All news with #product update tag

📚 Microsoft will retire the Send Documents to Kindle option in Microsoft Word, with the change rolling out after February 2026. The feature, formerly accessible from Word's Export menu, allowed .doc and .docx files to be transferred to a user's Kindle library while preserving page layout and most formatting. Microsoft notes that comments and tracked changes were not preserved when files were sent. After the retirement, users should use the Send to Kindle website to transfer documents.

🆕 Amazon Lightsail now offers two larger managed database bundles with up to 8 vCPUs, 32 GB memory, and 960 GB SSD storage. The new bundles are offered in both standard and high‑availability plans and support managed MySQL and PostgreSQL engines. They target production workloads and data‑intensive applications—such as e‑commerce, content management systems, business intelligence, and SaaS—by delivering increased storage and processing capacity. These sizes are available in all AWS Regions where Lightsail is provided.

🔧 Microsoft is testing a new Group Policy, RemoveMicrosoftCopilotApp, that enables IT administrators to uninstall the AI-powered Copilot app on managed Windows devices. The policy began rolling out in the Dev and Beta Insider channels with Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7535 (KB5072046) and applies to endpoints managed via Microsoft Intune or SCCM. It targets systems where both Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are installed, the app was not user-installed, and it hasn't been launched in the last 28 days. Admins can enable the setting at User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows AI -> Remove Microsoft Copilot App; users may still reinstall if they choose.

🤖 Amazon Quick now supports invoking third‑party AI agents from Box, Canva, and PagerDuty, enabling chat and automation tasks—such as querying documents, generating presentations, and extracting incident insights—directly within the Quick workspace. Quick has also expanded its built‑in actions to include integrations with GitHub, Notion, Linear, Hugging Face, Monday.com, HubSpot, Intercom, and more, allowing users to create issues, summarize notes, and manage CRM workflows without switching apps. Customers can further connect thousands of additional applications using Model Context Protocol (MCP) and OpenAPI connectors. These features are available in all AWS Regions where Quick is offered.

🤖 Amazon Quick now supports invoking specialized third-party agents (Box, Canva, PagerDuty) and expands its built-in actions library with integrations for GitHub, Notion, Canva, Box, Linear, Hugging Face, Monday.com, HubSpot, and Intercom. Users can run agentic tasks—pull incident insights, generate presentations, or query documents—directly from a single workspace. Quick also continues to support custom MCP and OpenAPI connectors for broader application connectivity. These features are available in all regions where Amazon Quick is offered.

🚀 Amazon has expanded availability of Amazon EC2 M8i instances to the Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Malaysia) regions. Powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, the M8i offers up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x higher memory bandwidth than prior Intel-based instances. AWS reports up to 20% better performance versus M7i, with workload-specific gains—up to 30% for PostgreSQL, 60% for NGINX, and 40% for deep learning recommendation models. The SAP-certified family includes 13 sizes, two bare-metal options and a new 96xlarge for very large workloads.

🚀 AWS Lambda now supports creating serverless applications using .NET 10 as both a managed runtime and a container base image, with AWS automatically applying updates to the managed runtime and base image as they become available. .NET 10 is a long-term support release with security and bug fix coverage through November 2028, and it brings features such as file-based apps. The release also adds support for Lambda Managed Instances, enabling functions to run on Amazon EC2 while retaining serverless operational simplicity, and Powertools for AWS Lambda (.NET) supports the new runtime. The runtime is available in all Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US) and China, and you can deploy using the Lambda console, AWS CLI, AWS SAM, AWS CDK, and CloudFormation.

🛡️ AWS has introduced a simplified onboarding Quickstart for AWS Client VPN that reduces endpoint setup to three required inputs: IPv4 CIDR, server certificate ARN, and subnet selection. The Quickstart provides pre-defined default configurations so teams can create endpoints quickly and immediately download the client configuration to connect. It is offered alongside the existing Standard Setup and is suggested automatically when a VPC is created. The workflow is available at no additional cost in Regions where Client VPN is generally available.

🌐 AWS now enables IPv6 connectivity to IAM Identity Center via newly introduced dual‑stack endpoints. Clients can connect using IPv6, IPv4, or dual‑stack, while existing IPv4-only endpoints remain available for backward compatibility. Dual‑stack endpoints resolve to an IPv4 or IPv6 address based on the client and network, helping organizations meet IPv6 compliance and reduce NAT complexity. Support is available in all Regions where the service operates, except AWS GovCloud (US) and Taipei.

