Spin Up MongoDB Atlas Clusters in Azure (Preview)
Your data platform just got a lot closer to home. You can now create MongoDB Atlas projects and deploy clusters directly from the Azure portal - the same place you already manage the rest of your cloud. This builds on the general availability of MongoDB Atlas as an Azure Native Integration. Back then, you could provision an Atlas organization from Azure and manage billing through the Azure Marketplace. Now the workflow goes all the way down to the thing that runs your app: the cluster. Atlas Projects & Clusters An Atlas Project is a logical container that groups clusters and related resources within your Atlas organization. Create one per app, team, or environment and then deploy clusters into it. An Atlas cluster is a fully managed MongoDB deployment running in the cloud. It is where your data lives and where it scales, replicates, backs itself up, and serves every read and write your application makes. Getting the cluster right is what turns a project into a production-ready app: Performance & scale - pick a tier that matches your traffic, from free experiments to high-throughput dedicated workloads. Data residency - the Azure region you choose for the cluster is where your data is stored, so you stay aligned with compliance requirements. Resilience - clusters come with backups and health state you can view at a glance. Organization - clusters live inside projects, giving you clean logical boundaries for teams, environments, and apps. What you can do now, right from Azure Create and browse Atlas projects from your MongoDB Atlas resource. Deploy clusters - Free (M0), Flex, or dedicated M10 / M30 tiers. Choose the Azure region where each cluster's data lives. View cluster details: MongoDB version, region, tier, backups, and state. Keep billing unified through your existing Azure Marketplace plan. Get started in minutes If you already have a MongoDB Atlas resource in Azure, you're four clicks from a running cluster: In the Azure portal, open your MongoDB Atlas resource (search All resources if you need to find it). In the service menu, select Projects (preview), then + Create project and give it a unique name Open the project and, in the Clusters section, select + Create Cluster. Pick a tier, enter a cluster name and Azure region, and select Create. That's it - your cluster deploys. Don't have an Atlas resource yet? Search for MongoDB Atlas in the Azure portal and create one against your subscription first to follow the steps above. You'll need the Owner role on the Atlas organization to create projects and clusters. Choosing your cluster tier Start small and grow. You can begin free and move up as your app takes off. Built for what's next: vector search & AI agents A cluster is the foundation for AI-powered apps. MongoDB Atlas brings native vector search right alongside your operational data, so you can build semantic search and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) experiences that ground large language models in Foundry in your own enterprise data. That story goes further with agents. As covered in Build and connect Microsoft Foundry agents to MongoDB Atlas, the MongoDB MCP Server is available in the Microsoft Foundry Tool Catalog - letting agents run vector search and database operations against the very clusters you just deployed, with enterprise-grade governance built in. Ready to build? Head to the Azure portal, create a project, and deploy your first cluster today. Start free, then scale when you're ready. Create projects and clusters in MongoDB Atlas — step-by-step docs MongoDB Atlas is generally available as an Azure Native Integration Connect Microsoft Foundry agents to MongoDB Atlas Create a free Azure accountComing soon: Updated Partner Center verification experience for the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program and Cloud Solution Providers
Starting July 28, 2026, we will be modernizing the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program and Cloud Solution Provider user experience in Partner Center to streamline how partners navigate vetting, along with a new look and feel and a more consistent verification flow. Learn more Be sure to follow our Cloud Solution Provider Partner discussion board where you connect with subject matter experts and other CSP partners.Sizing Copilot Credits for Cowork? Let Your Users Use Cowork Investment Advisor Agent.
