Microsoft Technology Briefing - March 2026

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. Avicii Arena, Globentorget 2, Stockholm.

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

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

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

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

Agentic AI introduces new security risks. Learn how the OWASP Top 10 Risks for Agentic Applications maps to real mitigations in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

High-value assets including domain controllers, web servers, and identity infrastructure are frequent targets in sophisticated attacks. Microsoft Defender applies asset-aware protection using Microsoft Security Exposure Management to detect and block threats against these critical systems. This article explores real-world attack scenarios and defense techniques.

Read the latest Microsoft Secure Access report for insights into why a unified identity and access strategy offers strong modern protection.

Threat actors abused trusted Trivy distribution channels to inject credential‑stealing malware into CI/CD pipelines worldwide. This analysis walks through the Trivy supply‑chain compromise, attacker techniques, and concrete steps security teams can take to detect and defend against similar attacks.

This research report explores the layers of agent intent and how to align them for secure enterprise AI adoption.

Microsoft Defender stopped a human-operated ransomware attack that abused Group Policy Objects (GPOs) to disable defenses and push encryption at scale. This case study breaks down the attacker’s playbook and shows how predictive shielding hardened 700 devices in time, resulting in zero GPO-based encryptions and blocking most of the attempted impact.

Excerpt: CTI-REALM is Microsoft’s open-source benchmark for evaluating AI agents on real-world detection engineering—turning cyber threat intelligence (CTI) into validated detections.

Twenty-five years ago, SharePoint set out to help people share knowledge and work better together, a mission that today operates at extraordinary scale.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has long been a critical deployment model for Microsoft Teams, especially for organizations that rely on centralized desktops for security, compliance, and scale. Over the past six years, Microsoft has invested heavily in improving the Teams experience in VDI—listening to customer feedback, addressing operational pain points, and rethinking how collaboration workloads should run in virtualized environments.

We’re excited to announce that sensitivity labels in OneNote have reached General Availability (GA) ! This milestone marks a significant step forward in helping organizations protect sensitive information while enabling seamless collaboration across Microsoft 365. Why This Matters Sensitivity labels help organizations control how sensitive data is handled where work happens, including OneNote.

Today, we’re bringing OpenAI’s GPT ‑ 5.4 Thinking to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio—available in addition to the recent GPT-5.3 Instant update. With GPT ‑ 5.4 Thinking, Copilot can think deeper on complex work by combining advances in reasoning, coding, and agentic workflows—helping it work through technical prompts and longer tasks with higher-quality outputs, and less back-and-forth.

Wave 3 marks a new version of Microsoft 365 Copilot, moving beyond assistance to embedded agentic capabilities.

We’re excited to announce Copilot Cowork, the execution layer for Microsoft 365—delegate tasks, coordinate workflows, and stay in control.

Work IQ is the intelligence layer that personalizes Microsoft 365 Copilot to you and your organization. It is the “brain” behind Copilot that understands context, relationships, and work patterns, so Copilot and agents can be faster, more accurate, and more secure than model companies that are built on connectors alone. Work IQ is comprised of three tightly integrated layers – data , context , and skills & tools .

Work today isn’t short-lived or linear. Projects span months, inputs come from everywhere across files, meetings, and conversations, and real progress depends on how well teams understand evolving information while turning all of it into clear decisions, updates, and deliverables. That’s why we’re excited to announce the general availability of the refreshed Copilot Notebooks experience across Microsoft 365 Copilot app and OneNote.

As content growth accelerates worldwide, organizations need better ways to manage inactive data without sacrificing security, compliance, retention, or discoverability. Today, we’re announcing a public preview of file ‑ level archiving in Microsoft 365 Archive. This new capability enables you to archive individual files moving them into a lower-cost, cold-storage tier in SharePoint.

Today, Researcher—Microsoft 365 Copilot's deep research agent for work—takes a significant step forward. Designed to tackle complex research in the flow of work, Researcher now goes further with two new multi-model capabilities that raise the bar for accuracy, depth, and confidence: Critique and Council. Critique is a new multi model deep research system designed for complex research tasks.

