Build plugins and connectors for Microsoft 365 Copilot

After completing this learning path, students will be able to:

• Describe the business value, benefits, and limitations of extending Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Examine use cases for different extensibility options.
• Optimize your plugins for use with Copilot.
• Apply best practices for building high quality plugins for Copilot.
• Understand data, privacy, and security considerations for plugins and connectors.
• Understand what message extensions are and how to build them
• Create a message extension
• Understand how to authenticate users using single sign-on and call a custom API protected with Microsoft Entra authentication
• Understand how to extend and optimize message extensions for use with Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Understand the purpose and functionality of Teams Message Extensions as plugins in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn how to set up a development environment and run the Northwind Inventory application.
• Gain practical experience in running the application as a message extension in Microsoft Teams and Outlook.
• Run the application as a plugin for Microsoft 365 Copilot and experiment with prompting.
• Develop skills in adding new commands to the application to expand the plugin capabilities and perform more tasks.
• Understand the underlying code of the application and how it works in more depth.

• Basic knowledge of C#
• Basic knowledge of Bicep
• Basic knowledge of authentication
• Administrator access to a Microsoft 365 tenant
• Access to an Azure subscription
• Access to Microsoft 365 Copilot is optional and required only to complete one exercise
• Visual Studio 2022 17.10+ with Teams Toolkit (Microsoft Teams development tools component) installed
• .NET 8.0
• Dev Proxy 0.19.1+
• Experience with TypeScript (TS), JavaScript (JS), Node.js, and npm
• Experience with Visual Studio Code (Visual Studio Code)
• Experience with the Microsoft Teams Toolkit, message extensions, and adaptive cards
• Familiarity with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility fundamentals

• Introduction
• Extension fundamentals
• Add knowledge with Graph connectors
• Add skills with plugins
• Build your own copilot
• Knowledge check

Choose a Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility development path

• Introduction
• Why extend Copilot?
• Which path for extensibility should you choose?
• What are the benefits and limitations?
• Optimize your plugin for Microsoft 365 Copilot
• How will you use your plugin or connector?
• Apply data, privacy, and security practices when developing your plugin or connector

Connect Microsoft 365 Copilot to your external data in real-time with message extension plugins built with .NET and Visual Studio

• Introduction
• What are message extensions?
• Create a message extension
• Exercise - Create a message extension
• Add single sign-on
• Exercise - Add single sign-on
• Return product data from Microsoft Entra protected API
• Exercise - Return product data from Microsoft Entra protected API
• Extend and optimize message extensions for use with Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Exercise - Extend and optimize message extensions for use with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Guided Project - Build a message extension plugin with TypeScript (TS) for Microsoft 365 Copilot (This is a Guided Project module where you complete an end-to-end project by following step-by-step instructions.)

• Introduction
• Prepare your development environment
• Exercise 1 - Run the sample as a message extension
• Exercise 2 - Run the sample as a Copilot plugin
• Exercise 3 - Add a new command
• Exercise 4 - Explore the plugin source code
• Summary