Right, let's talk about a headache. If you're helping a customer allocate Copilot Credits for M365 Copilot Cowork, you have to size it all up first — and doing that by hand is a fiddly, time-consuming job. Here's the problem, and a much easier way to solve it. Start with the Cowork Estimator Here's the good news: you don't have to start from scratch. Microsoft has published the Customer Cowork Estimator — a handy tool that turns personas, prompt complexity and expected usage into an estimated credit number. It's the perfect place to begin, and it does the core maths for you. To get the most out of it, you just need to feed it good inputs — and that's where a little groundwork comes in. For each part of the business, you'll want to: Work out who's who. There are four types of user — corporate knowledge workers, management and senior leaders, customer-facing folks, and technical staff. Count how many of each. Quick for a small team, a bit more involved for a big one. Pin down what they'd genuinely use Cowork for. The real multi-step workflows that hop across apps and actually do things — not just a quick chat or a summary. Judge how heavy each workflow is. Light, Medium or Heavy — since each level uses a different number of credits per run. Estimate how often it runs. Daily adds up to a lot of runs a month; weekly is far fewer. The estimator handles the sums beautifully once those inputs are in. Gathering the inputs themselves — persona by persona, workflow by workflow, across a few thousand people — is simply the part that takes time. And that's exactly where this agent lends a hand: it builds on the estimator by automating the groundwork that feeds it. How this agent helps This agent takes on that groundwork for you. Instead of sizing everyone from the outside, the admin simply switches the agent on for every user. Each person then sizes their own needs — and the agent does the clever bits for them, ready to drop into the estimator. Here's what it does behind the scenes: Spots the right persona. It works out which of the four personas each user fits. Finds the real workflows. It looks at the top Cowork scenarios the user would actually run. Keeps it honest. It checks each one is a genuine Cowork job — several steps, more than one app, real actions and a bit of decision-making — not something a Scheduled Prompt or plain Copilot Chat could do just as well. Grounds it in evidence. It reads the signals from recent work — emails, meetings, documents and Teams chats — so the estimate is based on what people actually do, not thin air. Does the sums. It maps each workflow's complexity to credits per run and totals it up — giving you numbers that line up neatly with the estimator. Shows the value. It gives a view of pay-as-you-go versus a pre-purchase plan, and a sense of the return on the spend. Stays transparent. It states its assumptions, flags how confident it is, and sticks to permitted data and the usual privacy and compliance rules. And here's the kind of report it hands back — persona, the top workflows, complexity, credits, cost and a clear recommendation, all in one place: Why this approach works better So why hand it to the users? A few good reasons: More accurate. The numbers come from each person's real workload, not a top-down guess. Consistent by design. Everyone follows the same method — same personas, same complexity bands, same maths — so the results line up and roll into one clean figure. No over-buying. Because it weeds out the workflows that don't really need Cowork, your customer only pays for credits they'll genuinely use. A proper business case. You get cost clarity and a feel for the return, so you're handing over more than just a number. It scales. Ten users or ten thousand — the effort on your side stays much the same. It saves you hours. You swap manual sizing for gathering and rolling up. Your time goes on advising, not tallying. Not ready to roll it out? Other ways in If an admin isn't quite ready to switch the agent on for everyone, that's OK— there's no need to. This agent is an M365 Copilot agent, and it has free access to Work IQ — the same engine that will eventually power Cowork. Because that access is free, the agent can read how people really work and take the guesswork right out of sizing. And there's more than one way to get at it: Build it with Agent Builder. Ready-made instructions, a description and a starter prompt are all sitting in the GitHub repo. Anyone with access to M365 Copilot can pop them into Agent Builder and stand the agent up in minutes. Prefer not to build an agent? Just use the prompt. There's a comprehensive prompt you can drop straight into the M365 Copilot Chat experience. Same sizing, same evidence — no agent to create. Ready to give it a go? Whichever route suits you best, getting started is dead simple. If you're rolling the agent out to your users: Have a quick word with your customer's admin about switching the agent on for their users. Let each person size their own Cowork needs. Gather it all up and roll it into a single estimate. Prefer to keep it in your own hands? Build the agent from the GitHub repo with Agent Builder, or drop the comprehensive prompt into M365 Copilot Chat — you'll get to the same place with even less setup. THE BOTTOM LINE That's the heavy lifting done for you. You'll save yourself hours, spare yourself the guesswork, and hand your customer a credit plan they can genuinely trust — with the numbers and the business case sitting right behind it. Give it a spin on your next engagement and see how much quicker it gets you there. Resources Everything you need is in one place: Customer Cowork Estimator — https://aka.ms/CustomerCoworkEstimator GitHub repo — agent instructions, description, starter prompt and the full Copilot Chat prompt: Cowork Investment AssessmentPartner Blog | From Microsoft Build to AI implementation: Build the skills to lead Frontier Transformation
