All news with #product update tag

🖥️ AWS now offers Windows Server 2025 bundles for Amazon WorkSpaces, available for both Personal and Core WorkSpaces. These managed bundles let customers launch Windows Server 2025 instances to run modern applications, including eligible Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise that require newer Windows. The option introduces enhanced security and firmware protections such as TPM 2.0, UEFI Secure Boot, and Secured-core server, and is available in all Regions where WorkSpaces is offered.

🛡️ At the Growing Up in the Digital Age Summit in Dublin, Google presented product safeguards and policy principles designed to support teen digital wellbeing, emphasizing defaults like SafeSearch and private YouTube uploads as baseline protections. The company announced improvements to Family Link, a unique option to set Shorts time to zero for supervised teens, and additional Gemini Apps guardrails for users under 18. It also unveiled a $20 million global initiative to create multilingual, open-source wellbeing resources and urged a risk-based approach to age assurance rather than blanket bans.

📞 Amazon Connect now offers integrated agent coaching workflows that let contact center managers create, assign, and track coaching plans directly from evaluation scorecards within the Connect UI. Managers can attach specific customer interactions and suggested language to illustrate strengths and improvement areas, while agents acknowledge feedback and add notes to confirm understanding. All coaching history is available on a single page, reducing delays and creating accountability across the contact center.

✉️ Amazon Connect now lets agents select the "From" email address when replying to inbound messages or composing outbound emails. Administrators can configure multiple sender addresses per queue, and agents can search and pick the appropriate address based on the queue they are working in. This capability helps contact centers preserve correct brand identity across interactions and supports multi-brand or multi-line-of-business deployments from a single instance.

🚀Fortinet has refreshed the Engage Partner Program to align partner rewards with platform-led customer outcomes across Secure Networking, Unified SASE, and AI-driven security operations. The update moves recognition beyond point-of-sale to lifecycle contributions such as architecture design, deployment, and managed services, and introduces clearer global tiers and specialization paths. Partners gain profitability incentives, expanded training (updated NSE content), and a new Partner Portal to streamline deal registration and operational workflows.

📊 Amazon Connect now exports case data directly into the analytics data lake, enabling unified analysis of case records alongside other contact-center metrics. With case data accessible in the data lake, teams can use Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight to build custom reports and explore trends such as case volume by type, handling by agent shift, and contact sentiment without maintaining complex ETL pipelines. The capability is available in multiple AWS regions including US, Europe, Asia Pacific, Canada, and Africa.

🤖 Cloudflare now returns RFC 9457-compliant Markdown and JSON error payloads to AI agents, replacing bulky HTML error pages with compact, machine-readable instructions. Agents requesting text/markdown or application/json receive a consistent schema with YAML frontmatter and explicit fields such as retryable, retry_after, and owner_action_required. This network-wide change is automatic for all 1xxx-class edge errors, reduces payload and token usage by ~98%, and preserves the traditional HTML experience for browsers.

🤖 Amazon Connect has enhanced its AI-powered predictive insights to support up to 40 million product catalog items (an 8× increase), integrate recommendations into message templates for trigger-based campaigns, and improve model accuracy by up to 14%. These updates, built on the five recommendation algorithms from re:Invent 2025, reduce training and deployment time so businesses can deliver automated, personalized outreach faster. Public preview is available across multiple AWS regions and Amazon Connect Customer Profiles remains pay-as-you-go.

📧 Amazon Connect now supports conversational analytics for email contacts, enabling automatic categorization, PII redaction, and generated contact summaries to streamline supervision and compliance. Administrators enable the capability by adding a Set recording, analytics and processing behavior block to contact flows and can specify which PII types to redact and whether redactions show specific or generic markers. Teams may store original and redacted versions in separate locations, enable contact summaries, and use analytics to create rules that trigger actions such as assigning categories, creating tasks, or updating cases. The capability is available across multiple AWS regions.

🔧 Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports in-place increases of cluster storage volumes above 3 TiB, removing the previous hard limit that forced blue/green deployments for large expansions. Domains already above 3 TiB still require a blue/green deployment the first time they increase, but subsequent increases will not. Decreases or rapid successive increases continue to require blue/green; use the dry-run option to verify whether your change requires one.

