Custom Engine Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot

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Agents in BizChat has been available for some time already, but now there is an upcoming update to Agents. The introduction of “ custom engine agents ” in Microsoft 365 Copilot! These specialized agents can be built on any large language model (LLM), toolchain, or orchestration tool, tailored specifically for your domain or tenant workflows. Initially supported in Microsoft Teams, this feature will soon be available in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat ( BizChat ).   The introduction of Custom engine agents enables your organization to create customized experiences using your own AI systems and orchestrators. You can design unique prompts, connect to any LLM, and integrate these custom agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot. After the rollout, users will be able to access these agents, provided they are enabled and deployed in the Microsoft 365 admin center under the Copilot tab.   You can read more about the feature on this page . Eligible users can create agents using Micros...

Installing OCS 2007 R2 (Still fighting a bit)

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Once again, .NET 3.5 is a prerequisite for installing OCS 2007, and once again the installation for this failed. A tip for you might be to enable these things ahead of the installation of OCS. I do not remember having the same problem on OCS 2007 with Windows server 2003. It might be a 2008 issue as much as a R2 problem. If anyone do install this on Windows 2003, please let me know if you run into the same issues.

Now, off to the installation at hand. First of is the Back End server on which I just installed SQL.
If you are going to install everything on one box, you don't have to read much to install OCS (a basic understanding of the components involved is really helpful though). But if you are about to what I am, install an Enterprise installation with back ends, frontends and possibly balance loaders and several pools. Reading the docs is just for you! Also, make sure the right client tools are inplace, and server times are synchronized (I am using SQL 2008 on the back end, and the installation comes with 2005 client tools).

Installing BE is really just about "preparing" the environment. For those you who have not seen the wizard; This is a task of it's own. A few simple steps to complete.

Installing the FE is another matter. Again; If you are installing all on one box, there isn't too many pitfalls. But when you deploy to several servers, you need to keep your head straight when it comes to poolnames, servernames, sipdomains and certificates.... If you have a basic understanding, it should not be too hard, but still... whatch out for those pitfalls when assigning roles, names and certificates. My biggest obstacle was figuring out how to add the certificate to IIS. AS it turned out, the management tools were not installed (and are not by default).