The latest posts from the Microsoft teams behind Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, Purview, Planner and Copilot, in one place. With a short summary and a link to the original; for posts that matter we add our own view.
Today, we are taking the next step in human-agent team collaboration, designed to help address the problem of fragmented and outdated information and enable agent teammates to have the required team context they need to perform tasks and answer questions. In Frontier Preview, Copilot and agents in the newly announced Copilot app, Teams, and SharePoint will be able to create, contribute to, curate, and reference a team’s knowledge base in SharePoint.
Knowledge bases can support a range of team needs by bringing together the context people and agents need to do their best work. Here are some examples of how we are working with frontier teams to leverage a knowledge base:
Legal: Collecting isolated knowledge from emails, files, and personal notes to help agents reference relevant context when creating agreements and contracts.
As organizations adopt generative AI into daily workflows, they face a new class of security challenges that do not fit traditional models of access control, identity, or data protection. One of the most important is indirect prompt injection: malicious instructions embedded in otherwise legitimate content such as emails, documents, or messages that an AI system may process as part of a task.
When that content is passed to the model alongside trusted prompts, the system may treat embedded instructions as commands rather than data. This can influence model behavior and contribute to outcomes such as unintended data disclosure, inaccurate information in responses, and other harms.
These attacks can occur entirely within existing permissions. The system is authorized to access the content, and traditional controls such as authentication, access governance, and data loss prevention may still function as designed while leaving inference-time risk unaddressed.
The Structural Gap in AI Systems
Traditional computing systems use layered structural controls such as hardware isolation, privileged instruction sets, and access control models to reduce exposure to specific classes of attack vectors.
Copilot Notebooks is an AI-powered workspace for a project or topic to help individuals and teams move work forward. It brings your Microsoft 365 work context into one workspace where you can collect references, ask questions grounded in your project context, uncover key insights across your work, and turn those insights into shareable outputs. Coming to Frontier in the coming weeks, this update helps you create notebooks, work with Copilot, and create or edit artifacts without leaving Notebooks. Try Copilot Notebooks today at https://aka.ms/copilotnotebooks.
Create Notebooks with ease
Copilot can help get you started by creating a new Copilot Notebook at your request. With new expanded references support and a UX refresh that keeps your notebooks organized, you can set up a notebook for your workflow.
Create a new notebook by just describing your goal to Copilot, rather than setting it up manually. Simply describe what kind of notebook you'd like to make — “I’m working on pitching to a new customer in [industry] and need to get more familiar with the industry and its biggest players”
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 with agents as part of the team, and a simpler, smarter, more secure foundation underneath it all.
AI in Teams is showing up in the flow of your work. Teams Phone Agent brings that to your phone line, helping callers with common requests in more than 60 languages and routing them with context attached, so a missed call turns into a next step instead of a lost one.
Context carries forward, too. Video recap turns a meeting you missed into a short, narrated highlight reel, so what a meeting decided outlasts the conversation itself.
And protection for everyday collaboration is always top of mind. The new Security Detection Report brings detections such as impersonation and malicious URLs into one view in the Teams admin…
Microsoft Office has defined productivity for the PC era, driving the shift from desktop software to cloud computing and collaboration-based work. Now, we’re defining productivity in the AI era with Microsoft Copilot. The Copilot app is where you can move from intent to outcome. Start with an idea, and work with AI to bring it to the finish line.
Today, we’re bringing the full power of Office into the Copilot app, combining the rich creation and collaboration capabilities of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with an AI-first way of working. You can start in either Chat or Cowork to explore an idea or create a first draft, then continue editing and collaborating directly within the same experience. Office in Copilot allows you to move from an idea to a finished document, spreadsheet, or presentation without losing context - within Office in Copilot or if you switch to the standalone apps.
That continuity matters because work is often complex: documents have multiple contributors, presentations are built from branded templates, and spreadsheets power important business decisions. By bringing Office into Copilot, people can use the editing, fidelity, and collaboration capabilities they already rely on without leaving their AI-powered…
Today we are announcing the General Availability (GA) of Sending from Aliases for Exchange Online. This was a highly requested feature that now empowers users to send emails from any alias (proxy address) associated with their mailbox, not just their primary SMTP address. Read on to learn how it works, how to enable it, and what’s next.
What Is Sending From Aliases?
Sending from Aliases allows Exchange Online users to send emails using any of their configured aliases or proxy (or secondary) SMTP addresses. Previously, aliases could only receive mail, and all outgoing messages used the primary SMTP address of the mailbox. Workarounds like shared mailboxes or distribution groups were used in the absence of native alias sending support.
With the Sending From Aliases feature, which until now has been in Public Preview, users can:
Send from any alias directly using Outlook clients.
Reply from aliases when an email was addressed to it.
Select which aliases to display in supported clients.
Welcome to the September 2026 edition of What's New in Microsoft 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.
We had some big announcements last week about how we’re introducing the new Copilot to connect the tools people rely on with the next generation of capabilities they’ll need to build, customize and scale AI across work. If you missed it, you can catch up on those announcements here: Introducing the new Copilot with Home, Code, and Autopilot.
Now let’s take a closer look at what else is new this month:
User capabilities:
New design and functionality for Copilot Chat
Plugins, connectors, and Work IQ enhancements to the Copilot App
Teams Phone agent for Copilot in Teams Phone
Citations and image modifications for Copilot in Word
As customers prepare for the final phase of Exchange Web Services (EWS) retirement in Exchange Online, many are asking the same practical question: how can I prove that EWSAllowedAppIDs is working before I depend on it? This field guide walks through a controlled positive-and-negative test, explains what the result means, and highlights an important naming trap that we are already seeing in customer conversations.
A note from the field
The most common confusion is not about the PowerShell syntax. It is about two similarly named controls that operate at different layers. EWSAllowedAppIDs is the new application-ID control for EWS. The older EWSAllowList and EWSBlockList settings are user-agent controls associated with EwsApplicationAccessPolicy, and they can affect both EWS and REST traffic.
Understand the two controls before testing
EWSAllowedAppIDs is a tenant-level list of application (client) IDs. When EWS is enabled and the list contains one or more Application IDs, only the listed applications are permitted to access EWS. This is the control to validate when you are testing an application's EWS access during the retirement transition.
The deprecation of EWS in Exchange Online starts today. This is a multi-step process, years in the making, and this post has lots of important information. We will keep this post updated if we have new information to add.
The first change, as previously announced, starting early October 2026, means setting EWSEnabled to True will no longer be sufficient on its own to keep EWS working in the tenant: an AppID allow list (EWSAllowedAppIDs) will be required to specify apps that you want to permit access to EWS.
What happens next
Customers in our multi-tenant (WW) cloud who have already set EWSEnabled = True but did not create EWSAllowedAppIDs (AppID allow list) will see a configuration change:
This behavior change will take place in the WW cloud first. Tenants in other clouds will see comms and timelines specific to them via Message Center in due course.
Once this above change has taken effect, we will move to the second phase, turning off EWS for customers in our multi-tenant (WW) cloud
Exchange Server 2019 CU14 and CU15 (to access, organization must be enrolled into the Period 2 ESU program)
Exchange Server 2016 CU23 (to access, organization must be enrolled into the Period 2 ESU program)
The September 2026 V2 SUs address vulnerabilities responsibly reported to Microsoft by security partners and found through Microsoft’s internal processes.
These vulnerabilities affect Exchange Server. Exchange Online customers are already protected from the vulnerabilities addressed by these SUs and do not need to take any action other than updating any Exchange servers or Exchange Management tools workstations in their environment.
More details about specific CVEs can be found in the
Files and photos are at the center of how we work, create, and collaborate. As AI and Copilot transform the way we use content, OneDrive is evolving for this era - helping people get more from their files with Copilot, delivering a faster and more dependable core file experience, making collaboration effortless, and creating new ways to discover, enjoy, and share photos and videos.
So, join us on October 20 for the 4th Annual OneDrive + Copilot Digital Event, a free online experience showcasing the latest innovations across OneDrive and Copilot.
✨ Hear directly fromJeff Teper, Executive Vice President of Microsoft Apps and Agents, Adam Harmetz, Corporate Vice President of Product, OneDrive and SharePoint, and Arwa Tyebkhan, Head of Product, OneDrive, alongside product leaders, engineers, and experts from across the OneDrive team as they share the latest innovations, demonstrating how AI is transforming the way people work with files and content.
💡 You'll see real product demos, hearing from the people building the product, and get a closer look at the experiences that will help you get the most out of OneDrive and Microsoft 365.
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 where human judgment and strong relationships matter most.
Teams Phone Agent is an AI-powered calling receptionist that answers incoming calls and scales to serve customer requests during call-volume spikes and outside regular business hours. We’re excited to announce that Teams Phone Agent begins rolling out to general availability (GA) today.
Teams Phone Agent handles common customer requests
Teams Phone Agent brings conversational AI to the customer-facing Teams Phone service lines and call flows that organizations already use. Callers can simply say what they need instead of navigating a cumbersome phone menu. Teams Phone Agent’s generally available capabilities cover several scenarios.
Answer questions. Give callers convenient, conversational answers about topics such as business hours, locations, policies, or service details, grounded in knowledge sources your organization can easily configure through FAQ files and URLs.
Your monthly roundup of what's new in Copilot in SharePoint.
Copilot in SharePoint general availability rollout started on September 30 — read the announcement blog for the full story.
But general availability isn't the finish line, and this month's release makes that clear. October is about what happens after Copilot creates something — reviewing it, restructuring it, publishing it, and getting it to the people who need to act on it. You'll find new ways to reshape documents and images, review and publish generated HTML, and send the result on without ever leaving the site. Round it out with plugins that reach your other business systems, workflows you can describe in a sentence, and analytics you can simply ask for, and the pattern this month is a simple one: fewer trips out of SharePoint to finish the job.
Most of these capabilities are included with your Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Image generation and editing, advanced autofill, and site analytics use Copilot Credits, which have started rolling out as part of general availability.
Microsoft Purview Unified Classification Management Experience
Feature overview and administrator playbook
Why this experience is important
Classification underpins data protection, data loss prevention, and data security. As classifier inventories grow, administrators need a consistent way to understand what exists, where it is used, and what could be affected by a change.
What administrators can do
Discover supported classifier types and understand what the organization already uses.
Create classifiers from a single entry point with type-specific preparation guidance.
Review classified-item counts and inspect policies that depend on a classifier.
Validate matched items across supported data sources and investigate unexpected coverage.
Access Classifiers through Information Protection, Data Loss Prevention, or Data Security Posture Management, depending on tenant availability.
Supported classification capabilities include sensitive information types, named entities, Exact Data Match, trainable classifiers, credentials, document fingerprinting, optical character recognition, and on-demand classification.
How the experience can help
Reduce context switching: Use one inventory to find and inspect supported classifiers.
Understand impact earlier: Identify policy dependencies before a change reaches enforcement.
Improve accountability: Connect classifiers to business owners, policy owners, and reviewers.
We have introduced security enhancements to Exchange Online PowerShell authentication in ExchangeOnlineManagement module version 3.10.1 and newer. These enhancements strengthen the authentication flow and provide additional protection against emerging threats.
Customers using a version earlier than 3.10.1 should upgrade to version 3.10.1 or later. Exchange Online authentication will increasingly rely on the security enhancements available in these versions, and older module versions may not support future authentication requirements.
Customers already using version 3.10.1 or later do not need to take any additional action beyond keeping the module up to date.
Microsoft recommends upgrading as soon as possible to benefit from the latest security, reliability, and performance improvements and to prevent any future PowerShell connectivity issues.
What is Changing
Microsoft plans to begin enforcement of more strict logon requirements for Exchange Online PowerShell module on 31st March 2027.
After the enforcement:
ExchangeOnlineManagement versions older than 3.10.1 may experience authentication failures in certain interactive authentication scenarios.
ExchangeOnlineManagement version 3.10.1 and later will continue to function normally.
Upgrading the ExchangeOnlineManagement module to versions 3.10.1 (or newer) is the only thing you need to do. No other changes are required.
In April, I published a set of referential architecture diagrams for Microsoft Purview — Microsoft Purview Referential Architecture Diagrams. They have been useful in workshops and training sessions for a simple reason: one picture is worth a thousand words - attempting to explain the complex in a single image.
Today I'm publishing an update focused on classification and labeling — and on the wave of public previews that make auto-labeling something you can scale across the entire estate with ease.
Detailed view mode
➡️ Download the interactive architecture on GitHub here. It's a self-contained HTML file - and it's a lot more than this picture!
Why now: auto-labeling scales to the whole estate
The most consequential change is surprisingly small. An auto-labeling policy can now be kept on while you edit it, without re-triggering simulation.
Anyone who has run auto-labeling at scale knows why that matters. Until now, tuning a policy meant turning enforcement off, re-simulating, waiting, and turning it back on — delays every time you refined a rule. That friction made it challenging for organizations from broadening scope as fast as they wanted to. Removing it changes the operating model: you…
Earlier this month, Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol joined model choice in Microsoft Copilot. Now, we're continuing to expand that choice by bringing GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 to Microsoft Copilot, giving users more model options for how they delegate work to Copilot. As customers take on different kinds of work with Copilot, expanded model choice gives them more flexibility to choose the experience that best fits the task at hand.
With Work IQ, Copilot grounds it in your organization's files, meetings, chats and business data, within your existing permissions, so responses are informed by the context of your work.
Get started
GPT 6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 begin rolling out today with usage-based billing in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio.
GPT 6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 will also begin rolling out in phases across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Chat in the coming week as part of the user subscription license (USL)--limits apply but are designed to enable broad everyday AI usage across the organization, with the vast majority of users not expected to reach them. Users are warned as they approach a limit, and they can switch…
Fall is officially here, and with it comes our first quarterly edition of What's New in Microsoft Planner! Each quarter, we'll bring the latest Planner updates together in one place.
We're continuing to invest in Planner to help people work alongside AI to plan and get work done, whether you're tracking your own tasks or coordinating a shared plan across your team. This quarter's updates give you a clearer view of your work, new ways to save time keeping plans current, and more places to manage tasks where work already happens.
Planner Agent is now built directly into basic plans, so you can ask questions about your plan, create and update tasks, and focus on your top priorities without leaving Planner. We're also making Planner Agent in Copilot more capable, with fuller answers on large, complex plans and faster, more reliable responses.
You'll also find updates that bring Planner closer to where your team collaborates, from adding Planner as a tab in private and shared Teams channels to bringing your tasks and plans into Outlook. And the new Task Details Side Pane lets you update assignments, dates, and checklists without losing sight of the…
On September 25, we introduced the new Microsoft Copilot to connect the tools people rely on with the next generation of capabilities they’ll need to build, customize and scale AI across work.
Agents in Copilot already help you work with your organization’s knowledge and automate business processes.Now, we’re giving you more ways to customize Copilot with plugins that contain skills, connectors, and agents, adding the data and actions you need to get work done.
To make these plugins easier to discover and manage, today we’re also announcing the Microsoft plugin registry, rolling out now. The plugin registry is a shared place to discover, publish, manage, and govern plugins across supported Microsoft Copilot experiences—Home (Chat and Cowork), Code, and Autopilot, Microsoft 365 apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and SharePoint. Your users can find organization-approved plugins through a consistent Plugins menu, while you manage access and oversight centrally. In the future, the plugin registry will support such experiences as Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft Foundry.
What is a plugin?
A plugin brings together the capabilities users need to get work done in Copilot in a package that is easy to discover, use, and manage. Users…
When teams lack a shared view of customer calls, follow-up can be delayed or missed.
Queues app for Microsoft Teams turns an existing call queue into a collaborative workspace where calling representatives and supervisors work the same set of customer conversations together, in the familiar Teams app they already use every day. The solution is built for collaborative calling teams that manage customer calls alongside their other responsibilities. It supports teams serving external customers, such as bank branches, as well as internal customers through functions like an IT help desk.
The latest Queues app innovations help these teams coordinate customer conversations and resolve issues more quickly.
Make customer conversations visible across the team
The single biggest change to how teams work a queue is shared call history, now generally available. Instead of each representative seeing only their own calls, the queue gets a unified view of missed, incoming, and outgoing calls along with voicemails. That transparency is what makes coordinated follow-up possible, and admins stay in control: access to shared history can be configured for all queue members or restricted to authorized users.
