Saturday, 26 September 2026

Maker Guidelines put environment policy in the Copilot Studio Review pane

Roadmap item 570967 lets administrators publish a guidance message to Copilot Studio makers naming which tools, models, connectors and channels are approved for an environment, and pointing at the relevant policy, request process or support contact. The message renders in the Review pane alongside the agent's blockers and warnings and stays visible when the agent has no issues. Preview is dated September 2026 and general availability November 2026, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), web only.

Why it matters: governance guidance reaches makers at the moment they would otherwise pick an unapproved connector, rather than sitting in a wiki nobody opens.

microsoft.com

Copilot pricing splits into a user subscription plus usage-based billing

Everyday AI stays covered by the Copilot user subscription licence, priced per user per month, including model selection and Auto, which weighs accuracy, speed and cost per request. Advanced AI, including new frontier models, moves to usage-based billing with Copilot Credits, which users meet when they choose a frontier model or hit a limit. Usage-based billing is visible to all end users but is not enabled or functional in an enterprise tenant until an admin creates a spending policy in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and it rolls out in Q4 2026. Cost management in the admin center now extends past Copilot Cowork and Work IQ APIs to Copilot Code, Copilot Managed Runtime and advanced work for SharePoint and OneDrive in Copilot, with Copilot Studio agents following in October.

Why it matters: nothing is billed until an admin writes a spending policy, so the first decision is whether to switch Copilot Credits on at all, not how to cap them.

techcommunity.microsoft.com

Copilot in SharePoint page authoring takes a canvas selection

MC1478958 lets a page author with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence select specific page canvas elements - whole sections or individual web parts - before submitting a prompt, with the selection shown as an indicator above the Copilot chat box. Copilot then scopes the edit to those elements; with nothing selected it still picks the area itself. Available now across Worldwide, GCC, GCC High and DoD, no admin action required.

Why it matters: it removes the main failure mode of Copilot page editing, where a prompt aimed at one web part rewrote a different part of the page.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Organization skills reach Copilot in PowerPoint for Windows

Admins can upload organization skills in the Microsoft 365 admin center using the documented schema and share approved ones so they appear in Copilot in PowerPoint for Windows. The feature replaces the earlier "tenant-wide shareable skills" wording with "organization skill support". General availability worldwide began in early September 2026 and completes by late September 2026.

Why it matters: it makes deck-building skills a governed tenant asset rather than something each user uploads, so a skills review process is now worth having.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Organization skills reach Copilot in PowerPoint for Mac

The same organization-skill support lands in Copilot in PowerPoint for Mac: admins upload skills in the Microsoft 365 admin center and share approved ones to the tenant, where they surface inside PowerPoint for Mac. General availability worldwide began in early September 2026 and completes by late September 2026. The support article is still being prepared by the feature team.

Why it matters: Mac and Windows reach parity in the same window, so a skills rollout does not need to be staged by platform.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Async notifications for Copilot in PowerPoint

Roadmap item 570436 lets users leave PowerPoint, switch devices, go offline or end the workday and still be notified when Copilot finishes its work or needs attention. General availability is dated October 2026, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), on Mac.

Why it matters: long-running deck generation stops requiring the app to stay open, which is what made agentic PowerPoint work impractical on a laptop.

microsoft.com

Introducing the new Copilot with Home, Code and Autopilot

Microsoft combined Copilot into one experience built from three parts: Home, where Chat and Cowork come together with the full power of Office; Code, which extends solution-building to knowledge workers; and Autopilot, a persistent, proactive, personal agent hosted in the cloud. The commercial model splits a user subscription for everyday value from usage-based billing for advanced capabilities, with FinOps for AI for cost governance, and platform capabilities for building, integrating, deploying and governing AI. The new Copilot rolls out through the Frontier program with capabilities arriving continuously.

Why it matters: Copilot stops being a set of separate surfaces, so positioning built around "Copilot Chat versus Cowork versus agents" needs restating as one product with three modes.

blogs.microsoft.com

The Copilot app rewrites its navigation around Home

Opening the Copilot app lands users in Home, with Chat and Cowork on one screen and a switch in the prompt box. The left navigation changes with it: Plugins replaces the standalone Agents entry point (Agents & Skills for some preview users) in Chat and the Customize entry point in Cowork, and for Cowork users Automations moves to the Home navigation pane. Chat also gains long-running multi-step work - drafting email, managing meetings, working in Teams, managing OneDrive and SharePoint files, finding people, and creating Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF and HTML files - with sensitive actions requiring user approval and a Tasks view for tracking. Home and the navigation changes roll out to Frontier in October for all Microsoft 365 users with access to the Copilot app; the Chat capabilities roll out to Frontier later in September for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.

