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...

Microsoft Teams Guest Access for all (Not just MSA)

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A truly collaborative platform

For a collaboration tool to be truly collaborative, it needs to support not only most kind of devices but it should also be able to include users from across the globe. For some time now, Slack and Google hangout have kind of ruled this space, by being able to bring people together based on a simple e-mail address, and not making it a prerequisite to be a subscriber of their services.

Microsoft Teams first version of Guest Access had the limitation of only being able to invite other users from companies who also were users of Office 365.

Their second version expanded this functionality to users with a so called MFA (much like Skype Consumer federation was limited to users with a "Microsoft" account).

But all that is gone now. It was just announced that the support for all kinds of guest access into Teams will be supported, and here is quick glance at how it looks.

Prepare the tenant

Guest access is controlled by the Admin of the tenant, and in order for it to work, the administrator needs to set the propper rights and licencing in the portal. This is quite easy done like this:
  • Click Settings
  • Click Services & Add-ins
  • Select "Microsoft Teams"
  • Select "Settings by user/license type"
  • Select "Guest" in the drop down list
  • Verify the option is set to "On"


Invite the user

Once the settings are implemented (Note: the setting is global), users may invite guest by entering an email address in the "add member" dialog:


This will send an email to your contact, which will contain a link to initiate the participation.




After the initial sign in, the user may choose download the client or participate in the web browser of his or her choice, and participate fully with everyone in the team.

I have been playing around with this for a while, and I see this as a great development of Teams, strengthening it's position in the market.