Microsoft Insights: Issue 6
Author: Sonia Older | Date published: 27th Jul, 2026 | Read est: 6 min read
Welcome to your July update
July has been dominated by one story above all others: Microsoft's global Microsoft 365 price and packaging update landed on the 1st, and it touches almost every plan in the commercial catalogue.
Alongside that, Microsoft has kept pushing AI deeper into Teams, SharePoint and Azure, while tightening governance controls around data and external collaboration. For resellers and enterprise IT teams alike, this is a month for auditing licences as much as it is for exploring new features.
This issue includes:
- Global Microsoft 365 pricing and packaging changes explained
- New CSP programme and partner updates
- Copilot, Teams AI and Azure developments
- SharePoint and Purview governance updates
- Teams meeting, chat and admin improvements
- Outlook changes and Microsoft 365 reliability fixes
Licensing and Pricing
What's new? – Global Microsoft 365 pricing and packaging update takes effect
Microsoft's global price and packaging update for commercial Microsoft 365 suites took effect on 1 July 2026, impacting Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, E5, E7 and Frontline plans across every purchasing channel, including CSP.
Increases range from roughly 8% on Business Standard to over 30% on Frontline plans, with Business Premium the only mainstream SKU holding its price. The new pricing applies at each subscription's next renewal on or after 1 July, not immediately, so the timing depends entirely on individual renewal dates.
What does it mean for you?
Every customer renewing from this point forward is renewing into higher pricing, so this is the moment to get in front of it rather than react to it.
Pull a renewal report, sort by date and seat count, and prioritise conversations with your largest accounts first. It's also a natural opening to review licence fit, since a meaningful share of most estates can move down a tier, such as E5 users who only need E3, without losing functionality.
What's new? – New Copilot-bundled SKUs give SMBs a simpler upgrade path
Alongside the price change, Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot and Business Premium with Copilot, bundling Copilot licensing directly into the Business tier rather than requiring it as a separate add-on purchase.
What does it mean for you?
This gives you a cleaner upsell conversation with SMB customers who have been hesitant about a standalone Copilot licence. Positioning the bundle against the like-for-like unbundled cost is an easy way to demonstrate value while the pricing conversation is already on the table.
What's changing? – CSP programme and certification updates
Microsoft confirmed there will be no NCE license-based preview price list published for August, meaning partners can tell customers that pricing holds at current levels into next month.
Microsoft also updated the Partner Agreement, taking effect automatically for most partners on 1 December 2026, and continues restructuring its Security Specialisation programme, with further skilling changes due at the end of July. Dynamics 365 and Power Platform certifications are also mid-retirement as Microsoft shifts toward AI-era skilling.
Do you need to do anything?
Yes. If your team holds or is working toward a Security or Dynamics specialisation, review the updated requirements now rather than at renewal. Partners in France should also flag the updated Partner Agreement, which needs explicit acceptance between 1 December 2026 and 28 February 2027.
Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI
What's new? – Copilot becomes more context-aware
Microsoft continues to expand how Copilot understands the wider context of your work. Recent updates allow Copilot Chat to work more naturally with Outlook conversations, PDFs and persistent workspaces like Copilot Notebooks, reducing the need to repeatedly upload documents or explain project context.
Microsoft is also continuing to develop multi-model experiences, allowing different AI models to work together depending on the task, improving reasoning and response quality.
What does it mean for you?
This is a subtle but important shift. Copilot is evolving from answering individual questions to understanding ongoing projects, conversations and documents. Over time, this should make AI interactions feel more natural and reduce the amount of manual context users need to provide.
What's new? – Claude models now hosted natively on Azure
Microsoft has begun hosting Claude models natively on Azure infrastructure, adding to the existing OpenAI and Microsoft model options already available through Azure AI Foundry. Azure AI Foundry Toolboxes has also reached general availability, allowing businesses to aggregate MCP client tools for agent workflows.
What does it mean for you?
For customers already committed to the Azure platform, this removes one of the last reasons to look elsewhere for model choice. It's worth revisiting any customer conversation where a lack of model flexibility on Azure was previously a blocker.
What's new? – Teams Phone Agent brings AI-led call handling
Microsoft introduced Teams Phone Agent, a new AI calling experience that can answer incoming calls for a department or organisation, understand what the caller needs, and route or resolve common requests automatically.
Unlike traditional IVRs, Teams Phone Agent uses generative AI to understand natural conversation before deciding whether to answer the request itself or route it to the most appropriate person.
What does it mean for you?
This is a genuine Copilot-adjacent upsell for customers running reception desks, service desks or any high-volume call environment. It's worth demonstrating alongside existing Teams Phone deployments rather than positioning it as a separate product.
SharePoint and Purview
What's new? – SharePoint gains natural-language AI skill creation
Microsoft continues to position SharePoint as the knowledge platform underpinning Copilot. Now, users with edit permissions can build reusable AI skills in SharePoint using natural language, automating common tasks such as reviewing documents or organising content without needing developer involvement.
