Microsoft Technology Briefing - October 2026

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.

Join data leaders, Microsoft experts, and the local Fabric community for a day of learning, networking, and practical insights. Explore the latest innovations in data, analytics, AI, and Real-Time Intelligence through expert-led sessions, customer stories, and conversations with people who are solving similar challenges. Whether you're evaluating Fabric or scaling adoption, you'll leave with new ideas, new connections, and a clearer path forward.

Tune in for expert insights, product updates, and real-world customer stories focused on data, analytics, AI, and Real-Time Intelligence. Discover what's new in Microsoft Fabric, learn from practitioners and technical specialists, and explore practical strategies you can apply immediately. Get the insights of the roadshow experience with the flexibility to participate remotely.

This event has become one of the largest gatherings of security leaders in Sweden, bringing together CxOs, business and IT decision makers and security practitioners to hear how today's most innovative organisations put AI at the core of their cybersecurity strategy. Alongside the sessions, the day is built for connection: time with Microsoft experts, our partner ecosystem in the expo area, and peers facing the same challenges.

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.

Are you ready to build real AI solutions and tackle challenges hands-on? Join us for a practical, hands-on hackathon focused on Fraud Intelligence 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. Location: Microsoft Office, Regeringsgatan 25 Läs mer om Agentic AI Hack...

Explore how GitHub Copilot for Application Modernization can help accelerate the transformation of legacy .NET and Java applications. In this hands-on hack, you'll learn how to modernize application code, identify and remediate technical debt, and enhance applications with AI-powered capabilities. Location: United Spaces, Östra Hamngatan 16 Läs mer om Application Modernization with GitHub Copilot...

Välkommen till en exklusiv workshop med Microsoft och kollegor från hela den svenska offentliga sektorn. Vi utforskar hur modernisering av infrastruktur, program och data plattformar kan frigöra AI:s fulla värde – samtidigt som högsta möjliga nivå av säkerhet, regelefterlevnad och digital suveränitet upprätthålls. Location: Microsoft Office, Regeringsgatan 25 Läs mer om Modernisera med trygghet...

Teams support impersonation led to remote access, malicious runtime execution, and Certificate Services abuse through authentication relay and Kerberos.

As Microsoft Threat Intelligence continues to track how threat actors operationalize AI to increase the speed and efficiency of attacks, we’ve identified North Korean threat actors expanding their use of AI with varying levels of adoption. This blog breaks down how North Korean threat actors are utilizing AI across their operations...

IDC has named Microsoft a Leader in the 2026 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Modern Endpoint Security for Enterprises.

As AI and agents reshape the enterprise, CISOs face two critical priorities: enabling innovation with the right identity and data guardrails, and modernizing defense to keep pace with AI-powered threats. Aarti Borkar shares how security leaders can approach both.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence analyzes the LiteLLM 1.107.0 compromise, including Python startup hooks, credential theft, remote code loading, detections, and mitigations.

Storm-0940 used ARTEX agentic AI to accelerate a ConnectWise supply chain compromise, enabling application credential abuse across Microsoft 365 environments.

New capabilities in Microsoft 365 E7 and Project Perception help organizations contain agent risk and adapt protection continuously.

New whitepaper from Microsoft and NVIDIA helps enterprises manage open-weight AI model risks with a shared taxonomy, evaluations, and controls.

Microsoft uncovered a Chinese-language cybercriminal ecosystem, an interconnected network of phishing kit operators (tracked as Storm-2990), and an illicit marketplace (tracked as Storm-3119) selling tools and infrastructure for large-scale phishing. In collaboration with law enforcement agencies and other partners worldwide, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit...

Bring an existing agent plugin into Work IQ Developer Tools (WIQD) and the plugin registry or create a new plugin to utilize the full Microsoft Copilot packaging workflow. A plugin gives Microsoft Copilot new ways to get work done. It packages one or more capabilities, such as skills, MCP servers, or agents, so Copilot can...

New Copilot UX components heading to Generally Available in October 2026, SPFx 1.24 Beta 5 is now available, React 18 support is coming in 1.24. Updates coming in Node.js support.

