Partner Blog | Partners agree: Benefits packages deliver ROI
Microsoft partner benefits packages start at $350 and, when fully utilized, can unlock significant value for partners. They empower you to run your business more efficiently, accelerate skilling and innovation, and improve solution quality. Partner benefits provide Microsoft partners with access to discounted product licenses, Azure credits, technical consultations, and support. They are available across three package tiers: Partner Launch Benefits, Partner Success Core Benefits, and Partner Success Expanded Benefits, so partners can choose the right level of benefits for their stage of growth. New research from Omdia and IDC shows that when partners actively use these benefits, the impact can be significant. Omdia found that 90% of surveyed partners reported some level of ROI from their package investment, and 83% of surveyed partners reported that benefits packages contributed to business growth, with growth of at least 30% in some scenarios. 1 According to a new IDC Info Snapshot, sponsored by Microsoft, partners can realize potential retail savings of $17,342* with Partner Launch Benefits, $99,407 with Partner Success Core Benefits, and $578,972 with Partner Success Expanded Benefits when they maximize package utilization.**² The message across both studies is clear: the strongest returns come when partner benefits packages are used as growth infrastructure, not simply as a set of discounts. Partners are using their packages to operate as Customer Zero (using Microsoft solutions internally before taking them to market), accelerate innovation, move faster to market, and build repeatable, high-margin offerings that strengthen their business. That Customer Zero approach is already showing up in how partners run their own businesses. “We have treated the Microsoft partner benefits package as a core operating component of our infrastructure. It’s not just a perk. It is something where we embrace it as Customer Zero.” – Jason Price, CEO, Aston-Price This blog shares a practical playbook you can use to turn your partner benefits package into repeatable motions toward Frontier transformation: across internal skilling, solution development, go-to-market, and delivery. Continue reading blog here Be sure to join our Partner benefits discussion board if you have questions or want to connect to subject matter experts!
Introducing Windows Ready Print and Modernized Driver Selection
Windows Ready Print: A clearer path to modern printing on Windows Printing on Windows is evolving. As printing environments modernize, customers and partners are asking for solutions that are reliable, secure, and easy to manage across today’s devices. To reflect this shift and make the value of our platform clearer, we are evolving the Modern Print Platform under a new name: Windows Ready Print. Windows Ready Print highlights what matters most: a streamlined, dependable printing experience built for modern Windows environments. It represents our commitment to simplifying printing, aligning modern standards, and delivering consistent, forward-looking experiences for users, IT admins, and partners. Driving the transition to Windows Ready Print with driver selection controls At the core of Windows Ready Print is a transition away from legacy, third party drive-based workflows toward modern, standards-based printing with IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) using the Windows inbox IPP printer driver. Starting in July 2026, new printer installations will default to Windows Ready Print where supported, enabling a simpler and more reliable setup experience. This change reduces the need for traditional driver management and lays the foundation for a more scalable and predictable print experience. However, we recognize that not all environments can move to Windows Ready Print immediately. To ensure a smooth and flexible transition, we are introducing the ability for users to configure Windows to install their printers using Windows Ready Print (if supported) or the OEM printer driver during installation. You can find this setting under Settings > Bluetooth & Devices > Printers & Scanners > Default install printer using Windows Ready Print. This feature enables users and IT admins to control how Windows selects drivers when installing printers: When “Default install printers using Windows Ready Print” is enabled, Windows Ready Print installation is preferred When “Default install printers using Windows Ready Print” is disabled, default driver selection is used The configuration applies to new printer installations only, without affecting existing devices. To enable/disable this feature via group policy, go to: Launch Group Policy Editor Navigate to Local Computer Policy -> Administrative Templates -> Printers Find and select 'Configure Windows Ready Print driver ranking' -> double click to open it Select 'Enabled' (if you wish to enable Windows Ready Print driver selection) or 'Disabled' (if you wish to explicitly disable Windows Ready Print driver selection). Select Apply Select OK How driver selection configuration works with Windows protected print mode When you enable "Default install printers using Windows Ready Print”, new printer installations will default to Windows inbox IPP printer driver when supported. When you enable Windows protected print mode, printers are exclusively installed with Windows Ready Print. Devices that do not support Windows Ready Print cannot be installed. Note: When you’ve enabled Windows protected print mode, you cannot disable "Default install printers using Windows Ready Print".Partner Blog | Copilot monetization for SMBs: Convert renewal momentum into wins
