Last Monday, we attended the After Ignite Special at the Microsoft Office in Zurich, a compact meetup that brought the highlights and announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2025 in San Francisco to a local audience. The event featured short, focused 30‑minute sessions (each with Q&A) presented by Swiss community experts (MVPs and an RD), plus a networking break and a Microsoft‑sponsored “Apéro”.

Sessions covered:

• Azure Infrastructure (Manuel Meyer)
• Modern Work – Copilot (Pascal Brunner)
• Security (Michael Rüefli)
• Modern Work — Collaboration (David Schneider)
• Data & AI (Marco Gerber)
• Data Security & Compliance (Alain Schneiter)

Overall it was a practical, information‑dense recap with useful takeaways and time to discuss how the new announcements might affect local projects.

Azure Infrastructure

In the Azure Infrastructure session the main focus was on Azure Copilot Agents and their management: Agent mode is now available inside the Azure Portal, there’s a dedicated Azure Copilot Admin Center, chat-based interactions are currently free, the agents themselves are free in preview, and six agent templates were shown.

There were also updates around MCP & Foundry: MCP‑Capable is now available and Foundry is being renamed/reshaped again into a more unified stack — including unified MCP tools for agents, a Model Router for dynamic model orchestration, Agent Hosting Services, and FoundryIQ for insights/orchestration.

Finally, Microsoft highlighted new hardware options — Azure Boost DPU and Azure Cobalt 200 — aimed at accelerating networking and AI workloads. Overall the takeaways were easier agent management, smarter model routing and stronger infrastructure for performance.

Modern Work – Copilot

The session focused on Microsoft’s push to embed AI more deeply into everyday work with a new “intelligence layer,” expanded Office agents and an Agent 365 framework. Many capabilities are being rolled out through the Frontier program (early access), while a few items are approaching general availability.

Key takeaways

• New intelligence layer components: Work IQ, Fabric IQ, Foundry IQ — intended to power smarter experiences across apps.
• Agent 365: a platform approach (registry, access control, visualization, interoperability, security). Most Agent 365 features are available in the Frontier program.
• Agent Mode and Office Agents:
  • Agent Mode in Word is GA.
  • PowerPoint and Excel Agent Mode are in Frontier (preview).
  • Dedicated agents for Word, PowerPoint, Excel are in Frontier.
• New agents highlighted: Workforce Insights Agent, People Agent, Learning Agent — all in Frontier.
• Outlook improvements: Schedule Meeting feature returns.
• Voice improvements: ongoing enhancements to voice capabilities (details presented in session).

Security

The Security session which covered Microsoft’s latest security investments, many items coming via the Frontier program, and practical integrations across identity, endpoint, cloud, and developer tooling.

Key points

• ZAVA: announced as a new Frontier company focused on security.
• Security Copilot & agents: Security Copilot is being expanded with new agents. Michael said Security Copilot is now included in E5 and mentioned an allocation of 0.4 SCU per licence.
• Entra Agent ID: new capabilities for agent identity.
• CA Optimization Agent to help optimize Conditional Access.
• Microsoft Internet Access: new features, such as prompt filtering and other controls for browsing/proxy scenarios.
• Defender & GitHub: tighter integration — notably GitHub Code Scanning autofix to speed remediation in CI/CD.
• Defender XDR: new Predictive Shielding capabilities to proactively reduce attack surface and threats.
• Passkey improvements: synced passkeys, passkey profiles and self‑remediation flows to help users recover or maintain passwordless access.

Modern Work – Collaboration

The Collaboration session from David, which focused on how SharePoint, Viva and Teams are evolving with Work IQ and Copilot-driven experiences to make knowledge discovery and teamwork smoother.

Key insights

• SharePoint celebrated its 25th anniversary and continues as a core knowledge platform.
• Work IQ is being used to surface smarter insights across content and people.
• SharePoint + Copilot advantages: tighter content understanding and context-aware assistance inside SharePoint experiences.
• New and preview agents:
  • Knowledge Agent (Public Preview) to help surface and query organizational knowledge.
  • FAQ Agent and Agent Link for easier access to canned answers and cross‑system connections.
  • Viva Engage Community Agent to better support community management and engagement.
• SharePoint roadmap highlights pointed to planned feature releases through November 2025 (high‑level roadmap items were shown).
• Microsoft Teams updates:
  • Activity visibility across other accounts and organizations to make cross‑tenant work smoother.
  • Speech/speaker recognition improvements for meetings.
  • Copilot Agent available in 1:1 chats to assist individual collaboration.

Data & AI

For the second consecutive year Microsoft has rebranded its AI/data offering; the current name is Microsoft Foundry. Marco gave us insight regarding the hot topic AI.

Highlights

• Microsoft Foundry (Preview): central platform demoed with new capabilities for orchestrating models and agents.
  • Model Router: new routing layer to direct requests to the appropriate model/endpoint.
  • Create Agent, Workflows and Tracing: tools to build agents, chain steps into workflows and trace executions for observability.
  • Foundry IQ: discovery/search layer using Azure AI Search under the hood, supporting RAG and document-level access controls.
  • Fabric IQ: presented as an integrated sub-service inside Fabric for analytics/insights.
  • Guard rails per use case, assets management and a compliance dashboard to help governance and auditability.
• New Database & analytics products & integrations:
  • Azure DocumentDB
  • SQL Server 2025
  • Azure HorizonDB (private preview) called out for storage and analytics backends.

Data Security & Compliance