Microsoft offers a surprising number of ways to build agents in Microsoft 365. Which one should you choose? Richard talks to Andrew Connell about the evolving Microsoft 365 Copilot landscape and the four major approaches to building agents. Starting with SharePoint Agents for document-focused scenarios, Andrew walks through Agent Builder inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, the increasingly popular Copilot Studio in the Power Platform ecosystem, and the often-overlooked Agents Toolkit for VS Code. Along the way, he discusses governance, licensing, publishing models, security concerns, and when Azure Foundry makes sense. The result is a practical guide to understanding Microsoft's growing agent platform and choosing the right tool for your organization.

How has patching changed in 2026? Richard chats with patching goddess Susan Bradley about what she's seeing in vendor patches and how they're affecting consumers and businesses. On one hand, you have the security risk of unpatched servers, which puts a lot of pressure on sysadmins to deploy patches immediately. And, at the same time, the number of patches has grown massively as tools like Anthropic's Fable have revealed far more vulnerabilities. Then there are the vendors that are slow to get fixes out for drivers and firmware for existing systems, increasing the risk of serious failures - it's not easy patching in 2026!

Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) was deprecated in Sept 2024 - when does it go away? Richard talks to Adam Marshall about how WSUS is still an essential service for Configuration Manager, included with Server 2025 and V.Next - it's not going anywhere! Adam talks about the use cases WSUS covers that no other update solution does, especially granular control of updates and offline scenarios. And while Microsoft is still feeding updates into the WSUS stack, no new code is going into the solution, making it hard to maintain. That is why Adam has been building WAM - WSUS Automated Maintenance. The stack includes free and paid tools, and all of them make your WSUS life easier!

How does AI change the intranet? Richard chats with Susan Hanley about her work helping organizations build great intranets and how tools like M365 Copilot are changing the intranet. Susan talks about the new reality of an intranet, where some users no longer go to the intranet directly but use an agent to retrieve the information they need. This impacts search statistics, but also means it's important to write pages that an agent can easily understand. The conversation also dives into the bane of all intranets - archiving data. LLMs can help with organizing data, but getting stale data out of view is essential. There are also retention policies and governance, and there's a role for these tools there too - the intranet is evolving!

How secure are your PowerShell scripts? Richard talks to Mike O'Neill about the powerful security features introduced with PowerShell 7.3 and above, including session configuration files and clean blocks. Mike talks about how some organizations are strict about installing anything on servers, including the latest version of PowerShell - which is one of the reasons 5.1 has persisted so long. But that ends with 26H2 and opens the door to securing your PowerShell with strict controls over accounts, cmdlets, and more! The latest PowerShell makes it easier to have just enough administration - and makes it harder for the black hats to exploit!

What if Microsoft Defender not only detected attackers - but also fought back? Richard talks to Liz Tesch about Microsoft Defender Automatic Attack Disruption and Predictive Shielding. Liz talks about how attacks are often detected before the payload executes, but by the time humans can respond, far more damage has been done. Automatic Attack Disruption acts immediately on detection to limit the attacker by locking accounts, restricting access on a compromised server, and more. Predictive Shielding goes a step further by limiting attackers' ability to respond to the disruption by turning off GPO changes, disabling safe mode, and otherwise interfering with the typical actions that attackers take once they know they have been detected. Add AI to the mix, and everything gets more complicated. The black hats are using AI to attack, and Microsoft Defender XDR is using it to defend - the race is on!

What is the state of content management systems today? Richard chats with Matthew Garrepy of CMS Critic about his views on how the CMS market continues to evolve. Matt digs into the build-vs-buy conversation that has been going on since the web first emerged - now made more complex with the power of the large language model to generate code. The evolution toward headless CMS brings up the idea of the explosion of different places that a CMS needs to touch now - not just web pages. The landscape for CMS is only getting more complex, and the tooling reflects that!

The risk of ransomware is real - are you ready? Richard talks with Heather Renze about her experiences dealing with a ransomware attack and how to get prepared when it happens to you. Heather talks about how ransomware has evolved into a business that has operators, affiliates, and even tech support. Making a plan is essential - involving finance, legal, and IT. Cyberinsurance plays a big role, as do regulatory bodies - it depends on the business you're in. But your plan needs to know three essential things: what breaks first, how long your company can function with it broken, and who can decide on what to do next in the first hour of the event. The plan may or may not work perfectly, but not having a plan is far worse. Get ready!

More ways to use Azure Virtual Desktop! Richard chats with Travis Roberts about how Azure Virtual Desktop continues to evolve and provides more options for remote users. Travis talks about how AVD grew out of Terminal Services and so is still very much an IaaS offering - as opposed to Windows 365, which is more PaaS, with less flexibility, but easier deployment. But when you need control, AVD is the way to go, and today will operate in Azure, on-premises via Azure Local. And if you've got an existing virtual desktop infrastructure, AVD Hybrid opens the door to running in a hybrid environment across on-prem and cloud, or to providing a smooth migration path. Lots of choices!

Bringing new software or SaaS into your organization is a security risk - how do you assess it? Richard chats with Jessie Schofer about her experiences in HR software acquisition, which led to the creation of secureless.ai. Jessie tells the story of evaluating various SaaS and other software products and realizing that, while the website says they are compliant with GDPR and/or SOC 2, are they really? This leads to a conversation about the product procurement process and about actually understanding the security risk you take on every time a new product is added to your organization. At what point does security block an acquisition? And after being acquired, how often do you reassess? Supply chain security hygiene starts at procurement - are you part of the evaluation?