Changes to Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online are imminent as per Exchange Online EWS, Your Time is Almost Up | Microsoft Community Hub. While EWS is not getting deprecated on-premises, we wanted to call out two specific scenarios that do impact our on-premises Exchange customers and how to ensure that your business is not impacted when Exchange Online EWS changes start happening between October 2026 and April 2027.
Scenario 1: Exchange hybrid customers who host mailboxes on-premises and online
The Microsoft Purview architecture diagrams provide a referential view of how data classification, sensitivity labeling, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Insider Risk operate across Microsoft 365 workloads. These diagrams are intended to help organisations understand where policy evaluation occurs, how signals flow between services, and how enforcement is applied consistently.
Rather than prescribing a single deployment model, the diagrams illustrate common architectural patterns used to protect sensitive data across endpoints, email, and collaboration services.
Classification: How Content Sensitivity Is Determined
This diagram shows how content is classified across Microsoft 365 workloads and connected locations.
Key points highlighted in the diagram:
Classification can occur in the client, in transport, or in the service, depending on workload and policy.
Multiple classifier types are supported, including Sensitive Information Types (SITs) - deterministic patterns and keywords, and several advanced classifier models such as Exact Data Match, document fingerprinting and trainable classifiers.
Update 9/29/2026: This blog post discusses a feature that is not yet fully available. Please see The rollout schedule for Cross-Tenant Access Policy table below for expected availability dates.
If your organization shares Free/Busy, MailTips, or calendars with other Microsoft 365 organizations, there's a change coming that you'll want to understand and plan for. If it doesn't, you can stop reading in about two paragraphs. This post covers what's changing as Exchange Web Services (EWS) is deprecated, how the new Microsoft 365 Cross-Tenant Access Policy model replaces the old plumbing, how to tell whether your tenant is affected, and what to do about it. The official announcement is Message Center post MC1446796; consider this the friendlier, more complete version with the context we wish the MC post had room for.
Is your organization impacted by this change?
Only if your organization shares Free/Busy, Calendars, or MailTips information with other Microsoft 365 organizations.
This change affects cross-tenant / cross-organization collaboration - the ability for people in your organization (Organization A) and people in a partner's Microsoft 365 tenant (Organization B) to see each other's Free/Busy availability, shared calendars, and MailTips (such as out-of-office notices).…
You need to know what AI is going to cost so you can plan for it and manage it. That’s a fair ask. As AI becomes more agentic, we’re committed to delivering predictable value for everyday AI, while enabling state-of-the-art AI experiences that deliver more value and cost more to run. That’s why Copilot pricing is evolving to combine predictable per-user pricing with usage-based pricing
Everyday AI
Everyday AI is what you give your whole workforce. It's covered by the Copilot user subscription license (USL), priced per user per month (the way you've bought software for years), and there are no changes to the value you already have.
We price it this way on purpose. Some vendors put everyday AI work on a meter. We think that's the wrong deal, because when every task has a meter, companies may ration access and only some people get to use AI. We think everyone should.
Microsoft internal analysis, September 2026. Cost comparison modeled two user profiles across 40 prompts, with each prompt tested 10 times: everyday AI users (15 prompts: 9 Chat, 6 across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and advanced AI users (25 prompts: 5 Cowork plus…
Most organizations start in the same place: licenses are provisioned, a handful of enthusiasts begin experimenting, and excitement around AI is high. Yet for most employees, building and using agents remains largely unexplored. The technology is ready, but widespread adoption has yet to follow.
The challenge is rarely technical. More often, it is about driving awareness, building confidence, demonstrating value, and creating the right conditions for new behaviors to take hold. Successful agent adoption requires more than technical readiness. Change management can help organizations build awareness, confidence, and engagement as employees begin creating and using agents.
This guide brings together practical approaches organizations can consider as they scale agent creation and usage.
Whether you are part of an AI Centre of Excellence, Learning and Development team, or Change Management function, you'll find a practical framework for scaling both agent creation and agent usage across your organization.
Included in Microsoft 365 Copilot, Agent Builder makes it easy for users to create agents that support personal and team productivity and enables organizations to democratize agent creation at scale.
Today we announced the new Copilot app, bringing together how people assist, delegate, build, and automate work in one experience powered by Work IQ.
Because Work IQ grounds these experiences in your work and organizational context, the quality and structure of knowledge behind them matters more than ever. The better that content gets, the better Copilot gets: in Microsoft evaluations, responses in the Copilot app improved by an average of 17 percentage points when the underlying content had been enriched and structured by Copilot.
That’s why over the past year we’ve invested in Copilot’s content experiences and tools – both in the Copilot app and inside the content repository itself with the Copilot in SharePoint preview. In just the past month, millions of users have tried this preview, applying it to real-world challenges to translate complex content into tangible business value and accelerate their organization’s AI transformation.
See Copilot in SharePoint in action, from asking questions of your content to building reusable skills your teams can share.
You have invested in Copilot. Adoption is climbing, prompt volume is up, and your dashboards are full of engagement charts. Yet the question leadership keeps asking is: How do we quantify the value of AI when it helps us across so many kinds of work?
Value has always been incredibly hard to define for software, and as a result organizations looked to signals like usage trends as a proxy. These metrics were good approximations of value and made sense in a world where products and product costs were simple. The only assumption you need to make is that monthly usage of a product is at least equal to the monthly cost of that product, and you're confident that your active usage numbers are correlated with positive ROI (i.e. value).
With AI, usage is incredibly dispersed and produces a massive variety of outputs and outcomes, from simple to complex. Additionally, costs vary with usage, so the old proxy measures are likely insufficient for more complex tasks.
Most AI assistance today is transactional. A person prompts, reads the response, and takes the next step themselves. Copilot Cowork works differently. People describe an outcome, and Cowork helps plan,…
Exchange Server 2019 CU14 and CU15 (to access, organization must be enrolled into the Period 2 ESU program)
Exchange Server 2016 CU23 (to access, organization must be enrolled into the Period 2 ESU program)
The September 2026 SUs address vulnerabilities responsibly reported to Microsoft by security partners and found through Microsoft’s internal processes.
These vulnerabilities affect Exchange Server. Exchange Online customers are already protected from the vulnerabilities addressed by these SUs and do not need to take any action other than updating any Exchange servers or Exchange Management tools workstations in their environment.
More details about specific CVEs can be found in the Security Update Guide (filter on ‘Server Software’ under Product Family for Exchange SE and ‘ESU’ under Product Family for Exchange 2016 and 2019).
Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol are rolling out to Microsoft Copilot today across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Chat, Cowork, and Copilot Studio.
Bringing Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol to Microsoft Copilot reflects Microsoft's commitment to giving customers access to the latest AI innovations as they emerge. As AI continues to evolve, Microsoft is expanding model choice in Copilot so customers can benefit from the unique strengths of different models within a familiar, trusted, and enterprise-ready experience.
No single model is ideal for every task. That's why Microsoft Copilot provides access to multiple frontier models, giving users the flexibility to choose the one that best fits the work they need to accomplish. But model choice is only part of what drives a great response. Equally important is what the model knows about your work. Through Work IQ, Copilot grounds responses in your organization's files, meetings, chats, and business data, helping deliver results that are relevant, informed, and connected to the context of your work.
Get started
Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol begins rolling out today. Availability may vary by license, access, and region.
Exchange Web Services (EWS) retirement in Exchange Online is entering its final phase. Over the last several years, Microsoft has worked with product teams, independent software vendors (ISVs), and customers across the ecosystem to migrate workloads to Microsoft Graph and other modern APIs. Many of those migrations are complete, and many others are well underway.
As phased EWS disablement in Exchange Online approaches in October 2026, we are introducing a new capability to help administrators prepare in a controlled and predictable way: EWSAllowedAppIDs. This is the AppID Allow List functionality that we mentioned in Exchange Online EWS, Your Time is Almost Up | Microsoft Community Hub.
EWSAllowedAppIDs gives administrators a practical way to identify remaining dependencies, limit EWS access to approved applications, and reduce the risk of disruption as retirement enforcement begins.
This feature is starting to roll out now. All tenants should be able to view the parameter when running Get-OrganizationConfig, but they won’t be able to set the list until the roll out reaches the tenant.
Microsoft Project Online will be retired on September 30, 2026. As part of this process, starting April 1, 2026, the creation of new Project Web App (PWA) sites will be blocked, and existing tenants without projects across their PWA sites will be blocked from accessing Project Online.
What is changing on April 1, 2026
Starting April 1, 2026, Microsoft will implement the following changes for Project Online:
Creation of new Project Online PWA sites will be blocked. Users will no longer be able to create new Project Online sites (new PWA site collections) in their tenants.
Existing tenants with no projects will be blocked. Any existing Project Online tenant that contains at least one project across any PWA site will be allowed. All others will be blocked. Non-PWA data will still be accessible.
How this affects your organization
If your organization creates Project Online sites on demand, you should ensure all required PWA sites are created before April 1, 2026.
If you have existing PWA sites that were set up but never used, those sites will no longer be accessible after this date. Non-PWA data will still be accessible.
Since we released cloud-based Message Recall in April 2023 (see Cloud-based Message Recall in Exchange Online), we’ve continued to expand where and how recall works – including support for Outlook on the web and mobile, recipient recall notifications, a maximum recallable message age, and support for external round-trip routing (see Exchange Online Message Recall Updates).
Until now, all these capabilities shared one boundary: Message Recall only worked within a single tenant. Today, we’re pleased to announce one of our most requested cross-organization enhancements:
Cross-Tenant Message Recall, controlled by a tenant admin allow list
The intra-tenant boundary
By design due to privacy concerns, Message Recall operates within the Exchange Online service boundary, and until now it has been limited to intra-tenant messages – those where the sender and the recipients belong to the same Microsoft 365 tenant. When a sender tried to recall a message they had sent to recipients in a different tenant, the recall would fail, even between organizations that work closely together and trust one another.
Today we are expanding model choice in Copilot with the addition of Grok models from SpaceXAI1. This continues our commitment to bring the latest AI innovation in the industry to Copilot, tuned for work and tailored to business needs.
Adding SpaceXAI as a subprocessor
To support access to SpaceXAI models in Copilot, SpaceXAI has been added to Microsoft's Online Services Subprocessor List. Access to SpaceXAI models is managed through a dedicated administrative setting that is disabled by default.
Organizations that want to use these models enable the setting first, and administrators keep transparency and control over the data processed by SpaceXAI models in supported Copilot experiences.
Access to Grok models is rolling out through the Microsoft Frontier Program in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. We are starting with a focused release to gather customer feedback and learn how customers use the model across common productivity scenarios.
Grok is not available to Frontier customers in the European Union (EU), European Free Trade Association (EFTA), and the United Kingdom during the preview.
You have a presentation to finish by the end of the day, but instead of focusing on the story, you are searching for the latest template, fixing fonts and colors, and repeating the same review steps you completed last time. What should be a creative process can quickly turn into a checklist of small, time-consuming tasks.
Brand Kit and Skills in Copilot in PowerPoint can help with those hurdles. Brand Kit helps presentations to start with the appropriate look from your organization, while Skills make familiar workflows repeatable, so you can spend your time shaping the message.
Company branding at scale with Brand Kit
First, there is the challenge of getting the look right. Brand Kit brings your organization’s templates, imagery, icons, fonts, and other assets into the PowerPoint creation experience. Instead of hunting through folders or reworking slides at the end, you can give Copilot the visual foundation it needs from the start, rather than requiring a separate clean up pass later.
Start with an approved Brand Kit
When starting a presentation, choose an approved Brand Kit so Copilot can create with your organization’s visual identity in mind so it’s not inferring what “on…
Creating and refining SharePoint pages is becoming more intuitive. Instead of describing where content lives on the page, authors can now simply select a section or web part and tell Copilot what they want to change.
Watch the demo
Featured speakers
Sara Cummings, Product Manager for AI authoring, Microsoft
Vesa Juvonen, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft
From describing a location to selecting it
Previously, authors described both the content they wanted to change and where it was located on the page. With on-canvas selection, location becomes part of the context automatically. Simply select a web part or section and describe the outcome you want. The selected item appears in the Copilot experience, giving the request clear context.
What you can do
Make focused edits. Select an image or another page element and ask Copilot to move or update it.
Restructure a section. Select the section and ask for a different column layout; Copilot can work across the components inside it.
Apply broader updates. Ask Copilot to update repeated content across a page, for example, changing a product or brand name in text and supported web-part content.
Get ready for the August 2026 OneDrive Customer Office Hours! This session creates space for open conversation around the latest updates and how they support the way you use your files every day. In this month’s session, we’ll walk through what’s new and open the floor for questions, feedback, and shared experiences.
Join us for our next call
Join the OneDrive team to learn how we're revitalizing OneDrive as the productivity hub for mobile work. As mobile devices, particularly iPads, become primary work surfaces for frontline employees, executives, and hybrid workers, we're investing in experiences that make productivity seamless on the go. From intelligent search enhancements to enterprise-focused innovations, discover how we're bringing powerful file, content, and AI experiences to mobile and making OneDrive the destination for getting work done anywhere.
Anyone can join this one-hour webinar to ask us questions, share feedback, and learn more about the features we’re releasing soon and our roadmap. We can't wait to share, listen, and engage every month!
Exchange Server 2019 CU14 and CU15 (to access, organization must be enrolled into the Period 2 ESU program)
Exchange Server 2016 CU23 (to access, organization must be enrolled into the Period 2 ESU program)
The August 2026 SUs address vulnerabilities responsibly reported to Microsoft by security partners and found through Microsoft’s internal processes.
These vulnerabilities affect Exchange Server. Exchange Online customers are already protected from the vulnerabilities addressed by these SUs and do not need to take any action other than updating any Exchange servers or Exchange Management tools workstations in their environment.
More details about specific CVEs can be found in the Security Update Guide (filter on ‘Server Software’ under Product Family for Exchange SE and ‘ESU’ under Product Family for Exchange 2016 and 2019).
We are pleased to announce expanded Outlook client support for Exchange Server AD FS Modern Authentication.
In our previous update, we announced broad Outlook for Windows/Mac support and support for the native Mail app on iOS and macOS. We are now extending this support to Outlook for iOS and Outlook for Android.
Outlook for iOS and Outlook for Android can now use AD FS Modern Authentication to access mailboxes in supported pure on-premises Exchange Server deployments.
Deployment context: AD FS Modern Authentication is intended for pure on-premises Exchange organizations that don't use Microsoft Entra ID or an Exchange hybrid configuration. Exchange hybrid organizations should continue to use Hybrid Modern Authentication (HMA) with Microsoft Entra ID.
Supported clients at a glance
Updated documentation
We have updated the deployment documentation to make the supported-client requirements easier to review:
A new summary brings all supported clients and operating-system requirements together.
Outlook for Windows build, Windows update, registry, and AD FS trusted-domain requirements are grouped under the Windows client.
Outlook for Mac requirements include the ADFSAuthorizedURLs Terminal configuration, a multiple-namespace example, and the equivalent Mobile Device Management settings.
GPT-6 Astra joins the frontier models available in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio, giving customers more choice for complex work they want to delegate to AI. Astra expands the range of work that can be handed off to Copilot. Instead of breaking work into smaller pieces and guiding it step by step, you can delegate larger tasks and focus your time on reviewing results, making decisions, and moving work forward.
As more work is delegated, the quality of the outcome depends on both the model and the context it can reason over. Work IQ grounds GPT-6 Astra in your files, meetings, chats, and business data within existing permissions, resulting in more relevant and accurate responses.
Get started today
GPT-6 Astra is rolling out today to users in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio.
Availability may vary by region and organization. Admins can manage access and configure availability for their organization through the Microsoft 365 admin center.
As we prepare for the final phase of Exchange Web Services retirement, we are refining how EWSAllowedAppIDs setting (which you can use to define your EWS AppID allow list) will be applied. Our goal is to protect customers from unexpected disruption while keeping control of the allow list with each tenant administrator.
