orchestration
The New Copilot Studio Agent Sandbox
How the Copilot Studio agent sandbox turns model reasoning into finished files, calculations, and other executable work while keeping external access governed.
The Custom Engine
// The Custom Engine · Copilot Studio CAT
Field notes for building real Copilot Studio agents.
Deep technical dives, patterns, and hard-won gotchas from Microsoft's Copilot Acceleration Team, helping the builders and architects who ship agents.
75 deep dives · 9 topics · Updated weekly
// Featured
Building inside the GHCP harness
orchestration
Video Demo: Upgrading a Classic Agent to Modern Orchestration
Watch GitHub Copilot CLI upgrade a classic Copilot Studio travel agent to modern orchestration with our newly released plugin, then explore how its capabilities become Skills and tools.
orchestration
New Harness, New Rules? CAT's Got You
Copilot Studio agents can now be powered by the GitHub Copilot harness, a big shift in how you build them. We shipped four resources so you can understand it, see it run, upgrade to it, and extend it. Here's how to use each one.
// Browse by topic
Topics
All topicsChannels
WebChat, embedding, and Microsoft Teams.
15 postsMCP & Tools
Model Context Protocol servers, tools, skills, and resources.
14 postsKnowledge & Retrieval
Knowledge sources, retrieval, search, and structured-data patterns.
10 postsOrchestration
Generative orchestration, multi-agent routing, and topic design.
9 postsAutomation & Integration
Custom connectors, agent flows, RPA, and line-of-business integration.
9 postsTesting & Evaluation
Evals, batch testing, and scoring answer quality.
6 postsGovernance & ALM
Lifecycle, governance, licensing, and shipping to production.
6 postsAuthentication & Identity
SSO, on-behalf-of, Entra ID, and consent flows.
3 postsAgents SDK
Pro-code custom engine agents with the M365 Agents SDK.
3 posts// Fresh off the bench
Latest
All posts
mcp
Turn Your Daily Digest Into a Podcast You'll Actually Listen To
A Copilot Studio Skill that turns any document, email, or press review into a two-host podcast episode, with multi-voice SSML, an Azure Text to Speech endpoint, and an agent you can listen to from your phone.
orchestration
Redlining Documents with the New Copilot Studio Experience
Compare documents using Microsoft Word's Native Redlining Track Changes.
alm
Why Your E3 Users Can Suddenly Build Agents in Copilot Studio — and How to Turn It Off
A recent redirect change surfaced classic agent creation in the Copilot Studio web app for basic-licensed users. Here's the single service plan admins can disable to govern it.
testing
Stop Asking an LLM to "Rate This 1-5": A Better Way to Score with LLMs
Asking an LLM to "rate this 1-5" gives you a number that looks decisive but isn't. Here's how to build LLM scores you can actually defend.
mcp
Agents Have Skills Now — Here's How They Work in Copilot Studio
How Skills work in Copilot Studio agents: instructions and resources loaded on demand for specific scenarios, why you would modularize instructions into Skills, and when to use Skills versus instructions.
alm
The Admin Control That Closes the Door Before "Hello"
A new Power Platform admin control lets you govern how users authenticate to Copilot Studio agents, and it answers a question that DLP channel blocking never could.
alm
ALM for Copilot Studio Agents: The Foundation
The fundamentals of Application Lifecycle Management for Copilot Studio agents: environments, solutions, publishers, and pipelines - the safe baseline every maker should have in place.
knowledge
Page-Level PDF Citations in Copilot Studio
How to deliver page-level PDF citations in Copilot Studio for SharePoint and uploaded file knowledge sources, so users land on the exact page that grounded the answer.
mcp
Wiring up a Snowflake-managed MCP server in Copilot Studio
An end-to-end walkthrough for wiring a Snowflake-managed MCP server into a Microsoft Copilot Studio agent with delegated user OAuth through Microsoft Entra ID, including the Cortex Agent prerequisite, the manual OAuth path Snowflake actually requires, and the small details that make or break the setup.
automation
Building a Custom Human-in-the-Loop Experience for Copilot Studio Workflows
When every workflow approval is another email in someone's inbox, something has gone wrong. A custom connector pattern that lets Copilot Studio workflows pause for human input and resume through any UI you want.
mcp
Wiring up the Jira (Atlassian) Remote MCP server in Copilot Studio in 5 mins
The Atlassian Remote MCP server uses Dynamic Client Registration. If you wire it up with Manual OAuth in Copilot Studio you'll waste an afternoon. Use Dynamic discovery and a few Atlassian admin toggles, and you're done in five minutes.
alm
Herding Clouds: Taming Pay-As-You-Go Billing Policies in Power Platform at Scale
Assigning billing policies to 50+ environments by hand doesn't scale, and nobody reads the budget alert email before Monday. This post walks through a bulk assignment script and an automated unlinking pipeline that solve both problems.