Your customers are your number one priority, and you want to be there whenever they call. But customer needs don’t follow a schedule. Questions and appointment changes can come during your busiest periods or after hours, and customers still expect fast, convenient service. Keeping up with those expectations can leave employees handling repetitive requests instead of focusing on higher-value conversations...

A quick note before we get into it: What's New in Teams is shifting from a monthly to a quarterly rhythm. You'll hear from us next in December, March, and June, and each edition will round up everything announced and released over the full quarter. One post, one fuller view of what's new. Two investments shape where Teams is heading, and you'll see both in this quarter's releases: AI transforming teamwork...

Developers building AI applications face a familiar challenge: how do you ground AI experiences in enterprise content while maintaining security, compliance, and governance? You can use the Microsoft 365 Copilot Retrieval API for SharePoint Embedded, which helps you add Microsoft 365 Copilot and agent experiences to your SharePoint Embedded apps when you want to control the grounding...

Continuing to use software after end of support can leave your devices vulnerable to potential security threats and compliance issues. Today, October 13, 2026, support ends for Office LTSC 2021 suites and standalone applications . Microsoft no longer provides security updates, bug fixes, or technical support for these products. See the full list of affected products below. Organizations with devices running Office LTSC 2021 should move those devices to...

Your team is gathered in a Teams Room for a project review, but the customer’s invitation is for a Zoom meeting. You want to use the room’s audio, video, and displays, share the presentation, and stay connected to the conversation. You shouldn’t have to give up your room’s setup just because the meeting is on another platform. Whether your organization uses Teams or Zoom Meetings today, people need the flexibility to meet with customers, partners, and colleagues on a range of platforms.

Some of the best moments at a conference happen outside the traditional breakout room. They happen when you meet someone working through the same challenge you are. When a quick conversation with a Microsoft MVP turns into a new idea. When you sit down with a product expert, join a meetup, or find a community that keeps the learning going long after the event ends.

Copilot UX components are generally available with SPFx 1.24. Bring interactive dashboards, forms, and business actions directly into Microsoft Copilot, so people can complete tasks in context using experiences built on existing web skills and systems.

SharePoint content isn’t limited to sites and document libraries. Increasingly, organizations are bringing Microsoft 365 content capabilities directly into the custom apps their users rely on. That’s where SharePoint Embedded comes in. SharePoint Embedded is a cloud-based, API-only document management platform that enables developers to bring Microsoft 365 content capabilities into custom applications, including Office...

Today we're launching Glint Labs , the new home for Microsoft People Science: a dedicated destination for the research and AI-powered tools our team creates to help organizations understand their people and lead through change. From employee listening and experience to AI transformation and the future of work, Glint Labs is built for HR, people, and business leaders who want evidence they can put to work.

GitHub empowers any team to become builders in Microsoft Teams. Customer support teams are using GitHub to turn customer feedback from Teams channels into filed issues. Engineering teams are asking GitHub to investigate, reproduce, and fix bugs without leaving Teams. Business and marketing teams with innovative ideas are asking GitHub to turn their discussions into working prototypes.

See how Power Apps, Power Platform, and Copilot Studio are helping teams transform ideas into AI-powered business solutions at PPCC 2026.

What if supervisors could act on operational issues before customers feel the impact? New real-time streaming analytics in Dynamics 365 Contact Center provide live insights into queues, conversations, and workforce performance, helping teams move from monitoring to action faster than ever.

We’re excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft Power Pages in the Sweden Central and Italy North regions. Whether you’re a no-code, low-code, or code-first developer, Power Pages empowers you to build scalable, secure, and business-centric websites.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is named a Leader for operational ERP, helping organizations connect people, data, and business systems to drive more agile operations.

Learn how Scheduling Operations Agent helps Dynamics 365 Field Service teams optimize resources, automate scheduling plans, and run recurring optimizations.

Introducing Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence, bringing purpose-built agents and analytics to contact centers to modernize customer experiences.

