Custom Engine Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot

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...

Backing up your Lync 2010 Standard edition

When it comes to Lync 2010 Backup and restore, there are a lot of good articles out there to help you one your way. But none of these examples really satisfied my needs.
And as the Lync 2013 Preview has been released, backing up your existing Lync environment before installing the preview is a really smart thing to do.

I am not going to pretend I wrote all of this, as much of it is almost copy/paste from other posts. But I have been tweaking what others have done before me, and added elements I wanted in my script.

I would like to send a great thank you to  Traci Herr, who did most of the job for me over at: http://bit.ly/eGjGrl

In addition to the original script, I have altered the SQL backup to run within the PS script based on this Wiki post: http://bit.ly/ROnG6v So a great thank you to the contributors there is also in order.

Lastly, I have added a send to .zip file and a clean up routine. This way, I have it all in a singe zip file (which can then be backed up by the system file backup), and I will not run out of disk space (You have no idea how much data you might end up with after a few backups)

The script itself can be downloaded here. And will be posted on my script page shortly.

Here are a few things to consider before you run this on your own servers.

  • This script is for a Standard Edition Server (I will look into a Enterprise edition shortly).
  • The script must be run on a server where Lync PS is available, and this must be imported if you are to run this as a scheduled task (See the script for details).
  • If you want to backup your RGS information, you will have to install reskit tools as well (and import the script commands as I do in my script)
  • My script creates a directory C:\lyncbackup\, this may be edited if you like.
  • I have not been able to enumerate the filepath for a local share on a STD Lync server. This must be edited for autpmation (See script for details)
  • Certificates will only be backed up if you allowed for this when requesting and creating certificates.
  • The creation of the zipfile can take a while. The script finishes before the zipfile is finished (If anyone know how to wait for this task before quitting the script, please let me know).
That's all there is to it.

As always, I appreciate feedback or suggestions on improvements.