Painful behavior of "slash" ("/") in chat prompts
I know about the /commands (/reset, /help, ...) in Copilot powered applications where hitting "/" triggers auto-completion suggestions. Here we are talking about Copilot chat (Teams or Web app for instance) Each time you hit the "/" key, it pops up a menu inviting you to upload files, preventing you from going on typing until you hit the <esc> key. That's too disruptive. That would be ok if the upload menu what acting like a suggestion -- You may select with arrow keys if you wish, or just go on typing if you just need a "/" in your prompts. Please consider disabling this "feature" or I at least enhancing it so the upload menu is not modal and gets dismissed when you go on typing. Comments positive or negative are welcome, thumbs up too 😉Supercharge Customer Experiences Integrate Microsoft 365 with Customer Engagement Apps
In today’s digital-first world, seamless collaboration and data visibility are key to delivering superior customer experiences. Many organizations already leverage Microsoft 365 for productivity and collaboration, while also using CRM or customer engagement platforms like Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, or others to manage customer interactions. But what if these two worlds could work more closely together? By integrating Microsoft 365 with customer engagement apps, businesses can empower teams, streamline workflows, and deliver more personalized, timely customer interactions—all without leaving their everyday tools. https://dellenny.com/supercharge-customer-experiences-integrate-microsoft-365-with-customer-engagement-apps/
Can we enable Copilot in Azure Devops for AI assisted user story and test case generation?
I am currently using Copilot as an enterprise user for github copilot in VSCode and want to have copilot enable in Azure Devops so that it can assist in user story and test case generation. But i am not sure if it's even possible. Please let me know how can i achieve it?
What's difference creating Agent from Copilot page vs from Copilot Studio -> Copilot for M365?
Hello, I am learning about Copilot and was very confused by these two different ways to do it. My understanding is both are "Declarative Agents" which lets the Microsoft 365 Copilot do the most heavy lifting. Method 1. First way is to go to Copilot page and clicking 'Create an Agent' w3 Method 2: Going to Copilot Studio -> Agents -> Copilot for Microsoft 365 -> New Agent (Couldn't find a screenshot) Q1. Anyway, first, I created an Agent using the first Method 1 above, and now I see it on the Copilot page under 'Agents' section. However, when I go to Copilot Studio -> Agents -> Copilot for Microsoft 365, I don't see that Agent there. Is this normal and intended? Q2. Is an Agent created using the Method 1 only available to people who have Copilot license? (as long as they are shared; I see options are only me, anyone in the organization, and specific users in the organization) Q3. Could you please confirm agents created using either way above are both "Declarative Agents"? Sorry for the newbie questions in advance... I took the course MS-4010 and reviewed several posts but still confusing...When not to purchase Copilot Studio
Copilot agents are everywhere and for everyone. They are experts on a topic, able to talk to other agents, start an automation, and complete tasks for you. Agents can boost team productivity and process efficiency. Productivity dreams may come true with agents. That's how the need to use and create agents increases every day. ✅ Stay calm and read further before making any purchase decision on the M365 admin center. It may save you over 224,64 EUR monthly with a 1-year upfront commitment. 👇 Who can create agents, and how? M365 Copilot licensed users can create agents using Copilot Studio. Although the creation is not available for M365 Copilot non-licensed users, they can add and interact with agents. Nowadays, the easiest way to create Copilot agents is as follows: Use the built-in version of Copilot Studio. Do not start from scratch. Instead, use an agent template like the Prompt Coach to build your own. Why do agents bridge the gap between M365 Copilot licensed and non-licensed users? Agents are an excellent option for providing M365-Copilot non-licensed users access to Copilot capabilities grounded on organizational data. Even if users are not licensed with M365 Copilot, they can benefit from Copilot grounded on organizational data via agents. Can I purchase Copilot Studio? Copilot Studio is a no-code Power Platform tool that allows the creation of Copilot agents. The M365 Copilot add-on license already includes licensing for Copilot Studio. You can find it as Copilot Studio in M365 Copilot. There are 3 different ways to license Copilot Studio: 🤖 Copilot Studio pay-as-you-go meter: 0.01 USD per message (no upfront commitment) 🤖 Copilot Studio message packs: 200 USD per tenant, per month 🤖 Copilot Studio in M365 Copilot: 30 USD per user, per month Nevertheless, there's a product called Microsoft Copilot Studion on the purchase services on M365 Admin Center. I am not quite sure, what this product is for. If you know it, please let me know in the comments. 🛑 The challenge is: Microsoft Copilot Studio on the M365 admin center purchase services can easily be mistaken for Copilot Studio in M365 Copilot. Be cautious!How to create Copilot Agents using the M365 Biz Chat
Users can effortlessly create simple Copilot agents using the no-code agent builder available within BizChat at Microsoft365.com/chat or in Teams. By providing natural language instructions and utilizing grounding documents stored in SharePoint, these agents adhere to the same security and information protection policies as Microsoft 365 Copilot. All installed agents, including plugins, are conveniently located in the right-side pane within Copilot, ensuring a focused and streamlined chat experience.Rewrite it with Copilot!