We strongly recommend that every customer review EWS usage and configure EWSAllowedAppIDs themselves. If an administrator has already configured EWSAllowedAppIDs, Microsoft will not overwrite or change the list. The customer-managed list remains authoritative.
What happens during rollout
Beginning October 1, 2026, Microsoft will start enabling the updated behavior as outlined in previous blog post. With this logic change, if the customer has EWSEnabled set to True, EWS will require an Allowed AppID list. The timing will depend on when the change reaches that tenant's environment.
If organization has:
EWSEnabled = True - Microsoft will ensure that each tenant has an EWSAllowedAppIDs list. If the customer has not created a list, Microsoft will populate one to reduce the risk of an outage when the cloud environment logic changes (and AppID allow list becomes required when EWSEnabled = True). The list will be based…
Microsoft Teams Rooms gives organizations the flexibility to create high-quality collaboration experiences across meeting spaces of every kind and size. Often we hear from customers, “which device or which platform should I choose?” The way we think about it is simple: we believe that customers should be empowered to expect high-quality collaboration experiences in any physical space, regardless of what platform they prefer, or the devices they install. We designed the Teams Rooms ecosystem with flexibility and optionality in mind, and those principles still guide us today. With Certified for Teams devices from more than 30 manufacturers, customers have options across a broad ecosystem spanning Windows and Android to select the platform, form factor, and hardware that best fit each space. That range is possible because Teams Rooms embraces a mixed‑platform strategy. Whether you choose Windows or Android, Teams Rooms delivers a high‑quality, feature‑rich experience for joining Teams meetings, with native manageability that keeps devices current. Both platforms are here for the long term, here’s how to think about the choice, and if you choose Android, here’s exactly what the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP) means for you.
Welcome to the August 2026 edition of What's New in Microsoft 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:
More control for effort level and cost in Cowork
Text selections, session sharing, and more for Copilot Chat
New ways to work in Copilot Notebooks
Change languages for meeting recaps with Copilot in Teams
Hyperlinks, image understanding, and highlights for Copilot in Word
Chat history and change history skill for Copilot in Excel
SharePoint helps communicators create rich, engaging stories, announcements or news posts for their organizations. Viva Engage helps those stories travel through the communities and conversations where people connect every day. With SharePoint News and Viva Engage cross-posting, authors can now bring these experiences together.
The new experience lets you distribute a SharePoint news post to a Viva Engage storyline or community. Readers can open the complete news post in full fidelity from Engage, while comments, replies, and reactions made in SharePoint or across Engage surfaces remain synchronized as one conversation.
A great news post should not stop at the boundary of a single site. Cross-posting extends the reach of SharePoint news into Viva Engage feeds, digests, and connected experiences. Readers get the same experience whether they use Engage on the web or mobile app, including iOS, or the Engage apps in Microsoft Teams and Outlook. Authors can reach these audiences without recreating content or managing separate discussions.
Your monthly roundup of what's new in Copilot in SharePoint.
Copilot in SharePoint helps you do more with your content — ask questions, run workflows, and create sites, pages, interactive reports, and Office files using natural language. This month, reusable skills can follow you across SharePoint and OneDrive, Copilot can measure and improve those skills with evaluations, and new guidance helps AI agents build live, SharePoint-safe experiences. Here's everything that's new.
Build better skills and use them anywhere
Personal skills that follow you
What's new: Create a personal skill once and use it across all your SharePoint sites
Why it matters: Your preferred formats, standards, and repeatable ways of working can travel with you instead of being tied to one site.
Sample use cases:
Save your executive-update structure as a personal skill, then use it with project content wherever it lives.
An executive can ask Copilot to create a personal document briefing skill that turns lengthy SharePoint documents into concise summaries. The skill highlights proposals, expected value, decisions needed, key risks, open questions, and next steps
Get ready for the September 2026 OneDrive Customer Office Hours! This session creates space for open conversation around the latest updates and how they support the way you use your files every day. In this month’s session, we’ll walk through what’s new and open the floor for questions, feedback, and shared experiences.
Join the OneDrive and SharePoint team to see how we're making Markdown and HTML first-class content in OneDrive.
OneDrive Markdown + HTML Files: Open a .md or .html file and it renders instantly in OneUp preview, fully formatted, no download and no third-party app required. Edit right where you are: make in-line text edits directly in your rendered HTML, and author Markdown in a true WYSIWYG experience where you see the formatted result as you type. Then share the file and collaborate with in-line anchored comments on both file types, so feedback lands on the exact word, line, or section it refers to instead of scattering across email and chat. Whether the file came from…
As Exchange Online continues its multi-year directory modernization, we are evaluating the future of several long-standing identifier properties: ObjectGuid (most would recognize this property as Guid), SamAccountName, and DistinguishedName.
Today, multiple properties can identify the same object in Exchange Online. While this has provided flexibility and compatibility, some of these identifiers reflect design decisions from an earlier era and can add complexity for customers building and maintaining automation, integrations, and administrative workflows.
As part of our modernization efforts, we are exploring whether a smaller and more consistent set of identifiers could better support the future of the service. No decisions have been made. Before determining a path forward, we want to better understand how these properties are used today, what the impact of potential changes could be, and what alternatives, notice periods, and migration assistance customers would need.
We are particularly interested in hearing from customers, partners, and solution providers who use these properties in scripts, automation, reporting, applications, provisioning systems, or operational processes.
The potential changes discussed in this survey apply only to the
So far, these changes have been implemented silently. But, today, we are announcing that starting in the second week of September 2026, we will raise the oldest allowed version for Exchange 2016 or Exchange 2019 servers that connect to Exchange Online over an inbound connector type of OnPremises to at least the last available public update version, released in October 2025. This update level was released almost a year ago, and all organizations should have updated to it, since.
A very important implication of this change:
After going into effect, the oldest Exchange Server version allowed to send email to Exchange Online over the inbound OnPremises connector will be Exchange with October 2025 updates.
The next time we update the oldest allowed Exchange Server version for sending email to Exchange Online, the .
Claude Fable 5.1 is now joining the frontier models available in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio, giving customers more choice as they delegate more complex tasks to AI.
Fable 5.1 is designed for long-running work, financial analysis, and front-end visual coding, with tighter plans up front and more concise summaries at the end.
As more work is delegated to AI, the quality of the result depends on both the model and the context. Work IQ grounds Fable 5.1 in your files, meetings, chats, and business data—within your existing permissions—so it can reason over your work instead of the prompt alone resulting in more relevant and accurate responses, with sources you can trace back to your work.
Get started today
Claude Fable 5.1 is rolling out today to eligible users in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio.
Availability may vary by region and organization. Admins can manage access and configure availability for their organization through the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Flexible Sections give SharePoint page authors the freedom to build layouts without a strict column structure, resizing, moving, and overlapping web parts freely within a section. That freedom is powerful, but it can also make it harder to keep pages predictable and consistent across the many ways people view them.
Today we're shipping a set of usability improvements designed to make flexible sections more predictable, easier to control, and faster to author, without giving up any of the flexibility that makes it useful in the first place.
Flexible Sections now show visual layout guides that mirror the familiar column structures you already know from standard sections. These guides give your page an underlying sense of structure, so content reflows cleanly and predictably across email, mobile, and canvas resize.
When you add a web part to the canvas, it automatically matches the layout guide's column width, giving you a sensible starting point every time. And you keep full flexibility: resize, reposition, or overlap any web part whenever your design calls for it. The guides inform your layout;…
Three layers that work like a good team and slides to show it
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is not new, many use it daily without ever even knowing it, but with AI bringing faster results for productivity so does the risk of data leakage. That is where we take a layered approach, meeting the end user exactly where they are working, on a device, or in a browser, or through that cute cat Office add-in that had to be installed. But don't think of layered protection as three products but more as three specialists who are each excellent at their own job and have the good sense not to try doing everyone else's.
Endpoint DLP lives on the device. USB and removable media, clipboard, print, restricted apps. It carries the deepest classification support, EDM, fingerprinting, OCR, and it works offline, which turns out to be more useful than it sounds at 30,000 feet.
Browser Data Security lives in the session, inline in Edge for Business, checking content before an upload or a form submission. It is the most precise layer for AI prompts and for activity happening inside a managed web app, where nothing else…
In 2016, we introduced modern SharePoint and the SharePoint Framework to our online service – a cloud-born user experience & developer extensibility framework. Ten years later, we continue to invest in this stable platform to provide reliable, well-governed, AI-ready, mobile-friendly, and secure-by-default foundations for customers’ publishing and content management needs.
Also in 2016, we renamed our previous publishing and UX extensibility system to “classic”. These features were designed to ease our customers’ transition from on premises environment to the cloud service. Now, ten years later, these classic features are used by fewer than 5% of our monthly active tenant base, and the classic SharePoint page content is not participating in the latest ways content should be secured, managed, and shared. Classic pages are also not fully represented in the content formats that power Microsoft 365 Copilot, which can reduce the coverage and accuracy of Copilot responses that draw on classic content. As such, over the next two years, we will take steps to retire classic SharePoint pages and custom scripting add/update capability in SharePoint Online from Microsoft 365 – below you will find details on timelines, assessment tooling, and migration guidance.
AI becomes most impactful when it helps with the work teams already do every day. The challenge is rarely a lack of information. It is turning trusted information into a clear, repeatable process without starting from scratch each time.
That is where Copilot in SharePoint can help. It works with the content and structure already in SharePoint, including sites, pages, lists, libraries, and files. Teams can ask questions, compare and summarize content, organize information, create outputs, and turn repeatable multi-step processes into reusable skills.
The examples below are based on real customer scenarios from organizations exploring Copilot in SharePoint. To protect customer confidentiality, organization names and identifying details have been generalized. What matters is the pattern: start with trusted SharePoint content, define the work that needs to happen, keep people in control, and make the process easier to repeat.
1. Turn fragmented project updates into a usable project history
Industry Scenario: A life sciences organization needed a better way to understand how complex projects changed over time. Important decisions and updates were spread across email exports, presentations, planning documents, and other project files. Reconstructing the story behind a project required significant manual review and…
Organizations continue to look for faster ways to modernize intranets, improve internal communications, and increase employee engagement. Partners in the Microsoft ecosystem are helping customers accelerate that journey by extending SharePoint and Microsoft 365 with ready-to-deploy solutions that deliver immediate business value.
As organizations increasingly adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot, a well-structured and engaging intranet becomes even more important. High-quality content, clear information architecture, and effective content management help employees get greater value from AI-powered experiences.
This partner showcase highlights ACP, one of the leading IT service providers in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.
About ACP
ACP is one of the leading IT service providers in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. As a leading technology and digital transformation partner, ACP delivers modern IT solutions, cloud services, digital workplaces, cybersecurity, and managed services to businesses and public sector organizations. With more than 2,600 specialists and a strong local presence, ACP helps customers unlock innovation and turn technology into measurable business value.
Within ACP, the SCOPE team (SharePoint & Copilot Experts) serves as the
After more than a decade of supporting project managers and teams around the world, Project Online will officially retire on September 30, 2026. We know this is a significant change, and we want to acknowledge the impact it may have on your organization, your workflows, and your planning processes.
This update is exclusive to Project Online and does not affect Project desktop, Project Server, or Planner.
Why this change is happening
Project Online has served organizations well, but its legacy architecture limits innovation and integration that enhance today’s collaborative work environments, as we announced in 2018. With certain SharePoint Online workflow design tools deprecating in 2026, Microsoft is prioritizing innovation within Planner, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the Project Manager agent, which represents a new generation of work management tools designed to be more intuitive, scalable, and powered by AI. These tools are built to support both simple task tracking and complex project planning, while integrating deeply across Microsoft 365.
What this means for you
No immediate disruption: Your current Project Online environment will continue to function as expected until the retirement date.
As shared in Exchange Online EWS, Your Time is Almost Up, Exchange Web Services in Exchange Online will begin phased disablement in October 2026 and will be fully disabled in April 2027. As part of this work, we are addressing the remaining Exchange Server collaboration scenarios that currently depend on the Exchange Online EWS endpoint.
Most Exchange Server Free/Busy scenarios will not change. Free/Busy between two Exchange Server (purely on-premises) organizations will continue using Federation/DAuth and Organization Relationships. Exchange hybrid organization can continue sharing Free/Busy between Exchange Server and its own Exchange Online tenant using OAuth and IntraOrganizationConnectors through the dedicated Exchange hybrid app, with Graph replacing EWS in the modern hybrid flow.
The scenario requiring a new path is an Exchange Server organization retrieving Free/Busy or MailTips from another organization's Exchange Online tenant through an EWS-dependent Organization Relationship. For Exchange Server to external Exchange Online scenario, we are evaluating leveraging Microsoft 365 Cross-Tenant Access Policy which is also becoming the standard for Free/Busy, calendar, and MailTips collaboration between Microsoft 365 tenants.
Coding where context lives and collaboration happens
The best prompt may be the conversation your team has already had or is currently having. Until now, using a coding agent often meant paying context and coordination taxes. Developers had to leave the discussion, open another tool, and reconstruct the problem in a lengthy prompt: what happened, what the team decided, which constraints matter, and what needs to be built.
With GitHub Copilot in Teams, teams can move directly from conversation to action. @mention GitHub Copilot when the team is ready to act, and it can use the conversation alongside repository context to understand the request, implement the change, and create a pull request for review.
This makes working with a coding agent more collaborative and visible. Instead of one developer privately reconstructing the request, teammates can contribute context, correct assumptions, refine the approach in real time, and review the resulting work together.
Let’s explore the new GitHub Copilot in Teams experience to see how it can streamline development tasks:
GitHub Copilot in Teams is available in Teams channels, group chats, meeting chats, and 1:1 chats
Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard, and Business Premium now include an additional 50 GB of primary email storage for eligible users. This brings the supported primary mailbox entitlement from 50 GB to a maximum of 100 GB. We wanted to talk about this change, so Exchange Online administrators understand how this mailbox size increase is delivered. We will focus only on mailbox size in this post.
What changed for the Business suites
Microsoft announced an additional 50 GB of email storage for Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard, and Business Premium as part of the 2026 Microsoft 365 packaging updates. The packaging changes are rolling out June - September 2026, with customers receiving advance notice through Message Center before the changes became available in their tenant.
The additional storage changes the effective primary mailbox size for eligible Business suite users from 50 GB to 100 GB. The affected commercial product suites are:
Microsoft 365 Business Basic
Microsoft 365 Business Standard
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
After the rollout, all users that had the appropriate licenses assigned will have received a new service plan and the corresponding mailbox quota increase.
Over the last several weeks we have received several questions about possible extension of the Exchange Server 2016/2019 ESU program past October 2026. After all, in our original Exchange 2016/2019 ESU announcement we said that there would be no extensions, but then we ended up creating a Period 2 Exchange ESU program that is scheduled to end with October 2026. We are just about at the mid-point of Period 2 Exchange ESU now.
There will be no further extension of Exchange 2016/2019 ESU program timeline. Once October 2026 ends, there will be no further updates for Exchange 2016/2019, even if you currently have a Period 2 ESU.
If your organization still uses Exchange 2016 or 2019 in production:
We are getting questions from our customers on when they can expect us to release Exchange SE Cumulative Update 1 (CU1). After all, in the past we mentioned that it would be released by the end of the first half of calendar year 2026, later updated to “second half of 2026”. What is the deal? Where is CU1?
Over the last few months, various Microsoft execs made statements explaining how Microsoft is leveraging a variety of AI tools to help find vulnerabilities in our products (examples of such announcements can be found here, here and here).
It should come as no surprise that this is a Microsoft-wide initiative. Many teams, Exchange Server included, are working through reported issues – which includes validation that they are real security issues, reproducing, fixing, testing for regressions / issues after fixes are deployed and releasing updates monthly.
We have been releasing security updates for Exchange Server regularly: May, June, July, August. You can expect this increased pace of security releases to continue. We are
Add your READMEs, wikis, logs, and transcripts to your notebook
Your most useful project knowledge does not always live in a polished document. It might be captured in a README, project wiki, system log, meeting transcript, research export, or a simple text file.
Copilot Notebooks can now use Markdown (.md), rich text format (.rtf) and plain text (.txt) files as references—helping you bring more of the content your work runs on into one focused workspace.
