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...

Still installing OCS, and getting grey hairs

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I admit it, I guess I was a bit quick on that last post, when I said I did not run into any serious problems. Well, I did. Biggest problems though, were all related to naming conventions, certificates, and a very aggressive firewall on the brand new 2008 windows server.

- First of all the Firewall:
I was fooled by how easy the installation is, and I was not prompted for any errors. The databases and files were created as expected. The only problem was when I started to run the verification tools, and got error messages. I tried to Google the messages, and the answers indicated certificate problems. So I started all over again, being very careful about names and certificates (By the way; If your CA is a 2003 server, and the client is a Vista or 2008 machine. Make sure to search TechNet for CA updates to the website. And enable ssl on the CA site). After rebuilding the pool 3 times, I was pretty sure certificates weren’t the thing, even though the error message indicated the certificate. So what else could it be? In what way did this installation differ from the OCS 2007 installations I had made on 2003 servers? No...! It can't be that simple? Yes it was. As it turns out: Windows 2008 comes with the firewall turned on by default. Pretty nice actually. But if you're not aware of this, you're in for some grey hairs like me. 

Once the appropriate rules were enabled, the validation came through like a charm. Now most of the features are up and running.

My next project is to integrate the Exchange 2007, and really create that UC environment we need in the demo/lab here.