Microsoft Planner @Mention and Comment Notification in Microsoft Teams - NEW VERSION
Hi Planner Community, Thank you for the overwhelming support for my original post last year on how to @mention someone within the Microsoft Planner community and have a message automatically emailed to them. I'm excited to share that I've completely redesigned and updated the solution to now support the new Microsoft Teams Planner and remove the issues some users found with setting up the solution. Additionally, the notification is now an adaptive card within the Microsoft Teams chat to the user you @mentioned in the Microsoft Planner comment. Screenshot example above shows a comment posted by me in a Microsoft Planner task where I’ve @mentioned David at the end of the message. Screenshot example above shows the comment posted by me in Planner being automatically sent to David (thanks to the @mention in the comment) on Microsoft Teams. Allowing David to reply in either the traditional Planner or new Teams Planner. Attached is a zip file containing the Microsoft Power Automate solution, along with a detailed walkthrough to help you set it up. Enjoy! If you download the solution, all I ask is that you please give this post a thumbs up. Thanks, everyone! Matthew Davis No More Bad MondaySmart Auditing: Leveraging Azure AI Agents to Transform Financial Oversight
In today's data-driven business environment, audit teams often spend weeks poring over logs and databases to verify spending and billing information. This time-consuming process is ripe for automation. But is there a way to implement AI solutions without getting lost in complex technical frameworks? While tools like LangChain, Semantic Kernel, and AutoGen offer powerful AI agent capabilities, sometimes you need a straightforward solution that just works. So, what's the answer for teams seeking simplicity without sacrificing effectiveness? This tutorial will show you how to use Azure AI Agent Service to build an AI agent that can directly access your Postgres database to streamline audit workflows. No complex chains or graphs required, just a practical solution to get your audit process automated quickly. The Auditing Challenge: It's the month end, and your audit team is drowning in spreadsheets. As auditors reviewing financial data across multiple SaaS tenants, you're tasked with verifying billing accuracy by tracking usage metrics like API calls, storage consumption, and user sessions in Postgres databases. Each tenant generates thousands of transactions daily, and traditionally, this verification process consumes weeks of your team's valuable time. Typically, teams spend weeks: Manually extracting data from multiple database tables. Cross-referencing usage with invoices. Investigating anomalies through tedious log analysis. Compiling findings into comprehensive reports. With an AI-powered audit agent, you can automate these tasks and transform the process. Your AI assistant can: Pull relevant usage data directly from your database Identify billing anomalies like unexpected usage spikes Generate natural language explanations of findings Create audit reports that highlight key concerns For example, when reviewing a tenant's invoice, your audit agent can query the database for relevant usage patterns, summarize anomalies, and offer explanations: "Tenant_456 experienced a 145% increase in API usage on April 30th, which explains the billing increase. This spike falls outside normal usage patterns and warrants further investigation." Let’s build an AI agent that connects to your Postgres database and transforms your audit process from manual effort to automated intelligence. Prerequisites: Before we start building our audit agent, you'll need: An Azure subscription (Create one for free). The Azure AI Developer RBAC role assigned to your account. Python 3.11.x installed on your development machine. OR You can also use GitHub Codespaces, which will automatically install all dependencies for you. You’ll need to create a GitHub account first if you don’t already have one. Setting Up Your Database: For this tutorial, we'll use Neon Serverless Postgres as our database. It's a fully managed, cloud-native Postgres solution that's free to start, scales automatically, and works excellently for AI agents that need to query data on demand. Creating a Neon Database on Azure: Open the Neon Resource page on the Azure portal Fill out the form with the required fields and deploy your database After creation, navigate to the Neon Serverless Postgres Organization service Click on the Portal URL to access the Neon Console Click "New Project" Choose an Azure region Name your project (e.g., "Audit Agent Database") Click "Create Project" Once your project is successfully created, copy the Neon connection string from the Connection Details widget on the Neon Dashboard. It will look like this: postgresql://[user]:[password]@[neon_hostname]/[dbname]?sslmode=require