Add the files to a notebook, chat with Copilot, and generate grounded insights and useful artifacts from your project context.
Bring structured knowledge and raw data together
Markdown often contains the structured knowledge behind a project: READMEs, technical documentation, project wikis, architecture notes, release notes, and runbooks.
Plain-text files often contain raw data: system logs, exported transcripts, ticket dumps, customer feedback, and working notes.
Rich Text Format (.rtf) files preserve formatted notes and documents—such as reports, drafts, and exported content.
With support for Markdown, rich text, and plain-text files, Copilot Notebooks helps you bring together documentation, notes, logs, and transcripts into a single workspace for deeper insight and outcomes.
We are announcing our plan to retire and disable the OWA Light experience in Exchange Server in a future update. OWA Light was created for a much earlier era of the web, when browser support, bandwidth, and accessibility technologies were very different from today. Going forward, we want to invest in modern Outlook on the web experience that provides the cross-browser, accessible, and security-focused experience.
Organizations that still rely on OWA Light must move users to the standard Outlook on the web experience and review any internal guidance, bookmarks, training material, helpdesk scripts, or accessibility workflows that reference OWA Light.
This is how OWA Light looks like:
What is changing
In an upcoming Exchange Server update (estimated in August 2026), we plan to disable and remove the OWA Light experience. After that change is introduced, users will no longer be able to choose or be redirected to OWA Light and…
The tools that run a business rarely live in one place. For a small business owner, that means stepping out of the document you're writing to search for an attorney, digging through a folder for the LLC paperwork you half-remember filing, or pausing a client deliverable to figure out if a contract clause is enforceable. Every one of those detours pulls you out of the work you were doing to go chase down something that should've been a quick answer. For a small business, where focus is one of the most valuable resources there is, constant switching adds up.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is designed to keep your work moving, bringing your data, expertise, and workflows into the apps you already use like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams - now powered by AI. And through built-in and custom agents, Copilot extends to include specialized tools and services that run your business, so you can use their capabilities all in one place. That ecosystem of partner agents is growing quickly, and LegalZoom is a great example of what it makes possible: chat with a LegalZoom Legal Assistant, get a recommended business formation plan, or connect with…
Most people don't need more meetings—they need meetings that lead to action. At their best, meetings drive decisions and keep work moving forward. But poorly managed meetings can actually slow progress. In fact, our Work Trend Index report found that inefficient meetings are the biggest productivity disruptor at work. Common challenges include staying on track, catching up after joining late, and leaving without clear next steps.
Microsoft 365 Copilot helps teams get more out of every meeting—from spending less time preparing to having more productive discussions and staying aligned on follow-up. The impact can be significant. Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study on Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams. The study, New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Teams With Microsoft 365 Copilot, projects that companies could realize a potential ROI of 400% over three years.
Here are some of the latest Microsoft 365 Copilot innovations designed to make meetings and collaboration more effective.
I hope everyone is having a great summer - July has flown by. As we head into the second half of the year, we're continuing to innovate in Teams to help people collaborate with people and AI to get work done more efficiently. This month's updates bring together new ways to stay informed, simplify everyday tasks, and put AI to work across more scenarios and roles.
One highlight is the new Meeting Recaps app, which makes it easier to find, revisit, and catch up on important conversations across your meetings. We're also expanding how organizations manage apps and agents in Teams with improved request experiences that provide greater transparency for users and more control for admins.
You'll also find updates that make collaboration more seamless, from accessing Viva Engage communities directly in Teams to improving calling experiences on mobile. Read on to see everything that's new in Microsoft Teams this month.
Feature categories: (All features listed are generally available unless otherwise noted)
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. This capability helps users focus on engaging with the calls that matter most and is available through the Frontier program.
What is intelligent call delegation?
Here's how the experience works:
After turning on intelligent call delegation in the Teams Call settings, it answers an incoming call on your behalf and starts a conversation with the caller, helping filter out spam and capturing context so you can understand why the caller is contacting you.
When a call is time-sensitive, intelligent call delegation identifies the urgency and attempts a live transfer so you don’t miss out on important conversations.
When a call isn't urgent, intelligent call delegation offers the caller the option to leave you a voicemail or book a follow-up appointment on your calendar through an integration with .
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 people who turn to it every month to get their work done. We’re also thankful for our global community of partners, whose expertise and dedication carry that impact even further into every industry and region we serve. It’s the trust our customers and partners place in us that makes a recognition like this possible.
We believe this recognition reflects the past year of innovation we’ve delivered to make Teams simpler, smarter, more secure, and where humans and agents collaborate to get work done. Here’s a look at some of the key releases along that journey.
Copilot in SharePoint helps you do more with your content — ask questions, run workflows, and create sites, pages, interactive reports, and Office files using natural language. Here's everything that's new in the last month:
📊 Create live SharePoint dashboards
Copilot can now generate a SharePoint dashboard directly from a list as an interactive HTML report that stays connected to the underlying list. Instead of exporting data and rebuilding a report every time something changes, your SharePoint dashboard refreshes from the list whenever it's opened. Dashboards can also be created from Excel and CSV files.
Why it matters: Most AI-generated dashboards go stale the moment they're created. You export data, generate a report, update the list, then rebuild the whole thing. No more. Now SharePoint can generate HTML dashboards and apps that stay connected to the underlying list data -- unlocking all types of new List-driven experiences!
Sample use cases:
Project status dashboard — turn a list of projects into a live executive view showing what's on track, at risk, or blocked, with filters for owner, priority, due date, or status.
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.
Customers are looking to identify relevant use cases, experience AI in their everyday work, and evaluate its value before making a broader commitment. This creates a significant opportunity for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners to lead customers from initial interest to sustained adoption. The SMB segment represents a Microsoft-estimated $625 billion* market opportunity in FY27, yet most organizations remain early in their AI transformation journey.
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) into more business-critical workflows, admins need practical controls that help web-grounded experiences stay aligned with organizational policies, compliance expectations, and trusted source strategies.
Give admins more control over web grounding
Web grounding helps Copilot deliver more timely and relevant answers by allowing Copilot to reference current information from the public web when it can improve the response. With Domain Exclusion, administrators can now specify external sites that Copilot should not use for web grounding, giving organizations a more precise way to align Copilot responses with internal policies, compliance needs, and trusted source strategies.
What is Domain Exclusion?
Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot enables administrators to define domains that are excluded from Copilot web grounding. Once configured, excluded domains are not used in Copilot responses that rely on web grounding. This capability applies to Microsoft…
Our team just wrapped up the M365 Community Conference in Orlando, FL, and it was an incredible way to close out April! Our teams were energized by connecting with, listening to, and sharing what’s new with many of you: the builders, innovators and icons of intelligent work. Thank you to everyone who attended, and we can’t wait to see even more of you at next year’s conference!
As for this month’s Teams updates, we remain focused on bringing you features that can make collaboration more intelligent, secure, and seamless—whether you’re working with AI, managing calls, or enabling hybrid teams at scale.
Across meetings, calling, and the workplace, you’ll find improvements designed to remove friction, from smarter call handling with intelligent call delegation, to Interpreter agent enhancements that support proper attribution for sign-language users in meetings, and updated room booking and live transcription in meetings in Teams Rooms.
In another new update, Targeted messages for agents now enables your agents and bots to send targeted, private, temporary updates to specific users in chats, channels, and meetings, without interrupting everyone else.
In May, we announced the Public Preview of Writeback for Cloud-Managed Remote Mailboxes. Since then, many customers have enabled this feature and shared their feedback. Today, we're excited to announce that Writeback for Cloud-Managed Remote Mailboxes is now Generally Available (GA).
Writeback is available in WW, GCCH, DoD, and 21Vianet environments and supports up to 600,000 cloud-managed mailboxes per tenant.
A quick recap
Cloud-Managed Remote Mailboxes allow organizations to transfer the Source of Authority (SOA) for a directory-synchronized mailbox's Exchange attributes to Exchange Online by setting IsExchangeCloudManaged to true.
The user identity remains synchronized from on-premises Active Directory but Exchange attributes become editable in Exchange Online. Administrators can update these properties through Exchange Online PowerShell, the Exchange admin center, or the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Writeback extends this capability by synchronizing a critical set of Exchange attribute changes from Exchange Online back to on-premises Active Directory through Microsoft Entra Cloud Sync. This helps organizations whose on-premises line-of-business applications continue to read Exchange attributes from Active Directory.
If you already use Microsoft Entra Connect Sync, you don't need to uninstall or replace it. Cloud Sync runs alongside Connect Sync:
Welcome to the July 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:
Adding agents in Copilot Chat
Model update, search enhancements, and push notifications in the Copilot app
Model update and new ways to work in Cowork
Additional reference support for Copilot Notebooks
Workflows for Copilot in Word
New skills and Power BI context for Copilot in Excel
Branded assets, custom skills, and more for Copilot in PowerPoint
Meetings recaps app for Copilot in Teams
Access heatmap, AI summary, and document creation for SharePoint and OneDrive
More Copilot connectors
IT admin capabilities:
New controls and reports in Microsoft admin center
User capabilities
Adding agents in Copilot Chat
Users can now add the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents directly into their Copilot Chat prompt
Every team has repeatable work they want done the right way, not just once, but every time. Copilot can learn the way your team already works, follow the processes you trust, and help people repeat high-quality outcomes without starting from scratch every time.
That is the idea behind skills in Copilot in SharePoint. Skills are reusable instructions that teach Copilot how to perform a specific task, whether that is summarizing meetings, analyzing a SharePoint site, generating reports, reviewing documents, or preparing project briefs. Once saved to a SharePoint site, skills become a shared team asset that anyone with access to the site can invoke from chat.
For organizations, that means less repetitive prompting, more consistent results, and a growing library of expertise that can be reused across projects and teams. If you are new to skills, learn more at Teaching AI in SharePoint What to Know and How to Act and the Copilot in SharePoint adoption page. To help you get started, here are ten skills that show what is possible today and can help you turn proven processes into reusable capabilities for your team.
Get ready for the July 2026 OneDrive Customer Office Hours! This session creates space for open conversation around the latest updates and how they support the way you use your files every day. In this month’s session, we’ll walk through what’s new and open the floor for questions, feedback, and shared experiences.
Join us for our next call
Date: July 15, 2026
Time: 8:00 AM-9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Special Topic: Hero Link Sharing with Stephen Rice
Join the OneDrive team to learn about Hero Link sharing, a single link that controls access to your files, so you can quickly share content and clearly understand who has permission to view, edit, or reshare. This updated sharing experience makes collaboration easier and gives you control with a single, unified experience to both share and manage permissions. Anyone can join this one-hour webinar to ask us questions, share feedback, and learn more about the features we’re releasing soon and our roadmap. We can't wait to share, listen, and engage every month!
Today we’re expanding model choice in Microsoft 365 Copilot with the addition of Anthropic’s latest model—Claude Opus 5.
Claude Opus 5 is the newest model in Anthropic’s Opus family. Designed to be used every day for complex, multi-step work. It improves on Opus 4.8 across agentic coding, professional knowledge work, and long-horizon reasoning1.
With Opus 5, Copilot takes on more of the steps between idea and finished work across the apps you use every day—while keeping you in control of the final outcome:
Word: Move from rough idea to a complete draft, holding structure and flow together across longer documents.
Excel: Work through complex analysis with higher-quality modeling and more polished workbooks.
PowerPoint: Build and refine presentation drafts from first outline to polished deck, with more visual polish, creative layouts, and better use of slide space
Copilot Chat: Tackle open-ended, novel problems—comparing options, structuring plans, working through ambiguity—with stronger reasoning.
Copilot Cowork: Stay focused on long-running tasks, orchestrating work across tools and files with the context Work IQ brings from your organization to carry a project through start to finish.
Exchange Server 2019 CU14 and CU15 (to access, organization must be enrolled into the Period 2 ESU program)
Exchange Server 2016 CU23 (to access, organization must be enrolled into the Period 2 ESU program)
The July 2026 SUs address vulnerabilities responsibly reported to Microsoft by security partners and found through Microsoft’s internal processes.
These vulnerabilities affect Exchange Server. Exchange Online customers are already protected from the vulnerabilities addressed by these SUs and do not need to take any action other than updating any Exchange servers or Exchange Management tools workstations in their environment.
More details about specific CVEs can be found in the Security Update Guide (filter on ‘Server Software’ under Product Family for Exchange SE and ‘ESU’ under Product Family for Exchange 2016 and 2019).
Check for presence of legacy Exchange security groups
AI note-taking has become a familiar part of the meeting experience, helping people keep track of important details while staying present in the conversation. But as AI meeting tools have become more common, new challenges have emerged. Bots have begun joining meetings that participants never intended them to attend. For example, after connecting a third-party service to a meeting, some users have found that its bot continues joining future meetings automatically.
Unexpected participants in a meeting can create security and privacy risks, particularly when sensitive information is being discussed. Organizations need confidence that the right people and tools are participating in their discussions. That's why we're introducing a new Teams admin policy designed to give organizations more visibility and control over external bots in their meetings. This new experience helps organizers identify bots, and adds safeguards before they're admitted, giving organizations greater confidence that only the intended participants and tools will be present.
A new admin policy for managing external bots
The new policy in the Teams Admin Center, Manage external bots and their access to meetings
1 million documents. 100,000+ monthly users. 300+ Copilot Studio agents. Here's what we learned building the Microsoft 365 Copilot connector behind them.
Most enterprise knowledge lives in portals and repositories that people trust but rarely visit in the flow of work. That's the gap this connector was built to close.
At Microsoft, we built an enterprise-scale Microsoft 365 Copilot connector to make internal documentation available as grounded context across supported Copilot experiences. The connector runs in production today, serving teams across engineering, support, and field roles.
Who this post is for: platform teams, developers, and connector owners who are past prototype and thinking about production. We cover the design choices, security and governance considerations, schema decisions, operational patterns, and retrieval-quality practices that helped us make enterprise knowledge easier to discover and reuse through Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Understand why a Microsoft 365 Copilot connector matters
By Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Spriha Chandrayan, Natasha Gaitonde, Zhen Lei, Reed Pankhurst, Anush Sankaran, Amrit Shandilya, Ryen W. White
Organizations put their most important content in OneDrive and SharePoint, trusting us to deliver AI experiences they can depend on. That trust runs across everything Copilot does with their content — surfacing the right information through retrieval, and, increasingly, driving agentic workflows that reason over documents and take action on their behalf. Living up to that trust is what we care about most, and it's why we put the quality of these experiences — and consequently the ways we measure that quality — at the center of how we build.
It turns out that this is a non-trivial problem, because quality in AI is rarely binary. An agent can call exactly the right tools and still produce an answer that's subtly, confidently wrong. A search result can be technically relevant and still miss what the user was really after. An AI-generated page can be well-structured and fluent and still omit the one detail that mattered. Quality here is continuous, context-dependent, and multidimensional — and when these experiences are serving hundreds of millions of enterprise users, measuring…
Where did the first half of the year go? This edition of What's New in Teams comes to you on the heels of InfoComm 2026 in Las Vegas, the largest professional AV show in North America, and the week where the people who design, build, and run the world's collaboration spaces all gather in one place. It's a fitting backdrop, because so much of what's new in Teams this month comes back to a single idea: bringing people and AI together to get work done.
That was the high-level takeaway of our InfoComm keynote, where our Corporate Vice President for Teams Calling, Meetings, and Devices, Ilya Bukshteyn, showed how AI now shows up across Teams like a teammate, in your calls, in your meetings, and in the environments where work happens. A few highlights from each worth calling out:
In your calls and conversations
New calling agents: Teams Phone Agent is a new AI calling experience that answers incoming calls for a department or organization, understanding what each caller needs and routing or resolving common information requests and appointments scheduling conversationally. Custom voice agents your organization builds in Microsoft Copilot Studio integrate with Teams…
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
Tuesday, July 21, 2026 9:00–10:00 AM Pacific Time
Join us for a live webinar and Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) featuring experts from the Microsoft 365 Copilot team as they dive into the latest capabilities of Copilot Cowork and share practical guidance for managing Copilot Credits across your organization.