Microsoft Build showcased the next phase of AI transformation. Across AI platforms, agents, and secure development, one message came through: customers are moving from AI exploration to implementation. For partners, that shift creates a practical opportunity. Customers are looking for guidance on ways to design, deploy, manage, secure, and scale AI-powered solutions that create measurable business value. That takes skilled teams, repeatable delivery capabilities, and a clear path from learning to implementation. This month’s skilling updates focus on turning Build momentum into action. New Frontier Transformation Engineering resources, on-demand Frontier Transformation Summit content, upcoming certification preparation, Microskilling, and go-to-market assets give partners multiple ways to strengthen AI implementation capabilities and show customers they are ready to lead. Build Frontier Transformation Engineering capability Frontier Transformation describes the shift from AI pilots to embedded, governed operating models. It requires technical depth across agents, Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft IQ, security, governance, and business process transformation. The Frontier Transformation Engineer Badge is designed for technical professionals building this capability. It validates the skills needed to design and deliver AI agents across Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, and the broader Frontier stack. For partners, the badge signals readiness to move from AI vision to execution. To support that journey, all of the Frontier Transformation Engineer Summit sessions are now available on demand, giving your teams a chance to revisit key content or catch up on sessions they missed. Use the recordings to continue progressing toward badge attainment and prepare your teams for the AI implementation work customers are prioritizing now. Continue reading hereFrontier Transformation campaign in a box now available in Partner Marketing Center
AI transformation is moving beyond isolated experimentation to organization-wide initiatives and customers are looking for partners who can help them scale. Organizations scaling AI are seeing measurable gains across productivity, efficiency, and customer engagement. To support this shift, the Frontier Transformation campaign in a box provides a ready-to-launch, co-branded marketing campaign aligned to Microsoft AI solutions. This campaign is aligned with the Frontier Success framework and engages customers as they advance in their AI maturity, with messaging that connects AI capabilities to real business context while reinforcing trust, governance, and security. Available in Partner Marketing Center Pro, the Frontier Transformation campaign in a box empowers you to go market faster, support lead generation, and build pipeline. Partner Marketing Center Pro is available to partners who have purchased a partner benefits package, attained a Solutions Partner designation or are enrolled in ISV Success. Explore Frontier Transformation campaign in a box.Ability Summit 2026: Accessibility-first innovation and your next partner opportunity
Accessibility is increasingly both a business imperative and a meaningful commercial opportunity for partners. At this year’s Microsoft Ability Summit, leaders across technology, education, and advocacy reinforced a clear point: accessibility-first innovation is creating new demand across AI, collaboration, learning, and customer experience. For partners, accessibility represents a clear opportunity to grow customer value. Accessibility-first innovation is becoming a mainstream expectation, opening opportunities to build differentiated services and solutions across AI, collaboration, learning, compliance, and customer experience. Organizations are increasingly viewing accessibility as part of a broader shift in how they approach AI, employee experience, and customer engagement. For partners, that shift creates an opportunity to lead higher-value conversations around innovation, trust, and long-term business impact. I encourage you to read Microsoft Chief Accessibility Officer Neil Barnett’s full recap of this year’s announcements and stories from the summit, including updates across AI, developer tools, Windows, devices, learning, Xbox, and inclusive packaging design. Why accessiblity matters for partners now Accessibility is becoming part of how customers