Note: Keep this connection string saved; we'll need it shortly. Creating an AI Foundry Project on Azure: Next, we'll set up the AI infrastructure to power our audit agent: Create a new hub and project in the Azure AI Foundry portal by following the guide. Deploy a model like GPT-4o to use with your agent. Make note of your Project connection string and Model Deployment name. You can find your connection string in the overview section of your project in the Azure AI Foundry portal, under Project details > Project connection string. Once you have all three values on hand: Neon connection string, Project connection string, and Model Deployment Name, you are ready to set up the Python project to create an Agent. All the code and sample data are available in this GitHub repository. You can clone or download the project. Project Environment Setup: Create a .env file with your credentials: PROJECT_CONNECTION_STRING="<Your AI Foundry connection string> "AZURE_OPENAI_DEPLOYMENT_NAME="gpt4o" NEON_DB_CONNECTION_STRING="<Your Neon connection string>" Create and activate a virtual environment: python -m venv .venv source .venv/bin/activate # on macOS/Linux .venv\Scripts\activate # on Windows Install required Python libraries: pip install -r requirements.txt Example requirements.txt: Pandas python-dotenv sqlalchemy psycopg2-binary azure-ai-projects ==1.0.0b7 azure-identity Load Sample Billing Usage Data: We will use a mock dataset for tenant usage, including computed percent change in API calls and storage usage in GB: tenant_id date api_calls storage_gb tenant_456 2025-04-01 1000 25.0 tenant_456 2025-03-31 950 24.8 tenant_456 2025-03-30 2200 26.0 Run python load_usage_data.py Python script to create and populate the usage_data table in your Neon Serverless Postgres instance: # load_usage_data.py file import os from dotenv import load_dotenv from sqlalchemy import ( create_engine, MetaData, Table, Column, String, Date, Integer, Numeric, ) # Load environment variables from .env load_dotenv() # Load connection string from environment variable NEON_DB_URL = os.getenv("NEON_DB_CONNECTION_STRING") engine = create_engine(NEON_DB_URL) # Define metadata and table schema metadata = MetaData() usage_data = Table( "usage_data", metadata, Column("tenant_id", String, primary_key=True), Column("date", Date, primary_key=True), Column("api_calls", Integer), Column("storage_gb", Numeric), ) # Create table with engine.begin() as conn: metadata.create_all(conn) # Insert mock data conn.execute( usage_data.insert(), [ { "tenant_id": "tenant_456", "date": "2025-03-27", "api_calls": 870, "storage_gb": 23.9, }, { "tenant_id": "tenant_456", "date": "2025-03-28", "api_calls": 880, "storage_gb": 24.0, }, { "tenant_id": "tenant_456", "date": "2025-03-29", "api_calls": 900, "storage_gb": 24.5, }, { "tenant_id": "tenant_456", "date": "2025-03-30", "api_calls": 2200, "storage_gb": 26.0, }, { "tenant_id": "tenant_456", "date": "2025-03-31", "api_calls": 950, "storage_gb": 24.8, }, { "tenant_id": "tenant_456", "date": "2025-04-01", "api_calls": 1000, "storage_gb": 25.0, }, ], ) print("✅ usage_data table created and mock data inserted.") Create a Postgres Tool for the Agent: Next, we configure an AI agent tool to retrieve data from Postgres. The Python script billing_agent_tools.py contains: The function billing_anomaly_summary() that: Pulls usage data from Neon. Computes % change in api_calls. Flags anomalies with a threshold of > 1.5x change. Exports user_functions list for the Azure AI Agent to use. You do not need to run it separately. # billing_agent_tools.py file import os import json import pandas as pd from sqlalchemy import create_engine from dotenv import load_dotenv # Load environment variables load_dotenv() # Set up the database engine NEON_DB_URL = os.getenv("NEON_DB_CONNECTION_STRING") db_engine = create_engine(NEON_DB_URL) # Define the billing anomaly detection function def billing_anomaly_summary( tenant_id: str, start_date: str = "2025-03-27", end_date: str = "2025-04-01", limit: int = 10, ) -> str: """ Fetches recent usage data for a SaaS tenant and detects potential billing anomalies. :param tenant_id: The tenant ID to analyze. :type tenant_id: str :param start_date: Start date for the usage window. :type start_date: str :param end_date: End date for the usage window. :type end_date: str :param limit: Maximum number of records to return. :type limit: int :return: A JSON string with usage records and anomaly flags. :rtype: str """ query = """ SELECT date, api_calls, storage_gb FROM usage_data WHERE tenant_id = %s AND date BETWEEN %s AND %s ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT %s; """ df = pd.read_sql(query, db_engine, params=(tenant_id, start_date, end_date, limit)) if df.empty: return json.dumps( {"message": "No usage data found for this tenant in the specified range."