During this session, we'll explore:
Who should be using Copilot Cowork
How to allocate and manage Copilot Credits effectively
Best practices for adoption and governance
Strategies for scaling Copilot Cowork while maintaining visibility and control over costs
This is your opportunity to hear directly from the experts, learn from real-world scenarios, and get answers to your most pressing questions. Whether you're an IT administrator, adoption lead, business decision-maker, or Microsoft 365 enthusiast, you'll leave with actionable insights to help your organization maximize the value of AI-powered collaboration.
Copilot in SharePoint helps you do more with your content — ask questions, run workflows, and create sites, pages, interactive reports, and Office files using natural language. June was a big month: starting June 16 Copilot in SharePoint began rolling out as on by default for everyone with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, and we shipped a wave of new capabilities for creating content, automating work, and getting trustworthy answers. Here’s everything that’s new.
🛠️ Create content with natural language
Create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files
What’s new: Ask Copilot to create a Word document, Excel workbook, or PowerPoint deck directly from your content in SharePoint — no blank-page start required.
Why it matters: Turn the knowledge already living in your sites into finished, shareable deliverables in minutes, without copy-pasting across apps.
Sample use case: A program manager turns a project site’s notes into a first-draft status deck before a leadership review.
Try this prompt “Create a press release as a Word doc based on the sales performance dashboard [doc link]. Summarize key results, highlight top growth areas, call out trends, and frame it for an internal leadership audience.”
These vulnerabilities affect Exchange Server. Exchange Online customers are already protected from the vulnerabilities addressed by these SUs and do not need to take any action other than updating any Exchange servers or Exchange Management tools workstations in their environment.
More details about specific CVEs can be found in the Security Update Guide (filter on ‘Server Software’ under Product Family for Exchange SE and ‘ESU’ under Product Family for Exchange 2016 and 2019).
Turn any basic plan in Microsoft Planner into a reusable, shareable template to speed up planning and ensure consistency across plans. Custom templates capture key plan elements such as tasks, goals, buckets, labels, notes, attachments, and checklists to help teams plan faster and stay consistent.
To publish a template, create and customize a basic plan to fit your needs. When you're ready, select Share and choose Publish as Template. Enter a template name and description, pick the Microsoft 365 group to share it with, choose which parts of the plan to include, and select Publish.
A screenshot of Planner for the web shows the “Publish as Template” window with respective fields selected.
Once published, the template can be reused to create new basic plans. To create a plan from a template, click Create a plan, then go to either Shared or Created by me and select a template to use.
How teams use custom templates
Standardized onboarding processes An HR team onboarding new hires each month can use a custom template to create plans with the right tasks, buckets, and checklists already in place, helping ensure each onboarding follows the same process.
Starting today, OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family of models is available in Microsoft 365 Copilot—in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Chat and Cowork. OpenAI and Microsoft partnered together to optimize GPT-5.6 for knowledge work across Microsoft 365 apps and make it the preferred model for Microsoft 365 Copilot. In addition to serving the models natively, Microsoft will also access OpenAI models directly through the API to bring GPT-5.6 to Microsoft 365 customers.
Knowledge work is complex—multistep, ambiguous, and spread across tools and files. With stronger reasoning for agentic, multi-step work, GPT-5.6 helps Copilot take on more of that complexity more efficiently, moving faster from initial ideas to more complete work. Microsoft 365 Copilot is AI built for work, where frontier models like GPT-5.6 are an important part of a broader system designed to deliver business value—bringing together Work IQ, Microsoft 365 apps, and the enterprise-grade security, compliance, and privacy customers expect from Microsoft.
Higher-quality work across apps you use every day
GPT-5.6 helps Copilot raise the quality of everyday work in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, moving from rough intent to stronger drafts, clearer analysis, and richer presentation drafts.
For this month's SharePoint showcase, we're zooming in on AI skills in SharePoint and real Microsoft use cases for Copilot in SharePoint. We're also introducing a new "Product Drops" standing section to recap all the new GA functionality across the platform each month.
As always, would love to hear from you in the comments. Let's get into it!
Start with the playbook: building AI skills that actually work
Before the new capabilities below, start with the thinking behind them. In a new companion post, our team distills what we've learned working with customers building real skills in Copilot in SharePoint — why some AI workflows take off and others stall after the demo. Three lessons stand out:
Pick the right workflow. Most efforts succeed or fail here. A quick filter: is it worth building, is it content-centric, and is there a repeatable path to a known-good outcome? Proposal drafting, compliance checks, and vendor evaluation pass; one-off creative work doesn't.
Build it the way work actually happens. Skills beat ad-hoc prompts the moment judgment needs to be consistent. Design around the handoff to the next person, set the human checkpoint first, and let site memory…
We are excited to share a new episode on our partner showcase series focused on SharePoint in Microsoft 365. In this brief discussion Tim Bogemans and Pascal Herreweghe from Involv Intranet are joining Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft to highlight capabilities they've built for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint using SharePoint Framework (SPFx).
Involv Intranet is trusted by over 300 organizations across healthcare, the public sector, construction, finance and beyond. It provides a fully branded, mobile-ready intranet experience with more than 50 configurable components out of the box. These include personalized news, onboarding experiences, employee directories, mandatory reading, social interactions and targeted communication - all designed to support modern internal communications and engagement scenarios.
Built entirely on Microsoft 365, the solution runs within your existing tenant, ensuring that data residency, compliance and governance remain fully in your control. Users benefit from a seamless experience across familiar tools such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft Search, without the need for separate platforms or disconnected systems.
By combining SharePoint’s extensibility with a curated set of ready-made capabilities,
Organizations increasingly view Microsoft 365 as more than a productivity platform. They use it to streamline business processes, modernize operations, and empower employees with solutions that integrate into the tools they use every day.
For more than 11 years, Manoj Kumar, Anirban Mitra, and the team at Cubic Logics have helped organizations extend the value of Microsoft 365 through business applications built on SharePoint and the broader Microsoft ecosystem. Through their Apps365 portfolio, customers can deploy solutions for contract management, human resources, help desk operations, asset management, learning management, expense management, and other business scenarios directly within their existing Microsoft 365 environment.
With more than 12,100 deployments across 172 countries, Cubic Logics serves organizations ranging from small and medium businesses to large enterprises, government agencies, nonprofits, and highly regulated industries. Their solutions help customers accelerate time to value while leveraging existing investments in SharePoint, Teams, Power Automate, Microsoft security capabilities, and increasingly, Microsoft Copilot.
What stands out in Cubic Logics' approach is their focus on bringing business applications closer to where users already work
SharePoint and Microsoft 365 have evolved into a powerful platform for building business applications that meet organizations where they already work. With SharePoint as the content, collaboration, and process foundation, and Microsoft 365 services such as Teams, Power Platform, and Azure extending the experience, partners can deliver practical solutions that simplify everyday work, improve compliance, and help organizations move faster.
This partner showcase highlights ShareCloud, an Estonian software company that has been delivering productized and tailor-made solutions on top of Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Power Platform, and Azure services since 2016. ShareCloud focuses on making business processes smarter, faster, and more efficient for organizations across the Baltics and Nordics, serving both SMEs and large enterprises.
ShareCloud helps organizations turn Microsoft 365 into practical business solutions across communication, administration, HR, and adoption. Their work spans intranets, employee portals, instructions management, document collaboration, e-signing in SharePoint, asset management, absence management, onboarding, training, and consulting that aligns SharePoint, Power Automate, Teams, and Microsoft 365 with business goals.
In this partner showcase, ShareCloud introduced two productized SharePoint-based solutions that show
Starting today, Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 is available in Microsoft 365 Copilot—a new frontier model rolling out in Copilot Cowork and PowerPoint, built for agentic, multi-step work across everyday work: documents, spreadsheets, and presentation tasks.
Anthropic describes Sonnet 5 as a more capable agentic Sonnet model, with performance close to that of Opus 4.8, but at lower prices1 —bringing another capable option to Copilot for work that requires planning across steps, reasoning through context, and turning information into polished business artifacts.
Sonnet 5 joins a growing lineup of frontier models in Microsoft 365 Copilot, giving users the flexibility to choose the right model for their tasks, tuned for work and tailored to business needs, with the security, compliance, and privacy that you expect from Microsoft.
When combined with Work IQ, Copilot plans, builds, and creates artifacts grounded in the files, meetings, chats, and business data of your work.
Get started today
Claude Sonnet 5 is now rolling out to Copilot Cowork and Copilot in PowerPoint. Admins can manage access to Claude Sonnet 5 based on their organization’s policies and readiness.
Give every seller the customer and deal context they need, wherever work happens—helping them prepare faster, follow up sooner, and keep CRM data current.
Built for the pace of modern selling, Sales Agent helps sellers quickly access the customer and deal information they need, so they can enter every conversation better prepared, capture what matters afterward, and maintain momentum across every opportunity.
By bringing together CRM insights and Microsoft 365 work data in the flow of work, Sales Agent reduces the friction of switching between systems and piecing together information from scattered sources. With general availability, organizations can confidently deploy Sales Agent at scale across their sales teams to help sellers stay informed, responsive, and focused on what matters most: building relationships and advancing revenue.
From preview to general availability
When the public preview of Sales Agent was released last December, it introduced a new way for sellers to access CRM and work data in the flow of work using natural language. From the start, sellers could get up to speed on accounts with account summaries and customer relationship insights, catch up on past customer meetings, look up information across CRM records, and generate personalized…
Planner Agent works alongside teams to help get work done faster and focus on what matters. The agent can execute tasks and act on feedback, while also providing a unified view of tasks across Planner plans, Microsoft Teams conversations, and Outlook emails—highlighting urgent work and creating new plans based on supporting resources and deadlines.
Earlier this week, we announced that Planner Agent is rolling out to general availability in Microsoft 365 Copilot, enabling Microsoft 365 Copilot customers worldwide to create new plans and tasks and manage work directly in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat. Now in Frontier, users can access these same agentic experiences directly within Planner.
With Planner Agent in Planner, the Microsoft 365 Copilot experience is embedded alongside Planner plans. These capabilities make it easier for teams to shift from understanding their work to taking action without leaving their plan. Planner is where teams organize work, align on goals, and track progress.
By bringing the same Planner Agent experience from Microsoft 365 Copilot into Planner, teams can more quickly see what needs attention, identify potential risks, and take action within the flow of work. Instead of manually scanning…
Most of the work that matters doesn't happen in one place. A quarterly review, a win-loss analysis, an onboarding plan—each one draws on several systems, moves through several tools, and depends on someone holding the thread across all of them. That sort of connective work is exactly what our customers would like to see from AI.
Copilot Cowork, now generally available worldwide, is built for this sort of work—navigating long-running, multi-step processes. We designed it to be enterprise-ready from the outset: secure, compliant, and grounded in the data your business runs on, across your connected systems.
Cowork is at its best when it can reach the systems your teams already use. I'm excited to show you the partners already making that real.
Cowork works across the systems that power your business
Our partners each extend Cowork with a new place to do real work—a system to draw from, a tool to act on, a step a user can review and take action on. The more systems Cowork can reach this way, the more of the task it carries from start to finish.
Matt Wolodarsky, a principal program manager at Microsoft, has led an early access program, testing out how skills in SharePoint can drive value for customers.
You can roll AI out and still have nothing to show for it. We've all seen the headlines about companies spending big on AI and getting little back. But it doesn't have to go that way. Over the past few months, I've worked alongside teams doing the opposite - one got a usable proposal draft in a fraction of the time it used to take; another got a clear read on where a project actually stood, when the information they needed was scattered across documents and hard to surface. What ultimately set these teams apart was how intentionally they applied Copilot to real work.
This is where skills matter. In SharePoint, skills transform Copilot from a general-purpose assistant into a specialist grounded in your content, policies, and business logic - enabling it to perform meaningful work on your behalf. They capture the repeatable judgment your teams already use to make decisions and move work forward. The rules your legal team applies when reviewing marketing content before it goes live? That’s…
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, hands-on sessions, and a first look at where the platform is headed. A lot of what's in this release ties directly to what's being unveiled on the Build stage, and I wanted to highlight a few Teams Platform features worth calling out:
Linear, Cursor, and Atlassian Rovo agents in Teams — three powerful new partner agents that turn channel conversations into shipped code, filed issues, and updated project plans without ever leaving the chat.
New Teams CLI — one command to register, configure, and deploy a Teams agent, so developers can spend their time on agent logic instead of managing complex processes
Collaborative features for agents – ournew agent capabilities include quoted replies to keep conversations anchored, slash commands to quickly take action in the flow of…
Today we wanted to take a few minutes to discuss a topic that has come up several times. Consider the scenario where your organization has created Resource mailboxes, and you want to know which ones are actually being used. Seems like a fair request.
This would include Room and Equipment mailboxes as well as Workspaces. Unfortunately, there are no native reports (at the time of this writing) that include details on Resource mailbox utilization. We are going to provide a few options you can use to find this information out, and you can choose which one works for you.
This returns data quickly and only targets the calendar. The possible downside of this approach is that the meeting subject is not a property that is exposed.…
Microsoft Planner capabilities are now part of the new Work IQ APIs which reached general availability on June 16, 2026.
The Microsoft Planner MCP Server is part of Work IQ MCP and makes it easier to connect Planner capabilities into agent-driven workflows. It allows agents to manage and automate work across plans. These capabilities extend Planner into end-to-end work management workflows, where agents can take action on plans and handle routine coordination. Designed for building custom agents, the Planner MCP Server connects planning, execution, and tracking across tools. As agents take on day-to-day coordination, teams can spend less time managing tasks and more time focusing on higher-impact decisions.
Core capabilities
The Work IQ MCP provides a unified set of tools that allow agents to interact with Microsoft 365 entities through a single endpoint. As part of this interface, the Planner MCP Server enables new ways to help manage and automate work.
Core capabilities include:
Manage and automate work across plans: Create new plans and tasks, update existing ones, and understand the state of work. This includes scenarios such as status reporting, workload visibility, and automated updates.
Get ready for the June OneDrive Customer Office Hours! This session creates space for open conversation around the latest updates and how they support the way you use your files every day. In this month’s session, we’ll walk through what’s new and open the floor for questions, feedback, and shared experiences.
Join us for our next call
Date: June 17, 2026
Time: 8:00 AM-9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Special Topic: OneDrive. Cloud. Microsoft. with Stephen Rice & Lauren Bell
Join the OneDrive team to learn how OneDrive is moving to a new, dedicated web address: onedrive.cloud.microsoft. This is part of Microsoft's broader effort to bring Microsoft 365 apps and services together under the unified cloud.microsoft domain, which is reserved exclusively for Microsoft's trusted, authenticated cloud services. Consolidating onto this single, purpose-built domain reduces reliance on the many legacy URLs OneDrive has used over the years, strengthens protection against spoofing and phishing, and simplifies network and allow-list management for admins. Anyone can join this one-hour webinar to ask us questions, share feedback, and learn more about the features we’re releasing soon and our roadmap. We can't wait to share, listen, and…
SharePoint is getting a refreshed look and feel designed to make the product feel simpler, clearer, and more focused on your content. We’ve recently introduced a new SharePoint experience, organized around helping you discover knowledge, publish content, and build solutions. Along with that new experience, we’re introducing visual updates across key product surfaces that reduce visual noise, improve readability, and bring more consistency to the interface while preserving the branding investments your organization has already made. We call this work the SharePoint visual refresh: a thoughtful update to the product’s visual language that helps SharePoint feel more modern, approachable, and easier to use.
Background
Over time, SharePoint’s capabilities have continued to grow, which has given us an opportunity to update the look and feel as well. These updates not only make the SharePoint UI fresh, but it ensures that we are consistent across M365.
The SharePoint visual refresh, rolling out to general availability now, is part of a broader collaborative effort across Microsoft 365 to modernize the suite and improve usability with this bold, new visual design, while also responding to customer feedback about visual clutter and the need for clearer focus on content. These…
It’s often difficult for businesses to serve every customer right away during surges in call volumes. Callers sit on hold while staff race to work through the backlog. Meanwhile, agentic voice AI is opening entirely new ways to serve customers, such as getting answers to questions or even enabling them to pay a bill over the phone, including after hours and on weekends.
