FabCon 2025 Highlights

We had a brilliant time at FabCon 2025 in Vienna. It was fantastic to meet friends, clients, and partners, and to see first-hand how quickly Microsoft Fabric is maturing. The event had a real buzz — not just about new features, but about the sense that Fabric is becoming the enterprise-ready platform many of us have been waiting for.

Here’s our summary of the announcements and product updates that stood out most, including what’s now Generally Available (GA), what’s in Public Preview, and what’s coming next.

 

 

Fabric Data Factory

 

Data Factory within Fabric continues to grow quickly, with important updates to both developer experience and performance:

• New connectors for Teams and Office 365 Email (Public Preview) — opening new integration possibilities across the Microsoft 365 suite.
• Expression testing in design mode (GA) — a long-awaited feature that lets you test pipeline expressions during design without needing a full run.
• Tumbling-window triggers and improved scheduling (GA/Preview) — adding more control and flexibility for time-based pipelines.
• Dataflow Gen2 now significantly more performant — recent updates to the underlying engine and copy activities mean pipelines are faster and more cost-effective.
• Parameterisation for Data Flows and connections (Preview) — making it easier to build reusable, CI/CD-friendly pipelines.

 

OneLake & Mirroring

 

OneLake has expanded its reach with major new mirroring capabilities:

• Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure Blob Storage mirroring (GA).
• Gateway support for mirroring is now GA, enabling secure hybrid and on-premises scenarios.
• Google BigQuery mirroring is in Private Preview.
• Oracle mirroring is available through partner integrations (e.g. Oracle GoldenGate) in Public Preview.
• SAP integration via partners (SAP Datasphere, ABAP for ECC and S/4HANA) is supported, with outbound licensing subject to SAP terms.

 

Fabric Platform & CI/CD

Enterprise readiness was a theme throughout FabCon, with big strides in deployment and lifecycle management:

• Business Process Solutions (Public Preview) — prebuilt data and AI models for core processes like Sales, Finance, Procurement, and Supply Chain.
• CI/CD improvements across Fabric workspace items — with support expanding significantly.
• Variable Library (GA) — centralised environment variables for smoother deployments.
• Terraform provider modules and open-source CLI — enabling true Infrastructure as Code.
• Branching and environment-specific workspaces — helping teams isolate changes and copy data safely between environments.
• Fabric MCP and VS Code Copilot (Preview) — developer accelerators that allow rapid scripting and automation directly against Fabric APIs.

 

Partner Ecosystem

Interoperability was another strong focus:

• ESRI integration (Public Preview) brings advanced spatial analytics into Fabric.
• Snowflake interoperability is expanding, allowing cross-platform analytics and shared governance approaches.

 

Semantic Models & Power BI

The Power BI side of Fabric also got a boost:

• Create and edit semantic models directly in the Power BI Service (GA/Preview, with some limitations). This makes modelling easier without dropping back into desktop tools.

 

Developer Experience

• Microsoft Extensibility Toolkit (Preview) — the successor to the Workload Development Kit, now in open preview, providing a supported framework for building custom Fabric workloads and extensions.

 

Security Announcements

 

Security and governance were a strong theme, reflecting Fabric’s push into enterprise adoption:

• Workspace Outbound Access Protection (Preview) — the ability to block outbound public internet access at workspace level, with managed allow-lists to prevent data exfiltration.
• Private Link and Private Endpoints (GA/Preview) — keeping Fabric traffic on secure Azure private networks.
• Purview DLP and Information Protection (GA/Preview) — extending data loss prevention, classification, and labelling to Fabric items.
• Conditional Access and API permissions — tighter controls for service principals and Entra ID conditional access policies.

 

Together, these features significantly strengthen Fabric’s enterprise security story.

 

What’s Next

Looking ahead, we expect many of the previewed features — particularly Outbound Access Protection, Private Link per workspace, and OneLake security models — to move to GA. Developer tooling will continue to evolve, and mirroring support will broaden to cover more enterprise and cross-cloud systems.

It’s an exciting time for Fabric, and we look forward to seeing more at the next FabCon.