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Manufacturers face a pivotal moment: cloud modernization paired with AI is no longer an optional efficiency play but a strategic imperative that can reshape product lifecycles, R&D velocity, and factory-floor operations at scale, as outlined in a recent industry brief that catalogs major Microsoft-led customer outcomes and partner stories. Background: why cloud-first modernization matters now Manufacturing’s move to the cloud is driven by three converging pressures: exploding volumes of...

Microsoft’s decision to collapse Price Levels A–D into a single, web‑published price for Online Services will simplify licensing on paper but shift real economic value away from many large enterprise customers — a change that takes effect for renewals and new purchases on November 1, 2025 and will materially affect Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Windows 365, Defender, GitHub and a broad array of identity, security and management subscriptions. Background Microsoft’s volume‑licensing...

Hitachi Vantara’s decision to make Virtual Storage Platform One Software‑Defined Storage (VSP One SDS) available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace marks a clear acceleration of its hybrid‑cloud strategy—bringing enterprise block storage features traditionally reserved for on‑prem arrays into Azure, while promising tighter operational continuity across cloud and data‑center boundaries. This move, announced on August 19, 2025, expands an already active hyperscaler footprint (AWS and Google...

Microsoft has quietly removed the long-standing, user-facing option to permanently switch off automatic app updates in the Microsoft Store for many consumer devices, replacing it with a pause-only model that forces automatic updates to resume after a short, fixed interval (commonly one through five weeks). Microsoft Store served as an optional distribution channel where users could choose whether Store apps were updated automatically. That simple toggle — Update apps automatically — was a...

Venom-like creature offers roses to a shocked woman; she shouts “HELP!”.

Canadian universities are moving quickly to put generative AI into the hands of students, faculty and staff — but the rollout is pragmatic, uneven, and loaded with trade-offs that will shape teaching, research and institutional risk for years to come. Overview Across Canada, flagship institutions including McGill, the University of Toronto and York University have adopted managed deployments of Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT Edu and other generative-AI tools as part of campus IT services and...

Board’s Microsoft alliance — crowned by a Solutions Partner designation and deeper Azure integration — recasts the company from a niche EPM vendor into a credible contender for AI-driven, enterprise-scale planning workflows. Background Board announced availability of the Board Enterprise Planning Platform in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace in September 2024 and has since amplified its Azure-centric positioning, product integrations, and market messaging around AI-augmented planning. The move...

Microsoft released an out‑of‑band update on August 19, 2025 — KB5066189 for Windows 11 (OS Builds 22621.5771 and 22631.5771) — to fix a high‑impact regression introduced earlier in the August security rollup that broke Reset and cloud recovery flows, while reiterating a separate, platform‑level advisory about impending Windows Secure Boot certificate expirations that begin in June 2026. Background and overview Microsoft’s August security releases (delivered in the second week of August)...

Microsoft released an out‑of‑band update on August 19, 2025—KB5066189—for Windows 11 devices on the 22621 and 22631 build families (OS Builds 22621.5771 and 22631.5771). The package is an optional, non‑security rollup that patches a regression introduced by the August 2025 monthly updates, restores broken reset and recovery flows, and includes a servicing‑stack refresh (SSU KB5062686). Administrators and advanced users should treat this as a targeted remedial update: it fixes failed attempts...

Microsoft released an out‑of‑band (OOB) non‑security update on August 19, 2025 — KB5066189 for Windows 11 (OS Builds 22621.5771 and 22631.5771) — to repair a regression introduced by August’s cumulative updates that can block device reset and recovery operations, and to deliver a servicing stack refresh; the release also re‑emphasizes Microsoft’s public timeline for the upcoming Windows Secure Boot certificate expiration and the steps organizations must take to avoid boot and update...

Microsoft released an out‑of‑band (OOB) fix on August 19, 2025 that restores Windows’ Reset and cloud recovery workflows for devices on the 22621/22631 servicing families (Windows 11 22H2 and 23H2) after an August security cumulative caused those flows to fail; the update, published as KB5066189 (OS Builds 22621.5771 and 22631.5771), also bundles a servicing‑stack refresh and reiterates Microsoft’s ongoing Secure Boot certificate timeline. Background / Overview The August Patch Tuesday...