We are excited to announce Teams Phone Agent, along with the ability to bring custom voice agents your organization builds in Microsoft Copilot Studio to Microsoft Teams Phone.
For customer-facing organizations using Teams Phone, like healthcare clinics or bank branches, these agents take repetitive calls off the plate of employees so they can focus on the conversations that truly need a human touch. All this enables faster issue resolution for customers.
How Teams Phone Agent works
Teams Phone Agent greets callers and resolves common requests with these skills.
Questions and Answers: Using configured knowledge bases that support file uploads and URLs, Teams Phone Agent answers callers' questions in natural conversation, so customers get answers quickly instead of being placed on hold or hunting through a website.
Planner Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot is now rolling out to general availability, bringing intelligent, AI-powered work and task management to Microsoft 365 Copilot customers worldwide. Planner Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot delivers interactive task cards and actionable insights so users can easily prioritize tasks and focus on what matters. Via natural language prompts, users can also create and update tasks directly in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
This release builds on the foundation set during our initial rollout and introduces a host of new capabilities designed to streamline planning and drive better results.
A screenshot of the Planner Agent home page in Microsoft 365 Copilot shows suggested prompts for prioritizing work, creating new tasks, and updating existing tasks.
Here’s what’s new
Customers will notice a comprehensive set of enhancements and new features when using Planner Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot. Here’s what users can expect:
Quickly find and act on the right plan
The new plan picker makes it easier than ever to find and select the right plan. Users can search and filter their basic plans by name, then interact with the agent to update a task’s name, status, due date, or priority. This…
We’re introducing workplace check-in via Wi-Fi for Microsoft Places and Teams, designed to help employees coordinate in-person work by keeping their workplace location up to date when they’re in the office. This capability builds on existing Microsoft 365 presence signals like calendar availability and Teams presence by making workplace location easier to keep current. For employees who choose to enable it, workplace check-in via Wi-Fi can update their workplace location based on connection to configured company networks, reducing the need to manually change status. This experience is similar to the existing workplace check-in via peripherals, where a user can keep their workplace location updated by plugging into a configured peripheral like a display or a desk dock. Organizations enable and configure this feature in their tenant, and individual users control whether and how it is used.
When an employee is in the office and connects their laptop to a configured corporate network, workplace check-in can update their work location for the day, only when enabled by the organization and the individual user. This reduces the need to manually update location while keeping employees in control.
OneDrive on macOS is getting a major update to how it syncs! The Native Sync Engine is rolling out to Insiders today with version 26.098. It's up to 2x faster on initial sync and on-disk state changes, uses less CPU, memory, and battery, and removes the hidden cache folder that's been the source of most reliability issues since 2022.
When we moved OneDrive to Apple's File Provider platform in 2022, we needed a way to bridge the existing sync engine with how File Provider expected things to work. Broadly, there are two parts to OneDrive sync: the sync engine itself, and the code that OneDrive uses to work with files. To support File Provider, we had to change how OneDrive interacted with the file system. However, to reduce risk, we decided to use a hidden cache folder that mirrored your OneDrive contents, so the sync engine…
By: Ihor Lukyanenko, Sachin Jain, Kappa Ramlal, Abdul Rahim Charif, and Shangwei Fang
Every day, hundreds of millions of people depend on Microsoft Teams to connect with colleagues, share ideas, make decisions, and move work forward. Whether they are jumping into a quick chat between meetings, joining a customer call that cannot be missed, or using Copilot to accomplish more, people rely on Teams to be ready the moment they need it.
That trust is what drives our continued investment in performance. We know that every second saved, every interaction that feels more responsive, and every improvement in reliability can have a meaningful impact when multiplied across millions of users and billions of daily interactions. That's why we're continually innovating behind the scenes, not only to make Teams faster today, but to build the systems, practices, and engineering culture that keep it responsive and dependable over time.
In our November 2025 update, we shared gains across video rendering, memory efficiency, and platform-level optimizations that improved the experience across devices and operating systems. Since then, we've continued to raise the bar.
Organizations are moving fast with AI, and many of those AI workloads are not staying in one cloud. A team might use Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview for governance and in addition to Microsoft Foundry they may still choose to run an AI agent on AWS Bedrock or on the Google Cloud Platform. The technical challenge is straightforward: how do you keep one consistent set of data security, governance, and compliance controls when the agent itself runs outside Microsoft Azure?
This is where Microsoft Purview becomes the central policy engine for your data estate. In this post, we show why that matters and then walk through a practical example: an expense approval agent running on Amazon Bedrock, protected by Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies.
Fig 1. AWS console page showing "ExpenseApprovalAgent" details of the Agent blade
Why Purview should be the central policy engine
Most organizations do not want separate policy stacks for every cloud, every model endpoint, and every app team. That leads to duplicated controls, inconsistent enforcement, and audit gaps. The better model is to separate where workloads run from where policy decisions are made.
Join the OneDrive product team live each month on our monthly OneDrive Customer Office Hours to hear what's top of mind, get insights into roadmap updates, and dig into a special topic. Each call includes live Q&A where you'll have a chance to ask the OneDrive product team any question about OneDrive - The home of your files.
Our next call is Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025, 8:00am - 9:00am PDT.
This month's special topic: "Microsoft Ignite 2025: News, demos, and resources with the OneDrive team! We will have our product teams on call ready to answer your questions.
Our goal is to simplify the way you create and access the files you need, get the information you are looking for, and manage your tasks efficiently. We can't wait to share, listen, and engage - monthly! Anyone can join this one-hour webinar to ask us questions, share feedback, and learn more about the features we’re releasing soon and our roadmap.
There’s no better way to start the new year than listening, learning, and taking action!
OneDrive Consumer Office Hours are back this January, creating space for open conversation around the latest updates and how they support the way you use your files every day. In this month’s session, we’ll walk through what’s new and open the floor for questions, feedback, and shared experiences.
Our next call is Wednesday, January 21st, 2026, 8:00am - 9:00am PDT.
This month's special topic: "OneDrive (Personal) Updates" with the Eli Waalkes! We will have our product teams on call ready to answer your questions.
Our goal is to simplify the way you create and access the files you need, get the information you are looking for, and manage your tasks efficiently. We can't wait to share, listen, and engage - monthly! Anyone can join this one-hour webinar to ask us questions, share feedback, and learn more about the features we’re releasing soon and our roadmap.
OneDrive Consumer Office Hours are back! Creating space for open conversation around the latest updates and how they support the way you use your files every day. In this month’s session, we’ll walk through what’s new and open the floor for questions, feedback, and shared experiences.
Our next call is Wednesday, February 18th, 2026, 8:00am - 9:00am PDT.
This month's special topic: "File-level Archive" with the Trent Green! We will have our product teams on call ready to answer your questions.
Our goal is to simplify the way you create and access the files you need, get the information you are looking for, and manage your tasks efficiently. We can't wait to share, listen, and engage - monthly! Anyone can join this one-hour webinar to ask us questions, share feedback, and learn more about the features we’re releasing soon and our roadmap.
Note: Our monthly public calls are not an official support tool. To open support tickets, go to see
OneDrive Consumer Office Hours are back! Creating space for open conversation around the latest updates and how they support the way you use your files every day. In this month’s session, we’ll walk through what’s new and open the floor for questions, feedback, and shared experiences.
Our next call is Wednesday, March 18th, 2026, 8:00am - 9:00am PDT.
This month's special topic: "I asked SharePoint to organize my library...and it did!" with the Sean Squires! We will have our product teams on call ready to answer your questions.
Our goal is to simplify the way you create and access the files you need, get the information you are looking for, and manage your tasks efficiently. We can't wait to share, listen, and engage - monthly! Anyone can join this one-hour webinar to ask us questions, share feedback, and learn more about the features we’re releasing soon and our roadmap.
Note: Our monthly public calls are not an official support tool. To open support tickets, go to see
Get ready for April’s OneDrive Customer Office Hours! This session creates space for open conversation around the latest updates and how they support the way you use your files every day. In this month’s session, we’ll walk through what’s new and open the floor for questions, feedback, and shared experiences.
Join us for our next call
Date: April 29, 2026
Time: 8:00 AM-9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Special Topic: Markdown in OneDrive with Lesha Bhansali & Stephen Rice
Our goal is to make it easier to work with Markdown files right where you store them. With built‑in support in OneDrive and SharePoint, you can open, read, and update Markdown files directly in your browser. Whether you’re reviewing notes, documentation, or shared files, everything stays simple and in one place. Anyone can join this one-hour webinar to ask us questions, share feedback, and learn more about the features we’re releasing soon and our roadmap. We can't wait to share, listen, and engage every month!
Get ready for May’s OneDrive Customer Office Hours! This session creates space for open conversation around the latest updates and how they support the way you use your files every day. In this month’s session, we’ll walk through what’s new and open the floor for questions, feedback, and shared experiences.
Join us for our next call
Date: May 20, 2026
Time: 8:00 AM-9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Special Topic: What’s New in OneDrive Sync with Jack Nichols, Kayla Ngan, and Jonathan Leung
Join the OneDrive Sync product team for a look at two big investments shipping now. First, 1 million item sync is in public preview on Windows. We’ll cover what’s included and the prerequisites to get your tenant ready. Then we’ll dive into the new Native Sync Engine on Mac, a ground-up rewrite that’s faster, lighter on system resources, and the foundation for 1M item sync on Mac. Anyone can join this one-hour webinar to ask us questions, share feedback, and learn more about the features we’re releasing soon and our roadmap. We can't wait to share, listen, and engage every month!
1. The Real‑World Problem Endpoint DLP analyst Faced (What Was Missing Earlier)
Before the introduction of the Device Status API enhancements and logged‑in user visibility, Endpoint DLP teams consistently struggled in below discussed areas:
Device Visibility Was Fragmented and Manual - Customers repeatedly told us:
We know some devices are unhealthy, but we don’t know who owns them.
We export the onboarding table to Excel every week just to understand drift.
By the time we detect a policy issue, the user is already blocked or impacted.
In practice, this meant:
Device onboarding views were static snapshots, not operationally actionable.
Admins relied on manual Excel exports to track onboarding, drift, and health.
Reporting pipelines were brittle and always out of date.
2. Device Status API: Why Customers Asked for This (Beyond “Reporting”)
The Hidden Cost of Excel‑Driven Operations as earlier, customers had to:
Export device onboarding data manually.
Rebuild dashboards every time they needed updated insight.
Repeat this process weekly or even daily for compliance and SOC reviews.
This approach failed at scale and created blind spots during incidents. When a device policy sync failed or appeared unhealthy, admins had no real‑time, view to answer basic…
The way governance gets done continues to evolve. Across organizations, agents are no longer a sidebar conversation; they are showing up in everyday work, reasoning over content, and stretching how IT thinks about permissions, lifecycle, and recovery. At the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, nearly every demo this year landed on the same grounding question from CISOs and admins alike: "What will it reason over, and how do we stay in control?"
That question is exactly what the SharePoint Admin Agent was built to answer. In this month's SharePoint Showcase, we're spotlighting Microsoft's first-party AI assistant for managing your digital estate, along with the six-step Content Governance Journey it powers, designed to take a tenant from chaos to AI-ready through a practical governance journey.
Meet the SharePoint Admin Agent
As the content backbone of Microsoft 365, powering Teams, OneDrive, Loop, Copilot, Copilot Cowork, and a growing ecosystem of agents, SharePoint sits at the center of content governance. Permissions, lifecycle, resilience, and relevance now span users, apps, and AI agents. Managing that surface with portals and PowerShell alone doesn't scale.
Years go by and we continue to see customers still relying on the IIS 6.0 SMTP virtual server feature, which has been out of support for a looong time. To give you an idea just how old this component is, the built-in IIS SMTP virtual server stack was tied to Windows Server 2003. This blog post aims to present practical options to help you retire IIS SMTP and replace it with supported Microsoft solutions (because IIS SMTP virtual server is long unsupported).
Historically, we have encouraged customers to retain their last Exchange on‑premises server in certain scenarios. One of the most common scenarios is on‑premises applications still depend on Exchange for email relay, even after all mailboxes have been migrated to Exchange Online.
Then there are also cloud‑only Exchange Online customers who have already decommissioned their last on‑premises Exchange server (or never had one at all) and, for various reasons, are unable to configure their applications, Fax and printers to relay email directly through Exchange Online. When this scenario applies, the most straightforward and supported way to eliminate the use of IIS SMTP is to replace it with a
We announced several exciting updates at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference this week: you can now scale Teams pilots to your broader frontline organization faster, fill open shifts automatically with smart scheduling, deliver official operational updates with the new Communicator App, and conduct site walkthroughs handsfree in Frontline Agent.
Scale your frontline pilot with a guided deployment wizard
Deploy and manage a consistent Microsoft Teams experience to your frontline workforce from the Teams Admin Center. Within the Frontline section, admins can start a new deployment or expand an existing frontline pilot to your broader organization through a guided deployment wizard. Use the wizard to select capabilities, add frontline users, organize them into static teams, and apply a standardized pinned app configuration across your frontline environment.
Use this feature to:
Extend a frontline pilot to additional users. If you have already validated a frontline pilot, you can use this experience to extend to additional frontline users across the organization. The capability configurations carry forward automatically so you can build on what you have already tested.
We’re excited to announce general availability of Microsoft Teams Phone user multi-line, which lets admins assign up to 10 phone numbers to a single Teams Phone user.
What is Teams Phone user multi-line?
Many organizations need a simple way for a single person to represent multiple lines of business or regions across calling without juggling multiple Teams accounts, devices, or complicated call routing workarounds. Teams Phone user multi-line helps streamline that experience by enabling a Teams user to make and receive calls for multiple phone numbers within one unified Teams experience.
Here’s what the experience delivers:
Assign up to 10 phone numbers to one user: Administrators can configure multiple numbers for a single user, such as when one person needs to handle calls for different departments or roles.
Supports localized calling across markets: Serve customers with a familiar local caller ID by using region-specific numbers, helping build greater trust into each interaction.
One experience across endpoints: Supported across Teams desktop and Teams Phone devices, so users can make and receive calls from multiple numbers without the hassle of switching accounts or hardware.
AI is raising the bar for document management. It’s no longer enough to store and share files— content needs to be governed, structured, and connected to the way teams actually work so AI can reason over it responsibly and help people move from information to action.
We believe this recognition reflects the investments we’ve made in making SharePoint and OneDrive the unified knowledge platform at the heart of Microsoft 365, keeping content trusted and compliant, while making it more discoverable, more actionable, and more valuable as AI adoption accelerates.
In our view, this recognition is also a reflection of the customers and partners who build with us. Every day, users create 2 million new SharePoint sites, add 2 billion files, and run 3 billion automated workflows on SharePoint content each week, a scale that reflects how deeply document management is embedded in daily work. We’re excited to keep building what’s next with you.
AI does not create entirely new categories of risk—it supercharges existing ones. Traditional data leakage stems from ordinary behavior: sharing a document too broadly, sending an email to the wrong person, copying regulated data to an uncontrolled device. Generative AI amplifies all of these because of the power and speed with which it can proactively surface content that may be obsolete, over-permissioned, or ungoverned. DSPM exists to help with exactly this challenge: it continuously scans your environment to identify sensitive data, assess risk, and recommend actions to reduce exposure.
Oversharing at Scale Before AI, an overshared SharePoint file might sit unnoticed. Now, Copilot can summarize it in response to a casual prompt, distributing its contents far beyond the original audience.
Prompt Leakage Users can inadvertently expose sensitive information—financial account numbers, health records, project code names—simply by typing them into a Copilot prompt. Because AI interactions feel conversational, users tend to drop their guard.
Shadow AI Beyond sanctioned tools, employees experiment with unapproved AI services.
Work rarely lives in one place. Your priorities may be spread across personal tasks, shared plans, email follow-ups, meeting notes, and chats. Planner Agent can help bring that work together, delivering intelligent work and task management right within Microsoft 365 Copilot. Now you can see what needs attention, take action, and keep projects moving all in one place. Planner Agent is currently available in Microsoft 365 Copilot through Frontier and can be added from the All agents menu once enabled by your admin.
