Microsoft is retiring VBScript, which also marks the end of slmgr.vbs, the script you have likely used for years to activate Windows, check license status, or configure a KMS server from the command line. The replacement is a new PowerShell module called OSLicense, which returns structured objects instead of text you have to parse. This article explains why slmgr.vbs is going away, when the new module becomes available, and how the commands you already know map to the new cmdlets. It also covers a few limitations you should know about before rewriting scripts.

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Oracle is cutting staff again even as its remaining performance obligations reach a record $664 billion, underscoring the financial pressure behind its aggressive AI data-center expansion. The latest layoffs follow a year in which Oracle reduced its workforce by about 13%, while continuing to borrow and raise capital to fund cloud infrastructure.

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Claude for Small Business now offers 43 ready-to-run workflows and 27 new integrations, extending Claude from back-office automation into lead generation, proposals, marketing, and reporting. Anthropic says the service has surpassed 900,000 installations and is adding free workshops, partner webinars, and online training to help small businesses adopt the expanded capabilities.

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Salesforce in Claude is now in beta, giving sellers AI assistance for account research, call preparation, pipeline reviews, forecasts, and CRM updates without leaving Claude. The plugin already has more than 7,000 Salesforce sellers using it and preserves existing Salesforce permissions while requiring approval before proposed changes are written back.

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Google has launched Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, two voice-focused models that can process live video, switch between 97 languages, and run tools or API calls without pausing the conversation. The release gives developers and enterprises a faster model for scalable voice agents and a reasoning-focused option for complex, multi-step workflows.

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AI agents are developing their own shared vocabulary and increasingly opaque ways of communicating, raising concerns that humans may be able to observe their conversations without understanding what the systems are doing. Experiments found models from DeepSeek, Anthropic, Google, and Mistral independently created metaphors, shorthand, and conventions within days of being placed in cooperative “societies.”

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Lenovo says its agentic AI-powered security operations center reduced threat-detection time by 87.5% across an internal network of more than 140,000 devices. The deployment also delivered a reported 20-fold improvement in detection accuracy, giving administrators a large-scale example of how AI agents can automate SOC work without removing human oversight.

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Cisco is extending Splunk AI to self-managed, private-cloud, and air-gapped environments while giving IT teams real-time visibility into agent behavior and token spending. The updates also add runtime guardrails, network-aware troubleshooting, and broader deployment options for Splunk Agent Observability.

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Microsoft has reproduced a Microsoft Word crash that occurs when third-party document or case-management software populates templates, and says an upcoming update will address the fault. The problem affects Word Version 2608, Build 20326.x, but Microsoft has not yet published a workaround or a release date for the fix.

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Google has launched Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, allowing the models to speak while they reason, call tools, and process information in the background. Building on Gemini Live’s background work across Google apps, the new models bring that parallel processing into the conversation itself, alongside visual grounding, 97-language switching, and invisible SynthID audio watermarking.

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Microsoft has given organizations still running Windows 11 23H2 Enterprise or Education roughly two months to begin upgrading before support ends on November 10, 2026. The November security update will be the final one for these editions; afterward, affected devices will no longer receive monthly security, quality, or preview updates.

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Java 27 is now available with hybrid post-quantum key exchange for TLS 1.3, giving Java teams a migration path toward quantum-resistant communications without abandoning current cryptography. The release also makes G1 the default garbage collector in every environment and adds performance and productivity improvements aimed at AI-heavy workloads.

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Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing now effectively unlocks key SharePoint Advanced Management capabilities for the whole tenant, changing how organizations should plan Copilot readiness. The entitlement helps administrators find overshared, stale, and ownerless content, but advanced Purview protections still require Microsoft 365 E5 or equivalent licensing.

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Microsoft has canceled plans to remove Outlook Classic’s expanded people cards, preserving the detailed contact view despite its broader effort to move users to New Outlook. The reversal gives organizations another reason to delay migration while Microsoft continues encouraging the transition through other changes.

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Microsoft is adding a long-requested meeting ownership transfer feature to Outlook on the web, New Outlook for Windows, Teams, and Exchange Online. It will let organizations hand recurring meetings to a new organizer during offboarding, but Classic Outlook will not support the capability—another potential migration pain point for administrators.

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OpenAI is endorsing a specific federal mandate for third-party safety assessments of the most powerful AI models, marking a significant shift from voluntary safeguards to legally required oversight. A bipartisan group of six House lawmakers is proposing that the Department of Commerce accredit independent auditors and appoint an official to supervise AI security compliance.

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Cloudflare’s new Disallow AI Training setting lets website owners reject AI model training while keeping their pages available to search crawlers. The control is available on every Cloudflare plan, but administrators should note that Bingbot will not yet receive the preference through robots.txt, and stronger blocking can still remove a site from search.

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Microsoft’s draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct would make shutdown compliance, human oversight, and audit transparency mandatory for its MAI models. Microsoft is opening the 37-page framework to public review for six weeks before revising it later this year.

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Salesforce is expanding Agentforce across AWS and Google Cloud while introducing Enterprise AI Harness, a control layer for governing agents, models and enterprise data across multiple platforms. The integrations let agents use Salesforce context and workflows alongside AWS and Google Cloud services without forcing customers to move all their data or standardize on one model provider.

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