Welcome once again to everyone in our Microsoft Tech Community! We’re glad you’ve joined us to check out a fresh lineup of Teams features designed to keep you productive, secure, and connected.

Welcome to the March 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.

A Unified Control Center for Queue Monitoring and SLA Tracking Work queues in Power Automate are structured lists that let you assign, track, and manage work items across users or automations in an organized, scalable way.

Custom Neural Voices enable organizations to move beyond generic text-to-speech and create voice experiences that reflect their brand, values, and customer promise—while still benefiting from the scalability and intelligence of AI-driven contact centers.

Today, we’re taking a significant step forward in bringing agentic business applications to life across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform.

Agents help deliver intelligent, conversational experiences for your site users directly within your websites. With the latest enhancements to agent integration in Power Pages, you now have more flexibility to configure authentication, manage access, and validate agent experiences more easily.

We’re excited to introduce the Agent API for Power Pages, a new capability that enables site creators to build custom chat and other user experiences and integrate these seamlessly with their custom-built Microsoft Copilot Studio agents. This enhancement gives organizations more flexibility for integrating intelligence into their web experiences.

As AI systems become capable of reasoning, acting, and adapting, organizations are beginning to rethink the relationship between humans and software.

We’re pleased to introduce a new capability for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations archive with Dataverse long-term retention: parallel processing for archive jobs. This enhancement allows the Archive job scheduler to run multiple archive jobs at the same time, dramatically reducing the time required to archive high volumes of transaction data across legal entities.

We’re excited to publish the 2026 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Role-based agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Welcome to the Power Platform monthly feature update! We will use this blog to share news in Power Platform from the last month, so you can find a summary of product, community, and learning updates from Power Platform in one easy place.

The promise of agentic service requires more than just automation; it demands a unified context and intelligence layer that travels with the work.

Restore deleted table records in Microsoft Dataverse is now in GA in late April 2026 for organizations have the assurance that they can recover from unforeseen data loss without disruptions, ensuring business continuity...

While makers are building or testing Power Pages sites in trial or developer environments, there’s always a risk that these sites could accidentally be made public, exposing incomplete or sensitive content to external users.

Today, we’re excited to introduce instant access support for incremental snapshots of Premium SSD v2 (Pv2) and Ultra Disk, delivering an industry-leading snapshot experience where creation, disk restore, and production-ready performance all happen instantly.

Azure Databricks workspaces have two network configurations – Azure Databricks-managed VNet and VNet Injection. The ability to update the Network Configuration of your workspace is now generally available. This enhancement provides greater flexibility and...

Today we’re announcing the General Availability of Azure Databricks Lakebase, a managed PostgreSQL environment with next generation separation of storage and compute for OLTP, providing instant availability, instant clones, and scale-to-zero. Lakebase let...

The new Draft & Deploy feature for Azure Firewall Policy introduces a streamlined, two-phase approach to managing firewall policies, significantly reducing deployment time and disruption. Traditionally, any policy update would trigger a full deployment of...

As organizations accelerate digital transformation, infrastructure decisions increasingly shape how quickly teams can adopt AI, how reliably applications operate at global scale, and how effectively businesses respond to constant change.

We’re announcing the first agentic end-to-end modernization solution that brings IT and developers into a single, connected workflow.

You can now monitor your Azure Database for PostgreSQL with rich, built-in Grafana dashboards—right from the Azure portal. This native integration with Azure Monitor means you no longer need to set up or manage a separate Grafana instance to get deep visi...

GitHub Copilot is now generally available in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22, bringing AI‑powered assistance directly into the application that you use every day. With GitHub Copilot in SSMS, you can use natural language to develop, explain, fix,

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam, we're making announcements that reflect the goal of bringing the operational maturity of Kubernetes to today's workloads and demands.

You can now leverage pgoutput for online (minimal-downtime) migrations with improved reliability and performance. By aligning with PostgreSQL’s native logical replication framework, this update improves ecosystem compatibility with modern PostgreSQL deplo...

