Public Sector, Local/State Government topics

August 20 Federal Event: Accelerating Enterprise Modernization, AI & Cybersecurity

rajithanair — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:58:17 GMT

Overview

Federal agencies are under increasing pressure to modernize mission systems, strengthen cybersecurity, and responsibly adopt artificial intelligence. Executive Order 14409, record federal technology investments, and Microsoft's OneGov initiative have created a unique opportunity to accelerate secure digital transformation.

What Attendees Will Learn

How agencies are translating AI strategy into operational outcomes.
Microsoft's latest AI, cybersecurity, and modernization capabilities.
How Microsoft OneGov is accelerating secure AI adoption across federal agencies.
Real-world modernization strategies and success stories from CDC and USGS.
Practical approaches to modernizing legacy systems while improving mission outcomes.

Plus: Every attendee receives a complimentary 30-minute FY27 AI Readiness Consultation with a MERP Solutions Architect.

Why Attend

Join MERP Systems and Microsoft to discover the latest AI and cybersecurity innovations and hear directly from CDC and USGS as they share real-world enterprise modernization strategies and success stories. Attendees will leave with actionable insights, proven approaches, and a better understanding of how to accelerate secure AI adoption across their organizations.

Event Link- Accelerating Enterprise Modernization, AI & Cybersecurity

August 20 Federal Event: Accelerating Enterprise Modernization, AI & Cybersecurity

rajithanair — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:46:03 GMT

Overview

What Attendees Will Learn

How agencies are translating AI strategy into operational outcomes.
Microsoft's latest AI, cybersecurity, and modernization capabilities.
How Microsoft OneGov is accelerating secure AI adoption across federal agencies.
Real-world modernization strategies and success stories from CDC and USGS.
Practical approaches to modernizing legacy systems while improving mission outcomes.

Plus: Every attendee receives a complimentary 30-minute FY27 AI Readiness Consultation with a MERP Solutions Architect.

Why Attend

https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/b58ebc1e-e927-4e66-b73c-f25d7f43be7f@c33861f9-4a57-4bc4-bc88-d6e0c7b92c37?source=copyLinkOneEventsShareDialog

Microsoft Prompt Gallery for Gov Clouds

sara_clark_NH — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:55:04 GMT

Has anyone found a way to access Microsoft's prompt gallery with a gov cloud? Any web access link requires you to log in and brings you to the commercial endpoint. I don't see a way to access it from inside Office using the Copilot panel. We are GCCH.

Also has anyone built an internal prompt gallery for your business to use and share prompts? Did you create this in a SharePoint list? Would love to hear other's ideas and even some examples of what is working great for them as far as what you are capturing and what is your repository.

Planner Premium in GCCH

sara_clark_NH — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:46:57 GMT

Hi all,

We are looking to do more with Planner Premium and are frustrated at the lack of tools given to gov clouds to support the conversion of Planner basic plans to Planner Premium. We don't have the magic button to add the premium views like commercial. I then attempted to build a flow to do this based on a basic plan exported to Excel and we don't have the action within Power Automate to interact with Premium plans. It only allows me to select the basic Planners, the Premium ones don't show up in the drop-down to select. Has any one else figured out a way to do this other then manually recreating your tasks from one plan to another?

UK Public Sector IT Professionals Needed - MSc Research Participation Request

GreenResearcher — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 21:39:21 GMT

Hello,

I am an MSc Cybersecurity student at the University of South Wales conducting research on Microsoft 365 security compliance in UK public sector organisations.

My dissertation investigates the gap between the default security configuration of Microsoft 365 and the outcomes required by the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework v4.0. I have developed a practical compliance roadmap and I am looking for experienced IT professionals to review it and complete a short anonymous questionnaire.

What is involved:
Reading a compliance roadmap document — approximately 20 to 30 minutes
Completing a short anonymous questionnaire — approximately 12 minutes
Submitting responses within seven days

Who I am looking for:
IT managers, cloud architects, systems administrators or CISOs
Working in or contracted to UK local government, NHS, education or public sector cloud security
Minimum three years of Microsoft 365 experience

Everything is completely anonymous. No names or identifying information are collected. This research has received ethical approval from the University of South Wales.

If you are interested please reply to this post or send me a direct message.

Thank you.

Architecture Risk Brief: Silent Data Integrity Failures in Distributed Criminal Justice Systems

deepeshd87 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:18:12 GMT

Why Modernized Public Safety Environments Need Stronger Data Integrity Controls

In criminal justice information services systems, the most dangerous failures are often the ones you cannot see.