evaluate experience quality, employee productivity, compliance expectations, and technology trust. Organizations are looking for technology that works consistently across real-world scenarios, roles, abilities, and environments. That expectation is accelerating as AI adoption grows. Accessibility is increasingly becoming part of how customers evaluate transformation readiness, technology trust, and the quality of the experiences they deliver across their organizations. A 2026 Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Microsoft found that assistive technology is already part of everyday work and life. Consumers reported using assistive features across at least six activities in the past month, on average. The same study found that 63% of respondents reported some level of difficulty with daily tasks related to vision, hearing, learning and cognition, mobility, and/or mental health. It also found that 71% of respondents would use assistive tools more often if enhanced with AI capabilities, and 55% said they feel a stronger commitment to employers when companies prioritize assistive tools and features. For partners, this points to a broader opportunity. Accessibility-first design can expand participation, strengthen employee and customer experiences, and build greater trust in technology, making it an increasingly important part of long-term transformation strategy. Where partners can lead The opportunity for partners is to bring accessibility into the conversations that are already shaping customer priorities, including AI transformation and adoption, modern work, application innovation, employee experience, customer engagement, and compliance. As accessibility becomes more central to business and technology strategy, partners can differentiate by making it part of the broader value they bring to customers. Partners that bring accessibility-first innovation into these conversations can deepen trust, expand strategic relevance, and create more differentiated value over time. This opportunity spans organizations of every size. Across both SMB and enterprise customers, accessibility is increasingly part of how leaders think about growth, workforce experience, customer connection, and technology modernization, and the Microsoft partner ecosystem is well positioned to meet that need. Partner opportunities in Microsoft Marketplace Microsoft Marketplace offers a useful view into how partners are translating accessibility-first innovation into practical customer value. The examples below illustrate how that opportunity is taking shape across different business and technology scenarios. Level Access makes digital accessibility a streamlined, scalable part of everyday operations The Level Access platform supports a continuous approach to accessibility, embedded into design, development, governance, and training workflows. Unlike point tools or episodic audits, this integrated solution helps organizations accelerate remediation, reduce risk, and demonstrate progress over time. Organizations can extend the power of the Level Access platform through private offers with capabilities such as LevelDocs for accessible content creation and remediation in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; LevelCI for automated web accessibility testing within CI/CD pipelines; and Mobile Testing for native iOS and Android accessibility across physical and virtual devices. Retain Connector by Inclusively Many organizations have invested heavily in benefits, workplace accommodations, mental health resources, and employee support programs. But employees, especially those navigating disabilities or workplace barriers, often don't know what is available or how to access it. Retain Connector by Inclusively closes that gap directly inside the tools employees already use. Deployed within Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 with no heavy integrations required, Retain acts as a workforce intelligence layer that lets employees describe their needs in plain language and get routed to the right benefits and resources through Inclusively's Success Enabler framework without needing to know what to search for or where to look. For employees who may feel hesitant to disclose a need or navigate a fragmented benefits landscape, the anonymous, conversational experience lowers the barrier to getting support. For HR and people leaders, Retain surfaces something equally valuable: real-time, aggregated insights into the benefits and barriers employees are actually experiencing. That intelligence helps organizations understand unmet demand, allocate benefits investments more effectively, and demonstrate a genuine commitment to inclusion not just in policy, but in practice. Creating differentiated value through accessibility offerings Taken together, these examples reinforce a broader point: accessibility is becoming an increasingly important part of how partners create differentiated value across both employee and customer experiences. Marketplace solutions can strengthen how partners bring accessibility-first innovation into customer conversations and platform experiences. The Microsoft Accessibility Partner