Writing is not an easy task, at least not for me. It simply demands time to challenge the complexity of our thought process. Whether you’re drafting a client proposal, refining a team announcement post, or just trying to get rid of the daily pile of emails, the words just don't always come out right the first time. That's where Rewrite with Copilot steps in. This feature, integrated across Microsoft 365 apps, acts like your personal editor — helping you sharpen your message, adjust tone, and even tailor your writing to your audience. It’s not just about fixing grammar. It’s about making your words work. There's a prompt for the most common challenges: Do your colleagues have no time to read a long message? Then select the option "Make it shorter". Or you tried hard, but your message still sounds complicated. Then go for "Simplify". Maybe you need to add more details, then use "Add more detail". Rewrite with Copilot is almost everywhere 🪄 You’ll find “Rewrite with Copilot” in: Outlook: Auto-rewrites, make it shorter or longer, change the tone, and more. Teams: Rewrite or adjust the tone of the message. SharePoint: Edit your text web-part and select "Auto rewrite". Loop: Prompt to Copilot to change the tone, simplify, and make whatever text improvements needed to communicate purposefully in your Loop pages. Edge: Rewrite with Copilot either using the shortcut Alt. + I or selecting your text and clicking on the "Rewrite with Copilot" option of the context menu. Here note that Rewrite with Copilot in Edge is currently not available with your work account, only with personal accounts. That's not all, you can use the feature in MS Forms, Word, PowerPoint, Notepad for Windows, and more! Adoption Tips 1️⃣ AI-generated content may be incorrect. Always verify what Copilot rewrites. 2️⃣ Copilot evolves quickly. If your favorite Microsoft 365 app does not offer the feature yet, it may be different next month. So check regularly for feature updates. 3️⃣ Asking Copilot to rewrite in a language that is not your mother tongue? Try to write sentences that are simple and clear, using straightforward vocabulary, so that the original text does not lead to confusion. Verify the given text with another source. Copy the text and prompt to Copilot: "Help me understand the meaning this text: <Copy your text>" Limitations Copilot might misinterpret your text if the content is ambiguous, grammatically flawed or lacks of context. There could be misunderstandings or inaccuracies for individuals working with "Rewrite" feature if one is working in a language that is not their first language. Rewrite with Copilot is easy to use, be aware that there are small differences from app to app. For example, in MS Teams you access the feature by click on a magic pen icon and not on a Copilot icon. Communication can be challenging. Words don't always align perfectly with our intentions, especially when time is limited. But the good news is, "Rewrite with Copilot" is a great way to support everyday writing processes. Stay curious and give it a try! ***** I write this post in collaboration with sohnash .
Building Copilot Agents with User Experience in Mind
Understand where and how the user will be accessing the Copilot agent Create multiple-modal experiences for your Copilot using voice To enhance the accessibility and user-friendliness of your copilot agent, consider developing a voice agent for voice interactions. This hands-free experience is not only inclusive but also particularly beneficial in customer scenarios where associates are using their hands and need to interact with the agent quickly and effectively without typing. Before deploying the agent to your user base, ensure thorough testing in the work environment to validate a good end-user experience, especially considering the loudness of the environment. For step-by-step instructions on testing the voice agent experience, you can view this blog Determine the proper channel deployment Selecting the appropriate channel for deployment is crucial. Ensure you reach users where they perform their work, whether it's through M365 Copilot, M365 Copilot chat, embedding into a website, or other channels. It's essential to deploy the agent to the channels that best suit the use case. Creating multilingual agents Creating multilingual agents is essential for providing a personalized and inclusive experience. By enabling your agent to interact in multiple languages, you can cater to a diverse user base and ensure effective communication without language barriers. This feature enhances accessibility, user satisfaction, and expands the agent's reach in global contexts. For more specific information on multilingual agents see below. Take Time During the Configuration to Set Up the Agent for Success Creating a name for the agent In a world where multi-agents are on the rise, it's essential to be as descriptive as possible in the name and description for the intended use. This helps users understand the agent's purpose and functionality. Planning out your multi-agent scenarios early and defining clear names is especially important to avoid confusion. Add starter prompts Starter prompts guide users on how to interact with the agent effectively. These prompts should be clear and concise. When selecting starter prompts, consider defining the most common use cases for the agent. For example, if you are creating an IT Support agent, you might include prompts like "create a support ticket" or "check request status" to cover the most asked questions. Provide description and general instructions A detailed description of the agent's capabilities and intended use helps users understand what they can expect from the interaction. This description also assists the language model in identifying and utilizing your agent for specific tasks or situations. Ensure that the description