Partners serving small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) continue to tell us that customers are excited about AI, but they want clear guidance on what to buy, how to buy it, and how to justify the investment. For partners, this creates a critical opportunity to simplify the path to decision and translate that momentum into measurable wins. This is the third installment in our Copilot series focused on SMB monetization. Earlier posts covered how Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat introduces AI in an approachable way and how Microsoft 365 Copilot Business embeds AI into everyday work, and how agents extend AI into core processes. This month, we are focusing on the moment that matters most: converting interest into action. Stage 3: Empower & Achieve is the inflection point Stage 3 of the Microsoft Customer Engagement Methodology (MCEM), Empower & Achieve, is built for customers approaching a decision point. This is where partners can accelerate deals and create a more predictable path to conversion. As customers evaluate their options, partners can help move them forward by: Bundling Microsoft 365 Copilot Business with Microsoft 365 at renewal or upgrade moments Reducing friction with promotion kits, in-market offers, and CSP incentives Reinforcing value with ROI tools, business case builders, and customer success stories These actions help simplify decision-making while addressing the two things SMB buyers care most about: clarity and confidence. This is also where Customer Zero partners stand out. By sharing first-hand experience with Copilot, partners can bring practical insights into conversations and build the trust customers need to move forward. With the recent announcements on transitioning Microsoft 365 Business with Copilot promotion bundles into two durable SKUs, partners are well positioned to help organizations scale from intent to action, while giving organizations the controls to scale AI responsibly. Stage 3 is also where you can align go-to-market efforts to a repeatable framework. When you consistently apply the Empower & Achieve motion, you can improve conversion at renewal and upgrade moments, strengthen your value story, and create a clear on ramp to ongoing adoption and expansion. Continue reading blog herePartner 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 hereMaking it easier to identify Windows protected print mode compatible devices
As the Windows print ecosystem continues transitioning away from legacy driver‑based architectures, Windows Protected Print Mode (WPP) helps improve system security by enforcing use of the Windows modern print stack and introducing additional security features. To increase transparency for users and support industry readiness for modern print environments, Windows is introducing a new compatibility icon that can be found in Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Printers & scanners: This icon appears next to each installed printer that supports Windows protected print mode, which requires IPP capabilities. To provide the best experience for customers using Windows protected print mode, printer manufacturers can create Print Support Apps (PSAs) to replicate driver customization features.
From insight to action: how Adobe and Microsoft are helping marketers move faster with AI
Today’s marketing leaders are under pressure to do more than ever—deliver meaningful personalization, accelerate execution, and prove measurable business impact. At the same time, teams are navigating increasing complexity: fragmented data, disconnected tools, and insights that arrive too late to act on. AI can change this—but only when it’s embedded directly into how people already work. That’s why Microsoft and Adobe are deepening our partnership: bringing customer experience intelligence, AI-powered workflows, and enterprise-grade AI directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot—so teams can move from insight to alignment to execution in one continuous workflow. The result is faster decisions, more coordinated execution, and clearer business outcomes—without breaking flow or context. Bringing customer experience intelligence into the flow of work Marketing teams don’t struggle because they lack data. They struggle because insights live in one place, collaboration in another, and execution somewhere else entirely. That disconnect slows teams down and creates unnecessary friction between analysis and action. Together, Adobe and Microsoft are changing that dynamic by connecting Adobe’s customer experience capabilities with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Cowork—so insight, collaboration, and next-best action can happen where work already happens: in Copilot Chat and in everyday apps like Teams, Word, and PowerPoint. Marketers can ask questions, explore insights, align with teammates, and take action without jumping between tools—turning intelligence into impact at the moment it matters. Adobe Marketing Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot: now generally available A major milestone in this journey is the general availability of the Adobe Marketing Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot, now available via Microsoft Commercial Marketplace. The Adobe