// The Custom Engine · Copilot Studio CAT
Deep technical dives, patterns, and hard-won gotchas from Microsoft's Copilot Acceleration Team, helping the builders and architects who ship agents.
77 deep dives · 12 topics · Updated weekly
// Featured
copilot-studio · governance
Identify GitHub Copilot harness agents, review their environments, and apply Power Platform controls to manage Copilot Credit consumption during maker development and production use.
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
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
WebChat, embedding, and Microsoft Teams.
15 postsModel Context Protocol servers, tools, skills, and resources.
14 postsKnowledge sources, retrieval, search, and structured-data patterns.
10 postsGenerative orchestration, multi-agent routing, and topic design.
9 postsCustom connectors, agent flows, RPA, and line-of-business integration.
9 postsEvals, batch testing, and scoring answer quality.
6 postsLifecycle, governance, licensing, and shipping to production.
6 postsSSO, on-behalf-of, Entra ID, and consent flows.
3 postsPro-code custom engine agents with the M365 Agents SDK.
3 posts// Fresh off the bench
copilot-studio · agents
Use Agent Review Tool to investigate findings, assess skill quality, and understand configuration relationships before releasing a Copilot Studio agent.
mcp
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
How the Copilot Studio agent sandbox turns model reasoning into finished files, calculations, and other executable work while keeping external access governed.
orchestration
Compare documents using Microsoft Word's Native Redlining Track Changes.
alm
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.