Mission 10: Integrate with MCP Servers

🕵️‍♂️ CODENAME: `OPERATION MCP RENDEZVOUS`

⏱️ Operation Time Window: ~45 minutes

🎯 Mission Brief

Welcome, Operative. Your previous missions have shown you the power of prompts. You learned about multimodal document analysis, grounding your prompts with Dataverse data and document generation. Now you'll unlock another advanced capability: Model Context Protocol (MCP) server integration.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is Operation MCP Rendezvous. In this operation you'll be connecting your agent to external MCP servers to extend its capabilities, enabling it to arrange interview prep meetings.

🔎 Objectives

In this mission, you'll learn:

How to understand and work with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard
How to use Agent 365 to integrate MCP servers with your Copilot Studio agents
How to connect your Copilot Studio agent to MCP servers
How to leverage MCP server capabilities within your agents

🔌 What is MCP?

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that enables AI assistants to securely connect to external data sources and tools. Think of MCP as the USB-C of AI integration – just as USB-C provides a universal connector for various devices and peripherals, MCP provides a standardized way for AI systems to connect to different services, databases, and applications.

Before USB-C, every device had its own proprietary connector (remember all those different charger cables?). Similarly, before MCP, connecting AI agents to external systems required custom integrations for each service. MCP solves this by providing a universal "plug-and-play" protocol.

✨ Key benefits of MCP

Universal connectivity: One standard protocol works across different AI platforms and data sources
Secure access: Built-in authentication and permission controls protect your data
Extensibility: Easily add new capabilities to your agents without rewriting core logic
Interoperability: MCP servers can work with multiple AI assistants and applications

In this mission, you'll use MCP to connect your Copilot Studio agent to external services, dramatically expanding what your agent can do beyond its built-in capabilities.

🛠️ Where does Agent 365 come in?

Agent 365 is Microsoft's comprehensive platform for managing and extending AI agents at enterprise scale. It gives each AI agent its own Microsoft Entra Agent ID for identity, lifecycle, and access management, while providing the infrastructure to safely connect agents to business systems through MCP servers.

Think of Agent 365 as the enterprise control plane for your AI agents - it handles security, governance, and observability while enabling agents to interact with Microsoft 365 and business applications through standardized MCP tooling servers.

👥 How Agent 365 serves different roles

Agent 365 addresses the needs of everyone involved in the agent ecosystem:

IT Administrators: Monitor agent activity, enforce policies, and manage threats through the Microsoft 365 admin center
Security Teams: Apply enterprise-grade controls for identity, authentication, and compliance with Microsoft Purview and Defender integration
Developers: Build and extend agents using unified SDKs, pre-built MCP servers, and frameworks in Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry
Business Decision Makers: Deploy agents securely and measure their impact on productivity and business outcomes
Information Workers: Collaborate with agents seamlessly to amplify productivity

🔧 Agent 365 tooling servers for MCP integration

Agent 365 provides enterprise-grade MCP servers that give your agents safe, governed access to business systems, including:

Pre-built MCP servers for Microsoft 365 and business applications:

Outlook Calendar: Create, update, and manage calendar events
Outlook Mail: Send, read, and search emails
Teams: Create chats, post messages, and manage channels
SharePoint & OneDrive: Upload files, manage lists, and search documents
Word: Create and edit documents, add comments
Dataverse & Dynamics 365: Perform CRUD operations on business data
User Profile: Access user information, managers, and direct reports
Copilot Search: Chat with Microsoft 365 Copilot and ground responses with files

Enterprise security and governance:

Centralized control: Manage all MCP servers through the Microsoft 365 admin center - allow or block servers organization-wide
Scoped permissions: Agents only access the resources they need based on Microsoft Entra scopes
Full observability: Monitor and audit all tool calls using Microsoft Defender Advanced Hunting
Policy enforcement: Apply DLP, MIP, rate limits, and security scans at runtime
Threat protection: Detect and remediate attacks targeting agents with Microsoft Defender integration

Custom MCP server creation:

Build scenario-specific servers using the MCP Management Server - an API-first tool for creating custom MCP servers
Connect to 1,500+ Power Platform connectors (ServiceNow, JIRA, etc.)
Integrate Microsoft Graph APIs, REST APIs, and Dataverse custom APIs
Publish and certify custom servers for your organization
Enable ISVs to build and publish certified servers

Developer experience:

Available in both Copilot Studio (low-code) and Azure AI Foundry (pro-code)
Built into the Agent 365 SDK for seamless integration
Visual Studio Code integration for creating and testing custom MCP servers
Consistent, standardized interfaces across all tooling servers

💡 Why this matters for your agents

Agent 365 transforms MCP from an open standard into an enterprise-ready platform. Your agents get:

Deterministic, auditable actions - every tool call is tracked and governed
Production-grade reliability - all MCP servers undergo rigorous testing for accuracy, latency, and reliability
Security by default - enterprise controls are built-in, not bolted on
Rapid development - pre-built servers for common scenarios, easy customization for specialized needs
Unified management - one control plane for all agents, regardless of where they're built

🎯 What you'll focus on in this mission

While Agent 365 offers a comprehensive platform for agent management, governance, and custom MCP server development, this mission focuses specifically on using pre-built MCP servers in Copilot Studio.

