Posted by: kurtsh | June 1, 2026

INFO: Microsoft Q3FY26 Income Statement

Ever wonder where Microsoft gets its revenue & income from?

(courtesy of AppEconomyInsights)

Microsoft Q3 FY26 Income Statement

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Posted by: kurtsh | May 28, 2026

INFO: Fabric Unified Admin Monitoring (FUAM)

Fabric Unified Admin Monitoring (FUAM) is a solution that enables holistic monitoring on top of Power BI and Fabric. FUAM is completely built with Fabric capabilities through Pipelines and Notebooks as the main tool to extract and transform data.

All of the data is stored in its raw format but also in Delta Parquet, enabling the user to directly use it through Power BI Direct Lake or the Lakehouse SQL Endpoint via SQL. FUAM comes with a set of standard reports enabling a quick overview on the data, but it’s intended to give the users all the tools necessary to customize or build their own reports on top of the data model.

Through the openness of Fabric it’s of course also possible to combine it with your own data enabling you to do the analysis you wish.

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Posted by: kurtsh | May 15, 2026

INFO: Create & manage official Brand kits in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app

If you or your users have Microsoft 365 Copilot (Premium) licenses, you can enable brand managers to create and maintain official Brand kits that make branding consistent by default, across your organization. You can create, edit, update, and manage official Brand kits, giving you the authority to maintain brand integrity while enabling all employees to easily generate on-brand materials.

A Brand kit can include:

  • Logos, color palettes, and typography
  • Templates and layout patterns
  • Icons and data visualization styles
  • Photography rules and picture styles
  • Brand voice, tone, terminology, and writing guidance
  • Dos and don’ts for visual and verbal identity

Benefits of using Brand kits:

  • Apply your brand consistently using rich assets — such as icons and illustration libraries, chart and data visualization styles, photography guidelines and picture treatments and spacing, composition, and layout patterns
  • Automatically extract brand guidelines using built-in AI that identifies brand elements from your existing templates, guidelines, and assets — such as color palettes, fonts and typography rules, photography styles and image treatments, layout structures, brand voice patterns and visual do’s and don’ts — then review and refine them before publishing in AI that identifies ‑in AI that identifies
  • Keep presentations on brand with Brand Reviewer, which identifies issues and suggests one click fixes addressing incorrect colors or fonts, misplaced or unapproved logos, off brand imagery or picture styles, layout, spacing, or alignment issues and other violations of your brand’s usage rules click fixes addressing brand imagery or picture styles‑click fixes addressing‑brand imagery or picture styles
  • Use approved brand assets directly from where they already live — such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft 365 organizational asset libraries (OALs), and supported third-party Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems — so users can browse and apply up to date, compliant assets in Brand kit without downloading files or switching tools 
  • Support multiple brands by managing separate templates, assets, and defaults for each brand in one place

Note:

  • Brand kit creation, deployment & usage requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot Premium license.
  • Editing, renaming, and updating official Brand kits is restricted to brand managers, as specified in the brand manager policy. To gain access to these brand management capabilities, your IT administrator will need to designate you as a brand manager. After you have been designated as a brand manager, it can take up to 24 hours to receive permission to create official kits. See Enterprise Brand Manager policy for more information.

For instructions on setting up Brand kits in Microsoft 365 Copilot, visit:

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Posted by: kurtsh | May 15, 2026

TOOL: “Get-AzVMAvailability” – Find which Azure regions have VM SKU capacity

Get-AzVMAvailability helps you identify which Azure regions have available capacity for your VM deployments. It scans multiple regions in parallel and provides detailed insights into SKU availability, zone restrictions, quota limits, pricing, and image compatibility.

Features:

  • Multi-Region Parallel Scanning – Scan 10+ regions in ~15 seconds using concurrent HttpClient-based REST calls
  • SKU Filtering – Filter to specific SKUs with wildcard support (e.g., Standard_D*_v5)
  • Lifecycle Recommendations – Run fully autonomous with -LifecycleRecommendations — no prompts, auto-enables pricing, Excel export, savings plan/reservation details, and quota. Without -LifecycleFile, pulls live VM inventory from Azure via Resource Graph. With -LifecycleFile, loads VMs from a CSV/JSON/XLSX file. Legacy positional form -LifecycleRecommendations .\my-vms.csv is also supported
  • Live Lifecycle Scan – -LifecycleScan pulls VM inventory directly from Azure via Resource Graph with management group, resource group, and tag filters
  • Deployment Mapping – -SubMap / -RGMap sheets group affected VMs by subscription or resource group with risk enrichment
  • Pricing Information – Show hourly/monthly pricing (retail or negotiated EA/MCA rates) with optional Savings Plan and Reserved Instance comparisons
  • Spot VM Pricing – Include Spot pricing alongside on-demand rates
  • Placement Scores – Show allocation likelihood (High/Medium/Low) for each SKU via Azure Spot Placement API
  • Image Compatibility – Verify Gen1/Gen2 and x64/ARM64 requirements
  • Zone Availability – Per-zone availability details
  • Quota Tracking – Available vCPU quota per family
  • Multi-Region Matrix – Color-coded comparison view
  • Interactive Drill-Down – Explore specific families and SKUs
  • Export Options – CSV and styled XLSX with conditional formatting
  • JSON Output – Structured JSON for AI agent integration and automation pipelines
  • Inventory Readiness – Validate capacity and quota for an entire VM BOM in one command
  • Compatibility-Validated Recommendations – Alternatives are validated to meet or exceed the target SKU’s NICs, accelerated networking, premium IO, disk interface, ephemeral OS disk, and Ultra SSD requirements. Data disks and IOPS are scored as soft dimensions