Onboarding Guide also provides a useful foundation for partners looking to expand their accessibility focus on Microsoft platforms. The opportunity ahead for partners Accessibility is becoming an increasingly important part of the conversations customers are having around AI, modern work, security, application development, and industry transformation. The opportunity is not to treat accessibility as a separate conversation. It is to make accessibility part of how customers modernize, adopt AI, and build more trusted digital experiences. Ability Summit 2026 reinforced that accessibility-first innovation is shaping the future of AI, productivity, learning, collaboration, and end-customer experience. For partners, the opportunity is to turn that innovation into real customer impact. It is about building AI-powered experiences that are more trusted, more inclusive, and more effective for the people they serve. As Frontier Transformation accelerates AI adoption, partners are uniquely positioned to turn accessibility-first innovation into lasting business impact deepening customer relationships, expanding strategic relevance, and building stronger momentum as accessibility-first expectations continue to rise for our customers. Additional resources Read the Ability Summit 2026 blog by Neil Barnett, Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft. Explore the Forrester Consulting thought leadership paper commissioned by Microsoft, May 2026. Visit the Unique Unites Us accessibility hub. Watch for Ability Summit sessions to be available on demand in the coming weeks.Reminder: Become a sponsor of the Microsoft AI Tour
Make your mark on the 2026–2027 Microsoft AI Tour. This one‑day event series is traveling to 30+ cities in priority markets around the globe, and you have the opportunity to become a sponsor. Sponsors can accelerate pipeline through high-impact, in-person experiences that help customers make confident, informed technology solution decisions. Packages start at USD5,000. Review the sponsorship preview to learn more.Differentiate yourself for the AI era—earn your Frontier Transformation Engineer badge
Each session of the Frontier Transformation Engineer Summit is designed for you to build the skills to advance your Frontier Engineering journey and accelerate progress toward earning your Frontier Transformation Engineer badge. With this badge, you can validate that you have the expertise to deliver agentic AI solutions at the hypervelocity that customers expect, with the breadth of the Microsoft technology stack to support you. Here’s how you can keep building your AI capability: View the summit sessions on demand. Work toward earning the Frontier Transformation Engineer badge. Join us at MCAPS Start for Partners on July 22 to refresh your go-to-market approach for the next year.Partner Blog | Building AI-ready applications on open, enterprise-grade Azure platforms
Microsoft Build 2026 reinforced a practical reality for organizations moving from AI experimentation to production: AI is only as strong as the foundation it runs on. Customers need modern databases, governed data, secure infrastructure, and developer experiences that can carry performing AI-enabled applications at scale into production with confidence. The public preview announcements of Azure HorizonDB and Azure Linux, along with the general availability of Azure Container Linux, show how Microsoft is investing in open platforms, developer ecosystems, and enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure for AI-ready applications. These announcements also point to a broader shift: open source has become a strategic foundation for enterprise modernization, innovation, and strategic growth. These announcements give partners a straightforward way to connect customer AI goals to the open, secure, enterprise-ready platforms needed for production. They also create timely opportunities to engage customers on data modernization, AI-ready application development, secure infrastructure, and cloud-native operations. What was announced at Build 2026 Azure HorizonDB: A new standard for AI-native, enterprise PostgreSQL Azure HorizonDB enters public preview as a new PostgreSQL cloud database service engineered for performance, scale, and modern AI-powered application needs. For business leaders thinking about data strategy, this is significant. Organizations are under pressure to modernize legacy databases and support intelligent applications without sacrificing resilience, governance, or developer productivity. Azure HorizonDB is designed to address those priorities with a platform that can scale storage automatically for large enterprise workloads, scale compute across primary and replica nodes, and bring AI-native capabilities directly into the database layer. What stands out is that Azure HorizonDB gives enterprises a way to simplify architecture while also accelerating innovation. Features such as advanced filtered vector search, in-database AI model management, Microsoft Entra ID integration, and GitHub Copilot integration through the PostgreSQL extension for Visual Studio Code position it as more than a database modernization