Microsoft released an out‑of‑band update on August 19, 2025—KB5066189 (OS Builds 22621.5771 and 22631.5771)—that quickly became the must‑install patch for Windows 11 22H2/23H2 devices affected by a regression introduced with the August security rollup; the update’s headline fix restores Reset and other recovery flows that were failing after the earlier August security update. Background / Overview Microsoft’s August 12, 2025 security release introduced broad fixes across Windows client and...

Microsoft released an out‑of‑band (OOB) update on August 19, 2025 — KB5066189 for Windows 11 builds 22621.5771 and 22631.5771 — that restores broken reset and recovery flows introduced by the Patch Tuesday rollups earlier this month, and administrators and home users should treat this patch as a high‑priority remediation for affected client branches. Background Microsoft shipped its August 2025 Patch Tuesday updates on August 12, 2025. In the days after that rollout multiple reports surfaced...

Microsoft has folded generative AI directly into Excel’s calculation engine with a native =COPILOT formula that lets users type natural‑language prompts into cells, reference worksheet ranges for context, and receive live, spillable outputs that recalculate automatically when the source data changes. Background / Overview Spreadsheets remain the backbone of countless business processes — budgeting, customer analysis, reporting, forecasting and ad‑hoc automation. Embedding a language‑model...

Board’s announcement that it has earned the Microsoft Solutions Partner designation with Certified Software for Azure marks an important inflection point in the vendor’s long-running strategy to position its Enterprise Planning Platform as a first-class, enterprise-ready SaaS option for large organizations running workloads on Microsoft Azure. Background Microsoft’s Solutions Partner program with certified software is the company’s formal pathway for validating ISV offerings that meet...

SAP’s decision to host a flagship AI-enabled business application inside Amazon Web Services and Microsoft datacenters in Brazil marks a clear escalation of enterprise AI efforts — a move that combines SAP’s application footprint with hyperscaler scale and local data residency, while rewriting how Latin American companies will access generative AI inside core business systems. This is a pragmatic pivot: SAP is bringing its Business AI capabilities closer to customers by placing critical AI...

Aaeon’s new UP Xtreme ARL arrives as a decisive answer to the question many hobbyists and embedded developers have been asking: what if a Raspberry Pi–sized board used a modern Intel Core Ultra CPU, offered up to 64 GB of LPDDR5, and shipped with first-party Windows 11 support out of the box? The short version: it’s orders of magnitude more powerful than a Raspberry Pi 5 while preserving a familiar SBC form factor and a 40‑pin expansion header — but that power comes with trade‑offs in price...

Microsoft’s August cumulative for Windows 11 (KB5063878) has been implicated in a narrow but serious storage regression: under sustained, large sequential writes some solid‑state drives can stop responding, vanish from Windows, and in a subset of reports leave files or partitions corrupted or inaccessible. Background / Overview Microsoft released KB5063878 (OS Build 26100.4946) on August 12, 2025 as the combined servicing‑stack and cumulative quality update for Windows 11, version 24H2. The...

Most Australian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are already using generative AI tools — but more often than not they’re doing so without a coherent plan, leaving businesses exposed to security, cost, and strategic risks while missing opportunities to drive growth and competitive advantage. According to Decidr’s inaugural National AI Readiness Index Report 2025, an urgent adoption impulse sits beside a striking absence of formal roadmaps: 83% of SMEs expect AI to have a major impact...

A coordinated pair of stories surfaced this week that together sketch two urgent and contrasting dilemmas at the intersection of technology, power, and public life: investigative reporting that Israeli military intelligence has been using Microsoft’s Azure cloud to store and analyze massive volumes of intercepted Palestinian communications, and a new policy report led by former San Francisco supervisor Hillary Ronen that outlines how local governments should govern responsible AI adoption...