With business applications in Work IQ, now in public preview, Copilot and agents understand your business too.

The Dataverse MCP Server now supports custom APIs allowing customers to leverage their existing custom business logic, from their Agents, regardless of where they are hosted.

Today we’re excited to share big news for canvas app makers: agentic authoring in canvas studio using your GitHub account is now available in preview! In September, the canvas authoring agent plugin became generally available (GA), so you could build canvas apps from your own coding agent – GitHub Copilot CLI, Claude Code and more.

The Microsoft Dataverse plugin for Copilot Cowork turns a plain-language request into real Dataverse tables, sample data and a published app, with every change approved by you and every action running under your own permissions.

Dynamics 365 CX MCP Server - Sales brings governed CRM capabilities to supported AI agents and seller experiences, helping sellers take action wherever they work.

Five years in, PPCC is still built by makers. Explore the ideas, innovations, and community moments that shaped this year’s event.

Microsoft is advancing Azure cloud infrastructure with more efficient systems and Circular Centers that extend the useful life of datacenter hardware.

Discover Azure canvases for GitHub Copilot, interactive shared workspaces that bring Azure tools, dashboards, and guided workflows directly alongside your Copilot conversations. Explore Azure resources, analyze costs, and build hosted skills while keeping...

Starting October 15, 2026, Search in Microsoft Fabric will return tables from semantic models, lakehouses, and mirrored databases as individual results. Users can search by table name or description, or find a table by an exact column-name match. More ob...

Standard service endpoint, a new capability in the Azure Private Link family, provides a scalable and secure approach for connecting Azure IaaS workloads to Azure PaaS services. Standard service endpoint addresses the manageability, and the scale limitati...

External key management for Azure Key Vault Managed HSM is now generally available in all Azure public regions. For organizations with regulatory or sovereignty requirements to retain physical control of key-encryption keys, it lets Azure services that su...

Azure DNS now provides DNS based load balancing by seamless integration with Azure Traffic Manager. Customers can directly associate an Azure DNS record set with a Traffic Manager profile, eliminating the need to create a CNAME record pointing to the traf...

Higher Azure Storage account resource quotas are now generally available, supporting up to 1,000 storage accounts with standard endpoints per region, per subscription, up from the default of 250. Manage more accounts in a single subscription, reducing the...

Private offers through Microsoft Marketplace help you optimize your spending power with pricing and terms aligned to your organization’s needs, including flexible billing, custom contract lengths, and more. For eligible private offers, we are simplifying...

The Log Analytics logging destination for Azure Container Apps is now a legacy logging option. Existing environments configured with the Log Analytics logging destination will continue to function normally. However, we recommend planning a migration to th...

Azure MCP Server 3.0 is now generally available, expanding how AI agents and developer tools interact with Azure through the open Model Context Protocol (MCP).This release introduces new and expanded capabilities:Infrastructure as code: Azure Terraform to...

Announcing the general availability of the HTTP DDoS ruleset for Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) on Azure Front Door Premium. HTTP-layer DDoS attacks remain a leading cause of application downtime, and static controls such as IP filters and fixed rat...

Large OS Disk Encryption (LOSDE) is now generally available for Azure Confidential VM migration scenarios. Organizations can move larger, production-scale workloads into confidential computing with the OS disk fully protected, instead of being held back b...

We’re proud to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Global Industrial AIoT Platforms.

AI is reaching such a pivotal moment, and the focus is shifting from building larger frontier models to intelligence that delivers practical impact.

Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse is expanding its T-SQL capabilities with four language enhancements in preview. GROUP BY ALL, ORDER BY ALL, the QUALIFY clause, and the FROM ... SELECT query format help SQL developers and data professionals reduce repetitive code, simplify query maintenance, and make analytical logic easier to understand. Figure: A T-SQL query uses GROUP BY ALL and ORDER BY ALL in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse.

Real-time streams rarely contain just one kind of event. A building operations stream, for example, might carry thermostat readings, occupancy updates, air-quality measurements, and badge-reader activity through the same source. These events may share a payload format, but they don't describe the same thing. A temperature field matters to a thermostat event. An employee identifier belongs to an access event. An occupancy count describes something else entirely.

With Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse integration with workspace monitoring (Preview), you can analyze completed warehouse query activity across an entire workspace from the monitoring Eventhouse and KQL database, helping you find failed or slow queries and quickly identify the warehouse that needs attention. See warehouse activity across your workspace Monitoring multiple warehouses is difficult when query activity is spread across separate tools and experiences.

The Fabric Notebook Toolkit (Preview) helps developers shorten the feedback loop between writing code and validating it with live notebook results. It connects coding agents to Microsoft Fabric notebooks through a command-line interface (CLI) that runs in the terminal alongside tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Codex. An agent can inspect the current code, run one cell, review its output, make a targeted change, and run it again without resubmitting the entire notebook—much as..

AI coding assistants are excellent at turning natural-language transformation instructions into code. For data engineers, the harder question is whether that code produces results they can trust. You can describe transformation logic in natural language, and an AI coding assistant will happily generate hundreds of lines of Spark code. Impressive. But a Spark job can execute successfully and still produce completely wrong results.

Coauthor: Iddo Avneri (Treeverse) Use a live branch for up-to-date analytics or pin a shortcut to an immutable commit when reproducibility matters. Data teams often need two seemingly conflicting things: immediate access to the latest data and the ability to return to the exact data behind an earlier analysis, report, or experiment. Maintaining both...

Coauthor: Shehab Amin Microsoft OneLake gives every Microsoft Fabric tenant a single, unified data lake built on open formats. One copy of data, many engines: that is the promise, and it is what makes OneLake such a strong foundation for analytics and AI alike. This post looks at how Sail , the open-source distributed compute framework, and LakeSail Cloud , the managed platform for running Sail in production, connect natively to OneLake, and what that unlocks for teams running Spark and Python..

Moving a real-time data pipeline from development to test to production should not mean reconfiguring every source and destination. Yet environment-specific connection details and destination references can make each release a manual, error-prone task. Variable library integration with Eventstream in Microsoft Fabric lets teams reuse the same eventstream definition across environments, with references that resolve to each environment's resources. What's new?

Your teams are ready to build. They know their data, understand their business, and need the freedom to manage the workspaces where ideas become solutions. As adoption grows, that freedom becomes even more valuable. So does the ability to protect the settings that matter most. A workspace admin role brings broad responsibility. But owning an analytics workspace shouldn't mean every administrator also needs authority over its encryption and networking.

Organizations that operate sensitive applications often keep them in networks with no route to the public internet. Applications in restricted networks need real-time analytics without a route to the public internet. Eventstream now supports workspace-level private links for custom endpoint sources (Preview), so those applications can send events to Microsoft Fabric over a private connection.

Maybe you’d deploy that .NET application you’ve been working on. Try a serverless architecture. Experiment with containers. Build a proof of concept. Or spend some time exploring an Azure service you haven’t used yet. If you’re an eligible Visual Studio subscriber, you may already have a personal Azure sandbox waiting for you. Many Visual Studio...

Maia 300 operates as a single platform to meet the demands of cloud-scale agentic inference.

What happens when developers who have spent decades working with Visual Studio start rethinking how they write code, learn new skills, and expand their access to development tools? At VSLive! San Diego, we had an opportunity to find out as developers gathered for five days of technical sessions, hands-on learning, and conversations about Visual Studio,

Reorder your document tabs and return to them by visual position with new keyboard shortcuts.

Learn how to move an agent session from the GitHub Copilot app into VS Code without losing the conversation, code changes, or working context.

Three Java Champions share how they use GitHub Copilot to solve problems, accelerate development, and keep humans responsible for the results.

Start a standalone Markdown note and use the opt-in Hot Exit preview to resume unsaved work next session.

Compare commits with your working tree, resolve merge conflicts in bulk, and keep coding with refreshed Copilot chat, Hot Exit, keyboard tab controls, and Fonts and Colors.

See how a record year of growth reached every industry, every field, and every kind of builder in the 2026 Octoverse report.

