Thank you!

Based on your ongoing feedback I'm continuing to improve the format and maintain interesting and relevant content - note the red bit about Teams - this is serious!

New for This week

• As a user of Microsoft technologies, you are receiving this publication to stay informed about critical topics such as Microsoft licensing, price increases, end-of-life dates, technical updates, security notices, and more.
  If you do not want to continue receiving TOP STORIES, click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the mail.
  
• USB Cables are a web of different types, colours and.... trouble - find out more!
• Microsoft EoL section published to see what's EoL'ng up to December 2026
• 3 New vendors added to FirstMarketplace
• First Digital Microsoft Healthcare and Life Sciences Award Finalist
• Teams can track you at work!
• Microsoft CoPilot for Business announced - along with some promotions
• Office Online Server reaches end of Support - this is IMPORTANT
• Guide to Windows 10 ESU resources
• 10 Important things to note from Microsoft Ignite Conference
• MAJOR Security Flaw in Teams discovered, you need to act immediately.
• Account Task Over attacks increasing for holiday season
• Microsoft Releasing GPT 5.1
• New Huawei tablets to run Windows Apps

USB Cable standards and connector colours are a mystery.
It also includes info on the new Microsoft WHCP specifications you need to update your RFQ's with

We have added Anoxius, Panda Security and SuperOps to FirstMarketPlace for this week

Get all the releases and trailers for the next month in South Africa.
AVATAR: Fire and Ash for 19 December

Summary of what to know up to December 2026. Detailed document available for download

Did You Know?

Microsoft News This Week

Teams can track you at work!

Gary Kayye of RaVE has published a short YouTube "rant" on Microsoft releasing a new feature in Teams that allows it to infer a users location through the aggegation of multiple datapoints and then to automatically register the user as being "at the office".
As you can imagine, this is sparking a firestorm of controversies over whether this will lead to oppressive micro-management or greater productivity through Teams 'knowing where you are and ensuring you are more accessible to your colleagues.

PLEASE talk to your First Technology account manager to connect you with our Teams (and Zoom) experts to discuss with them how these and other features are enabled in your business while at the same time ensuring that people's privacy is respected

Microsoft 365 CoPilot for Business announced

Microsoft has announced Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, a new SMB-focused plan that brings the full Microsoft 365 Copilot experience to organisations with fewer than 300 users at a more accessible price point. 

 It is available as an add-on to Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard or Premium - or bundled with those plans for simpler licensing. 

The service rolls out worldwide on 1 December 2025, with introductory promotional pricing on the standalone Copilot Business licence and selected Business plan bundles for the initial launch period.

Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our licensing and CoPilot experts to explore the new full-featured plan at a lower price point for SMB's with additional promotional pricing.
Microsoft is steadily improving CoPilot and it is REALLY worth exploring. There are MANY AI solutions, but CoPilot has the advantage of being sucurely integrated into the Microsoft security ecosystem

Office Online Server reaches End of Support 31 December 2026

Microsoft will stop all security updates bug fixes and technical support. OOS underpins browser based viewing editing and co authoring for SharePoint Server farms and is also used with Exchange Server and Power BI Report Server.

Microsoft will not block OOS from running after retirement but it will be completely unsupported which introduces direct security and compliance risk for any farm that keeps it online.

For SharePoint Server 2016, 2019, and Subscription Edition, this effectively marks the end of the supported on-premises browser Office experience, so customers must either move those workloads to Microsoft 365 to use Office for the web or accept a desktop-only model and the loss of browser previews and editing on their on-premises servers.

Please contact your First Technology Group account manager to connect you with SharePoint and Office experts to assist in working out what to do next, as this can get quite complicated because of unique dependencies you may have.

Windows 10 ESU Resources from Microsoft

Microsoft has a number of resources available on its website that could be useful for you to refer to if Windows 10 is still an issue (and it is for most of us).

Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our specialists in Windows 10 and Windows 11 to help ensure you are handling the situation with Windows 10 machines in the most cost-effective manner noting that actually buying ESU's is the last resort, as there are many other options that can be explored.

Microsoft Ignite: 10 things you should know.

Mary Jo from Directions on Microsoft has published a very good summary of the 10 most important things you should know from the Microsoft conference, and predictably, apart from the announcement of the General Availability of SQL 2025, it is all about AI. What is most interesting is the extent to which Microsoft is adding Anthropic's models to it's AI portfolio.

Please contact your First Technology Group account manager to connect you with our AI specialists and discuss all these announcements and how you can best take advantage of them. Microsoft is determined that AI is in your future, let's see is we can help work out if you agree!

Security

Major Security flaw in Teams Guest Chat

This flaw lets attackers entirely bypass your company's Defender protections. This "flaw" is because of how security is managed. If a member of your staff accepts an invitation to join another company's chat the security is now controlled entirely by THAT hosting environment. YIKES!!!!!!

This risk is now even easier to exploit as Microsoft has just rolled out a feature that allows any Teams user to start a chat with ANYBODY who has an email address!

Again, as usual, this opens the user up to massive exploitation, and the opportunity to trick a user into allowing access that would normally not be permitted is now significantly increased.

Please contact your First Technology Group account manager to connect you with our Teams and security experts to advise you on how to immediately take steps in tightening up your security and to simultaneously step up your awareness training of your users to KNOW that they could be getting invitations to connect with outsiders that appear to be legitimate.

This is yet another reminder that you should contact your First Technology Group account manager to connect you with our specialist partners, who are experts in helping you train your users to understand these new dangers.

ATO Fraud phishing scams increasing

Account Take Over attacks involve the fraudster obtaining unauthorised access to a banking account and from there to use the access to siphon data and funds out of the account. It starts with the person getting tricked. It's a good time to maybe send out a reminder to your staff to be EXTRA aware of calls requesting an OTP or any unusual detail on your account, and to terminate the call immediately.

Contact your First Technology Group account manager to connect you with our specialist partners, who are experts in helping you train your users to stay alert to these attacks.

Cloud & AI

Microsoft Starts rolling out GPT 5.1

Though OPenAI released GPT 5.1 on the 12 of November, MIcrosoft has now started to roll it out along with a "Labs" feature.
The Labs program is where Microsoft is Microsoft has it's bundled features, with CoPilot vision being the most interesting.

Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our CoPilot experts who can assist in working with you to establish an adoption roadmap that is relevant to your business.

Hardware - Huawei a company to watch