Posted by: kurtsh | June 3, 2026

EVENT: Microsoft Build 2026 – Live Blog!

All the announcements from the keynote are summarized on the Build 2026 Live Blog which has short synopses of each event. I highly encourage taking a look at the live blog because frankly, it can be overwhelming – the amount of information that was announced!

Here’s shortcuts to the full overviews of each:

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Posted by: kurtsh | June 3, 2026

PREVIEW: “Azure Linux 4.0” – Purpose-Built for Azure

At Microsoft Build 2026, we announced the public preview of Azure Linux 4.0 – Microsoft’s first party Linux distribution, purpose-built for Azure. Azure Linux 4.0 is available now for Azure Virtual Machines, VM Scale Sets, and container images – with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) support and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) coming soon after.

Why Azure Linux 

Running Linux on Azure often involves a mix of distributions – one for VMs, another for Kubernetes nodes, a third for container base images, and sometimes something different on developer machines. That flexibility is powerful, but it can also introduce operational overhead: multiple patch schedules to coordinate, multiple security baselines to validate, and more moving parts for SRE and security teams to stay ahead of. A more consistent baseline – especially one with a smaller footprint – can help reduce exposure and simplify day‑to‑day maintenance 

Azure Linux was built with that principle in mind: a single, Microsoft-supported Linux foundation designed to work across every Azure compute surface. From kernel updates to CVE patches, Azure Linux is built and maintained by Microsoft with a predictable update cadence designed around Azure infrastructure. Azure Linux is included with Azure compute at no additional cost. 

What Is Azure Linux 4.0 

Azure Linux is a Fedora-derived, RPM-based Linux distribution built and maintained by Microsoft. It is open source, free to use, and optimized specifically for Azure. Minimal by choice, secure by default; Azure Linux ships only the packages required for cloud workloads. Azure Linux is built exclusively for cloud and server workloads, it is not intended to support desktop usage or GUI applications.  

Azure Linux already powers millions of cores across Azure’s internal services, including AKS, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, and many others. With 4.0, we’re bringing the same OS – same security posture, same performance tuning, same operational simplicity – to every Azure customer. 

When Azure Linux 4.0 reaches General Availability, you can expect seamless integration with the Azure services you already rely on, including: 

  • Microsoft Defender for Cloud – vulnerability assessment and threat detection 
  • Azure Monitor – telemetry, logs, and performance monitoring 
  • Azure Migrate – discovery and migration tooling 
  • Trusted Launch and Secure Boot – hardware-rooted security 
  • Azure Portal, CLI, ARM, Bicep, Terraform, Ansible -deploy and manage with your existing tools 

Read more at:

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Posted by: kurtsh | June 2, 2026

INFO: Retirement of CAPTCHA for Microsoft Teams meeting join

<taken from Microsoft 365 Message Center (GCC MC1262588, Commercial MC1262588: “Microsoft Teams: Retirement of CAPTCHA for meeting join”, published Mar 26, 2026>

Introduction

Microsoft Teams is retiring CAPTCHA for meeting join to improve accessibility, reduce join friction, and modernize protections against automated participants. This change follows the release of a new, default‑on capability that detects external meeting assistant bots and provides organizers with increased visibility and control during the meeting join process, as previously announced in Message Center post MC1251206 (Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 558107).

To ensure a smooth transition:

  • The new bot detection capability will be released and available to customers before CAPTCHA deprecation occurs.
  • There will be no gap where meetings are left without baseline bot protection.
  • CAPTCHA will be removed from meeting join flows and admin surfaces only after the new capability is fully in place.

When this will happen

  • Early May 2026: The Require verification by participants (CAPTCHA) policy will be locked and can no longer be enabled.
  • Late July 2026: CAPTCHA policy removed from PowerShell.
  • Late August 2026: CAPTCHA policy removed from the Teams Admin Center UI.

Note: Dates are subject to change based on the release of bot identification (MC1251206/Roadmap ID 558107). 