Today, we laid out our vision for GitHub as the most comprehensive, end-to-end software delivery system in the world.

Are you thinking about earning a Microsoft certification to help advance your career, build on your existing skills, or meet new requirements at work? If so, you may already be wondering where to start. Which courses, labs, and hands-on exercises will help you prepare? How much time will it take to find the right resources,

Security, compliance, and operations teams can use this hardware-originated evidence for monitoring, compliance reporting, and forensic investigations.

If you’re leading AI adoption, you may be asking why trained employees aren’t changing how they work. In this post, you’ll learn how to distinguish skill gaps from motivation and system barriers, so you can choose the right response and build an AI-ready workforce. William Nations is a Senior Learning & Skilling Manager at Microsoft. He is also the creator of The AI-Ready Executive, a thought-leadership video series that helps senior leaders translate AI ambition into practical decisions about..

With AI innovation moving so quickly, it can feel difficult to stay on top of everything that’s happening, including the projects and collaborations, the successes and failures, and “a-ha” breakthrough moments Across Microsoft, our researchers, engineers, and product teams are building new models, agent frameworks, benchmarks, applications, and research projects at a steady pace. But...

As more companies introduce AI-driven options to help their employees find information and accomplish common tasks, a question frequently arises: Which agentic tool is best suited for each need? Employees at Microsoft commonly face this decision. They might require help summarizing a meeting, finding a file, understanding a benefits policy, troubleshooting a device, or reporting...

How Microsoft combines the reach and personalization of AI with human expertise to turn workforce learning into business impact. When we think about AI transformation, we have to start with employees. There is simply no way around it. You can deploy the technology and set ambitious goals, but if people do not have the confidence, skills, and support to use AI in their work...

Preparing for a Microsoft Certification exam? Explore upcoming case study updates and new options for scheduling approved accommodations online. If you're preparing for a Microsoft Certification exam, two upcoming changes may make your exam experience easier to navigate and schedule. The case study interface is being redesigned for greater readability and accessibility, and Pearson's accommodations process is becoming more streamlined.

Explore EQ Bank’s practical framework for turning AI learning into responsible, measurable business impact. If you’re building an AI-ready workforce, employees may be starting with different levels of knowledge and confidence, but the organization still needs to find a shared path forward. In financial services, that challenge comes with an added requirement: Experimentation must coexist with oversight, security, risk management, and regulatory compliance.

Ready to put agentic AI to work? Discover how the new GitHub Certified: Agentic AI Business Professional certification can help validate your skills. Agentic AI offers business professionals new ways to organize work and automate multistep workflows. With GitHub and GitHub Copilot, business professionals can organize work and build automations while applying human oversight to workflow decisions.

Discover new ways to find relevant learning, stay engaged, prepare for credentials, and build skills in the flow of work with AI Skills Navigator. The way we build skills is changing quickly. Learners want guidance that reflects their roles and goals, fits into busy schedules, and helps them move from learning to practice to validated skills. Team leaders and learning professionals...

For the first time, everyday work can become verified proof of your skills For years, people have asked for a simpler way to prove the skills they use in the flow of work, without stepping away to prepare for another test. Today, Microsoft is introducing general availability of a first-of-its-kind credential that recognizes proficiency levels demonstrated through real, everyday product use. Welcome to Pro Badge.

Discover how organizations are reshaping business processes with AI by connecting knowledge, building trust, and measuring outcomes that create lasting business value.

Every great recipe starts with the right ingredients. Skip one and you’ll get uneven results (or even something RAW—rushed, ambiguous, and wasteful). The same goes for AI prompts. In this story we’ll share our not-so-secret prompt recipes, plus three new feature tips that we’ve pulled out of the Copilot oven—still warm!—that can save you time...

Bringing employee voices into our AI decision-making The early phase of enterprise AI can be a little chaotic, and that’s OK. Teams experiment. Ideas are generated across the organization. Momentum builds fast. That energy and enthusiasm matters, but it doesn’t create enterprise value on its own. In Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’ve learned...