Marketing Agent brings Adobe customer experience intelligence directly into Copilot, enabling marketing teams to: Accelerate time from insight to decision Move seamlessly from analysis to execution Keep humans firmly in control, with AI supporting—not replacing—decision‑making Importantly, the agent is enterprise-ready by design. IT administrators can deploy and manage the experience through the Microsoft 365 admin center, ensuring security, governance, and compliance at scale. Expanding executive experiences with Copilot Cowork Looking ahead, Adobe skills designed for customer experience orchestration will be accessible in Copilot Cowork—in a future release. This upcoming experience will enable customer experience leaders to engage with customer experience insights in a more direct, conversational way, bringing strategic visibility into the same Copilot environments where decisions are made and actions are coordinated. Built on Azure to scale securely and responsibly The technology foundation of this innovation is Azure. Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator, and Adobe AI Agents are built on Azure and leverage Azure AI models, providing the scalability, security, and reliability enterprises require. By running on Azure, these agentic experiences benefit from Microsoft’s global infrastructure, enterprise‑grade security, and responsible AI commitments—supporting customer trust as organizations scale AI across their business. Designed for interoperability across agent ecosystems Modern enterprises don’t operate in a single ecosystem—and their agents shouldn’t either. Adobe agents are built to interoperate with agents created using Microsoft Azure AI Foundry or Copilot Studio, enabling customers to orchestrate richer, cross‑functional workflows across marketing, sales, service, and operations. This architecture is designed to enable organizations to compose agentic solutions that reflect how work actually happens—across systems, teams, and business processes. Moving from experimentation to execution This partnership reflects a broader shift in how organizations adopt AI—moving from experimentation to embedded, enterprise‑ready execution. By bringing the full power of Adobe Experience Platform together with Microsoft’s AI platform, cloud infrastructure, and Copilot experiences, we’re helping teams move faster with clarity, confidence, and control. This is how AI becomes not just powerful—but practical. Learn more Adobe + Microsoft partnership page Adobe Marketing Agent for Microsoft Copilot pagePartner Blog | Streamline your campaign execution with Partner Marketing Center Pro
Your customers are moving quickly, and their expectations for relevance, speed, and clear business value are rising. For partners, that means marketing execution needs to move faster too, from campaign discovery, to planning, and localization, lead generation, performance tracking, and optimization. Since we introduced Partner Marketing Center Pro, the focus has stayed the same: reduce friction so you can find the right campaign, tailor it to your business, launch with confidence, and understand what to improve next. Partner Marketing Center Pro brings the campaign lifecycle into one AI-powered marketing hub so you can save time, reduce manual effort, lower localization costs, and get to market faster without stitching together multiple tools. If you are already running campaigns, PMC Pro is built to shorten the path from idea to execution and give marketing leaders better visibility into what is working. If you are building your marketing muscle, it gives you a clear starting point with proven campaign structures, Microsoft-aligned messaging, and the tools to customize, launch, measure, and improve over time. Partner Marketing Center Pro simplifies campaign execution Partner Marketing Center Pro Is the unified, AI-powered marketing hub designed to streamline end-to-end planning, activation, execution, and performance tracking. It enables partners to reduce manual production work, scale demand generation more consistently, and move from campaign idea to customer engagement faster. In this video walkthrough, Maddie Cupchak from Pax8 shows how PMC Pro brings campaign discovery, AI-assisted customization, translation, publishing workflows, lead engagement visibility, and reporting into one unified experience. Continue reading blog herePartner Blog | Microsoft Build 2026: Turning innovation into partner growth
Microsoft Build 2026 brought together developers at a pivotal moment. AI is reshaping how applications are built, scaled, secured, and operated, and developers are moving from creating simple assistants to long-running agentic systems that can execute real workflows. For Microsoft partners, the opportunity is clear. Customers are asking for more than experimentation. They want to move from pilots to production and to govern agentic systems, connect AI to trusted business context, and scale securely across their organization. Now more than ever, partners play a critical role in turning platform innovation into customer impact. You modernize the cloud and data foundation. You build and secure applications. You connect solutions to business outcomes. You make customer transformation real. At Build, Microsoft anchored the developer opportunity around three connected themes: intelligence grounded in your organization’s context, a full stack that gives developers choice with enterprise control, and new frontiers where agentic systems