Microsoft announce “Computer Use” – a capability that will enable Agents to interact with websites and desktop apps by clicking buttons, selecting menus, and typing into fields on the screen. It’s due to come to Copilot Studio soon through an early access research preview program.
You can find the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/3GgperF with a link to apply to participate in the preview program, and why not register for a demo session at Build in May 2025: https://bit.ly/4jV3EYl.
Copilot Studio is available on a Pay-As-You-Go basis from 1 December, 2024. That means that you can now choose to buy either the original Capacity Pack of 25,000 messages for $200 a month, or pay for messages that you use at a cost of $0.01 per message. As you might expect, messages are paid for via an Azure Subscription at the end of the month. If you want to, you can combine the two options, with the messages from the Capacity Packs being consumed first.
Find the Microsoft announcement here: https://bit.ly/4fgt7J1, and the pricing page here: https://bit.ly/4gvpLTs.
Microsoft announce that SQL Server 2025 is now in private preview with general availability sometime in 2025. No word yet on whether there will be changes to the licensing.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3Zi81oX.
Microsoft introduce Azure Local for customers to run Azure services on their own infrastructure. It’s enabled by Azure Arc and provides cloud-connected capabilities at a customer’s distributed locations. Think of it as the evolution of Azure Stack and, indeed, Azure Stack HCI has already been renamed to Azure Local.
There’s no change to the pricing or licensing for Azure Stack HCI customers, they’ll just get new Azure Local features as they’re available. At this time Azure Stack Hub and Azure Stack Edge remain, but there are “lower-spec hardware” and “disconnected operations” solutions in preview in Azure Local which will be the Azure Localisation of these Azure Stack components in due course.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4eCWKUr .
Microsoft announce a business continuity service for Windows 365 to protect against regional outages. When activated, the service creates temporary copies of users’ Cloud PCs in alternative geographical regions, preserving installed applications, user settings, and data. The Windows 365 Cross Region Disaster Recovery Add-On license costs $5 per user per month and is currently only available for Windows 365 Enterprise users.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3LJfyFB, and the Learn documentation here: https://bit.ly/46HK1hf.
Microsoft announce that they will retire Copilot GPT Builder starting 10th July, 2024. This means that users licensed with a Copilot Pro licence will no longer be able to create their own custom Copilot GPTs. All Copilot GPTs created by Microsoft or by customers will also be removed at this time. Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4bXhrdg.