitor usage, manage costs, apply guardrails, and enforce access contr...

The SharePoint connector for Azure Databricks is now generally available. Organizations can use Lakeflow Connect to ingest files from SharePoint into Azure Databricks, helping unify enterprise content with data and AI workflows on Azure. The connector sup...

GitHub Copilot and Azure are helping organizations modernize legacy applications, reduce technical debt, and prepare for AI innovation.

Free usage of Genie One and Genie Agents in Azure Databricks is now extended through January 31, 2027, from the previous end date of July 31, 2026. Budget controls do not apply to these products during the promotional period. The promotion covers usage by...

Microsoft Azure Databricks delivers the first-party advantage of Databricks on Microsoft—and for customers, that advantage shows up as real, measurable value. It is the same Databricks platform your teams already know, co-engineered with Microsoft and delivered as a native Azure service, so it fits naturally into the Microsoft tools, identity, and governance your organization already runs.

Every day, customers trust Microsoft Databases to power their most critical applications, business processes, and AI-powered experiences.

Azure Chaos Studio helps organizations validate application resilience by simulating outages, failovers, network disruptions, and infrastructure failures before they impact production.

See what changes as SQL Server 2016 reaches end of support. Choose between cloud migration, upgrading SQL Server, and Extended Security Updates (ESU).

AT&T processed approximately one trillion tokens while developing OTel2.0 using Microsoft Foundry Managed Compute, open AI models, and AMD and NVIDIA GPU infrastructure. Discover how flexible model choice and scalable infrastructure are enabling production-scale telecom AI.

Introducing OpenAI's latest frontier model series, the Asia Pacific Data Zone, and product agent capabilities, all generally available in Microsoft Foundry.

Learn how Microsoft is building a digital twin of Azure Service Health and why it changes how hyperscale operates.

Claude in Microsoft Foundry is now generally available, hosted on Azure, and running on NVIDIA GB300 Blackwell Ultra, giving teams a faster path from agent experimentation to production.

At Microsoft, building trustworthy AI agents is as critical as building powerful ones. New research from the 2026 Agent Confidence Index shows where teams trust agents today—and why human judgment remains the defining skill in the age of AI.

If you’re building and maintaining Visual Studio extensions, you’ve probably ended up with some sort of build and publishing workflow – whether it’s manual, scripted, or stitched together over time. This post is for extension authors who want a simple, repeatable way to build, version, and publish their VSIX files using GitHub Actions. I’m going...

The June update includes a Copilot Usage window refresh with proactive alerts as you approach your limits, MCP servers now get a trust check before they run anything new.

Cloud resiliency is about ensuring systems can adapt, recover, and keep functioning within real-world constraints.

New to the GitHub Copilot app? Learn how to start projects, work with AI agents, explore canvases, and streamline your development workflow.

A practical GitHub Copilot workflow for prototyping, planning, implementing, and reviewing software without chasing every new AI tool.

Explore the changes we've shipped across npm and GitHub Actions over the past few months to disrupt supply chain attack techniques and limit their impact.

Grounding an assistant in runbooks is the easy half. The interesting engineering is in the boundary between what a model proposes and what an authenticated person actually authorizes. An operations assistant stops being a demo the moment it can act. Answering “which runbook covers this alert” is a search problem. Opening an incident from 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...

Instead of one huge, un-reviewable pull request, teach coding agents to decompose work into a clean, ordered stack with GitHub stacked pull requests.

Learn how to build tools to simplify how you work—without writing a single line of code.

GitHub malware advisories no longer stop at npm. Here's how we wired OpenSSF's malicious-packages data into the Advisory Database, and why we built the pipeline paranoid.

Go beyond chat in the GitHub Copilot app with these slash commands. They'll help you plan, collaborate, automate, and customize your dev workflow.

SMBs leading with secure AI are building trust, integrating workflows, and making security the foundation for team-wide growth.

As data moves across tools and teams, security risks increase. Built for business professionals, the new Exam SC‑730 (beta) validates how you protect data, reduce risk, and respond to incidents. Work today depends on shared data, AI and cloud tools, and constant collaboration. As that expands, so do everyday security risks, phishing attempts, accidental data exposure, and misuse...

The new Windows Server Certification exam is here. One exam, in-demand hybrid skills—and a limited-time beta discount. Secure your spot before it fills up. Today’s IT infrastructure is more distributed than ever, spanning on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments and increasingly exposed to cyberthreats. Organizations need administrators who can secure, manage, and operate...

Discover how nonprofits are applying AI to strengthen communities, expand opportunity, and create lasting impact across the globe.

At Microsoft, we manage one of the world’s largest global corporate operations. Our operations teams process hundreds of billions in revenue and millions of transactions while adapting to fast-changing business demands. Much of that work flows through Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) operations, where vendors support workflows such as order and agreement processing. As these processes...

The future of AI isn’t a single model, it’s intelligent systems of agents working together. Are you ready to build them? As organizations move from standalone AI features to complex, multi-agent systems, the skills required are evolving fast. Organizations are no longer just experimenting, they’re deploying production-scale agent ecosystems that must be orchestrated, governed, and optimized.

What would happen if you built an AI version of your CEO to coach thousands of sellers? At Microsoft, that question emerged from a much larger challenge: How to rapidly upskill our customer and partner-facing teams in a way that is scalable, role-specific, and grounded in real business conversations. To bring this to life, we...

See how AI enriches employee experience: Frontier organizations help people grow, do meaningful work, and thrive, beyond time saved.

Building readiness for Agent 365 at Microsoft At Microsoft, we’re on a Frontier Transformation journey to reimagine work and redefine processes through the power of agentic AI. Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, operates a large and diverse population of agents, built across a broad range of tools and technical capabilities. With Microsoft Agent 365,

Here at Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we believe AI can be a powerful force for building community. In our Microsoft Asia region, our employees recently used AI tools to create a collaborative digital comic book featuring regional leaders traveling across Asia in a hot air balloon, visiting teams in different countries and learning...

Virtual labs give our employees at Microsoft on-demand access to the environments they need for development, testing, troubleshooting, and customer support. But at our scale—we have hundreds of thousands of labs and virtual machines internally here at Microsoft—determining the right amount of cloud resources for each workload becomes a significant challenge. Managed Cloud Labs (formerly...

For an enterprise company like Microsoft, understanding exactly which devices are connected to our corporate network is essential. As the company’s IT organization, we in Microsoft Digital manage millions of network-connected assets. An asset could mean an employee device, network infrastructure, pieces of equipment that sit inside the data center or buildings, or anything else...