expand what builders can create. For partners, these themes translate directly into growth opportunities across AI advisory, app modernization, data, security, infrastructure, Microsoft Marketplace, and managed services. Build business-ready agents on the Microsoft agent platform As customers move from pilots to production, context has replaced model capability as a primary barrier to adoption: how agents understand the business, access trusted knowledge, apply the right controls, and coordinate action across workflows. Microsoft Build 2026 introduced new capabilities that give developers and partners more ways to build agentic systems on a governed, enterprise-ready AI platform. Microsoft IQ is the enterprise intelligence layer of the Microsoft stack, giving Copilot and agents a shared, continuously updated understanding of how an organization works. Microsoft IQ brings together signals already present across a customer’s Microsoft estate: how people work in Microsoft 365 through Work IQ, how the business is modeled in Microsoft Fabric through Fabric IQ, and how knowledge is distributed across data, applications, and the web through Foundry IQ. Web IQ adds real-time grounding from the web, giving agents access to both enterprise knowledge and world knowledge. For partners, Microsoft IQ addresses a key barrier in agent development: lack of business context. By giving agents a shared understanding of people, data, processes, organizational knowledge, and real-time business signals, you can deliver more scalable and reusable agents grounded in real business operations. This creates services opportunities around agent strategy, process design, data readiness, semantic model readiness, governance, implementation, and ongoing optimization. Work IQ brings workplace intelligence to agents by building a semantic understanding across email, calendar, meetings, chats, files, people, collaboration patterns, and line-of-business systems. The Work IQ APIs will be generally available on June 16, 2026, giving developers a production-ready way for agents to interact with Microsoft 365 data and apps. The APIs include four domains: Chat, Context, Tools, and Workspaces. Work IQ also gives partners a practical way to build agents that are both useful and governable. Agent operations stay within the Microsoft 365 tenant trust boundary, and actions are auditable and discoverable. The APIs use consumption-based pricing denominated in Copilot credits, creating partner conversations around cost management, governance design, agent adoption planning, and workload prioritization. Foundry IQ extends this context layer by grounding agents in enterprise knowledge from documents, emails, meetings, operational data, and the live web. Foundry IQ knowledge bases are generally available with service-level agreement (SLA) coverage, stable APIs, compliance certifications, and a Foundry IQ Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for MCP-compatible hosts. For partners, Foundry IQ creates a repeatable way to build retrieval and grounding into agent solutions without rebuilding knowledge infrastructure for every customer scenario. You can package services around enterprise knowledge mapping, source integration, retrieval design, security configuration, and agent evaluation. Microsoft Scout also showed how this intelligence layer can come together in a new class of proactive agents. Scout is Microsoft’s enterprise-grade, always-on autopilot personal agent, built on open-source OpenClaw, with identity, policy, and security controls built in. It works on a user’s behalf with persistent context and memory across Microsoft 365. Continue reading herePartner Blog | How partners are using AI as a strategic accelerator to drive business goals
Partners from across the Americas have been sharing their innovative AI concepts with us this year. We’re seeing several trends, but one has been particularly prominent: using AI to support business acceleration. From brainstorming to evaluating ideas, partners are using tools like Microsoft Copilot to turn concepts into action faster. In this blog, we’ll explore how Microsoft partners like BNY, Cisco, and GFT Technologies are integrating AI into their planning and strategy efforts. Reclaiming time for innovation at BNY Before AI, analyzing data for insights was a time-consuming and resource-intensive pursuit. Although there were tools available, it was still a highly manual process. AI supports partners in potentially cutting time to insight from days to minutes. Partners still need the right data and prompts, but the potential for faster and better responses is there. However, speed alone doesn’t create a competitive advantage. Faster insights may lead to greater output, but that doesn’t ensure better outcomes. The shift happens when that reclaimed time is deliberately redirected toward higher-value work such as revisiting business priorities, identifying new growth opportunities, and aligning teams around what matters most. In practice, this means using AI not just to answer questions but to inform which questions should be asked next. “AI has changed leadership in a way that we can move forward in our strategic initiatives,” says Deanna Lanier, Head of Data & Analytics Strategy and New Product Innovation at BNY. “Now, we can place more innovation into our processes, and we can certainly start thinking about the organization and how we change it from a digital perspective.” Enabling insights is just the first step in BNY’s journey. The financial institution is reviewing both internal and external operations through an AI lens. Some opportunities to enhance existing practices have already been identified. With faster time to insight, BNY now has time to convert those opportunities into action. Using AI as a brainstorming partner at Cisco There are many ways to use AI, but research seems to be the most well-known. Many newer users see AI as an advanced search engine. Experienced users don’t simply ask it to generate content; however, they use it as a strategic accelerator. Continue reading blog hereGet ready for the 2026 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards: Nominations open June 1
