What's New in Microsoft Teams | August - September 2026
The round-up is going quarterly from here — next editions in December, March and June. This one covers August and September, with AI in teamwork as the headline theme.
Latest updates on the KB topics, summarised and linked back to the reference docs. Subscribe via RSS.
The round-up is going quarterly from here — next editions in December, March and June. This one covers August and September, with AI in teamwork as the headline theme.
Contact Center is bringing event-driven real-time streaming experiences for supervisors into production-ready public preview, so they can watch the floor live and act as issues emerge. Worth a look if your supervisors still rely on refresh-and-wait dashboards.
Teams Phone Agent is an AI agent that answers customer calls, handling routine questions and appointment changes, including out of hours. Worth a look wherever an auto attendant is doing little more than reading out opening times.
Customer Insights - Journeys 1.3.1162.80 makes the marketing skills and plugin generally available in Copilot Cowork. Users can retrieve Customer Insights data, check consent, review and draft emails, validate content before publishing and create journeys in natural language, using their existing permissions.
Copilot UX components, which let an agent render charts, forms and approvals inline in the Microsoft 365 Copilot canvas, are on track for general availability in October 2026. Worth knowing if you're designing human-in-the-loop steps that currently fall back to text and links.
The Queues app turns an existing call queue into a shared workspace where representatives and supervisors work the same customer calls together inside Teams. It's aimed at collaborative calling teams rather than a full contact centre.
Work IQ Developer Tools (wiqd) lets you import an existing Agent Plugins-format plugin, or scaffold a new one, and package it for Microsoft Copilot. The wiqd plugin command surface is public preview and may change, so check it before promising clients a delivery date.
The monthly Fabric roundup lands alongside FabCon Europe, with governance, CI/CD and data engineering changes in one of the larger updates this year. Worth skimming for anything touching Power BI workspaces and deployment pipelines.
Microsoft announced a natural-language app building experience in Power BI Desktop, generating write-back data apps from a trusted semantic model. Preview reaches Pro and Premium Per User customers as well as Fabric capacity, though Desktop availability is still 'coming months'.
The September roundup puts Power BI agentic experiences and Power BI data answers in Copilot Chat at GA, adds a remote authoring MCP server in preview, and lands larger Export to Excel row limits. It also retires the old file picker in Power BI Desktop, so check any documented steps that mention it.
Power Pages site ownership can now be transferred through a self-service flow rather than a support or admin workaround. Handy for leaver and reorganisation clean-ups, so add it to your site handover checklist.
Gateway build 3000.334 adds Soft Delete (recover a deleted gateway for 30 days), patches CVE-2026-18401 and bumps the bundled Log4j to 2.26.1, and fixes a sign-in failure on Windows Server 2016 installs.
Microsoft is reworking Copilot around three surfaces: Home (a unified chat and task-delegation hub), Code (natural-language app and automation building for non-developers, built on GitHub Copilot), and Autopilot (an agent that keeps working on tasks while you're offline). Rolling out first through the Frontier programme, with direct Word/Excel/PowerPoint editing in Copilot and broader grounding via Work IQ, Fabric IQ and a plugin registry.
Work IQ, a new intelligence layer grounding Copilot and agents in Dynamics 365/Power Platform business data, enters public preview 30 September 2026 - semantic models, reusable business skills, and governed write-back actions, landing first in Sales and Customer Service with Finance and Operations following in late October.
Power Pages' Modern List component is now GA, giving portal builders a Dataverse-backed list control with sorting, filtering and paging built in.
Power Pages sites can now call Power Automate cloud flows directly from server-side logic, opening the platform's connector ecosystem to portal builders without custom code.
Deleting a gateway has been permanent until now, which meant recreating it from scratch after an accident. Soft delete retains a deleted gateway for 30 days so an authorised admin can restore it. Standard-mode on-premises gateways only — personal mode and virtual network data gateways are not covered.
The settings pane is now the default way to configure a semantic model in the Power BI service — it opens beside the workspace so you keep your place instead of navigating away, and carries the same settings as the full page. The classic settings page still works during the transition but no longer opens first.
The monthly Power Platform roundup, and the Power Apps half carries the weight: the refreshed model-driven app UI goes GA with display density in preview, the app-builder skill for generating whole model-driven apps goes GA alongside the canvas authoring agent plugin, and generative pages can now be embedded in a model-driven form and read from Power Platform connectors. Power Automate gets quick-start cards on the home page and server-side search for finding flows.
From 30 October 2026 you can't add new legacy Teams or Outlook activities to pipelines; existing ones keep working. New notification scenarios should use the modern Teams and Outlook 365 Email activities.
BigQuery mirroring is now GA, with production support and an SLA and no pipelines to build or maintain. It gives Power BI models a simpler route to BigQuery data via OneLake.
Power Pages now offers Microsoft-managed SSL/TLS certificates for custom domains, removing the manual renewal step that's caught out more than a few go-lives.
Power Query is moving Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery and the other embedded-ODBC connectors onto Apache Arrow ADBC drivers, with a per-connector default flip followed by a cutover that breaks any refresh still pinned to ODBC. Microsoft has published pq-adbc-advisor, a read-only Fabric notebook that inventories every semantic model, dataflow and pipeline in a workspace and classifies each one as will fail, needs review or ready.
Microsoft 365 G7 brings the E7 Frontier Suite to Government Community Cloud, bundling M365 G5, Entra Suite, Copilot and Agent 365 into one government SKU. G7 and Agent 365 go on sale to GCC customers on 1 October, with workloads switching on in phases as each clears its GCC authorisation.
The retirement of Power BI Q&A, the legacy natural-language query experience, has slipped from December 2026 to February 2027 to give tenants longer to work out what depends on it before moving to Copilot. The post also recaps which experiences are affected and where things stand on Copilot capacity, embedded scenarios and sovereign clouds — worth reading if you have Q&A visuals in published reports or a linguistic schema anyone has invested in.