A system may appear fully operational—dashboards green, services responsive, transactions flowing—while critical data is incomplete, inconsistent, or out of sync across connected platforms. In these environments, the absence of alerts does not necessarily mean the absence of problems. Instead, it can signal that data integrity issues are developing silently beneath normal system behavior.

As agencies modernize criminal justice information services (CJIS) systems, adopt cloud platforms, and expand data sharing across jurisdictions, the challenge is not only keeping systems online; it is ensuring the data moving between them remains accurate, consistent, and trustworthy.

Why This Risk Is Growing

Criminal justice agencies are going through rapid modernization, and with that comes a level of complexity that simply didn’t exist in earlier, more isolated systems. In many environments, legacy applications are still running alongside newer cloud-based platforms, which creates gaps in how data is processed and interpreted. At the same time, transaction volumes have increased significantly, and under heavy load it’s not uncommon to see partial commits, retry behavior, or subtle inconsistencies that are hard to detect.

There’s also a growing expectation for near real-time synchronization across systems, even when those systems weren’t originally designed to stay perfectly in sync. As more agencies begin sharing data across jurisdictions, the number of integration points increases, and each one introduces its own risk. None of these changes are inherently problematic, but together they create conditions where data integrity issues can develop quietly without triggering any obvious system failures.

These changes improve capability but also create new failure modes that traditional monitoring does not detect. System uptime alone is no longer a reliable indicator of operational health. The CJIS Security Policy reinforces this requirement by mandating that criminal justice information (CJI) remain accurate, complete, and protected from unauthorized alteration throughout its lifecycle.

What Silent Data Integrity Failures Look Like

Silent failures almost never show up as outages. Most of the time, everything looks fine on the surface—systems are up, jobs are running, dashboards are green. The problems usually come to light much later, often when someone is preparing for an audit, reconciling data between agencies, or digging into a case where something just doesn’t add up.

In one scenario, a transaction completed successfully in the source system but never made it to a downstream platform. There were no errors, no retries flagged—just missing data. In another case, records looked perfectly valid within each system, but when compared across environments, they didn’t match. These kinds of discrepancies tend to surface during reporting or compliance checks, not during normal operations.

That’s what makes them difficult to catch. From an operational standpoint, everything appears healthy. There are no alerts or obvious failures, but underneath that, the data has slowly drifted out of sync.

Database Corruption: The Most Silent Failure of All

Beyond synchronization gaps, database corruption represents an even more dangerous and often invisible threat. Corruption can arise from:

Storage subsystem issues
Hardware degradation
Incomplete writes under high load
Failover anomalies
Legacy-to-cloud interactions

Low-severity corruption may go unnoticed for weeks but eventually impacts multiple agency systems. Because corruption directly threatens the accuracy and integrity of CJI, it poses a significant CJIS compliance risk.

My Implementation: Automated Corruption Alerts

To deal with this, I implemented a simple automated alerting system that monitors corruption indicators and notifies me as soon as something looks off. Instead of waiting for issues to surface during audits or downstream failures, this provides an early signal that something isn’t right.

In practice, it means I can react quickly, investigate the issue before it spreads, and avoid situations where bad data propagates into other systems. In CJIS environments, even a single corrupted record can have real consequences, so early visibility makes a meaningful difference.

Flow Diagram to Detect Integrity

Root Causes of Silent Data Drift

In most cases, these data integrity issues don’t come from obvious failures—they build up during normal day-to-day operations. In high-volume systems, retries and partial commits under load can leave data in an inconsistent state without triggering any errors. During modernization or cloud migrations, subtle differences in schema behavior or transformation logic can cause data to drift between systems over time.

Another common gap is monitoring. Most setups track uptime and performance, but very few validate whether the data itself remains consistent across platforms. And once data moves across multiple systems and integrations, each handoff becomes a potential point where something can go slightly wrong. None of these issues stand out individually, but together they create conditions where inconsistencies quietly accumulate.

Next Steps for Agencies

Criminal justice organizations don’t need to overhaul their entire technology stack to strengthen data integrity. Instead, they can take practical, incremental steps that build resilience into existing systems while preparing for future modernization.

Establish a Baseline for Data Integrity Map where data originates, how it moves, and where it is stored across multiple agency systems.

Implement Routine Cross-System Validation Use Azure Data Factory, Azure SQL Data Sync, and Log Analytics queries to automate comparisons between operational and reporting systems.

Monitor for Corruption and Synchronization Failures Enable corruption detection and configure automated notifications—similar to the low-to-critical corruption alerts I implemented.