Why it matters: the entry points move, so adoption material and training that points users at Agents or Customize goes stale in October.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Declarative agents can call Agent 365 agents over Agent2Agent

Microsoft Agent 365 agents that implement the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol can now be used as connected agents inside declarative agents built with the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit, alongside the existing OpenAPI and MCP server connection types. Administrators install A2A-capable Agent 365 agents from the All agents page in the Microsoft 365 admin center and review them on the Connected agents tab of the declarative agent; users cannot install them themselves. General availability worldwide began in late August 2026 and is expected to complete by late September 2026, and is already live in Microsoft's own tenant.

Why it matters: a declarative agent can delegate to a governed Agent 365 agent instead of reimplementing its logic, but only for agents an admin has already approved tenant-wide.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Work IQ opens in preview on September 30

Work IQ is the intelligence layer that grounds Microsoft Copilot and agents in business data, modelling that data once so Copilot and agents share one foundation across Dynamics 365 CRM and ERP, Power Platform, Dataverse, Microsoft 365 context and third-party line-of-business apps. Preview starts on September 30 2026 with rollout continuing through October 2026, and ERP apps arriving in late October 2026. Developers get Work IQ APIs, an MCP server, a CLI, a plugin for coding agents, the Dataverse Ask API, semantic models and a reusable business-skills framework. Work IQ is charged through usage-based billing.

Why it matters: this is the grounding path for agents that need ERP and CRM records rather than documents, and because it bills per use, a Work IQ-grounded pilot needs a spending policy before it starts.

microsoft.com

Copilot Studio agents are being migrated to Entra Agent ID automatically

Self-service migration of Copilot Studio agents to Microsoft Entra Agent ID began rolling out on August 24 2026 through Power Platform Advisor, and from September 2026 Microsoft also began automatically migrating agents that have no Entra Agent ID. Agents created before May 2026 may still run on legacy app-registration identities. Migration brings audit logging in Entra ID, agent lifecycle management, Entra ID Governance integration, and connector permissions surfaced as API permissions on the agent identity so they can be targeted with Conditional Access on network location, device compliance or risk. The self-service path runs from Power Platform admin center under Actions > Recommendations > Active and needs Power Platform inventory enabled for the tenant.

Why it matters: automatic migration is already running, so an agent's identity can change under a customer who has not enabled Power Platform inventory or checked which connector permissions become Conditional Access targets.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Eight Foundry reasoning models now retire in November, not October

The retirement schedule now dates o1, o1-pro, o3, o3-deep-research, o3-mini, o3-pro and o4-mini at November 19 2026, all in the Deprecated stage, with gpt-5.6-sol as the listed replacement for o1, o1-pro, o3, o3-deep-research and o3-pro, and gpt-5.6-terra for o3-mini and o4-mini. codex-mini version 2025-05-16 retires November 15 2026 with no listed replacement. These dates supersede the October 1, October 16 and October 21 dates previously published for the same models; the page was last revised on September 23 2026.

Why it matters: anything still pinned to the o-series gets roughly four more weeks, but the replacement targets are now the gpt-5.6 line, so a migration planned as o3-mini to o4-mini has to be redone.

learn.microsoft.com

Breakout rooms in Teams webinars scale to 1,000 participants and 100 rooms

MC1478949 makes breakout rooms officially supported in Microsoft Teams webinars with up to 1,000 participants across up to 100 rooms, available now, with no admin action required.

Why it matters: large training, onboarding and workshop sessions no longer have to be run as a meeting instead of a webinar just to get breakout rooms, though internal guidance quoting the old limits needs updating.

m365admin.handsontek.net

SharePoint site metadata size will include document library fields

From October 20 2026 SharePoint's site metadata size calculation includes document library field data, so reported sizes rise for some sites. No content is added, moved or removed and the limit stays at 1 TB per site, but a site that crosses 1 TB under the new calculation is blocked from adding new metadata until usage drops back below it; existing content stays in place and accessible, and warnings appear from 80% of the limit. Sites already expected to reach or exceed 1 TB are excluded from the initial rollout to give them time to reduce usage first.

Why it matters: a tenant with large list and library schemas can hit a hard metadata write block without changing any content, and the sites most at risk are exactly the ones held back from the first wave.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Outlook batches new-mail notifications into one alert

Outlook for Windows (new) now combines multiple new-mail notifications into a single summary alert showing the number of new messages.

Why it matters: it removes the notification storm that made users turn Outlook alerts off entirely, which is usually where missed-mail complaints start.

learn.microsoft.com

The Favorites section in the Folder pane can be resized

The pinned Favorites section in the Outlook Folder pane is now resizable.

Why it matters: a small fix for users with long favourite lists, who until now lost most of the folder tree to them.

learn.microsoft.com

Pasting Markdown into a draft keeps its formatting

Outlook now preserves Markdown formatting when Markdown is pasted into an email draft.

Why it matters: Copilot and agent output arrives as Markdown, so pasting a generated draft into Outlook stops producing a wall of asterisks and hashes.

learn.microsoft.com

Access build 16.0.20430.20092 fixes zoom and label captions

Version 2609 (build 16.0.20430.20092) of Microsoft Access fixes a zoom issue and a problem affecting label captions.