} ) df.sort_values("date", inplace=True) df["pct_change_api"] = df["api_calls"].pct_change() df["anomaly"] = df["pct_change_api"].abs() > 1.5 return df.to_json(orient="records") # Register this in a list to be used by FunctionTool user_functions = [billing_anomaly_summary] Create and Configure the AI Agent: Now we'll set up the AI agent and integrate it with our Neon Postgres tool using the Azure AI Agent Service SDK. The Python script does the following: Creates the agent Instantiates an AI agent using the selected model (gpt-4o, for example), adds tool access, and sets instructions that tell the agent how to behave (e.g., “You are a helpful SaaS assistant…”). Creates a conversation thread A thread is started to hold a conversation between the user and the agent. Posts a user message Sends a question like “Why did my billing spike for tenant_456 this week?” to the agent. Processes the request The agent reads the message, determines that it should use the custom tool to retrieve usage data, and processes the query. Displays the response Prints the response from the agent with a natural language explanation based on the tool’s output. # billing_anomaly_agent.py import os from datetime import datetime from azure.ai.projects import AIProjectClient from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential from azure.ai.projects.models import FunctionTool, ToolSet from dotenv import load_dotenv from pprint import pprint from billing_agent_tools import user_functions # Custom tool function module # Load environment variables from .env file load_dotenv() # Create an Azure AI Project Client project_client = AIProjectClient.from_connection_string( credential=DefaultAzureCredential(), conn_str=os.environ["PROJECT_CONNECTION_STRING"], ) # Initialize toolset with our user-defined functions functions = FunctionTool(user_functions) toolset = ToolSet() toolset.add(functions) # Create the agent agent = project_client.agents.create_agent( model=os.environ["AZURE_OPENAI_DEPLOYMENT_NAME"], name=f"billing-anomaly-agent-{datetime.now().strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M')}", description="Billing Anomaly Detection Agent", instructions=f""" You are a helpful SaaS financial assistant that retrieves and explains billing anomalies using usage data. The current date is {datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d")}. """, toolset=toolset, ) print(f"Created agent, ID: {agent.id}") # Create a communication thread thread = project_client.agents.create_thread() print(f"Created thread, ID: {thread.id}") # Post a message to the agent thread message = project_client.agents.create_message( thread_id=thread.id, role="user", content="Why did my billing spike for tenant_456 this week?", ) print(f"Created message, ID: {message.id}") # Run the agent and process the query run = project_client.agents.create_and_process_run( thread_id=thread.id, agent_id=agent.id ) print(f"Run finished with status: {run.status}") if run.status == "failed": print(f"Run failed: {run.last_error}") # Fetch and display the messages messages = project_client.agents.list_messages(thread_id=thread.id) print("Messages:") pprint(messages["data"][0]["content"][0]["text"]["value"]) # Optional cleanup: # project_client.agents.delete_agent(agent.id) # print("Deleted agent") Run the agent: To run the agent, run the following command python billing_anomaly_agent.py Snippet of output from agent: Using the Azure AI Foundry Agent Playground: After running your agent using the Azure AI Agent SDK, it is saved within your Azure AI Foundry project. You can now experiment with it using the Agent Playground. To try it out: Go to the Agents section in your Azure AI Foundry workspace. Find your billing anomaly agent in the list and click to open it. Use the playground interface to test different financial or billing-related questions, such as: “Did tenant_456 exceed their API usage quota this month?” “Explain recent storage usage changes for tenant_456.” This is a great way to validate your agent's behavior without writing more code. Summary: You’ve now created a working AI agent that talks to your Postgres database, all using: A simple Python function Azure AI Agent Service A Neon Serverless Postgres backend This approach is beginner-friendly, lightweight, and practical for real-world use. Want to go further? You can: Add more tools to the agent Integrate with vector search (e.g., detect anomaly reasons from logs using embeddings) Resources: Introduction to Azure AI Agent Service Develop an AI agent with Azure AI Agent Service Getting Started with Azure AI Agent Service Neon on Azure Build AI Agents with Azure AI Agent Service and Neon Multi-Agent AI Solution with Neon, Langchain, AutoGen and Azure OpenAI Azure AI Foundry GitHub Discussions That's it, folks! But the best part? You can become part of a thriving community of learners and builders by joining the Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors Community. Connect with like-minded individuals, explore hands-on projects, and stay updated with the latest in cloud and AI. 💬 Join the community on Discord here and explore more benefits on the Microsoft Learn Student Hub.There are no benefits to being a MS Partner