Treat Failover and Migration as Integrity Events Use Azure SQL Failover Groups and ADF pipelines to verify data consistency before and after transitions.

Strengthen Governance and Documentation Use Microsoft Purview to track lineage, schema changes, and data ownership.

Build a Culture of Data Integrity Encourage teams to treat data correctness as a shared responsibility across the organization.

Final Thoughts

Criminal justice information systems have made significant progress in availability, scalability, and security. But as these systems become more distributed and interconnected, data integrity—including corruption detection—is emerging as one of the most critical and least visible operational risks.

The challenge is no longer simply ensuring systems stay online. It is ensuring that the data moving through them remains correct, consistent, and trustworthy across every system, agency, and workflow that depends on it.

In environments where data directly impacts investigations, reporting, and compliance decisions, integrity must be engineered, validated, and continuously enforced with the same rigor applied to system availability and security.

B2B SPO: GCCH tenant members as guests on commercial Entra

Kristin_L_365 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:35:39 GMT

Has anyone successfully enabled GCC guest access to a Commercial SharePoint Online site?

We support customers on GCCH tenants and are migrating an on‑prem SharePoint workload to Commercial M365 SPO. Inviting GCC users as guests fails with token/Token ID errors. Entra sign‑in succeeds, but SharePoint token issuance fails. CTAP is configured on both GCC (outbound) and Commercial (inbound).

Microsoft support indicated it may not be possible (“Entra won’t pass OIDC to SPO”), but Microsoft documentation suggests B2B for SharePoint works across US Gov and Commercial.

If you’ve made this work (or confirmed it can’t), I’d appreciate any practical guidance or gotchas. Thanks!

Where is the Teams Pay-As-You-Go Calling Plan for GCC Tenant License

ksalvail — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 21:08:17 GMT

Currently we are using Direct Routing for Teams calling and want to transition to a Teams pay-as-you-go (PAYG) calling plan for GCC license. Unfortunately, direct purchase through Microsoft 365 Admin Center "Microsoft Online Subscription Agreement" (MOSA) billing account is not available; and the license does not appear on our reseller "Microsoft Customer Agreement" (MCA) billing account price list. Microsoft’s Modern Work FAQ – Microsoft Teams (https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/docs/documents/download/Modern%20Work%20FAQ_Microsoft%20Teams_July2024.pdf) (last updated July 29, 2024), item 103 states pay-as-you-go calling plan is available for GCC.

Has anyone successfully purchased a Teams PAYG calling plan for GCC license since the implementation of the new Microsoft billing experience?

The Art and Science of Prompting: AI fluency. mayoral delegate edition

DanNarloch — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 22:45:36 GMT

Art and science of prompting is your gateway to unlocking citywide transformation.

AI skills are now foundational for every city leader. The winners will be those who ask better questions, shape better prompts, and empower their teams to experiment, learn, and scale what works. This session will show you how to move from curiosity to action, and from pilot to policy

The deck below is the best prompts I've curated over 2.5 years deeply testing, implementing, teaching, and scaling AI to governments and large companies around the world.

These are the basis to the prompting skills you can gain to augment and supercharge your expertise.

Slide 10 is my personal favorite -- the easy button -- i use it everyday and so should you. Start with an area you're already an expert in, and go deep with context. Get to your 'Aha moment' then rinse and repeat.

Have fun!

The Art and Science of Prompting for Public Safety

DanNarloch — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 17:05:15 GMT

Starting a discussion thread for those in Public Safety that are looking to improve their skilling and prompting of using Microsoft 365 Copilot and agentic AI in your flow of work.

Try all the prompts in the attached deck, these are my favorites I've curated over years. Slide 10 is the best prompt I've ever used, it automates persona prompting and is a MUST TRY.

Share your favorites or ideas of what you'd like to learn or prompt on.

Cheers

Dan Narloch

WW Government - Product Marketing Leader

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is now rolling out to GCC tenants.

Sarah_Gilbert — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 16:33:54 GMT

Now available in Outlook, Teams, and the web—with admin controls and no added cost for eligible licenses.

Read the full blog for what’s included and how to prepare here

How I can app for my Bonus card on Microsoft

sabhi05 — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 10:10:15 GMT

Applying for your Bonus Card on Microsoft platforms is simple and convenient. You can access exclusive deals, track your savings, and manage your purchases seamlessly by integrating your Bonus Card with Microsoft services. Visit the official Microsoft Store or AppSource to download the Bonus Card application and start saving instantly. Stay connected with the latest offers by linking your card to Microsoft Rewards for additional benefits.