Why it matters: Access ships inside Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, so these fixes arrive on the same update channels as the rest of the suite and need no separate deployment.

techcommunity.microsoft.com

Final reminder: Project Online retires on September 30 2026

Microsoft Project Online retires on September 30 2026, and users still on it now see an in-app retirement banner. Microsoft names three paths forward: Microsoft Planner, whose premium features under the Planner and Project Plan 3 licence cover portfolios, baselines, dependencies and Gantt charts; Project Server Subscription Edition; and Project Operations. Organisations that will not be fully migrated by September 30 are told to contact a Microsoft partner immediately and notify their account team. Project desktop, Project Online desktop, Project Server and Planner are unaffected.

Why it matters: the date is four days out, so any customer not yet migrated is now a data-preservation problem rather than a migration project.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Profile cards will show dotted-line managers

The organization panel on the Microsoft 365 profile card gains an additive display of a person's dotted-line manager alongside their direct manager, where the data exists, and the label follows the organisation's own wording such as People Lead or Capability Manager. Rollout begins early October 2026 and completes by late October 2026. It requires dotted-line manager attributes in the HR system, ingested through a supported organizational data integration such as SAP SuccessFactors or Workday; with no data, nothing extra appears.

Why it matters: it only lights up for customers who already feed HR org data into Microsoft 365, so for everyone else the change is invisible and needs no comms.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Purview network data security policies drop the pay-as-you-go prerequisite

Purview network data security collection and DLP policies, which discover and protect sensitive data shared with unmanaged cloud apps and websites including AI apps through browsers, applications, add-ins and APIs, can now be created and managed without configuring pay-as-you-go. Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access Internet Access is included with the appropriate per-user per-month licensing and works without it. Integrations with non-Microsoft SASE and secure-browser partners still require pay-as-you-go: policies can be created but the integrations will not function until it is configured. Global rollout begins late September 2026 and completes by late October 2026, automatically, and existing inline web traffic policies keep working.

Why it matters: the Azure subscription that used to block a Purview network DLP pilot is no longer needed for the Microsoft-only path, which removes the usual procurement delay.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Admins can repoint the compliance link in Copilot data access messages

When a Purview DLP policy stops Microsoft 365 Copilot grounding on, processing or returning content, the user sees a restriction message with a "Learn about access restrictions" link that currently points at Microsoft's public DLP documentation. Admins can now set that link's destination to their own compliance URL, such as an internal data-handling policy page, governance portal or help-desk form. The message wording and link label stay Microsoft-controlled and localised, and admin-authored message text is not part of this release. General availability worldwide runs through late September 2026; GCC, GCC High and DoD begin late September and complete mid-October 2026.

Why it matters: a blocked Copilot prompt becomes a route into the organisation's own policy rather than a generic Microsoft doc, which cuts the help-desk tickets that DLP blocks generate.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Purview retention now covers Copilot memory

Purview Data Lifecycle Management gains retention support for Microsoft 365 Copilot memory - saved memories, details inferred from chat history and custom instructions. When a memory item is updated or deleted, the inactive version can be retained in the user's Exchange Online mailbox according to the organisation's retention configuration, and compliance teams reach historical versions through Purview eDiscovery. Roadmap ID 569612; global rollout begins late September 2026 and completes by mid-October 2026.

Why it matters: Copilot memory becomes discoverable evidence, so retention and eDiscovery scoping needs to account for inferred personal context, not just chats and files.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Teams user reporting turns on by default in Defender for Office 365

Users will be able to report suspicious Teams messages, calls and meetings for security analysis. From October 7 2026 Teams user-reported settings move to a dedicated page in the Microsoft Defender portal, carrying existing configuration over, with changes made after migration possibly not reflected until the week of October 15. Organisations that have not configured the settings get Teams user reporting enabled by default from October 25 2026 unless they opt out. Worldwide rollout runs through late October 2026 for tenants licensed for Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 or Plan 2, Microsoft 365 E5 or Office 365 E5.

Why it matters: it is default-on with an opt-out deadline of October 25, so the reported-message destination and triage process need to be right before then, not after.

m365admin.handsontek.net

Introducing the new Copilot: One connected experience, designed for the next phase of AI-powered work

Partner Center framing of the new Copilot, with the partner opportunity across process redesign, solution building, adoption and AI cost management, and a Partner Digital Airlift on October 13 2026 covering the new Copilot, AI FinOps and platform innovations.

learn.microsoft.com

Measuring the value of Cowork: From AI interactions to completed work

Microsoft guidance on quantifying Cowork business value, moving the measure from AI interaction counts to completed work.

techcommunity.microsoft.com

AI at work: Learn, build, and grow with Microsoft Copilot and agents

Skills Hub roundup of learning paths covering the new Copilot modes, AI FinOps and the agent roadmap.

techcommunity.microsoft.com