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IFI Techsolutions Limited said on July 1, 2026, that it has renewed its Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Services Provider status for a fourth consecutive year after an independent third-party re-audit of its Azure delivery, operations, governance, and customer-outcome practices. The announcement is easy to file under partner-program news, but that would miss the larger signal. Azure’s center of gravity has moved from migration projects to continuous operations, and the badges that once...

Microsoft removed 3D Viewer from the Microsoft Store on July 1, 2026, following a February deprecation notice that ended new installs while allowing existing Windows installations of the app to continue working for now. The move is minor in practical terms but revealing in historical ones. It closes another door on Microsoft’s Windows 10-era bet that 3D creation, mixed reality, and consumer-friendly model viewing would become ordinary parts of PC life. What remains is not a broken workflow...

Acronis is pitching partner cloud IaaS to service providers in mid-2026 as customers reassess hyperscaler spending, VMware licensing changes, data-sovereignty obligations, and the limits of infrastructure resale. The company’s argument is not subtle: infrastructure is becoming a margin and control conversation again. For MSPs and cloud providers, the interesting part is less the product brochure than the market timing. After years of being told that raw infrastructure was a race to the...

Microsoft expanded Microsoft 365 Copilot throughout June 2026 with Copilot Cowork reaching general availability, new model choices, richer Office-app integration, administrative controls, and governance features across Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Planner, Power BI, Dataverse, and Microsoft Purview. The feature drop is not just another round of “AI writes your email” polish. It is Microsoft’s clearest attempt yet to turn Copilot from a chat sidebar into an execution layer for work. For...

Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. has introduced its MarketPlace PKI Cloud Suite for Microsoft 365 GCC and GCC High environments, positioning the cloud-based certificate-management offering for U.S. government agencies and contractors that must keep identity, print, and document workflows inside regulated Microsoft government-cloud boundaries. The announcement is narrow in product terms but broad in implication: the humble multifunction printer is being pulled into the same zero-trust...

Konica Minolta has introduced PKI Cloud Suite for Microsoft 365 GCC and GCC High environments, a bizhub multifunction printer integration announced through Access Newswire on July 1, 2026, aimed at agencies, contractors, and high-assurance organizations that rely on CAC and PIV credentials. The product is not a glamorous AI assistant, a new Windows feature, or another compliance dashboard. It is something more prosaic and, for many federal IT shops, more revealing: a recognition that the...

Microsoft’s recent Windows 11 preview builds, including February 2026 Release Preview builds for versions 24H2 and 25H2, shift attention from conspicuous AI branding toward practical efficiency changes such as taskbar network speed testing, improved taskbar overflow behavior, and faster resume from sleep. That does not make Windows 11 suddenly frictionless, nor does it erase years of user complaints about the Start menu, taskbar regressions, forced cloud tie-ins, and Copilot sprawl. But it...

Microsoft released the optional Windows 11 preview update KB5095093 on June 23, 2026, for versions 24H2 and 25H2, and its most visible desktop fix is a faster, more responsive File Explorer that will move into the July 2026 security update. That sounds modest until you remember how often File Explorer is the front door to Windows itself. Microsoft is not just shaving a few milliseconds off an app launch; it is admitting that the shell’s everyday latency has become a reputational problem. The...

Vexcel announced on July 1, 2026, in Centennial, Colorado, that its new Vexcel Model Context Protocol will let licensed customers access its aerial imagery and geospatial intelligence from MCP-compatible AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, and other assistants. The announcement is not just another connector in the fast-expanding AI middleware pile. It is a sign that the next phase of AI adoption will be fought over trusted context: not whether a model can talk...

In June 2026, Microsoft added a large set of Teams features across AI calling, Copilot-powered search, Teams Rooms, meeting security, mobile file previews, frontline scheduling, phone administration, and anti-impersonation protections for organizations using Teams on desktop, mobile, room devices, and managed calling environments. The headline is not that Teams received another busy monthly changelog. The headline is that Microsoft is turning Teams into the control surface for AI-assisted...