The absolute absurdity of being a Microsoft Partner is beyond insanity. Some of us have built businesses around the Microsoft Ecosystem (STUPIDLY I MUST ADD). And for what? For Microsoft to block us from our accounts and give zero explanation of the issue? As I am sure others have seen since there are posts everywhere of other people having the same issues, its mind blowing that Microsoft does nothing to assist its partners who are the ones generating them the revenue. Supporting their crappy products over and over and over again being the ones on the front lines getting beat up by their customers because of constant outages, constant issues. Back in September my account was blocked. Not one bit of an explanation. Not one email telling me why. The only thing I got was a notice saying my visual studio enterprise license was removed. Upon checking I couldn't find anything. I open a support ticket. And so far, the only thing I have been told is my account has been blocked. Yet not one person can apparently tell me why? Not one person can tell me what I need to do to fix it? Not one person can even get on the phone to assist on this. Before I lost numerous customers because of this. I was selling 30k a month in licenses. And now because my account was blocked, I have lost access to a crap ton of my development, I have lost access to any and all of the benefits. I have lost access to basically everything even though when you look at my partner center account. Every single thing still shows active / approved. Etc. My suggestion, if you are considering becoming a Microsoft Partner. DONT. SIMPLE AS THAT. The fact they can block you from doing business, block access to products and services you have paid for. And give you zero ability to fix it so you lose numerous customers and don't even tell you what happened or what needs to be done to rectify the issue. Partnering with Microsoft is the single biggest mistake I have made as a business owner. The second biggest would be that I built my development side of the business fully integrated into the MS ecosystem. Which made it so they cost me countless amounts of money and ability to even do business with my customers."GitHub Copilot Enterprise (via Azure Credits)" benefit on Billing Profile, but GitHub rejects it
Hi all, Posting here because we are stuck between three support teams and hoping someone has already been through this. Context We are a Microsoft Solutions Partner. Every year we redeem the "GitHub Copilot Enterprise (via Azure Credits)" benefit from Partner Center. Until last year, redeeming it meant assigning the benefit to a user, opening an activation link and getting a new Azure Sponsorship subscription (quotaId Sponsored_2016-01-01). We linked that subscription to our GitHub Enterprise under Billing and licensing, Payment information, Metered billing via Azure, and it worked fine. What changed After our renewal this year, Partner Center uses the new modernized redemption flow. The credits are deposited directly onto our MCA Billing Profile (the one tied to the partner program purchase). Partner Center confirms the redemption was successful and the credits are visible in Azure. The problem The only subscription offer we can create under that Billing Profile is Pay As You Go (0003P, quotaId PayAsYouGo_2014-09-01). Other offers say we are not eligible. When we try to add any of these subscriptions in GitHub, they are greyed out as "not supported". Our old Sponsorship subscription has expired, so we have the credits but no way to spend them on GitHub Copilot. What we already checked We are Owner on the Azure subscription and owner on the GitHub enterprise. The subscription permission validation app has admin consent. Marketplace purchases are enabled on the Billing Profile. GitHub and Azure use the same Entra tenant. Support so far Partner Center says the benefit was redeemed correctly and the issue is on the Azure side. Azure Billing says they cannot change the subscription offer or create a Sponsorship subscription, and points us to GitHub. GitHub says the subscription type is not supported as a payment method. Our distributor told us they are seeing the same issue and have escalated it with Microsoft. Questions Has anyone managed to use the Partner Center GitHub Copilot credits with GitHub after the move to Billing Profile redemption? Is there a specific Azure offer or subscription type under an MCA Billing Profile that GitHub accepts? Did GitHub Support manually enable a PAYG subscription for metered billing in your case? Is there a support path or escalation contact that owns this end to end across Partner Center, Azure and GitHub? Any pointers are appreciated, even "same here". Thanks!