From innovative solutions to high-impact services, the 2026 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards recognize and celebrate partner success in delivering meaningful customer outcomes across solution areas, industries, and regions. They’re an opportunity to highlight the exceptional work partners deliver and the many ways you’re driving Frontier Transformation—turning AI ambition into measurable, high-impact business outcomes for customers. If your organization has delivered transformative solutions on Microsoft platforms over the past year, now’s the time to begin shaping your strongest submission. The nomination window for the 2026 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards opens June 1, 2026, and closes July 7, 2026. Winners will be announced in November 2026, timed to celebrate with the global partner ecosystem at Microsoft Ignite. Review the 2026 award guidelines and resources linked at the end of this blog to begin preparing your organization’s submission early. What’s new for 2026 Across the ecosystem, partners continue to advance what’s possible for customers. Some are building innovative solutions and IP. Others are delivering high-impact services that modernize operations, strengthen security, and accelerate adoption at scale using Microsoft technology. The Partner of the Year Awards recognize these achievements and celebrate the breadth of partner innovation, execution, and customer impact. Award categories highlight how partners are delivering customer outcomes across solution areas and industries. The awards also recognize partners worldwide through the Country and Region Partner of the Year Awards, reflecting the global reach and local impact of partner delivery. New awards for 2026 include: Frontier Transformation: Recognizes partners who innovate with Microsoft AI, spanning Copilot, Foundry, and agent-based solutions, to deliver end-to-end customer transformation and create value through scalable, real-world business impact. Commercial Device Channel: Recognizes partners who deliver exceptional impact across commercial device sales motions, driving customer transformation through Copilot+ PCs, AI-powered devices, Windows 11, Surface, and OEM portfolios. In addition to updated category awards, a regional award tier recognizes partner impact across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia regions. Why nominations matter A strong nomination does more than compete for an award; it helps you clearly articulate your value to customers and Microsoft. By capturing your strongest work, you sharpen how you tell the story, from the customer challenge through the solution, delivery, and outcomes you achieved together. Finalists and winners gain broader recognition with Microsoft and customers. That recognition can increase credibility with customers, create stronger visibility with Microsoft field teams, and ultimately translate into expanded business opportunities. How to build a strong submission The winning submissions rarely come together at the last minute. Use the time before the nomination window opens to align your story, validate the details, and establish a simple internal process so your team can execute quickly once nominations open. Choose the category where your story is strongest and most differentiated. Start by reviewing the guidelines, which include details on each award. Focus on one flagship customer story or solution motion that clearly demonstrates what’s different about your approach and why it mattered to the customer. Document measurable outcomes and results. Strong nominations are grounded in specific proof points, so the key elements of your story should include: The customer scenario and the stakes. What you delivered and how it was deployed. How you used Microsoft technology to drive outcomes. Evidence of results, adoption, and business impact (as permitted and approved for sharing). Start the process for customer reference approvals early so you don’t lose time later. Treat your nomination like a small release. Assign a single owner, identify contributors (delivery, engineering, marketing, customer success), and set internal milestones that land well ahead of the July 7 submission deadline. Build in time for review so your submission is crisp, consistent, and complete. As you prepare your submission, use the following resources to plan, validate, and submit with confidence: Review the submission guidelines. Understand the official rules. Explore the awards overview. Check out the FAQ. Visit the awards website. Review the 2026 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards guidelines and resources now to begin shaping your strongest submission ahead of the nomination window opening on June 1. Read this article on the Microsoft Partner Blog