🔐 Microsoft is introducing passkey support in Microsoft Entra for Windows, enabling phishing-resistant, passwordless sign-ins via Windows Hello. The opt-in feature enters public preview worldwide from mid‑March through late April 2026, with government clouds (GCC, GCC High, DoD) following mid‑April through mid‑May. Passkeys are device-bound, stored in the Windows Hello container, and never transmitted over the network, preventing credential theft and MFA bypass. IT administrators must enable the Passkeys (FIDO2) authentication method, create a passkey profile including the required Windows Hello AAGUIDs, and assign the profile to appropriate groups to enroll devices.

🔔 Starting with the May 2026 Windows security update, Microsoft will enable hotpatch security updates by default for all eligible devices managed via Microsoft Intune and the Microsoft Graph API. The updates will be delivered through Windows Autopatch and are intended to halve the time to reach 90% patch compliance by applying fixes without requiring immediate restarts. Organizations can opt out at the tenant level through Intune controls that go live April 1, 2026, and administrators should use the Hotpatch quality updates report to confirm device readiness.

📈 Amazon Web Services has increased Amazon CloudWatch Logs query capacity: accounts can now run up to 100 concurrent Logs Insights queries (up from 30) and execute up to 10 StartQuery and GetQueryResults API calls per second per account per region using Logs Insights QL. Customers should see reduced throttling, faster result retrieval, and improved dashboard responsiveness. The update is available across a broad set of AWS regions, enabling larger teams and automated systems to run more parallel queries.

⚙️ Amazon is introducing User Preferences in Amazon Quick Suite, enabling end users to control how Quick looks and behaves. Users can set the Chat panel to open expanded or collapsed and Quick will remember their last state. They can choose a default chat agent and a default knowledge scope for My Assistant, provide a preferred name and area of focus, and view or manage memories to make responses more relevant.

⚡ Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio introduces data preview v2.0 for Visual ETL, delivering near-instant preview results (about one second) while building and iterating on ETL jobs. The new mode runs an in-browser query engine that fetches and caches source data locally, removing dependence on server-side Spark sessions and avoiding additional compute costs. It supports CSV, Parquet, and JSON from Amazon S3, as well as Amazon Redshift, S3 Tables, AWS Glue Data Catalog, and many third-party sources including Snowflake and common relational databases. A toggle lets users switch back to the original Spark-based preview when needed.

🛡️Microsoft will update Teams to clearly label external third-party bots that appear in meeting lobbies, and organizers will be required to explicitly admit them. The change is slated for May 2026 and will reach Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS for worldwide standard multi-tenant and GCC clouds. By distinguishing bots from human attendees, the feature aims to prevent malicious or unwanted automated participants from being inadvertently accepted into meetings and complements recent Teams security enhancements such as call-reporting, fraud-protection warnings, and Defender-based admin controls.

🔒 This contributed piece from Bitdefender explains how a unified security platform can help mid-market organizations meet enterprise-level expectations without enterprise budgets. The article promotes Bitdefender GravityZone and an upcoming webinar that shows how consolidating tools can simplify operations, reduce costs, and strengthen security posture. It targets IT directors, CISOs, and lean security teams seeking practical steps to demonstrate reduced risk and free up resources.

🔒 Cloudflare argues that SASE and Zero Trust migrations no longer need to be multi-year projects. Partners such as TachTech and Adapture report compressing deployments from 18 months to as little as four to six weeks by using the Cloudflare One platform. Key accelerators include identity-first on-ramps, a consolidated policy engine for SWG and ZTNA, and cloud-native connectors like cloudflared. The platform's extensibility also supports custom environments and provides AI-focused controls for safer LLM adoption.

🔎 The Forrester Total Economic Impact study modeled a composite $10B enterprise using Microsoft Foundry and estimated a 327% ROI over three years, with developer productivity identified as the largest contributor at $15.7M. Foundry reduced undifferentiated engineering work and improved technical team productivity up to 35%, with some teams seeing payback in as few as six months. Its unified platform, reusable knowledge bases, built-in evaluations, and agent controls also enabled organizations to decommission legacy tools and avoid infrastructure costs.

📦 Amazon Redshift now supports reusable templates for the COPY command, allowing teams to store and reuse commonly used COPY parameters across ingestion workflows. Templates standardize formatting and load options, reducing manual configuration and the risk of errors. Changes made to a template apply to future COPY operations, simplifying maintenance and updates. The feature is available in all AWS Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US).