On June 30, 2026, Microsoft detailed a new Teams admin policy that detects likely external meeting bots, routes them into the lobby even when lobby bypass is enabled, labels them for organizers, and requires explicit approval before they can enter a meeting. The feature is not a dramatic reinvention of Teams security so much as a correction to a surprisingly dangerous workflow assumption. Microsoft is acknowledging that in the AI-meeting era, “participant” is no longer a synonym for...

IO Interactive said on June 30, 2026, that its relationship with an external partner on Project Fantasy had ended, prompting layoffs and leaving the independent Danish studio to continue the original fantasy IP without Xbox’s reported publishing support. The announcement lands awkwardly because IOI is otherwise riding high after 007: First Light, a Bond game that reportedly became the studio’s fastest-selling release. But the real story is not that one promising project lost a backer. It is...

Grand Theft Auto VI developers at Rockstar Games are reportedly pursuing union recognition through the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain ahead of the game’s November 19, 2026 launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The move turns the most commercially anticipated game release of the decade into a test of whether blockbuster economics can still coexist with precarious labor. Rockstar and parent company Take-Two are selling confidence to investors and players; some workers are...

Microsoft removed 3D Viewer from the Microsoft Store on July 1, 2026, ending new installs of the first-party Windows 3D model viewer after announcing its deprecation in February while allowing existing installations to keep working for now. The move is small in practical terms but revealing in strategic ones. Another Windows 10-era bet on consumer 3D has been filed away, not with a dramatic shutdown, but with the quiet finality of a Store listing that no longer installs. That is how...

NC and Big Fire Games opened Cinder City’s Steam page on June 30, 2026, alongside a new developer preview for the open-world sci-fi third-person shooter set in a ruined near-future Seoul, and the listing names Windows 10/11 PCs with 64GB of RAM as the recommended configuration. That number is the story because it turns a familiar wishlist-page beat into a hardware referendum. Cinder City may or may not ship as a memory-hungry monster, but its Steam listing has already exposed how fragile the...

On May 21, 2026, the FBI warned that Kali365, a phishing-as-a-service platform promoted through Telegram, is being used to hijack Microsoft 365 accounts by abusing Microsoft’s legitimate device-code sign-in flow and capturing OAuth tokens instead of passwords. That distinction matters because it moves the attack away from the old ritual of fake login pages and stolen credentials. The user may visit a real Microsoft page, complete real authentication, and still hand the attacker access. For...

Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. introduced PKI Cloud Suite on July 1, 2026, for Microsoft 365 GCC and GCC High customers, bringing CAC/PIV card authentication, secure OneDrive scanning, and Microsoft Universal Print release workflows to bizhub multifunction printers used by government and regulated organizations. The announcement is not just another managed-print add-on; it is a sign that identity modernization has finally reached one of the least glamorous, most stubbornly exposed...

Microsoft added a broad June 2026 wave of Microsoft 365 Copilot features across Cowork, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Notebooks, Power BI, Dataverse, and admin controls, with Copilot Cowork’s general availability as the month’s clearest signal of where the product is heading. The story is not merely that Copilot gained more buttons. Microsoft is trying to turn Copilot from a chat box beside Office into an execution layer that can reason across corporate data, act through apps, and...

Microsoft has awarded Logicalis global Frontier Partner status and a Microsoft Copilot specialisation on July 1, 2026, recognising the service provider’s Microsoft cloud, AI, security, data, and Copilot deployment capabilities for enterprise customers. The announcement is less interesting as a trophy than as a signal: Microsoft’s AI partner economy is being pushed from reseller theatre toward implementation accountability. For Windows shops, Microsoft 365 administrators, and security teams...

Microsoft Edge 150 still leaves Microsoft’s AI-enhanced History search policy alive in the browser’s administrative catalog on July 1, 2026, even after recent reporting said Microsoft has paused the feature itself for now. That mismatch is not a clerical footnote; it is the kind of product-policy gap that turns into an audit finding six months later. For IT teams, the immediate issue is not whether one controversial Edge feature ships this week. It is whether the controls around browser...