is concise yet informative. For the instructions (declarative and generative mode), you should be as detailed as possible. Include the purpose, guidelines on what the agent should and should not do, tone, and the skills the agent will possess. Below are resources that provide detailed instructions on how to construct the verbiage effectively. Add key knowledge resources Adding key knowledge sources to the agent is crucial for its effectiveness and reliability. By integrating relevant documentation and connecting to essential business systems, the agent can provide accurate and timely information, ensuring users receive the support they need. These connections enable the agent to perform specific tasks efficiently, leveraging up-to-date data and resources. This not only enhances the user’s experience but also ensures the agent remains a valuable tool in various scenarios, from customer support to internal business operations. Offer alternative ways to answer questions Connecting to a live agent Provide users with the option to connect to a live agent for more complex queries or issues that the agent cannot resolve. Customizing the escalation topic is another way to track potential opportunities for agent improvement. Creating a step in the topic to record the escalation to ensure it is captured for agent performance is key to ensuring agent success and continued feedback on areas of improvement. Create adaptive cards Using adaptive cards in a Copilot agent enhances user interaction by providing a visually appealing and interactive interface. They facilitate structured data collection, ensuring consistency and ease of processing. Adaptive cards offer customization and flexibility, allowing them to be tailored to various scenarios and use cases. They improve communication by presenting information clearly and concisely, reducing ambiguity. Additionally, adaptive cards integrate seamlessly across different platforms and devices, ensuring consistent user experience. Overall, they significantly enhance the functionality and user experience of Copilot agents. Provide documentation references or links In the agent's response, include links to additional resources. Offer links to documentation or external sites where users can find more detailed information. Automate, Automate, Automate Enhancing efficiency with automation Using automation in Copilot agents (agent flows and agent actions) can significantly improve efficiency and reduce manual workload by identifying key processes that can be automated. Incorporating messages that inform users when the agent is processing their request helps manage user expectations and enhances the overall experience. By automating repetitive tasks and providing real-time updates, Copilot agents can streamline workflows, allowing users to focus on more complex and value-added activities. This approach not only boosts productivity but also ensures smoother and more transparent interaction with the agent. Monitor Agents for Insights Actively review the analytics for the agent Regularly reviewing analytics is essential for assessing the agent's performance and identifying areas for improvement, ensuring a high-quality user experience. By analyzing metrics such as engagement outcomes, knowledge source usage, action success rates, and user feedback, you can gain valuable insights into how effectively your agent is meeting user needs. Resources like Microsoft Copilot Studio Analytic, Topic Analytic Autonomous agent health, and Application Insights telemetry provide detailed guidance on measuring and enhancing agent performance. For more information see the discussion on monitoring performance and effectiveness of M365 Copilot agents. Collect Feedback Integrate feedback mechanisms Use adaptive cards to collect user feedback after every interaction with your agent. This allows you to assess and enhance the quality of agent responses while ensuring user satisfaction. Implementing this feedback mechanism helps in obtaining valuable insights into how well your agent is performing and identifying areas for improvement. Conclusion To create an effective Copilot agent, focus on providing easy accessibility by developing voice interactions and multilingual capabilities. Ensure you set up the agent properly in a world of multi-agents to decrease complexity and avoid confusion. Be creative in how you answer prompts, using adaptive cards and alternative ways to respond. Automate crucial business processes associated with the agent's purpose to enhance efficiency and reduce manual workload. Finally, actively collect feedback and apply it to continuously improve the user experience, ensuring the agent remains a valuable tool. A special thanks to IvicaIvancic ((3) Create your first custom AI enabled Copilot Studio Voice Agent – step-by-step guide | LinkedIn) and TrevorNorcross (Monitoring performance and effectiveness of Microsoft 365 Copilot agents | Microsoft Community Hub) for their incredible support in allowing me to link to their insightful blogs.Clarity around the different types of connectors available for Microsoft 365 Copilot