Download the script here:

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Posted by: kurtsh | May 14, 2026

RELEASE: Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 SP3

OMG we updated Microsoft Identity Manager 2016. (IKR?) This however doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft Identity Manager will go “end of support” on January 9, 2029.

Many organizations continue to depend on Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) 2016 for scenarios that are not easily replicated elsewhere, such as:

Synchronization across multiple directories and forests: 

  • Complex attribute flows and identity correlation logic 
  • Management of custom objects and extended schemas 
  • Deep integration with on-premises applications 

Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) 2016 Service Pack 3 (SP3) is now generally available. SP3 focuses on stability and supportability and updates compatibility with current platform components such as SQL Server, SharePoint, and Exchange. It also adds a new deployment option for the Synchronization Service: Azure SQL Database, with authentication through system-assigned and user-assigned managed identities to help reduce operational risk in hybrid identity environments.

In this release

Run MIM on current platform components

  • Updated compatibility for newer platform releases, including SQL Server 2022 and Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE).
  • New Synchronization Service database option: Azure SQL Database with authentication via system-assigned and user-assigned managed identities.

Modernize the MIM Service and Portal experience

  • Deploy the MIM Portal on SharePoint Subscription Edition (SE).
  • Support for System Center Service Manager Data Warehouse (DW) 2022 for reporting and audit integration.
  • Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) single sign-on (SSO) support for claims-based authentication, enabling users to sign in through AD FS instead of Windows integrated authentication.

Read the announcement post for details on download & installation:

For information about migrating from Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 to Microsoft Entra, visit:

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Posted by: kurtsh | May 12, 2026

RELEASE: Microsoft 365 & Copilot “In-Product Feedback” for GCC

As organizations deploy Microsoft 365 apps and Copilot, tenant administrators need a way to understand how these experiences perform in real-world environments and pass that feedback on to Microsoft.

In-Product Feedback enables IT leaders to capture end-user signals inside Microsoft 365 and Copilot while keeping controls aligned to their compliance posture.

In GCC, GCC High, and DoD, In-Product Feedback helps IT leaders spot mission-impacting experience issues, capture environment-specific needs, and share actionable signals with Microsoft.

Tenant administrators can choose between two configurations: “Restricted Feedback” or “Verbatim Feedback”. For details on each, visit the announcement here:

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Posted by: kurtsh | May 11, 2026

TOOLS: “AzTagger” & “ZureMap” – Tag your Azure Resources & Diagram/Map your Azure Infrastructure

Check out these 2 convenient & free tools for the Azure Infrastructure administrator:

AZTAGGER
AzTagger is a cross-platform desktop GUI application for fast and flexible querying of Azure resources and tag management. It allows fast search and filtering of all resources, resource groups, and subscriptions using Azure Resource Graph for your Entra ID tenant. It runs on latst Windows 11 (WPF), macOS (Mac) and Linux (GTK). Download the tool here:

ZUREMAP
ZureMap is an open-source Angular application that visualises Microsoft Azure infrastructure as interactive diagrams. Connect to your Azure subscriptions, scan resources, and explore VNets, subnets, VMs, storage, and more — with FinOps cost overlays, tag-based highlighting, and exportable architecture maps. Download the tool here:

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Posted by: kurtsh | May 10, 2026

INFO: Manage harmful content protection settings for Microsoft 365 Copilot (Premium)

Microsoft 365 Copilot licensees can now “adjust harmful content protection”, a configuration option controlled by IT Administrators & designed to support roles such as law enforcement, legal personnel, social workers, and medical staff by enabling them to use AI effectively in real-world scenarios. In some cases, these roles & fields may require reviewing or generating sensitive or potentially inappropriate language. (Ex; Medical reports, criminal evidence, or social work case documentation)

To support these job requirements, the feature allows for the ability to adjust harmful content protection settings so that Copilot Chat can respond to queries about harmful content when it’s fit for purpose. Access is restricted by administrators to approved personas only, ensuring it is used strictly for legitimate work purposes.