In late-March 2026, the following updates and enhancements were made to Azure SQL: Configure built-in SQL code analysis rules and severity settings without editing project XML. Use Fabric connectivity and provisioning options to connect wi...

Digital sovereignty has become a practical leadership discipline grounded in risk management, continuity planning, and long-term accountability.

Enterprises today face a familiar yet formidable challenge: mountains of documents -contracts, invoices, reports, forms - remain locked in unstructured formats. Traditional OCR (optical character recognition) captures text, but often struggles with context, layout complexity, or multilingual content. The result? Slow workflows, error-prone manual reviews, and missed insights.

Today, we’re announcing OpenAI’s GPT‑5.4 to be generally available soon in Microsoft Foundry: a model designed to help organizations move from planning work to reliably completing it in production environments.

Customers are on the hunt for smarter models, more capable agents, and market-ready solutions to operationalize AI workflows.

Our mission is to make PostgreSQL the most performant, scalable, and enterprise-ready open database platform available. With Azure Database for PostgreSQL and the newly introduced Azure HorizonDB, we’re delivering on that vision.

Microsoft combines accelerated computing with cloud scale engineering to bring advanced AI capabilities to our customers. For years, we’ve worked with NVIDIA to integrate hardware, software and infrastructure to power many of today’s most important AI breakthroughs.

We're bring attendees together to share real experiences and solve challenges side-by-side. Only together can we move into meaningful results.

Modern analytics workloads demand more than fast queries — they demand observability.

Here is the March 2026 release of the on-premises data gateway (version 3000.310).

The enterprise-grade JDBC driver enables secure, flexible, and performant connectivity to Spark SQL workloads running in Microsoft Fabric, using Fabric’s Livy APIs as the execution layer.

If you haven’t already, check out Arun Ulag’s hero blog “FabCon and SQLCon 2026: Unifying databases and Fabric on a single, complete platform” for a complete look at all of our FabCon and SQLCon announcements across both Fabric and our database offerings. Capacity overage, is a new opt‑in capability in Microsoft Fabric designed to help …

One of the most common pieces of feedback we hear from customers using SQL databases in Microsoft Fabric is the need for stronger cost control and predictable resource usage, especially in shared capacities. Today, SQL databases in Fabric automatically scale to meet workload demand. This delivers great performance, but in shared environments it can also …

Moving your Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse pipelines to Fabric Data Factory is now fast, easy, and free!

For the last decade, platform engineering has relied on explicit API interaction layers: CLIs, SDKs, pipelines, wrappers, and UI workflows that translate human intent into machine‑safe API calls. AI agents are now short‑circuiting much of that stack. By combining natural language understanding, reasoning, and direct access to API specifications and control schemas, agents can convert...

Part 1 of the Azure Skills Plugin series Coding agents like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code are great at code, but getting your app to production on Azure is not just about writing code. Really, it is about making the right calls. Which service fits this app? Which SKU fits this workload? Should this be...

We keep doing this thing where we solve a problem, celebrate the victory, then realize we’ve created three new problems we didn’t even know existed. Remember when manually configuring servers was the bottleneck? So we built containers. Great! Now we’re orchestrating thousands of them. Remember when monolithic deployments were too slow? So we built microservices.

Taming the Noisy Inbox: How I Used MCP to Automate Email and Teams Triage How the Model Context Protocol (MCP) turns your AI coding assistant into a workplace productivity engine — connecting Microsoft 365 data to your terminal workflow. The Problem We All Share If you work in a customer-facing role, you know the...

We all know this, even if we don’t like to admit it: modern infrastructure can scale infinitely, but human understanding doesn’t. We’ve all seen it happen – organizations going from managing dozens of servers to thousands of containers, from deploying weekly to deploying hundreds of times per day, from serving thousands of users to millions.

An inside look at repository-native orchestration with GitHub Copilot and the design patterns behind multi-agent workflows that stay inspectable, predictable, and collaborative.