How this affects your organization

Who is affected

  • Microsoft Teams tenant administrators
  • Meeting organizers with anonymous or external participants

What will happen

  • The CAPTCHA meeting policy will be retired and removed.
  • CAPTCHA challenges will no longer appear during meeting join.
  • A new, default‑on bot detection capability will provide baseline protection.
  • Detected bots will require organizer approval to join meetings (recommended default).
  • There will be no gap in bot protection during the transition.

What you can do to prepare

  • No immediate action is required.
  • Review the new meeting policy when it becomes available in the Teams Admin Center.
  • Keep the default setting that requires organizer approval for detected bots.
  • Update internal documentation or helpdesk guidance related to meeting join and lobby controls.

Compliance considerations

  • Admin control introduced: A new meeting policy governs how detected external bots are handled during meeting join.

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Posted by: kurtsh | June 2, 2026

RELEASE: AI Bot Detection for Microsoft Teams Meetings

<taken from Microsoft 365 Message Center MC1251206: “Microsoft Teams: Identify external bots joining your Teams meetings” Published Mar 13, 2026>

AI‑powered meeting assistant bots—such as transcription and summarization services—are increasingly used to enhance productivity in online meetings. While these tools can be valuable, some bots may access meetings without the knowledge or consent of the meeting organizer or the hosting tenant, which can create data security, privacy, and compliance risks.

To help organizations protect meeting content and increase visibility into automated participants, Microsoft Teams is introducing a new capability that detects external meeting assistant bots as they attempt to join meetings. This update gives organizers greater awareness and control and provides administrators with clear controls to manage how detected bots are handled in meetings hosted across the organization.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 558107.

When this will happen

How this will affect your organization

Who is affected

  • All organizations using Microsoft Teams meetings, including GCC tenants
  • Meeting organizers and Teams administrators

What will happen

  • Teams will detect external meeting bots as they attempt to join meetings hosted by your organization.
  • When detected, bots will be clearly labeled in the meeting lobby experience.
    • Note: There might still be bots that are undetected by the system due to their intrinsic behavior. Please inform your users to report them out directly from the app/meeting. This will help us improve our detection system.
  • Organizers will be able to:
    • approve or deny detected bots from the meeting lobby.
    • see clearly which participants have been identified as bots.
    • remove detected bots during the meeting if necessary.
  • These organizer controls are designed to help ensure that bot participation in meetings is an intentional and informed decision.
  • A new meeting policy will be available in the Teams admin center that allows admins to configure how detected bots are handled (do not detect bots, require approval). In the future, we intend to provide more granular controls to admins, as appropriate.
  • Bot detection will be enabled by default for all tenants.
  • Teams will continue improving detection accuracy; however, some bots may not be detected in all scenarios.

What you can do to prepare
No action is required at this time.

However, we recommend that Teams admins:

  • Review the new meeting policy in the Teams admin center once it becomes available.
  • Keep the default setting, which requires organizers to approve detected bots before they join meetings (recommended).
  • Choose a stricter or more permissive option based on your organization’s collaboration and compliance requirements.
  • Inform meeting organizers that they may see new indicators and approval prompts when detected bots attempt to join meetings.
  • Update internal helpdesk or governance documentation if your organization documents meeting join or lobby controls behavior.
  • Monitor future Message center updates for expanded administrative controls.

Compliance considerations

QuestionAnswer
Does the change introduce or significantly modify AI/ML or agent capabilities that interact with or provide access to your data?Yes. This change introduces detection logic that analyzes meeting join metadata to identify external automated bots attempting to join meetings.
Does the change provide a new way of communicating between users, tenants, or subscriptions?No. The feature only changes how external meeting assistant bots are surfaced to organizers during the meeting join process, increasing visibility of automated external participants. There is no change in the way participants can communicate with these bots or vice versa.
Does the change include an admin control, and can it be controlled through Entra ID group membership?Yes. The change introduces a new meeting policy in the Teams admin center that allows admins to define how detected bots are handled. It cannot be controlled through Entra ID group membership at this time.

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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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