story. Developers can use Microsoft 365 Copilot with live database context to generate schema-aware SQL, explore database structures, analyze and rewrite queries, and build against HorizonDB-specific capabilities without leaving Visual Studio Code. It is designed to bring together open-source PostgreSQL, enterprise security, AI readiness, and a more integrated developer experience in a single managed service. For business leaders, that can create a faster path from data estate modernization to measurable business outcomes. In Microsoft internal testing environments, Azure HorizonDB performed three times faster than self-managed PostgreSQL. For partners, the announcement creates an opportunity to engage customers in PostgreSQL modernization, intelligent application architecture, migration planning, performance optimization, and AI-enabled development. Azure Linux: Open-source infrastructure at enterprise scale The Azure Linux public preview announcement is meaningful for leaders focused on cloud efficiency, security, and platform consistency. Linux is already foundational to modern digital infrastructure, and two-thirds of customer cores in Azure run Linux. Now Azure Linux provides a first-party Linux distribution, purpose-built for Azure, and is available for Azure virtual machines (VMs), VM scale sets, and container images. We also announced Azure Container Linux (ACL), a secure, immutable container host designed to help platform teams run Kubernetes workloads at scale on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). By bringing Azure Linux forward as a more visible first-party platform choice, Microsoft is giving organizations a cloud-native operating system designed for modern workloads, including virtual machines (VMs), containers, and AI infrastructure. This matters because infrastructure choices increasingly shape agility, security posture, and operating cost. Azure Linux reflects the Microsoft focus on secure-by-default design, consistent servicing, and tighter alignment between the operating system and the Azure platform. For enterprises, that can translate into simpler operations and a more predictable foundation for cloud-native applications. These announcements reinforce what the Microsoft partner ecosystem and customer usage have shown for years: open-source infrastructure is foundational to Microsoft cloud strategy, as more than 65% of customer cores in Azure run Linux. Continue reading blog herePatner Case Study | Pax8
From their early days of selling Microsoft licenses to becoming a leading cloud commerce marketplace, Pax8 has always centered their business on the Microsoft partner experience. And their future-focused, partner first approach is redefining what it means to be a modern Cloud Solution Provider (CSP). For Pax8, the next evolution of that role is the Managed Intelligence Provider (MIP)—a partner that moves beyond managing systems to orchestrating intelligence and delivering measurable business outcomes with AI. While Pax8 delivers critical value through the streamlined billing and provisioning of Microsoft licenses, they also know that real business transformation doesn’t happen just because you’ve purchased software—it happens because of everything that comes after the sale. That’s why they invested heavily in enablement, education, and professional services. And that’s why today, they’re successfully cultivating an ecosystem that drives meaningful, scalable growth for partners and customers alike. Grounded in their experience as a member of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, Pax8’s approach has changed the trajectories of organizations like Sourcepass, a US-based managed services provider (MSP). Together, Sourcepass and Pax8 are making enterprise-grade AI accessible to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs)—but they’re going beyond traditional deployments. They’re delivering functional, agentic solutions designed to help customers realize value and support recurring service opportunities. Navigating AI adoption in the SMB reality SMBs are under constant pressure to do more with less, and the business outcomes they need the most—efficiency, strong security, scalable growth—are the exact outcomes AI can deliver. But with limited budgets, it’s hard for SMBs to justify the spend without clear proof of value—no matter how interested they might be. “SMBs hear about AI and want to be part of the wave,” said Elliott Eliason, Productivity Solution Consultant at Pax8, “but they don’t want to spend thousands without getting results back.” And once they’ve made an investment in AI, they likely lack the internal resources to operationalize it. That includes preparing data governance, validating security controls, and teaching teams new workflows. For a partner like Sourcepass, who primarily serves SMBs, this means their customers need trusted, strategic advisors who can guide them in turning AI’s potential into tangible outcomes. Continue reading here Explore all case studies or submit your own Subscribe to case studies tag to follow all new case study posts. Don't forget to follow this blog to receive email notifications of new stories!
