What's new for Microsoft partners: July 2026 edition
Your voice continues to shape how the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program evolves. This month’s update brings together the announcements, investments, and resources partners need now, so you can prioritize where to focus, what to skill, and which motions to scale as AI becomes central to more customer workloads. These updates reflect partner opportunity across the Microsoft ecosystem, grounded in partner feedback, and aligned to how customers are evolving their cloud and AI strategies. Spotlight Join us this month for MCAPS Start for Partners Join us for MCAPS Start for Partners, on Wednesday, July 22, 2026, starting at 7:00 AM Pacific Time. This digital event is designed to give partners a fast start to FY27; the event will share guidance on Microsoft priorities, innovation, investments, and go-to-market motions. Hear from Microsoft leaders and partner voices on where Microsoft is investing, what is changing, and how to activate AI-led growth opportunities. Whether your organization serves small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), enterprise customers, or both, your teams can use the event to align early, reduce rework, and move faster into the year ahead. Don’t miss the Microsoft Partner FY27 GTM Kickoff Event Join us on July 28, 2026, to learn about the go-to-market (GTM) priorities and initiatives planned for FY27 across Microsoft AI Business Solutions, Microsoft Commercial Cloud and AI, and Microsoft Security. Sign up for a double-click on priorities shared at MCAPS Start for Partners and kickstart your GTM plans and tactics for the new fiscal year. Continue reading blog hereMicrosoft Partner Code of Conduct Update
Microsoft is updating the Partner Code of Conduct (PCoC) to clarify expectations for partner compliance, effective August 1, 2026. What’s new The following provision is being added to the Governance section of the PCoC: Microsoft Partners may be required to participate in, and successfully complete anti-corruption and remediation programs related to this Partner Code of Conduct or other Microsoft partner programs or offers. Such remediation programs may address Partners’ business controls, training, and assistance obligations. These programs and trainings are separate and additional to any standard compliance training required as part of the Partner Code of Conduct. Microsoft Partners will fully cooperate with assigned anti-corruption and remediation programs, which may include, but are not limited to, Remediation Standard, Remediation Extended, and MCAPS Finance Partner Compliance programs, or successor programs. What this means for partners No immediate action is required; this update is for awareness and clarification. As a reminder, Partners are expected to: Maintain effective compliance controls Cooperate with Microsoft during investigations Participate in assigned remediation programs whenrequired Why this matters This update clarifies how Microsoft and partners will continue to work together to address compliance gaps and strengthen trust, transparency, and accountability across the partner ecosystem. Review the updated Partner Code of Conduct terms. You may also access the current Partner Code of Conduct until the new terms go into effect on August 1, 2026.Explore the Datacenter Optimization (DCO) initiative site
As DCO enters its tenth year as a global partner motion, we’re evolving how we support partners—bringing the streamlined Datacenter Optimization (DCO) experience directly into the Microsoft partner website. This transition marks the next phase of DCO: moving from a standalone experience to a fully integrated, global partner motion, expanding access across languages and regions while making it easier to engage, scale, and transform your business. The unified DCO experience is designed so you can move faster from exploration to execution, with everything you need in one place to modernize your hosting business and accelerate your evolution to hybrid cloud and AI-powered solutions. With the new DCO experience, you can: Access core DCO guidance to understand how to optimize your datacenter business and accelerate hybrid cloud adoption. Explore curated resources including tools, an FAQ, and technical guidance to drive execution and customer engagement. Follow a clear, simplified engagement path to strengthen your core offerings, expand hybrid solutions, and differentiate with AI-enabled capabilities. Connect with the DCO team to accelerate your journey and maximize impact. Stay informed on emerging opportunities through the Hybrid Cloud Partners podcast. This experience will continue to evolve, with ongoing updates and new content added throughout the year to support your growth. Visit the DCO site today and discover how you can use these Microsoft resources to scale, modernize, and transform your business. Explore the DCO site
Accessibility partners driving innovation and impact
