Forum Discussion
Minimum Environment Permissions (Security Roles) for Copilot Studio Agent in Teams?
Hi Copilot Studio Community!
I’m facing a strange permissions (Security Roles) challenge when sharing an Agent with users on Teams, and I’m looking for the best practice to determine the minimum required privileges.
The Scenario:
I built an Agent grounded in a SharePoint Knowledge Base.
The end-users currently have:
- Read access to the SharePoint Document Libraries.
- View-only access to the Agent when shared from Copilot Studio.
- No permissions at the Environment level in Dataverse.
The Issue:
When I share the Agent link on Teams, users add it successfully. However, when they ask a question, the Agent immediately triggers the Fallback Topic (acting as if it has no information to pull from or can't access SharePoint).
The Strange Behavior (Workaround):
I discovered that if I temporarily grant the user the following high privileges:
1. Environment Maker role.
2. Bot roles (Bot Contributor, Bot Transcript Viewer, Bot Viewer).
3. Editor permission on the Agent.
Then, if the user tests a question inside the Copilot Studio canvas, it answers correctly. After that, if they test it in Teams, it works perfectly there too!
The weirdest part: if I immediately revoke all these high privileges (returning the user to a simple Viewer with no Environment Access), the Agent continues to work normally for them in Teams and fetches answers from SharePoint without any issues!
My Question to the Experts:
1. Since I don't want (and for security reasons, shouldn't) grant end-users roles like Maker or Editor, what are the exact minimum basic permissions (Security Roles) at the Environment/Dataverse level (e.g., Basic User) that a user must have just to chat with the Agent in Teams successfully from the first try?
2. Is there a technical explanation for why the Agent keeps working in Teams after revoking the permissions? Is it just Token Caching, or is there something else at play?
I would highly appreciate your insights!
1 Reply
Your test shows that SharePoint read access alone is insufficient for the agent’s first query, while temporary maker/editor roles initialize access. End users should not need Environment Maker, Bot Contributor, or editor access to chat. Microsoft says chat users can receive “User – can use the agent,” but connector-backed unstructured knowledge needs a Dataverse role, such as Basic User. For OneDrive and SharePoint content stored in Dataverse, that role needs read privileges on Plug-in Assembly, Plug-in Type, SDK Message, SDK Message Processing Step, and SDK Message Processing Step Image. Assign that least-privilege role to a fresh test user, keep the agent shared for chat, require authentication, and verify direct read access to the SharePoint content. Test in Teams without opening Copilot Studio. Persistence after revocation is not proof of supported access; cached tokens or already-provisioned state are possibilities, not documented guarantees. Validate after sign-out and token expiry.