A screenshot of Microsoft 365 Copilot demonstrates an AI-generated response with prioritized task cards and a summary of urgent work.
Turn follow-ups into tasks in the right place
Planner Agent can also create new tasks directly in Copilot Chat. Users can create a single task, draft multiple tasks, or ground task creation in enterprise content such as email, chats, files, or meeting content. This helps turn work that is still in conversations into clear, actionable tasks.
For example, a user can review an email thread about a launch, ask Planner Agent to turn follow-ups into tasks, review the suggested titles and due dates in a preview card, remove anything unnecessary, and then…
Last year, we made a promise: your files should work for you, not the other way around. That meant reimagining OneDrive not just as a place to store files, but as an intelligent layer that surfaces what matters, eliminates busy work, and enables seamless collaboration across your organization. OneDrive became smarter, more collaborative, and more central to how work flows across Microsoft 365.
This spring, we're delivering what's next.
As OneDrive brings together intelligence, collaboration, cross-platform experiences, and enterprise control and governance, it helps you move work forward from the first file to the final outcome. That’s the idea at the center of this year’s innovations: helping individuals and teams move from file to finished faster, with greater clarity and confidence that their work is protected and ready wherever it happens.
Let’s take a look at what you can benefit from today with OneDrive.
Understand and act on your content
Agentic AI for files in SharePoint document libraries
Late last year, we introduced the AI Actions button in document libraries, giving you faster ways to find content, get answers, and take action on files with AI.
As AI moves from answering questions to carrying out real work, teams need a reliable way to store, manage, and refine the instructions and context that guide how AI operates. Markdown files are increasingly becoming that foundation, acting as durable AI artifacts that capture rules, preferences, and repeatable processes.
Today, we’re introducing native Markdown support in SharePoint and OneDrive, now rolling out to general availability across both consumer and commercial audiences. As AI and agents increasingly create and update Markdown files to carry out work, teams need a reliable place to manage that content. SharePoint and OneDrive make it easy to view and edit these files in the browser when precision, intent, or changes are required, with built‑in versioning and governance. Markdown files are now fully integrated into the Microsoft 365 file experience, behaving like any other file in your workflow.
View Markdown in the browser
The updated .md file viewer introduces a modern reading experience directly in the browser across M365. Markdown files now render with modern typography, replacing the outdated styling of the previous experience. Tables, checkboxes, links, and code blocks all render correctly, with full syntax highlighting code blocks. Changes you make…
Maia 200 is Microsoft’s second-generation first-party AI accelerator built to support large-scale AI inference workloads in Azure. As Maia 200 moved from pre‑silicon design toward deployment, work across multiple engineering organizations was managed within a single program responsible for bringing the accelerator into Azure. At its peak, that effort tracked over 700 active tasks spanning silicon, software, and datacenters. To manage the intricacies of the effort at that scale, the program team turned to Microsoft Planner.
As the Maia 200 program was forming, much of the individual engineering organizations’ work was already in motion across different products including Planner, Excel, and Azure DevOps. Creating a shared view across multiple products proved challenging, as milestones that looked achievable to one team could quietly introduce risks for another, and executive discussions relied on manually assembled status updates rather than a live picture of where the program stood. Program leads needed a shared view of execution to manage dependencies across workstreams, align milestone progress, and identify risks that had the potential to impact delivery timelines.
Enhancements Achieved with Exchange Priority Cleanup V2
Priority Cleanup (Use priority cleanup to expedite the permanent deletion of sensitive information from mailboxes | Microsoft Learn) was introduced to provide administrators with a powerful tool for permanently deleting mailbox content, even when under retention or eDiscovery hold, to address scenarios such as data spillage and urgent removals. Priority Cleanup addressed a key need in Exchange Online by allowing hold overrides. Through real-world use, we received valuable insights regarding the approval process, deletion speed, and reviewer experience. These learnings have guided our ongoing enhancements, ensuring that the solution evolves to better meet customer needs for efficiency and ease of use while maintaining robust security and compliance standards.
What's New in Priority Cleanup V2
Priority Cleanup V2 is currently in the planning stage. We’re sharing the proposed updates early to gather feedback before we begin implementation. The goal is to address the core limitations of V1 with enhancements focused on speed and simplicity.
Faster Data Deletion & Simplified Approval Workflow: We’re proposing to streamline the process to two key checkpoints:
As Microsoft Purview deployments mature, many organisations encounter the same scaling challenge: how do you decentralize operations without fragmenting governance or losing visibility? Administrative Units (AUs) provide a native way to solve this by enabling ring‑fenced operations—allowing teams to operate independently within clearly defined boundaries, while preserving central oversight.
This post focuses on the why behind using Administrative Units in Microsoft Purview, with a particular emphasis on scalable, ring‑fenced operations. We’ll walk through three reference architectures that illustrate how Administrative Units support real‑world operating models—without requiring multiple tenants or separate DLP platforms.
note: this article and visuals will focus on Administrative Units support in Purview Data Loss Prevention. However, Administrative Units are supported in additional solutions of Microsoft Purview. Refer to Administrative units in Microsoft Purview | Microsoft Learn for more details and support.
Why Administrative Units matter for scalable operations
Many large organisations operate with decentralized compliance and DLP teams, often aligned to regions, business units, or regulated functions. Historically, this led to one of two sub‑optimal patterns:
Proving Your Data Security Posture with Confidence
Microsoft Purview Posture Reports help organizations prove (not just assume) that their data security controls are working. They provide a clear, outcome‑based view of how effectively sensitivity labels and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies are protecting sensitive data across Microsoft 365. Rather than focusing on individual events or alerts, Posture Reports answer a higher‑level question:
Are our data protection controls consistently applied and enforced across the organization?
We designed Posture Reports to give security, compliance, and business leaders a defensible, measurable view of data security posture, especially critical as organizations adopt Copilot and other AI tools.
Purview reporting offers unified data security insights, helping teams identify and address top risks quickly. By consolidating intelligence, it highlights vulnerabilities so you can take prompt action. With contextual information and measurable results, Purview streamlines responses to threats, improves resilience, and supports a proactive security strategy. Microsoft Purview reporting dashboards drive security decisions because they convert massive, fragmented security telemetry into decision‑ready insights: what’s happening, where the risk is, whether controls are effective, and what to do next. For insights on customizing these reports, check out
For more insights on OOB Reports, check out this article.
Overview: NOW IN PUBLIC PREVIEW
Microsoft Purview Posture Reports provide a clear, outcome‑based view of how effectively data protection controls, such as Sensitivity Labels and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, are working across Microsoft 365. Rather than focusing on individual alerts or isolated events, Posture Reports help organizations answer a higher‑level, executive‑ready question:
Are our data protection controls consistently applied and actually reducing risk at scale?
Posture Reports transform complex telemetry from Audit logs, Activity Explorer, and policy enforcement into measurable, defensible insights that security, compliance, and business leaders can act on with confidence. Building on the out‑of‑the‑box experience, Custom Posture Reports enable teams to create scenario‑specific views tailored to their organization’s risk priorities.
Key capabilities include:
Custom dashboards with drag‑and‑drop sections and cards
Built‑in and custom metric or chart cards powered by Activity Explorer data
Flexible filtering to support focused investigations and reporting
Tips:
Start with clear questions, then choose cards that answer them
Avoid overcrowding reports; fewer, well‑chosen cards are more effective
The Microsoft 365 Community Conference is the ultimate Microsoft 365 community event—and the perfect place to expand your skills and knowledge in Microsoft 365 and Copilot. Come connect with the OneDrive team to learn what’s new, what’s next, and how to work smarter with AI.
With over 200+ expert led sessions and 20+ workshops designed for practical, real-world application this year’s conference is packed with fresh content to help you transform the way you work.
Photos capture real moments. With AI Restyle in OneDrive, you can reimagine them in fresh new styles-right where your photos already live.
Meet AI Restyle
Photos capture real moments. With AI Restyle in OneDrive, you can reimagine those moments in expressive new styles-right where your photos already live.
With just a tap, transform everyday photos into cinematic posters, hand‑painted artwork, pencil sketches, anime‑inspired scenes, and more. Choose a style, watch a new version appear in seconds, and keep exploring until it feels just right.
Through it all, the people, places, and memories you care about stay unmistakably yours-just seen in a fresh new light.
AI Restyle on OneDrive Mobile
Your photos stay private
When you use AI Restyle in OneDrive, your photos remain under your control and are processed only to generate the style you choose. For more information on how AI Restyle works, its intended uses, and limitations, see Transparency note for AI Restyle in OneDrive - Microsoft Support.
What you can do with AI Restyle
Create something beautiful instantly. Choose from a rotating set of one‑tap styles designed to match the content of your photo-so it’s easy to get a great…
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.
Before we dive in, mark your calendars: the Microsoft 365 Community Conference is coming up in April! Join us to learn the new ways Teams and Copilot help you stay in the flow of work.
And now to the main event: new Teams capabilities! This month's updates have something for everyone. The new AI-powered Workflows app lets you automate everyday tasks using Copilot—no coding required. Teams now enables you to View and manage activity in other accounts and organizations, so you can collaborate with colleagues and respond to messages without switching accounts. And for privacy-conscious users, Teams now automatically removes EXIF metadata from shared images, protecting sensitive location and device details by default.
Read on for the full list of what's new!
Feature categories: (All features listed are generally available unless otherwise noted)
In the evolving cybersecurity landscape, the choice between a unified security platform and a point solution is a strategic one with far-reaching implications. This blog post examines the strategic decision organizations face between adopting a unified security platform and relying on multiple point solutions in cybersecurity. It highlights the growing complexity of cyber threats and IT environments, emphasizing how a platform-centric approach can deliver significant business value.
Platform Approach vs. Point Solutions
As cyberthreats multiply and budgets tighten, the age-old IT question resurfaces: pick the very best point products for every domain or on a single vendor suite? Let us agree that the old saying “Best of breed” is not applicable for point solutions anymore. This post peels back the marketing hype and lays out the hard numbers from Forrester’s TEI report and dozens of customer stories: dramatic cost savings, 80% faster response times, 75% fewer costly breaches, and measurable bumps to your margin, EPS and ROE. We define what a security platform really means in the Microsoft ecosystem compare it side-by-side with the traditional best-of-breed patchwork, and give you the references, visuals and practical advice to make the strategic choice for your business and…
Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) policies are critical for meeting compliance and governance requirements across Microsoft 365 workloads. However, when something goes wrong – such as retention policies not applying, archive mailboxes not expanding, or inactive mailboxes not getting purged – diagnosing the issue can be challenging and time‑consuming.
To simplify and accelerate this process, we are excited to announce the open‑source release of the DLM Diagnostics Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, an AI‑powered diagnostic server that allows AI assistants to safely investigate Microsoft Purview DLM issues using read‑only PowerShell diagnostics.
Microsoft Teams is where people, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and agents come together to collaborate, communicate, and get work done—before, during, and after every interaction. Contributing to and benefiting from Work IQ, Copilot in Teams understands the context, relationships, and signals behind real work, bringing meetings, calling, chat, and collaboration into a single, connected experience across Microsoft 365.
At the 2026 Microsoft 365 Community Conference, Teams will be front and center with a broad set of sessions that reflect how teamwork is evolving. From everyday collaboration and meetings to frontline communications, external collaboration, and Copilot‑powered workflows, Teams is designed to help organizations move work forward with clarity and confidence.
Register for the M365 Conference today and save $150 with code SAVE150. #M365Con26
Across the Teams sessions at the conference, you’ll see how AI‑powered capabilities—like intelligent meeting recap, real‑time language interpretation, AI‑assistance for calling, and collaborative agents—help teams stay aligned whether work happens in the office, on the front line, or across time zones.
What to Expect from the Teams Track
The Teams track at the M365 Community Conference offers a practical, end‑to‑end view of how Teams supports new ways work gets done and how organizations can…
Today, we are excited to announce that the Project Manager Agent in Microsoft Planner has been officially renamed to "Planner Agent," and its powerful AI-driven features will be generally available across both plan types. This means that basic and premium plan users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license will have access to intelligent Planner Agent capabilities that help streamline project management and task work. Previously, users could try these agentic features in premium plans only.
The rebranding to "Planner Agent" reflects its role as an integrated part of the Planner experience and ensures naming consistency. You will see the new name and icon reflected across the Planner app's user interfaces and all supporting documentation going forward.
Planner Agent for basic plan users: New AI features coming your way
Planner Agent's capabilities are expanding to basic plans for the first time. Starting this week, organizations and users of basic plans will begin to see Planner Agent enabled in their Planner experience. This update brings intelligent, AI-driven assistance to all Planner users, even those without a premium license. Our goal is to empower every team to work smarter with Planner.
Today, we’re excited to announce the tech preview of the new Microsoft Teams VDI optimization for Omnissa Horizon environments, bringing a modern, high-performance collaboration experience to customers running Teams in virtual desktops.
This milestone, achieved in close collaboration with our counterparts from Omnissa’s engineering team, marks the next step in Microsoft’s broader journey to deliver feature parity, reliability, and performance consistency between physical and virtual desktops, building on the architectural direction we first outlined in The future of Microsoft Teams in VDI.
A modern Teams experience for Omnissa customers
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure remains a critical deployment model for organizations that require centralized management, security, and scale. At the same time, collaboration workloads like audio, video, and screen sharing place unique demands on VDI environments.
With thew new optimization now in available in tech preview for Omnissa Horizon, customers can deliver a native-like Teams experience while continuing to benefit from the operational and security advantages of VDI.
This release brings Omnissa customers onto the same next generation optimization architecture
OneDrive on macOS is a core part of the OneDrive ecosystem, designed to deliver a great experience for working with your files directly on your Mac. Over the years, we’ve continued to improve OneDrive for Mac, and we’ve also listened closely to your feedback. We want OneDrive to feel truly native on macOS, with a fast, reliable sync experience you can count on every day.
Over the past several years our team has been working behind the scenes to make the macOS experience better. Today, we’re shipping two major improvements coming soon to OneDrive on macOS:
An all-new Mac-first experience in the OneDrive Activity Center, giving you clean sync status and control that embraces the visual design of the Mac, including support for Liquid Glass on macOS 26 and beyond.
New Mac-native dialogs with the familiar look and feel of macOS 26.
The new Activity Center
The all-new OneDrive Activity Center on the Mac is the small window that appears when you click on the OneDrive icon in the menu bar, and right away you’ll notice the new, snappier interface that embraces the Swift UI design language, including support for Liquid Glass on macOS 26.
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.
That journey has now reached an important milestone: the legacy WebRTC based VDI optimization is being retired, and the new VDI optimization — built on top of a new media engine— is becoming the standard going forward.
In this post, I want to explain why Microsoft is making this change, what customers gain with the new architecture, what’s coming next, and how IT teams can track adoption and progress.
Why Microsoft Is Deprecating WebRTC-based optimization
The WebRTC-based optimization (“Citrix HDX Media optimized” or “AVD Media optimized”) was designed in an earlier era of Teams, relying on WebRTC stacks bundled with the Remote Desktop client / Citrix Workspace app
We’re excited to announce that a modernized user interface and new features are now rolling out to basic plans in both Planner in Teams and Planner for the web. The updated design offers enhanced navigation, responsive layouts, a new goals view for setting objectives and priorities, and task chat—one of your most requested features—to enable real-time collaboration and @ mentioning team members.
This release aims to make planning easier for everyday users while preparing for future AI-powered capabilities. Our goal is to streamline planning by making it more intelligent and connected, so teams can concentrate on achieving results rather than managing tasks.
What's new in Planner
A refreshed design: With this rollout, users will be able to manage their plans in a cleaner, more modern interface that brings a more consistent planning experience across work. Planner’s new look was designed to feel simpler, allowing users to find what they need. It reduces visual clutter, improves layout and spacing, and creates a more focused workspace.
A screenshot of a plan in Planner in Teams shows the new UI for Board view with tasks arranged by bucket.