Accessibility is becoming a more strategic way for Microsoft partners to turn innovation into customer impact across AI, employee experience, compliance, and digital transformation. It is no longer a niche requirement or a downstream remediation task. More and more, customers are evaluating accessibility as part of digital trust, platform readiness, customer reach, and long-term transformation resilience. That shift creates a clear opportunity for partners. Microsoft Marketplace gives accessibility ISVs a practical way to turn accessibility-first innovation into customer value and scalable growth. Recent offers from Level Access and Inclusively show how partners can open the door to broader conversations, and help customers make better platform decisions, reduce friction in employee and customer journeys, and build trust into transformation efforts from the start. Customer value in action Partners that bring accessibility into solution conversations can make it more relevant to customers and help connect it to funded business outcomes. Help customers build accessibility into everyday operations with Level Access The Level Access platform supports a continuous approach to accessibility across design, development, governance, and training workflows. For partners, that makes it easier to position accessibility as an ongoing capability tied to risk reduction, remediation velocity, and measurable progress rather than a one-time audit or point solution. Organizations can extend the Level Access platform through private offers such as LevelDocs for accessible content creation and remediation in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; LevelCI for automated web accessibility testing in CI/CD pipelines; and Mobile Testing for native iOS and Android accessibility across physical and virtual devices. Support workforce retention and employee experience with Inclusively Many organizations have invested heavily in benefits, workplace accommodations, mental health resources, and employee support programs, yet employees often do not know what is available or how to access it. Retain Connector by Inclusively helps close that gap inside the tools employees already use, giving partners a stronger way to support HR and employee experience priorities such as retention, inclusion, and program utilization. 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. For employees who may hesitate 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 also surfaces real-time, aggregated insights into the benefits and barriers employees are experiencing. That intelligence helps organizations understand unmet demand, allocate benefits investments more effectively, and demonstrate a stronger commitment to inclusion in practice. How ISVs can scale Scale does not come from listing on Marketplace alone. Accessibility ISVs grow when they package clear offers, organize the assets partners and customers need, and build the visibility required for repeatable engagement. That includes a concise value proposition, a defined customer scenario, demo and architecture assets, and a marketplace motion that supports discovery, alignment, and follow-through. How Microsoft activates the ecosystem Microsoft also helps customers see accessibility in business context rather than as abstract policy. Through ISV Success programs, marketplace enablement, hackathons and inclusion challenges, and events such as Ability Summit, Microsoft creates opportunities for partners to show practical solutions tied to real customer scenarios. That makes accessibility easier to understand, more relevant to customer priorities, and easier to activate across the ecosystem. Accessibility ISVs have a more practical path to scale: make offers discoverable, align to the customer priorities you can support most clearly, and show value through concrete use cases such as hackathons, Copilot trainings, consulting-led assessments, and published customer stories. These are the motions that help accessibility move from an important idea to a funded priority. If you are building accessibility solutions on Microsoft platforms, the Microsoft Accessibility Partner Onboarding Guide is a strong place to start building, publishing, and operationalizing solutions that deliver customer impact at scale. For more information on accessibility at Microsoft, feel free to contact Angela LeanLaunch campaigns faster using Partner Marketing Center Pro
Accelerate campaign activation with Partner Marketing Center Pro, a unified, AI-powered hub built to streamline your marketing efforts. Available through a partner benefits package, a Solutions Partner designation, or enrollment in ISV Success, Partner Marketing Center Pro supports efficient end-to-end campaign planning, activation, and execution. With Partner Marketing Center Pro, you can: Simplify consistency and alignment efforts by using AI-powered, end-to-end automation to easily access, customize, and deploy prebuilt campaigns. Tap into a slate of AI-powered features to search asset collections, set up and navigate campaigns, customize copy and branding, translate select assets into more than 130 languages, and deploy to targeted audiences. Unlock new features and capabilities as they are added, so you can continue to generate demand and move from launch to results with less friction. Note: For partners who have not yet unlocked access to Partner Marketing Center Pro, Partner Marketing Center remains available as a library of downloadable marketing assets aligned to Microsoft solution plays and product messaging. Learn more about streamlining campaign activation with Partner Marketing Center Pro—or sign in and start exploring.Explore curated Microsoft Partner Digital Skilling Journeys