CodeQL and AI‑powered detections work together in GitHub Code Security to identify vulnerabilities across more languages and frameworks.

And the developers running Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI didn’t notice… Status Page Says ‘Operational.’ Your Subagents Say Otherwise. If you’re running autonomous agents in any serious capacity, you’ve experienced this: model provider outages aren’t edge cases — they’re part of the operating environment. Anthropic has had outages. OpenAI has had outages. Google has had outages.

From April 24 onward, interaction data—specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context—from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users will be used to train and improve our AI models unless they opt out.

Reviewed advisories hit a four-year low, malware advisories surged, and CNA publishing grew—here’s what changed and what it means for your triage and response.

A look at GitHub Actions’ 2026 roadmap, outlining how secure defaults, policy controls, and CI/CD observability harden the software supply chain end to end.

Learn how to secure your projects and keep them safe with GitHub Advanced Security.

Knowledge workers have all been there. Maybe you’re a product manager with a backlog that you can’t ever get to. Perhaps you’re a designer who can never seem to get engineering resources assigned to you. Or maybe you’re a program manager who routinely gets stuck copying data between systems by hand. Engage with our experts!

Microsoft business operations teams know all too well that cyberattackers seek to exploit customer support pathways. Tools that can unlock customer accounts or aid in troubleshooting issues in complex environments are a rich target. “The path attackers really like to use is to compromise support tooling and laterally move to your core tooling,” says Raji...

The case for AI in employee assistance The advent of generative AI tools and agents has been a game changer for the modern workplace at Microsoft. And one of the foremost examples of how we’re reaping the benefits of this agentic revolution is our deployment of our new Employee Self-Service Agent across the company. Thanks...

Microsoft is powering manufacturing’s 2026 inflection point—turning AI from pilots into orchestrated, end‑to‑end intelligence.

Geoff Belknap, CVP and operating CISO for Core and Enterprise, shares four key practices your business can use to be prepared for managing network security incidents. Learn from our experience Network isolation (Secure Future Initiative) “Knowing where devices are, who owns them, and what they’re supposed to be doing is pretty important in the middle...

Microsoft shares how agentic AI, digital twins, and physical AI are reshaping logistics and supply chains at scale.

Technology companies are really people companies. In an age of rapidly advancing AI, losing sight of this reality leads to an overemphasis on new tools while neglecting opportunities for the transformational change that AI offers. Moving forward, the winners will be the companies that prioritize technological and operational excellence. Microsoft Digital, our company’s IT organization,

Chris Henley is a Microsoft Trainer, part of a community of professionals at Microsoft Global Skilling, working with customer and partner leaders to help them build the skills required to drive their organization’s AI strategy. Where AI conversations are shifting for leaders I’ve been working with executives and company leaders for several years, and it feels like the AI conversation is finally shifting from “What can AI do?” to “How do we move forward with AI in a way that creates real value?

The enterprise security frontier isn’t just evolving. It’s accelerating beyond the limits of traditional security models. AI acceleration, cloud adoption, and rapid growth of enterprise apps have dramatically expanded the attack surface. Every new app introduces a new identity. Every identity carries permissions. Over time, those permissions accumulate, often without clear ownership or regular review.

Like the computer itself and electricity before it, AI is a transformational technology. It’s providing never-before-seen opportunities to reimagine productivity, address major social challenges, and democratize access to technology and knowledge. Engage with our experts! Customers or Microsoft account team representatives from Fortune 500 companies are welcome to request a virtual engagement on this topic...

Kavitha Radhakrishnan is a General Manager in Microsoft Global Skilling, where she leads the teams creating AI‑first, learner‑centered experiences that help people and teams build skills they can apply at work. Sunday night. The week hasn’t started yet, but the questions already have. A leader is scrolling through AI headlines, trying to keep up with the constant changes...

The AI job boom is here. Are you ready to showcase your skills? We explored how Microsoft Certifications across AI, cloud, and security are evolving to keep pace with a rapidly changing job market...