Learn more on Microsoft

Microsoft Mesh for G3, G5 Plans

ericwood- — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 22:53:14 GMT

In January 2024, Microsoft released Microsoft Mesh for Enterprise O365 plans. As we approach the 1-year anniversary, I have to ask if there any plan to release Mesh for Government plans? My employees have been asking and I have no answer to offer them.

-Eric

Explore GPT-4o Audio with Copilot – AMA (Gov Cloud Questions Welcome!)

Sarah_Gilbert — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 19:21:55 GMT

Public sector professionals, get ready to transform your AI applications! Join our upcoming AMA to explore the new GPT-4o-realtime API with Audio, now available on Azure, and learn how it can revolutionize your use of Copilot Voice. From natural, multilingual conversations to streamlined workflows, this model offers a host of capabilities designed to enhance your operations.

What to Expect:

Deep Technical Insights: Our experts will dive into how the GPT-4o Audio model integrates with Copilot Voice, and share real-world use cases tailored to the public sector.
Gov Cloud Focus: Have questions about using these tools in government clouds? We've got you covered! Our team will be ready to answer all your questions related to Azure Government and other cloud solutions.
Connect Directly with Experts: Get your most pressing questions answered by Microsoft product experts and receive best practices for deploying these tools in public sector environments.

Don't miss this opportunity! RSVP here to secure your spot and be part of the conversation shaping the future of AI in government.

Join Us in Reston for Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC Readiness Days!

Sarah_Gilbert — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:26:13 GMT

Learn how AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC can tackle public sector challenges at our in-person event on October 15th, 16th, or 17th in Reston, VA! Tailored for IT professionals, you'll gain practical insights, engage with experts, and explore real-world solutions.

Spaces are limited! Reserve your spot today and get all the details in our blog post: Read More Here.

CART blocked in Town Hall

BenD2160 — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 20:02:30 GMT

When trying to turn on CART captions for a Town Hall meeting as the owner I get the error message "This option is locked for town halls" but it worked for me previously and everything online says it should work. Help!

What happened to the monthly updates in the Public Sector Blog?

Llysight — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 20:21:40 GMT

Haven't seen a new "Microsoft 365 US Public Sector Roadmap Newsletter" in a while. It was a very valuable resource, compiling all the GCC updates in one centralized location.

Will it be continued?

CMMC Workbook

Dean_Gross — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 17:57:55 GMT

Does anyone know why the CMMC workbook is located in Microsoft Sentinel instead of in Defender for Cloud? Firms that are not using Sentinel cannot use this potentially helpful tool.

Will that workbook function if it is stored elsewhere in Azure?

safety course in chennai

safety07 — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 05:33:32 GMT

What is the NEBOSH Course and its benefits?

The NEBOSH (National Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health) course is a globally recognized qualification that provides comprehensive training in health, safety, and environmental management. NEBOSH courses are designed to equip individuals with the knowledge and skills to manage workplace risks effectively and ensure compliance with health and safety regulations.

Types of NEBOSH Courses

NEBOSH International General Certificate (IGC) in Occupational Health and Safety:

Aimed at individuals seeking a broad understanding of health and safety principles and practices.
Covers topics such as risk assessment, hazard control, health and safety management systems, and workplace hazards.

NEBOSH National General Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety:
Similar to the IGC but tailored to UK-specific legislation and practices.

Suitable for those working in the UK or dealing with UK regulations.

NEBOSH International Diploma in Occupational Health and Safety:

An advanced qualification for professionals seeking to deepen their knowledge and expertise.
Covers complex health and safety issues, risk management, and the development of safety policies and strategies.

NEBOSH Certificate in Fire Safety and Risk Management:

Focuses on fire safety management and fire risk assessment.
Ideal for individuals responsible for fire safety in their organizations.

NEBOSH Environmental Management Certificate:

Provides knowledge on environmental management and sustainability practices.
Suitable for those looking to integrate environmental management into their roles.
https://safetyengineeringcourseinchennai.in/fire-and-safety-courses/

Windows Server CAL rights M365 G3

SuzanneBemo — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 21:30:43 GMT

This resource shows that Windows Server CAL rights are included in M365 E3 licenses. Microsoft Product Terms

Is it safe to say that the M365 G3 license includes the Server CAL rights as well? We have reviewed the government plan service descriptions as well as the Product Terms (but there is no entry for GCC).

Could someone please direct me to a resource? Thank you.