Two new Fabric REST operations return the upstream and downstream relations of any item, so the lineage graph behind the portal view is now scriptable. Useful for impact analysis before changing a semantic model, though it's Preview and not something to hang a release gate on yet.
Copilot Studio gains natural-language app building alongside agents and workflows, rolling out in public preview; the same capability lands in Copilot Cowork as an /app skill, currently gated behind the Microsoft Frontier program. You describe the outcome, data and users, Copilot generates an app scaffold you can iterate on in conversation or inspect as code.
The Power Pages data model migration utility is now GA and adds support for Dynamics 365 Portal templates, easing moves off the legacy Portals product.
Microsoft's own take on choosing between Teams Rooms platforms: the pitch is a consistent meeting experience whichever platform a space runs on. Useful framing for the Windows-versus-Android conversation with facilities teams.
Capacity admins can now stream operation-level telemetry from an F SKU into Real-Time Hub, in preview. Where the existing Capacity Overview Events told you the capacity was throttling, these tell you which workspace, item and operation caused it — which is the bit you actually need when a refresh window collapses.
A benchmark comparing Import, DirectQuery and Direct Lake against Azure Databricks, with the numbers behind each. Useful ammunition next time someone insists DirectQuery is fine.
Workforce actions reachable from Copilot, Teams and Outlook, so supervisors handle scheduling without opening the app.
Microsoft's sample reports have been rebuilt on the modern visual defaults. Handy as a reference for what the new formatting model is supposed to look like in practice.
Fabric data agents are generally available inside Copilot Studio, so an agent can query Fabric data directly. Worth knowing before anyone builds a bespoke connector to do the same job.
On testing what an agent actually knows and closing the gaps, using SPFx dev skills as the worked example. Useful if you're past the demo stage and into whether the thing is reliable.
Microsoft is moving Power BI and Fabric connectivity from ODBC to ADBC and wants people validating now. If you rely on third-party ODBC drivers, this is the early warning — test before the transition lands, not after.
The Admin API now reports workspace networking policies across the whole tenant, so outbound access and private-link settings can be audited in one pass. Useful if you've been checking these a workspace at a time.
Fabric data agents can now generate more advanced DAX against semantic models. Preview, so treat what it writes as a first draft rather than something to ship.
Two things reach general availability in release 1.3.1162.68: dynamic content blocks, so updating a block refreshes every email that uses it rather than each one being edited by hand; and Copilot-powered conversational text messages, which pair Contact Center with a Copilot Studio agent so an SMS becomes a two-way conversation the journey can branch on.
The canvas authoring agent — the in-Studio assistant that builds and edits canvas apps from natural-language prompts — has moved from preview to general availability. It's on by default for canvas makers, so fold its output into your app review and ALM process rather than treating every screen as hand-built.
The August on-premises data gateway release. Routine, but gateway versions are one of the things that quietly break refreshes, so it's worth keeping current.
From September 2026 Microsoft is folding the Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Dataverse roadmaps into the single AI at Work roadmap, so upcoming capabilities, rollout progress and adoption planning all sit in one place. If you've been tracking the separate release-plan sites, that's where they're heading.
Direct Lake models can now carry calculated columns, closing one of the more awkward gaps against import models. Still preview, so check the fallback behaviour before you design around it.
An upgrade wizard for moving Dataflows Gen1 to Fabric Dataflows Gen2. If you've been putting off that migration, this is the sanctioned path — worth trialling on a low-stakes dataflow before you commit the important ones.
GitHub Copilot's coding agent can now be driven from a Teams conversation, so the discussion becomes the prompt instead of being rewritten in another tool.
The August monthly round-up: the usual mix of visual, modelling and service changes in one place. Worth a skim even if you only care about one area — the summaries link straight to the detail.
Edit a Power BI project anywhere and reload it straight back into Desktop. Preview, and it pushes the .pbip story further towards treating reports as source you can work on outside Desktop.
Automates rotating schedules at scale rather than hand-building each rotation. Worth knowing about on any WEM engagement with shift patterns.
Second part of the Teams agent series, this one on keeping an agent useful in a noisy channel rather than making it another source of noise. Practical design guidance, not marketing.
Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams meetings, pitched at catching up after joining late, keeping meetings on track and leaving with clear actions.
You can now edit a semantic model as TMDL script directly in the browser, not just in Desktop. Useful for quick fixes and for anyone working somewhere Desktop isn't installed.
The July round-up. The headline is the new Meeting Recaps app, alongside updates for staying informed, simplifying everyday tasks and putting AI to work in more roles.
Intelligent call delegation is an AI experience that answers incoming Teams calls for you and books follow-up appointments, for the times you can't pick up.
Developer tools for Work IQ are in preview — the layer that gives agents access to work context across Microsoft 365. Early, but it's where the extensibility story is heading.
Microsoft's combined July/August roundup of what actually shipped across Power Platform — flows, apps, Dataverse and governance. Worth ten minutes if you've stopped reading the release plans.
Microsoft Entra Agent ID now covers Dataverse, giving AI agents a first-class directory identity so their access to your data can be governed, audited and lifecycle-managed like any user's, instead of piggybacking on a maker or service account. Public preview.
Outbound emails and attachments can be evaluated against business-defined policies before they send. The obvious fit is regulated clients who have been nervous about agent-drafted email going out unchecked.
Conditional formatting now reaches line series and legend entries, so thresholds and status colours no longer need a workaround measure per line.
April's round-up, published after the Microsoft 365 Community Conference.
Update a dynamic content block once and every email using it refreshes, instead of hunting down each message. Version 1.2.2104.110.