Working with some of the largest and most technical of Microsoft's partners in the Global System Integrators (GSI) team, we are still often met with confusion around the different types of connectors available in M365 Copilot. While agent extensibility could easily be a full week or more of discussion topics and sessions, I wanted to spend a moment to focus specifically on some of the various types of connectors available to agent makers working with M365 Copilot. GRAPH CONNECTORS Graph Connectors play a crucial role in enhancing the knowledge scope of Microsoft 365 Copilot, by enabling the integration of external data sources into the Microsoft Graph. This integration allows Copilot to reason over a broader range of enterprise content, thereby improving the relevance and accuracy of responses to user queries. By ingesting unstructured business data through Graph Connectors, organizations can ensure that their critical content is indexed and accessible within Microsoft 365 Copilot. This process involves semantic indexing, which optimizes data retrieval and enhances the matching of search queries to content, providing more relevant results than simple keyword matches. The relevance of Graph Connectors to Microsoft 365 Copilot is particularly significant in the context of enterprise search and data utilization. Copilot leverages these connectors to access and summarize information from various external sources, such as third-party applications, databases, and cloud services. This capability allows users to find, summarize, and learn from their business data through natural language prompts in Copilot. For example, when a user asks Copilot to summarize recent communications or project updates, Graph Connectors enable Copilot to utilize relevant data from integrated sources, ensuring comprehensive and accurate responses. As an agent maker using M365 Copilot, one important consideration of Graph Connectors is that they offer high-performance operations, due to direct access to information via the Large Language Model (LLM). However, keep in mind that data accessed is not pulled from the external data sources in real-time, as the Graph Connectors sync this business data on a set schedule. Additionally, your operations will be limited to retrieval-based ("read only") tasks when interacting with externally-synchronized Graph data. It should also be noted that these types of connectors will work best for working with unstructured data. Moreover, Graph Connectors are not limited to Microsoft 365 Copilot; they also power other intelligent experiences within the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Microsoft Search and Context IQ. This extensibility allows users to hover over in-text citations to preview external items referenced in responses and dive deeper into the referenced content by selecting links at the bottom of Copilot responses. The ability to configure custom connectors and utilize pre-built ones further enhances the flexibility and utility of Graph Connectors, making them a valuable tool for organizations looking to leverage their external data within Microsoft 365. By integrating these connectors, organizations can ensure that their data is not only accessible but also actionable, driving better decision-making and productivity. POWER PLATFORM (FLOW) CONNECTORS Power Platform Connectors are integral to extending the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot by enabling seamless integration with various external applications and services. These connectors act as proxies or "wrappers" around APIs, allowing Copilot to interact with other apps and services within the Microsoft ecosystem and beyond. By leveraging Power Platform connectors, users can connect their accounts and utilize prebuilt actions and triggers to build sophisticated workflows and applications. This integration enhances Copilot's ability to retrieve and process data from diverse sources, thereby providing more comprehensive and actionable insights to users. In the context of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Power Platform connectors enable the creation of custom agents that can perform specific actions based on enterprise data. For instance, connectors can be used to retrieve sales opportunities, manage orders, or even check the weather at a customer's location for site visits. This functionality is particularly valuable for businesses looking to automate routine tasks and streamline operations. By integrating these connectors, Copilot can ground its responses in real-time data from various enterprise systems, ensuring that users receive accurate and relevant information. While the performance of a Power Platform Connector will inherently not be as speedy as data retrieval via Graph Connectors, agent makers should consider advantages to using Power Platform Connectors in the right scenarios. The API wrapper can perform real-time operations with the external business data, not requiring data synchronization to the Graph to access. Additionally, these types of connectors offer the ability to add and update records, in addition to retrieval. I have also seen use cases where Power Platform Connectors are preferred when dealing with structured data, even in retrieval-only agents and tasks. Beyond that, Power Platform Connectors are essential for extending Copilot's capabilities through Copilot Studio. This platform allows makers to add custom knowledge and skills to agents using connectors, thereby expanding the range of actions that Copilot can perform. For example, connectors can bring in data from Microsoft Graph, Dynamics 365, and other non-Microsoft enterprise sources, enabling Copilot to provide more nuanced and detailed responses. The ability to use these connectors in a no-code environment makes it accessible for users with varying technical expertise, empowering them to create intelligent, automated experiences that address unique business challenges. CONCLUSION By understanding the different types of connectors, the advantages and disadvantages of each, and the scenarios where each work best, agent makers can use one of the most powerful tools for working with external business data. For additional technical detail, please see the links below: Copilot connectors and actions overview (preview) - Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn Use Power Platform connectors (preview) - Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn Extend Copilot for Microsoft 365 with connectors | Microsoft Learn Build Microsoft Graph Connectors for Microsoft 365 Copilot | Microsoft Learn
