Support Engineering Weekly

In this episode of Support Engineering Weekly, Alex and Maya examine the architectural differences between human interaction, deterministic execution, and adaptive reasoning. Rather than starting with a technology choice, the discussion starts with the nature of the work and asks which execution model best fits it.

The episode begins with Power Apps and the role of applications in providing structured human experiences. It then moves into Power Automate and deterministic workflows, where triggers, rules, actions, expected outcomes, and auditability can be explicitly defined.

The discussion then explores AI agents and the situations where reasoning, ambiguity...

This week on Support Engineering Weekly, Alex and Maya explore a growing tension in Microsoft's cloud ecosystem: administrators are gaining new visibility into AI usage, performance, and spending while legacy APIs and authentication methods are being retired. We examine new Agent 365 activity insights, tenant-level adoption metrics, and beta Microsoft Graph APIs for Copilot cost management, including how programmatic spending policies could help organizations monitor consumption and establish financial controls as AI deployments expand.

We then turn to the operational changes that demand preparation. Exchange Web Services (EWS) is entering retirement in Exchange Online, requiring affected archive and...

What happens when a Power Platform app stops being a personal productivity tool and becomes an enterprise system that the business depends on?

In this episode of Support Engineering Weekly, Alex and Maya examine Power Platform governance from the perspective of operating applications safely at enterprise scale. The discussion begins with the transition from lightweight apps to critical business workloads and why governance needs to scale with the importance of the workload.

The conversation explores environments and the risks of allowing the default environment to become a universal development, test, and production boundary. From there...

Power Apps can make application development look simple - but what actually happens behind the screen when an enterprise application runs?

In this episode of Support Engineering Weekly, Alex and Maya look beyond the app interface to examine the engineering layers that make Power Apps work in an enterprise environment.

The discussion begins with choosing the right application model, including Canvas apps, model-driven apps, Power Pages, and Power Automate. From there, we follow the Power Apps runtime journey—from a user's action and Microsoft Entra authentication through Power FX, connectors, APIs, gateways, data sources, and th...

A resilience update designed to make a service stronger can end up taking it offline. A routine cleanup can break a critical feature. And a small increase in response time can trigger a traffic surge that overwhelms an entire system.

In this episode of Support Engineering Weekly, Alex and Maya examine Microsoft 365 service incidents from October 5–9, 2026. They explore Outlook calendar caching failures and unwanted add-ins, cascading failures affecting Teams meetings and Copilot voice, request queuing and retry storms, and silent failures involving Teams contacts and PowerPoint Live recordings. The discussion also examines security and compliance issues involving De...

Why is Microsoft Dataverse so much more than a database? In this episode, Alex and Maya examine Dataverse as a managed application data platform and explore how metadata, security, APIs, storage, capacity, integration, analytics, governance, and application lifecycle management work together to support enterprise workloads.

The discussion follows what happens when a request reaches Dataverse and explains why the platform's layered architecture changes how engineers should think about schema changes, metadata, standard versus custom tables, storage models, capacity planning, and security. The episode also examines the difference between operational and analytical workloads, API service protection limits, HTTP 429...

This week on Support Engineering Weekly, Alex and Maya examine a series of Microsoft 365 incidents that reveal a common engineering pattern: as cloud services become more deeply connected, failures increasingly occur in the connective tissue between systems rather than in the systems themselves.

The episode begins with Microsoft’s transition from SharePoint One-Time Passcodes to Microsoft Entra B2B for external sharing, and what that means for legacy sharing links, guest identities, Conditional Access, and help-desk preparation. From there, the discussion moves into Teams device-management consolidation, iOS enrollment failures, and a Windows Autopilot routing issue where an in...

A Power Automate flow can start as a simple productivity shortcut and quietly become business-critical production software. In this episode, Alex and Maya examine what changes when automation has to operate reliably at scale, including workload management, concurrency, downstream limits, retries, error handling, observability, ownership, application lifecycle management, and architectural boundaries.

The discussion begins by reframing a production flow as a small distributed system rather than a simple sequence of actions. Alex and Maya explore the multiplication problem, why broad triggers and loops can generate far more work than the flow designer suggests, and why increasing concurrency...

This week on Support Engineering Weekly, we look beneath the surface of Microsoft 365 incidents and the hidden dependencies that make apparently simple failures difficult to diagnose. The discussion begins with Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing and routing failures, then moves into Purview policy behavior and audit-log issues that show how problems in administrative and compliance layers can affect the support experience.