Skilling is foundational for success in an AI-first market. Keeping up with evolving technologies and capabilities better positions you with the skills you need to succeed in an ever-changing market, making it a base-level requirement for sustained growth. As part of our effort to support partners with skilling, we offer Microsoft Partner Digital Skilling Journeys (PDJs), curated presales, sales, and tech skilling experiences designed to enhance your knowledge aligned with partner strategic wins. First-time users may need to register—use your work email credentials to sign up. Curated journeys include: Microsoft Security Copilot Drive Business Transformation with Microsoft Copilot 365 Innovate with Azure AI Platform Drive Windows in the Cloud with Windows 365 Cloud Endpoints Modern Security Operations Data Security for AI Migrate to Azure Drive Business Collaboration and Teamwork with Microsoft Teams Accelerate Data Analytics Journey with Microsoft Fabric Cloud Security These journeys are tailored to your interests, needs, and role within your organization. Select the link relevant to the journey you're interested in, register today on the Skilling Hub using your organizational email credentials, answer a few questions, and you'll receive tech and sales-ready skilling experiences customized to your interests and goals. And to continue supporting you as you grow your revenue, we're hosting our annual MCAPS Start for Partners event on July 22. We encourage you to register today so you can get insights from Microsoft leaders on where we’re investing, our shared priorities, and how to activate AI-led opportunities to drive growth this year. Register nowBuild AI skills at Microsoft AI Skills Fest
Register now for Microsoft AI Skills Fest, a no-cost digital skilling event taking place June 8–12. Designed so partners can stay ahead in the rapidly evolving AI landscape, attendees can build in-demand AI skills, gain practical insights, and discover ways to deliver innovative solutions, deepen customer relationships, and stay competitive in a fast-changing market. Get ready to lead Frontier Transformation If you’re a solution engineer or architect building AI agents across the Frontier stack—including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, Fabric, and Agent 365—you can validate your expertise with the Frontier Transformation Engineer badge. Want to fast-track your badge completion? Join us at the Frontier Transformation Engineer Summit on June 9 for a live, expert-led skilling experience where you’ll explore how to use Microsoft Agent Factory at scale, build your expertise, demonstrate organizational readiness, and lead Frontier Transformation for your customers.Don’t miss out: Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards nominations are now open!
It's time: the Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards nomination window is now officially open until Tuesday, July 7, at 6:00 PM Pacific Time. Nominate your organization today for awards highlighting exceptional work across solution areas, industries, and regions. The 2026 Partner of the Year Awards celebrate the many ways our partners are driving Frontier Transformation––turning AI ambition into high-impact business outcomes for customers. Winning an award is a meaningful achievement that highlights the transformative influence partners like you have on customers around the world—and positions your organization for greater market recognition and new business opportunities. Winners receive benefits such as a customized logo and other go-to-market assets that signify award-winning status, as well as impactful press coverage. To prepare your submissions, we recommend reviewing the following resources before completing your application: Check out the awards website and the FAQ. Read the awards overview and the blog. Review the submission guidelines and the rules and regulations. Get advice from the judges. Winners and finalists will be announced on November 11—just in time to celebrate together at Microsoft Ignite 2026. We look forward to reviewing another amazing set of nominations, so get started today. Don’t miss this opportunity to celebrate your organization’s accomplishments on a global stage! Nominate your organization todayICYMI: Build the skills to strengthen customer conversations with Microskilling
Microskilling supports partners throughout their skilling journey as an autonomous learning modality, offering a holistic, curated experience through short, high-impact videos and podcasts. Read more in the blog: Get started with Microskilling, the autonomous learning modality built to speed dealsImportant: FY26 PRACR close deadlines
We’re sharing the Partner Reported Azure Consumed Revenue (PRACR) deadlines for the close of fiscal year 2026 (July 2025–June 2026) to help you stay on track. These dates are sequential and critical to an accurate year-end close, ongoing submission eligibility, and a smooth transition to FY27. Category Deadline Requirement Owner Notes PRACR submissions June 10, 2026 (EOD) Final cutoff to submit PRACR reports through Partner Center Partner N/A Deal eligibility June 13, 2026 (EOD) Last day to mark deals as “Won” in MSX Microsoft Seller Required before deal registration Deal registration June 14, 2026 (EOD) Deals must be registered in Partner Center and all revalidation and disputes must be submitted by June 14. Deal registration will resume starting July 15, 2026. Partner Only registered deals can be reviewed for approval Exception handling June 19, 2026 (EOD) Final deadline to submit exception requests with full evidence through the PRACR Ops alias Partner or PDM Last exception forum of fiscal year 2026: June 24 Deal review June 26, 2026 (EOD) If deal is selected for further review, final date to submit required documentation Partner N/A No immediate action is required at this time; however, you as a partner are expected to plan and align internal activities to meet the deadlines outlined above. This communication is intended for awareness and planning purposes and partners are expected to align activities accordingly.