If you've been using site archive to manage cold data, you know the value of moving inactive content to cheaper storage. But sometimes you don't want to archive an entire site — you just need to archive specific files that haven't been touched in years. That's exactly what file archive lets you do. On this month's episode of Sync Up, Trent gave us a live demo showing how simple the experience is: Select your files, click archive, done. He also walked through the 7-day instant undo window (in case you archive something by accident) and shared how file archive can improve your Copilot experience too!
File archive is coming to public preview in March 2026 for SharePoint sites. Admin-driven archive policies are on the roadmap for later this year.
If you’ve ever wished Copilot could remember the context of a project, understand the documents your team already relies on, or answer repeat questions without retracing your steps, Agents in OneDrive were built for you.
Rather than asking Copilot the same questions across individual files, you can now create an Agent that understands an entire set of documents, project plans, specs, meeting notes, research, or decks, and responds with answers grounded in your content.
What is an agent in OneDrive?
Think of an agent as a focused AI teammate built from your own files and folders. You choose the content, and the agent uses it to:
Answer questions across multiple documents at once
Summarize discussions, decisions, and key takeaways
Surface owners, deadlines, risks, and action items
Keep shared context intact as work evolves
Agents are saved directly in OneDrive as .agent files, just like a document or spreadsheet. Open one, and you’re dropped into a full-screen Copilot experience that stays centered on that specific project or topic.
A special thanks to Chris Jeffrey for his contributions as a peer reviewer to this blog post.
Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI provides a unified location to monitor how AI Applications (Microsoft Copilot, AI systems created in Azure AI Foundry, AI Agents, and AI applications using 3rd party Large Language Models). This Blog Post aims to provide the reader with a holistic understanding of achieving Data Security and Governance using Purview Data Security and Governance for AI offering. Purview DSPM is not to be confused with Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) which is covered in the Blog Post Demystifying Cloud Security Posture Management for AI.
Benefits
When an organization adopts Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), it unlocks a powerful suite of AI-focused security benefits that helps them have a more secure AI adoption journey.
Unified Visibility into AI Activities & Agents
DSPM centralizes visibility across both Microsoft Copilots and third-party AI tools—capturing prompt-level interactions, identifying AI agents in use, and detecting shadow AI deployments across the enterprise.
The Microsoft Planner team recently celebrated two pivotal milestones: International Project Management Day and Microsoft Ignite. To round out the year, here’s a quick look at some of the new and existing features we announced.
7 hidden gems to effectively manage your tasks
In honor of International Project Management Day on November 6, our team published a blog post to highlight lesser-known but powerful Planner features that help teams work more efficiently across Planner and Microsoft Teams. These features include the ability to bulk edit tasks, export plans to Excel, and auto-generate status reports. To learn more, check out our blog post, “7 hidden gems to effectively manage your tasks in Microsoft Planner.”
Planner at Microsoft Ignite
At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we unveiled a major wave of updates that deepen the integration between Planner, Teams, and the Project Manager Agent—bringing AI-powered coordination, automation, and compliance capabilities into everyday workflows.
In meetings, Facilitator now listens for spoken intent, captures decisions as actionable tasks, and generates documents using meeting context. Tasks are automatically synced to Planner, reducing manual follow-up and ensuring alignment as soon as the meeting wraps.
Today at Microsoft Ignite, we’re excited to share the next major evolution in work management—one that builds on the journey we began in April 2024, when we unified Microsoft To Do, Planner, and Project for the web into a single, modern experience we called the new Planner. Now available in Microsoft Teams and as a web app, Planner has further been enhanced with the Project Manager Agent, an AI-powered assistant that helps streamline your planning process.
Now, we’re taking the next step by bringing advanced AI skills through Project Manager Agent to our platform—delivering intelligent automation and a seamless planning environment that can help empower teams to move faster, stay aligned, and deliver results with less friction.
A day in the life: From conversation to coordination
It’s Monday morning. A product launch team gathers—some in person, some remote. Instead of action items getting lost in chat threads or emails, Facilitator and Project Manager Agent are now part of the meeting experience.
During the meeting, Facilitator listens for spoken intent and captures decisions as actionable tasks. Team members can also prompt Facilitator through the meeting chat to add, update, or assign tasks in real…
We’re excited to announce that the new Planner app in Microsoft Teams (web and desktop) is now available to customers in the Government Community Cloud (GCC) High environment!
There’s no migration required—your existing tasks, basic plans, and premium plans are already in the new Planner. In August, we introduced the modern Planner experience on the web for GCC High. Now, that same experience comes to Microsoft Teams—the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365—so your teams can plan, track, and collaborate on work right alongside their chats, meetings, and files.
Add the Planner app in Teams and start managing all your work in one place
Your feedback helps us prioritize what to build! Share it with us via the Planner Feedback Portal.
Getting started
Open Planner in Teams. You can also find the Planner app in the Apps browser. Start by selecting the View more apps “…” menu in the navigation bar. Then, select the Planner icon.
This month, we introduced the Project Manager Agent in Microsoft Teams meetings and channels and enhanced Planner’s security. These features make collaborating with your team more effective while keeping your work secure.
Project Manager Agent skills now available in Teams meetings and channels
Project Manager Agent skills are now available in Microsoft Teams meetings and channels, meaning you can turn meeting conversations into actionable tasks, assign and update items right in the chat, and even generate polished documents with a simple prompt. Meeting tasks sync automatically to Planner for seamless follow-up, and you can filter or retrieve tasks based on due date, assignee, or topic, all without leaving Teams. In channels, each team gets a dedicated agent to create tasks, set due dates, answer plan-related questions, and keep projects moving.
New Project Manager Agent capabilities make it easier than ever for teams to stay organized, track progress, and work efficiently—wherever collaboration happens. Project Manager Agent skills are now in public preview for Teams meetings and Teams channels, unlocking new ways to streamline workflows and boost productivity right inside your conversations. Read on to learn more.
Select the image above or button below to launch a demo of Project Manager Agent in Planner.
Project Manager Agent skills in Teams meetings: Capture, assign, summarize, and kick off tasks
Facilitator agent helps keep Teams meetings on track and remain productive, and thanks to its new integration with Project Manager Agent’s meeting skills, you can turn conversations into execution without leaving Teams. Facilitator pulls tasks from transcripts, so nothing gets missed, and meeting tasks automatically sync to Planner for advanced tracking beyond meetings. It can even generate documents from the meeting, helping to overcome the "cold start" problem. Just @mention Facilitator to create, assign, or retrieve tasks, or generate documents.
Create tasks by simply @mentioning Facilitator during the meeting.
Our team has released a range of updates in Microsoft Planner’s Project Manager agent including improved suggestions, and seamless access through existing premium plans, and a new entry point in the web—enabling a more efficient planning experience. Additionally, Government Community Cloud (GCC) High customers can now access the new Planner for the web. Read on to learn more about how you can adopt these updates into your workflows!
Project Manager agent now available in existing premium plans
We’re excited to announce that Project Manager agent is now live and fully integrated across all existing shared premium plans in Microsoft Planner! With Project Manager agent available in the everyday context of premium plans, users can work more efficiently and collaboratively with their teammates.
Project Manager agent now available in Planner for the web
Project Manager agent is now integrated and available within Planner for the web, making task management and project coordination more accessible to users directly through their browser. This update allows teams to leverage Project Manager agent’s intelligent capabilities—such as plan generation, status report creation, and task execution—regardless of which endpoint they use Planner.
We are thrilled to share that we have started rolling out the new Microsoft Planner for the web to customers in GCC High!
When rolled out to your organization, users with a Microsoft 365 license who visit Planner for the web https://tasks.office365.us/ will receive the new Microsoft Planner experience, bringing together the simplicity of Microsoft To Do, the collaboration of Microsoft Planner, and the power of Microsoft Project for the web into a simple, familiar experience with a rich set of capabilities for individual and team work management. These include:
The ability to access all your plans, projects and to do lists in a single place
Access all your tasks assigned to you within My Tasks and manage your priorities in a My Day view.
Manage and coordinate work using various plan views (Grid, Board, Charts, Schedule, and more)!
A screenshot of the Board view of a plan in the new Planner for the web shows various task cards grouped by the following buckets: "Scope," "Analysis/Requirements," "Design," and "Development."
Experiencing premium capabilities in the new Planner for the web
Discover the latest enhancements in Planner, designed to help you manage your work more efficiently. This month, we’re excited to highlight new features and updates that make planning, organizing, and tracking tasks simpler than ever.
Get real-time task notifications for Project Manager agent via email
This enhancement gives you more flexibility in how you stay informed, helping you maintain momentum on critical tasks—even when you’re away from Teams. Whether you prefer to manage your day from your inbox or your Activity feed, these notifications ensure you never miss a beat on the tasks assigned to Project Manager agent.
Boost efficiency with Planner's bulk editing feature
Planner’s new bulk editing feature is here to simplify task management. In the Grid view of any basic plan, you can now update multiple tasks simultaneously—assign tasks, adjust priorities, update progress, and modify start and due dates—all in one…
This month, explore the latest enhancements to Microsoft Planner, including the streamlined Status Reports feature for project updates, expanded functionality of the Project Manager across multiple views, and preparations for transitioning from Project for the web to Planner. Thank you as always for your feedback in shaping our product!
Generate status reports in minutes
Are you looking to streamline your project updates? The new Status Reports feature in Planner in Teams is here to help! You can quickly and easily auto-synthesize your plan's progress, milestones, risks, and next steps, ensuring everyone on your team has shared visibility. Customize these reports to fit any audience and timeframe, making your updates more relevant and impactful.
To get started, navigate to the Planner app in Teams and open a premium plan, or a plan with Project Manager that has at least ten tasks. Select the Reports tab, specify the reporting period, and add any specific details you want to include. The generated report will be displayed in a Loop component for real-time coediting, making collaboration easier than ever. You can also share the newsletter in SharePoint.
Explore the newest updates in Planner, aimed at making your work management even more effective. This month, we share key updates on retiring Project for the web, expanding language support for Project Manager, and bringing Board view front and center across My Day and My Tasks.
My Day and My Tasks now default to Board view
We're rolling out a smoother planning experience—now, when you open My Day or My Tasks, you'll see your work organized in Board view by default instead of Grid view. This update makes it easier to visually arrange, prioritize, and track your tasks, helping you stay focused and productive at a glance.
Starting August 1st, 2025, we will be transitioning all users to Microsoft Planner. To provide a unified work management experience, we are retiring Project for the web, as well…
Next week Microsoft Ignite 2025(Nov. 18-21) lands in San Francisco’s Moscone Center for the first time! Bringing a wave of innovation that’s reshaping the industry for AI-driven content management, secure collaboration, and seamless digital experiences.
This is your guide to Ignite's "must see" OneDrive and SharePoint sessions. Take a moment to explore what excites you most and lock them into your schedule so you don’t miss a thing!
Be sure to grab some“social swag”and share across your channels using the official hashtag #MSIgnite.
Explore the session lineup
It all kicks off with Judson Althoff’s keynote on Tues, Nov 18 @9AM PST. Watch it live or catch the replay on-demand following the conference. Most sessions will be recorded and made available on-demand as soon as possible. We’ll keep this guide up to date throughout the conference.
If you are using Microsoft Purview to secure email attachments, it’s important to understand how Conditional Access (CA) policies and Guest account settings influence the experience for external recipients.
Scenario 1: Guest Accounts Enabled
✅ Smooth Experience
Each recipient is provisioned with a guest account, allowing them to access the file seamlessly.
📝 Note
This can result in a significant increase in guest users, potentially in hundreds or thousands, which may create additional administrative workload and management challenges.
Scenario 2: No Guest Accounts
🚫 Limited Access
External users can only view attachments via the web interface. Attempts to download then open the files in Office apps typically fail due to repeated credential prompts.
🔍 Why?
Conditional Access policies may block access to Microsoft Rights Management Services because it is included under All resources. This typically occurs when access controls such as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) or device compliance are enforced, as these require users or guests to authenticate.
To have a better experience without enabling guest accounts, consider adjusting your CA policy with one of the below approaches:
These challenges aren’t just theoretical—they’re already impacting organizations deploying AI at scale. Traditional security tools and ad-hoc controls often fall short when faced with the unique risks of custom AI agents, such as prompt injection, data leakage, and compliance gaps. What’s needed is a platform that not only accelerates AI innovation but also embeds security, privacy, and governance into every stage of the AI lifecycle. This is where Azure AI Foundry comes in. Purpose-built for secure, enterprise-grade AI development, Foundry provides the integrated controls, monitoring, and content safety features organizations need to confidently harness the power of AI—without compromising on trust or compliance.
Why Azure AI Foundry?
Azure AI Foundry is a unified, enterprise-grade platform designed to help organizations build, deploy, and manage custom AI solutions securely and responsibly. It combines production-ready infrastructure, advanced security controls, and user-friendly interfaces, allowing developers to focus on innovation while maintaining robust security and compliance.
Security by Design in Azure AI Foundry
Azure AI Foundry integrates robust security, privacy, and governance features across the AI development lifecycle—empowering teams to build trustworthy and compliant AI applications:
As organizations scale generative AI, two motions must advance in lockstep: hardening the AI stack (“Security for AI”) and using AI to supercharge SecOps (“AI for Security”). This post is a practical map—covering assets, common attacks, scope, solutions, SKUs, and ownership—to help you ship AI safely and investigate faster.
Why both motions matter, at the same time
Security for AI (hereafter ‘ Secure AI’ ) guards prompts, models, apps, data, identities, keys, and networks; it adds governance and monitoring around GenAI workloads (including indirect prompt injection from retrieved documents and tools). Agents add complexity because one prompt can trigger multiple actions, increasing the blast radius if not constrained.
AI for Security uses Security Copilot with Defender XDR, Microsoft Sentinel, Purview, Entra, and threat intelligence to summarize incidents, generate KQL, correlate signals, and recommend fixtures and betterments. Promptbooks make automations easier, while plugins provide the opportunity to use out of the box as well as custom integrations. SKU: Security Compute Units (SCU). Responsibility: Shared (customer uses; Microsoft operates).
The intent of this blog is to cover Secure AI stack and approaches through matrices and mind map. This blog is not intended to cover AI…
Security Operations Centers (SOCs) and InfoOps teams are constantly challenged to reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR). Analysts often spend valuable time navigating multiple blades in Microsoft Defender, Purview, and Defender for Cloud portals to investigate entities like IP addresses, devices, incidents, and AI risk criteria. Sometimes, investigations require pivoting to other vendors’ portals, adding complexity and slowing response.
Cyber Dial Agent is a lightweight agent and browser add-on designed to streamline investigations, minimize context switching, and accelerate SecOps and InfoOps workflows.
What is Cyber Dial Agent?
The Cyber Dial Agent is a “hotline accelerator” that provides a unified, menu-driven experience for analysts. Instead of manually searching through multiple portals, analysts simply select an option from a numeric menu (1–10), provide the required value, and receive a clickable deep link that opens the exact page in the relevant Microsoft security portal.
Agent base experience
The solution introduces a single interaction model: analysts select an option from a numeric menu (1–10), provide the required value, and receive a clickable deep link that opens the exact page in the Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Defender for Cloud portal.
How long have you been working with Microsoft products?
I am a Microsoft MVP in Security and a results-driven and dedicated Senior Solutions Architect with more than 14 years of professional experience in Microsoft Technologies. I have in-depth experience in Cloud, Security, Enterprise Mobility, Messaging & Collaboration, and IT Infrastructure. I am dedicated to customer satisfaction with focused delivery of technical solutions.
I'm a proven leader in directing operations, maintenance, and support of complex systems. Highly adept in request for proposal development, technology needs assessment and staff training.
How (and when) did you get involved in the Microsoft Community? (MCCP, MVP) Tell us about your journey!
I became a member of the Microsoft Customer Connection Program (MCCP) in 2022 and was honored with the Microsoft MVP award in Security in 2023. Throughout my time in the MCCP, I’ve consistently contributed valuable insights and feedback to help enhance Microsoft Security products.
Over the past years, I’ve been recognized as one of the top contributors across several MCCP focus areas—ranking second in Security, and first in Identity, Management, and Purview in the last two years. My contributions have earned me multiple accolades, including the Community Rockstar Award…
This site uses only functional storage to remember your language choice. With your consent, we also use Google Analytics to measure site usage.More in our privacy policy.
