Microsoft
"New Outlook" Development on hold
Microsoft Pulls the Emergency Brake
This is a major development, which is no surprise, as the "New Outlook" has been consistently poorly received with many complaints about it's performance and lack of functionality, especially with it no longer supporting COM add-ins.
The new leader, Gaurav Sareen, seems to think that Outlook must be fundamentally rebuilt around CoPilot. The previous leader is on "Sabbatical".
As a "long game", this strategy (albeit vague) makes sense, but the reality is that "Classic Outlook" carries with it a HUGE history of features and add-ins critical to the functioning of legacy corporate systems that keep companies running today.
AI is still a great idea - but it is FAR AWAY from replacing that legacy workflow to get an invoice approved via an account system that may be 10 years old, using a COM add-in written by a developer long lost to the mists of time.
The dream of AI replacing email remains just that - a dream. It will happen, but not in the next few years, as AI needs to become significantly smarter.
You can read more about this change in direction here (use translation). And another article here.
By destabilising Outlook (which is already wobbly), Microsoft is risking the powerful inertia that has secured its enterprise dominance.
This moment of transition provides a rare opportunity for competitors like Zoom to challenge the narrative of ecosystem lock-in and offer enterprises a compelling reason to re-evaluate their entire collaboration stack.
Please contact your First Technology Group account manager to connect you with our Teams, messaging, and Zoom specialists to consider your options for the future.
This is a major inflexion point to reconsider your future strategy.
Microsoft Q1 FY’26 earnings
Directions on Microsoft has published a summary of the Q1 FY'26 earnings call where it seems Microsoft is continuing to accelerate it spend on cloud compute capability, although Microsoft is still being secretive about it's CoPilot revenue. The outage just before the earnings call was not very helpful!
You can read more about the earnings call here.
CoPilot Studio Licensing Guide October 2025
The new Copilot Studio Licensing Guide has been released with useful tweaks.
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New: Copilot Credit Pre-Purchase Plan.
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Clarified: Copilot Credit Commit Units (CCCUs), plus how they stack up against other ways to buy Credits.
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Handy extras: Dataverse capacity add-on and meter tables now live in this guide
(they used to sit only in the Power Platform Licensing Guide).
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Removed: the “Dynamics 365 Agents in Paid Public Preview” section, and the “Agent Flow Actions” detail.
Please contact your First Technology Group account manager to connect you with our Dynamics specialists to see if any of these changes may affect or benefit you and it is always useful to hear about what is new with Dynamics, something is always changing!
Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux
You can bring your existing Red Hat or SUSE Enterprise Server Subscriptions to Azure, enabling you to pay only for the infrastructure costs of the VM on Azure. Microsoft has published an interactive guide here on how to do it.
Please contact your First Technology Group account manager to connect you with our Azure and Linux experts to help ensure you get the most benefit from this announcement, noting that SUSE is now available on the marketplace...
New Copilot Credits Pre-Purchase Plan
The currency for many Microsoft Agents.
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Existing options: Capacity Pack (25,000 for $200/month) or PAYG at $0.01 per credit.
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New: Pre-Purchase Plan for 300,000+ credits, usable any time in the next year. Useful for spikes in consumption.
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Pricing: nine volume tiers, with 5% to 20% off versus PAYG.
You can find the Microsoft announcement here.
Please contact your First Technology Group account manager to connect you with our CoPilot specialists to explore how you may be able to benefit from the discounts offered on these credits.
Microsoft Defender for Office P2 licensing Confusion addressed.
Microsoft has now clarified that MDO P2 is NOT required for all mailboxes and is applying "if you benefit from a feature, you pay for a feature" principle that already applied to MDO P1 licensing.
You can read more about the change here.
Please contact your First Technology Group account manager to connect you with our licensing and SAM specialists to assist in ensuring that this new (and more sensible) rule is correctly applied and any perceived compliance risk is removed.
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