You'll learn how to connect your agent to ready-made tooling servers (like Outlook Calendar and Teams) and enable real actions in Microsoft 365 applications - without building custom integrations. Think of this as learning to use the tools already in the toolbox before building your own.

🧪 Lab 10: Add MCP Servers to arrange an interview prep-meeting

IMPORTANT

For this lab, you need to make sure that you are part of the Frontier preview program to get early access to Microsoft Agent 365. Frontier connects you directly with Microsoft’s latest AI innovations. Frontier previews are subject to the existing preview terms of your customer agreements. As these features are still in development, their availability and capabilities may change over time.

Add MCP servers to the Interview Agent

WARNING

In this lab, you will learn how to add two MCP servers: the Microsoft 365 User Profile MCP server and the Microsoft Outlook Calendar MCP. For the lab to work, you will need to configure the following in your tenant ahead of time:

Have a manager configured for your user which can be configured in the M365 Admin Center
Have an appointment on your calendar in the upcoming 24 hours - this is because you will test the MCP server by asking "Get my meetings for today"
Have an extra user created on your tenant, so that you can invite that user for the interview prep-meeting (How to create a user in M365)
For that extra user, the mailbox needs to be provisioned and it would be good to set the working days / hours

To add MCP servers to your agent you only have to add one tool per MCP server. This is different to connector tools which require you to add a tool for every connector action. This ability to add a single tool that handles multiple actions is one of the things that makes MCP Servers a lot easier to work with.

Add the Microsoft 365 User Profile MCP server

Open Copilot Studio and open the previously created Interview Agent
Select Tools in the top navigation
Select Add a tool to start adding the MCP Server
Select Model Context Protocol in the filters to filter the tools down to only MCP Servers
Select the Microsoft 365 User Profile MCP server from the tools list
Select Create new connection from the connection dropdown
Select Create to start the create a connection process
Select your account in the pick your account popup to create the connection
After picking your account, you will see the following screen. Select Add and configure to add the Microsoft 365 User Profile MCP server to the Interview Agent
If you scroll down on the tool overview page, you can find the MCP tools that are part of the MCP server:
Next, select Test to test out the newly added tool
Send the following prompt to the agent in the test pane:
text
```
Who is my manager?
```
Select Allow to consent that you are OK with the MCP server using your data. This consent card will only show once for the agent and this MCP server combination, after you have allowed it for this agent it will not prompt again (unless you add another MCP server that uses the same connector).
Next, you will see the response from the agent. If all goes well, you will see something like this:
If you look on the left of the Test your agent pane, you will see that the agent initialized the MCP server, and it triggered the getMyManager MCP tool. You can also see the details of what the agent sent and received from the MCP tool.

The first part of the lab is done, you can now ask questions about users on your tenant. This enables you to ask questions like:

- Who is my manager?
- Who are my direct reports?
- What is the job role of Daniel Laskewitz?
- And much much more...

You can now try out other tools if you want to as well. If you're ready, lets get the other MCP server added too.

Add the Microsoft Outlook Calendar MCP server

In the last section, you have added the User Profile MCP server, which makes it possible for you to work with user details on your tenant. This is very helpful when you want to for instance plan meetings, because users of your agent usually don't send a prompt that includes an email / user principal name when they want to plan a meeting. Instead, they will send a prompt like the following:

text

meeting with Daniel Laskewitz tomorrow

To add capabilities like this, we need to add another MCP server: the Microsoft Outlook Calendar MCP server. Bear with us: the following steps are a lot like the previous section.

Select Tools at the top navigation
Select Add a tool
Filter the tools by selecting Model Context Protocol
Scroll down and select the Microsoft Outlook Calendar MCP Server
Select Add and configure
Now, you can scroll to the bottom again to see the tools in the Microsoft Outlook Calendar MCP server:
Let's test out this MCP server.
Enter the following prompt:
text
```
Get my meetings for today
```
The agent will respond with the consent card again, because we added another MCP server. Select Allow to consent with the MCP server using your data
Now you will get a response with the meetings you have on your calendar for today:

Plan an interview prep-meeting

Now, we know both the MCP servers work. We want to plan an interview prep-meeting though. So, let's see if that works too!

Select New test session to start a new test session
Enter the following prompt:
text
```
Can you find 3 meeting times for a 30 minute meeting with Jane Doe for an interview prep-meeting?
```
This will trigger the findMeetingTimes MCP tool and it will look at the calendars of both the user of the agent and the Jane Doe and figure out which times work based on their availability. It will then respond with three options for meetings:
And you will be able to figure out what tools have been called in the testing pane:
To plan the actual meeting you still have to respond to the agent.
Enter the following prompt (replace the time with one of the suggested meeting slots you got from the agent):
text
```
Please schedule the one on 10:30 AM UTC
```
This will trigger the createEvent MCP tool and schedule the meeting.
It will show the following meeting request in Jane Doe's mailbox:

Now we're done with this lab. Hopefully this gave you a good overview of how MCP servers can help you in your agents!

🎉 Mission Complete

Great work, Operative! Operation MCP Rendezvous is now complete. You've successfully integrated external MCP servers with your Copilot Studio agent, unlocking powerful new capabilities for extending your agent's functionality!

🚀 Next up: In your next mission, you'll learn how to collect and analyze user feedback to continuously improve your agent's performance.

⏩ Move to Mission 11: Collecting feedback from users