What does it mean for you?
This lowers the bar for customers to start automating repetitive content tasks themselves, but it also means more AI activity happening without central IT sign-off. Worth pairing with a conversation about governance before it spreads unmanaged.
What's new? – Purview adds a wave of governance and DLP controls
July brought a significant batch of Purview updates, including automated sensitive-data remediation triggered via Teams, deletion of inactive OneDrives and mailboxes, archive-file label detection, FTP/SFTP DLP protection, user-based alert aggregation, eDiscovery diagnostics and certificate-based RMS authentication.
What does it mean for you?
Any customer with active compliance or eDiscovery obligations should know these exist. The automated remediation and inactive account cleanup in particular can meaningfully reduce the manual admin load on stretched IT and compliance teams.
Microsoft Teams
What's new? – Breakout rooms now scale to 1,000 attendees
Teams meetings now support breakout rooms with up to 1,000 attendees across as many as 200 rooms per meeting, rolled out globally this month with no admin action required.
What's new? – Apps in private channels complete their rollout
Support for apps, bots and message extensions in private channels is now enabled by default for everyone, giving private channels the same rich app experience previously reserved for shared channels.
What's changing? – Device management moves to the Pro Management portal
Management of Android and Windows-based Teams Rooms, panels and phones is moving from the Teams admin centre into a consolidated Pro Management portal, providing device health monitoring, inventory and analytics in one place.
What's new? – External Domains Anomalies Report helps flag risky collaboration
A new report helps admins spot unusual or risky interactions with external organisations, flagging sudden spikes, new domains or abnormal engagement patterns that could indicate a data-sharing risk.
What does it mean for you?
Together, these updates push Teams further into enterprise-grade meeting scale and admin control. If you support customers with meeting room estates, the move to the Pro Management portal is worth planning for ahead of time, and the External Domains report is a strong talking point for any customer with heavy external collaboration.
Outlook
What's changing? – Send Availability removed from Outlook mobile
The Send Availability feature has been removed from Outlook for iOS and Android. Users composing email on mobile can no longer share their availability directly from their calendar and will need to check it manually.
Do you need to do anything?
No action required, but it's worth a heads-up to any users who relied on this feature regularly, particularly frontline or sales teams who schedule frequently from mobile.
Microsoft 365 Updates
What's new? – July builds focus on reliability fixes
Recent Microsoft 365 Apps builds resolved a range of stability issues, including Outlook closing unexpectedly during calendar use, missing DLP policy tips on sensitive attachments, incorrect text copying from text boxes, and the Copilot side pane getting stuck loading.
What does it mean for you?
None of these are headline features, but reliability fixes like these matter day to day. Make sure customers are on a current, supported update channel so these fixes actually land.
Azure
What's new? – Azure Site Recovery handles higher-throughput workloads
Azure Site Recovery now supports up to five times more data churn, making replication viable for high-IOPS databases and big data workloads that previously exceeded its limits.
Do you need to do anything?
Yes, if any customers are on the retirement path. Legacy Reserved VM SKUs stopped selling on 1 July, NVv3/NVv4 support ends 30 September 2026, CuRP retires 31 October 2026, and HBv2/HC/NP series retire in May 2027. Flag these to affected customers now rather than at the point of disruption.
Looking ahead
Microsoft's announcements over the past six months all point in the same direction.
Rather than adding isolated AI features to Microsoft 365, Microsoft is building an AI operating layer that spans productivity, communications, knowledge management and security.
The next wave of updates is likely to focus less on introducing new AI capabilities and more on refining how those capabilities work together across the platform. It helps the series feel more like an insight publication than a news digest.
July has made one thing clear: Microsoft's AI investment across Copilot, Teams and Azure isn't slowing down, but this month it's the commercial side of the house driving the more urgent conversations.
- Pricing and packaging changes are already live and tied to renewal dates, not a future deadline
- Copilot is extending into new surfaces, from calling to natural-language automation
- Governance and DLP controls are catching up with how AI is spreading through the estate
- Teams continues to add enterprise-grade scale and admin control
- Azure's model choice and disaster recovery capabilities keep broadening
Clearly, Microsoft is increasingly treating AI as part of the core Microsoft 365 experience rather than an optional add-on, making long-term planning around governance, licensing and user adoption more important than ever.
All of which means July is as much about licence and renewal housekeeping as it is about new capability. Getting ahead of both puts you in a stronger position with customers heading into the second half of the year.
If you would like help reviewing your Microsoft environment, our specialists can help.
Sonia Older
Brand & Campaign Manager
Sonia Older is the Campaign Manager at Focus Group and a highly experienced copywriter. She boasts over 20 years of experience in content marketing and PR across multiple industries, and is the key driver of content and PR for Focus Group across all UK offices. Away from work, Sonia usually swaps keyboard strokes for ski slopes in the Alps with her family.