☁️Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) now supports creating Apache Airflow 2.11 environments and offers support for Python 3.12. Airflow 2.11 introduces trigger-based scheduling for delta intervals and consistent metric reporting in milliseconds to help prepare for an upgrade to Airflow 3. You can launch new 2.11 environments from the AWS Management Console in all currently supported MWAA regions.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon EC2 C8i and C8i‑flex instances are available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Powered by AWS-exclusive custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, these instances deliver up to 15% better price‑performance and 2.5x higher memory bandwidth compared with prior Intel-based instances. AWS reports up to 20% higher general performance versus the C7i family, with workload-specific gains — up to 60% for NGINX, 40% for deep learning recommendation models, and 35% for Memcached. C8i‑flex targets common sizes (large to 16xlarge) for cost-efficient compute, while C8i offers 13 sizes including two bare-metal and a new 96xlarge for memory‑intensive or continuous high‑CPU workloads.

🔍 Google Cloud has enhanced Gemini CLI telemetry with pre-configured Google Cloud Monitoring dashboards that provide immediate visibility into adoption, usage patterns, and performance. By exporting data via OpenTelemetry, teams can use out-of-the-box visualizations or analyze raw logs and metrics to build custom views. Setup is simplified through direct GCP exporters and a three-step flow—project ID, authentication and IAM roles, and updating .gemini/settings.json—so telemetry can be live quickly.

📣 OpenAI is reportedly preparing to test ads within ChatGPT, beginning with internal trials limited to employees. Reports say the company is evaluating multiple ad formats — including sponsored content prioritized in AI answers and sidebar placements — while details on how ads would affect paid plans like Go, Plus, and Pro remain unclear. OpenAI has confirmed it is exploring ads and says any approach would be designed to respect users' trust, though the timeline and implementation remain unspecified.

🤖 OpenAI has begun rolling out a new variant of its coding agent, labeled GPT-5.2-Codex-Max, to a subset of paying users who have spotted the model identifier when querying Codex. The release follows December’s introduction of Codex with GPT-5.2 and appears to deliver enhanced long-task persistence, repository context compaction, improved tool reliability, better Windows workflow handling, and stronger vision for interpreting screenshots, UI bugs, and diagrams. Given the prior uplift seen with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, this Max tier is expected to provide another notable performance bump, and OpenAI may publish formal details in the coming days.

📭 Microsoft has canceled plans to impose a new daily limit of 2,000 external recipients on Exchange Online bulk senders after receiving negative customer feedback. The External Recipient Rate (ERR) cap was announced in April 2024 and was scheduled to begin in January 2025 with phased enforcement through late 2025. Microsoft said it will pursue "smarter, more adaptive approaches" to balance security and usability, while existing recipient limits remain unchanged.

📊 AWS announced collection visibility in AWS Marketplace Seller Reporting, adding up-to-date payment collection status to the Billed Revenue Dashboard and Billing Event Data Feed. The update lets sellers distinguish invoiced, collected, and disbursed amounts to close the gap between invoice creation and disbursement. Available in all Regions where Seller Reporting is offered; access via the Marketplace Management Portal → Insights → Finance Operations.

🧰 Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports tmpfs mounts for Linux tasks running on AWS Fargate and Amazon ECS Managed Instances, extending functionality beyond the EC2 launch type. Tmpfs creates memory-backed filesystems exposed inside containers for fast temporary storage, caches, and short-lived secrets without writing to task storage. You enable it by adding a linuxParameters block with tmpfs entries in your task definition and specifying containerPath, size, and optional mountOptions; task definitions can be registered or updated via the console, AWS CLI, CloudFormation, or AWS CDK. This capability is available in all AWS Regions where ECS and Fargate are supported.

🔐 Amazon MQ now supports delegating RabbitMQ authentication and authorization to an HTTP endpoint. The capability is provided as a plugin for RabbitMQ 4.2 and later on Amazon MQ and is enabled by updating the broker configuration file. When provisioning, choose RabbitMQ 4.2 with the m7g instance type via the AWS Console, CLI, or SDKs, then edit the configuration to enable the plugin. The feature is available in all regions where Amazon MQ RabbitMQ 4 instances are offered.

🔔 AWS Config now supports 21 additional AWS resource types across services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon S3 Tables, enabling broader visibility into resource state and drift. If you have recording enabled for all resource types, these additions are tracked automatically and are available to use in Config rules and Config aggregators. The change helps teams discover, assess, and remediate resources more comprehensively.

⚡ Cloud SQL for MySQL Enterprise Plus now includes optimized writes, an automated runtime tuning suite that adjusts MySQL configuration and I/O behavior to reduce write latency and increase throughput. Enabled by default on Enterprise Plus instances, the feature implements adaptive purge, adaptive I/O limits, sharded I/O, faster REDO recovery, and adaptive buffer-pool warmup. Google provides a reproducible sysbench benchmark and reports up to 3x write throughput improvements versus the Enterprise edition, with results varying by machine type and workload.