Adjusting harmful content protection does so exclusively for Copilot Chat & text responses & it will not disable “core responsible AI protections” including prompt injection defenses, copyright safeguards, biosecurity & image protection. Policy changes also do not affect image generation or agents.

When granted the ability to adjust harmful content protection, users can use a toggle to enable or disable harmful content protection in Copilot Chat. The menu includes a Harmful content protection setting, as shown in the following screenshot:

The administrative control is available to Microsoft 365 Copilot licensees & is available for both Commercial as well as Government/GCC Microsoft 365 Copilot cloud instances. For more details, read:

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Posted by: kurtsh | May 8, 2026

EVENT: Microsoft Azure Infra Summit 2026 – Online – May 19-21, 2026

The Microsoft Azure Infra Summit is a free, engineering-led virtual conference built for experienced IT professionals, platform engineers, and SREs using Azure in production running May 19-21. Expect deep technical guidance (300–400 level) on the parts of Azure that matter when you’re the one on-call.

This isn’t “cloud 101.” It’s an ops-first event focused on how to build, operate, and optimize Azure workloads in real-world environments, including tradeoffs, failure modes, and what breaks in production.

AGENDA:

Day 1: May 19 – Build your Azure infrastructure

  • Provisioning, architecture, automation, IaC, landing zones.
  • Examples: resilient compute designs, secure network topologies, Bicep/Terraform patterns, storage strategies for performance + cost.

Day 2: May 20 – Operate Azure infrastructure workloads

  • Operations: monitoring, governance, patching, identity, hybrid ops at scale.
  • Examples: Azure Monitor/Log Analytics at scale, policy enforcement, Azure Arc operations, access lifecycle

Day 3: May 21 – Optimize Azure infrastructure

  • Performance tuning, cost management, reliability, modernization.
  • Examples: VM/container optimization, storage performance tuning, cost optimization drills, network reliability/throughput.

Attendees will leave with:

  • Clear mental models for Azure infrastructure decisions
  • Real-world patterns (and anti-patterns) used in production
  • Practical guidance you can apply the next day
  • Fewer unknowns when designing and operating Azure at scale

(Short version: You’ll leave knowing why things behave the way they do in Azure, and how to design around it.)

A semi-live broadcast with a mix of curated sessions (live + pre-recorded), a live host desk, moderated chat, and daily AMAs, plus follow-up “clinic” troubleshooting and hands-on resources. On-demand: sessions posted within 24-48 hours with captions/transcripts and resources retained.


WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

This event is for:

  • IT professionals running or planning Azure in production
  • Infrastructure / platform engineers, Azure admins/architects
  • Hybrid / enterprise operations teams

This event is not:

  • Beginner cloud 101 (unless explicitly labeled as such)
  • App-dev-centric content
  • Sales or marketing-led sessions

It’s really “Built for the people who get paged at 2am.”

FAQ

  • Is this free? Yes — it’s designed as a free, engineering-led virtual event.
  • Will sessions be recorded? Yes — on-demand will be available Immediately after broadcast with captions/transcripts where possible.
  • What level is the content? Expect 300–400 level Azure infrastructure and operations topics.
  • Will there be live Q&A? Yes – Each session will be moderated in the chat by presenters and SMEs.

————-

Date/Time:

  • May 19-21, 2026 | 8:00 AM – 2:00 PM PST

Location:

  • Online

Registration:

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Posted by: kurtsh | May 3, 2026

RELEASE: High Volume Email (HVE) generally available

High Volume Email (HVE) is now generally available in Exchange Online, allowing organizations to send large volumes of internal email (for scenarios where email in excess of 10,000 total to any internal recipients per day is required) without hitting recipient rate limits or risking service health issues associated with user mailboxes.

It delivers a purpose‑built, tenant‑native way for applications and devices to send large volumes of internal email reliably, securely, and at scale without impacting user mailboxes or Exchange Online service health.

…

High Volume Email is designed specifically for transactional and operational messaging, not marketing campaigns. It does not include campaign tooling, templates, or engagement tracking. Instead, it supports the high‑trust, high‑reliability use cases that organizations depend on every day.

Common scenarios include:

  • Payroll and HR system notifications
  • IT monitoring and service alerts
  • Business and line‑of‑business application messaging
  • Device‑driven workflows, such as printers and scanners
  • Security and compliance notifications

…

High Volume Email is now generally available in Exchange Online for sending email to internal recipients. Usage will be metered starting June 1, 2026 based on the number of expanded email recipients, with pricing set at $42 per one million recipients through Microsoft commerce (equivalent to $0.000042 per one recipient). This is a pay-as-you-go configuration using billing policies in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

Read more at:

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