From there, we examine regressions across Office clients and their cloud-connected services, including the interaction between Word, SharePoint, and Exchange state. The episode also looks at rollbacks as diagnostic evidence and at API routing and infrastructure migration, highlighting...

Why does the Microsoft Power Platform become difficult to support when Power Apps, Dataverse, and Power Automate are treated as isolated products? In this episode, Alex and Maya examine the Power Platform as an architecture, with clear responsibility boundaries between the user experience, governed business data, orchestration, integration, compute, analytics, and the control plane.

The discussion explores deliberate handoffs between Power Apps, Dataverse, and Power Automate, the event-driven pattern that connects them, why Dataverse should be treated as shared business context rather than simple storage, and why specialized compute and analytics belong in the appropriate services instead...

This week on Support Engineering Weekly, Alex and Maya examine the Microsoft 365 Service Health events from September 14–18, 2026 through the lens of hidden dependencies and architectural complexity. The discussion begins with Microsoft 365 Copilot incidents, including retrieval failures caused by problems in semantic indexing and request-processing changes that affected multiple Copilot experiences.

The episode then moves into the administrative side of the stack, where telemetry and reporting failures created misleading data, audit logging problems removed critical user identity information, and seemingly simple desktop actions were affected by cloud-connected state. Excel copy-and-paste failures, Teams shared-channel links, and Outlook add-ins all de...

Why can a user be blocked even when one Conditional Access policy shows a successful result? In this episode, Alex and Maya examine how Microsoft Entra evaluates Conditional Access and why a successful policy does not necessarily mean that access will be granted. The discussion explores the difference between a policy that did not apply and one that actually failed, how multiple applicable policies can combine requirements, and why troubleshooting requires finding the requirement that remained unsatisfied.

The episode then moves from the evaluation model into practical troubleshooting. Alex and Maya explore authentication strength, session controls, Authentication...

This week on Support Engineering Weekly, Alex and Maya examine a set of Microsoft 365 incidents and updates that reveal just how deeply connected modern cloud services really are. A shared access configuration created a cross-service blast radius, while telemetry failures produced misleading reporting and downstream service behavior that turned incomplete data into real operational impact.

The discussion then moves into several targeted regressions across Outlook and Microsoft Teams, including unwanted Outlook add-ins, malformed shared-channel links, and failures affecting run-only workflows. The episode also looks at two very different forms of intentional disruption: an internal Microsoft resiliency drill...

A Microsoft Entra sign-in log is more than a simple success or failure. In this episode, Alex and Maya examine how to read a sign-in event as an evidence trail, connecting identity, authentication, client and protocol, device, location, application, resource, Conditional Access, risk, status, error information, and correlation identifiers.

The discussion focuses on an evidence-first investigation approach: start with the exact sign-in event, understand what actually happened during authentication, identify the policies and requirements that applied, and connect the available evidence before reaching a conclusion. The episode also examines how the same sign-in data can be used...

Why can a user successfully complete MFA and still receive an access-denied result? In this episode, Alex and Maya examine what happens after MFA succeeds and explain how Conditional Access, authentication strength, grant controls, device requirements, Authentication Context, and session controls can influence the final access decision.

The discussion focuses on an evidence-first troubleshooting approach: start with the exact sign-in event, identify which policies and requirements applied, determine what remained unsatisfied, and remediate the actual cause rather than weakening an unrelated security control.

The central lesson is straightforward: MFA success is evidence that one authentication...

This week on Support Engineering Weekly, Alex and Maya review the latest Microsoft Service Health and Message Center updates from August 24 through August 28, 2026.

The episode looks at incidents and changes across Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Power Automate, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft 365 administration, and other Microsoft services.

We discuss what happened, who was affected, how Microsoft investigated and mitigated the incidents, and what the underlying causes reveal about operating large-scale cloud services.

The episode also covers the latest Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager update for AI Powered Regulatory Templates and what administrators should know...

Microsoft Project Online is approaching its September 30, 2026 end-of-service date—but what comes next isn't as simple as clicking an upgrade button.

In the first episode of Support Engineering Weekly, we take a deep technical look at what the retirement means for organizations that have spent years building projects, workflows, reporting, integrations, governance and operational processes around Project Online.

We begin with the retirement timeline and clarify what is—and isn't—being retired. From there, we examine one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding the transition: the assumption that Planner Premium is simply a modernized version of Projec...