Many organizations use SharePoint to power their employee-facing websites, delivering experiences that streamline the way employees interact with the organization and with each other. SharePoint is also the content management platform behind OneDrive, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.

In 2023, we announced Generative AI features in Microsoft Copilot Studio that transform the traditional model of bot development and allow makers to build copilots that respond to questions, simply by pointing the copilot at knowledge sources like public websites or content stored in SharePoint and OneDrive. Given all the content that is already managed in SharePoint, the Generative Answers capability makes it easier than ever to create an employee-facing, conversational AI experience, that can answer questions on topics like personal time-off, perks and benefits or company policies.

Copilots created with Copilot Studio can be easily published to Microsoft Teams and other channels. However, many use cases would benefit from copilots deployed directly on SharePoint sites, allowing a conversational experience grounded in the sites’ pages and documents. For example, think about a SharePoint site consolidating HR related information, with an embedded copilot answering employee questions and referencing the relevant HR policies.

This can be achieved using the new code sample: the component included in the sample allows copilots created with Microsoft Copilot Studio to be wrapped and published to SharePoint sites as a floating widget. The component also supports SSO, so users would do not have to provide their credentials or use the validation code required by the standard copilot canvas.

How does the new code sample work?

This sample includes a SharePoint Framework Extension (SPFx) component which acts as a wrapper for copilots created with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

A user accessing a SharePoint site has already signed-in using their Microsoft Entra ID credentials. The SPFx component, embedded natively in SharePoint sites, acquires a token for the user, and exchanges the token with the copilot, allowing the copilot to access protected data sources, like SharePoint and OneDrive, on the user’s behalf.

For example, a user with access to a SharePoint site dedicated to Perks and Benefits will be able to interact with an embedded copilot, by asking questions like “do we get reimbursed for professional training?”. The copilot will answer the user’s questions based on the site’s pages and documents, but only those to which the user already has access. Most of this flow is made possible by the Generative Answers capability, with the SPFx component handling single sign-on, so users do not have to enter credentials or a validation code.

How can I deploy the component on my SharePoint site?

Creating a wrapper for Copilot Studio that can be deployed in SharePoint, with SSO support, can be somewhat of an involved process. It requires an understanding of the SPFx framework, as well as setting up the required permissions in Azure.

Luckily, the code sample comes with a step-by-step guide, with detailed instructions on how to:

• Set up the app registration configurations required for SSO.
• Set up a Generative Answers node for your copilot, over a SharePoint or OneDrive data source.
• Build the SPFx component from scratch and bind it to your copilot.
• Upload the component to the tenant app catalog and deploy on a site.

Suggest feedback or report issues related to the sample here

The post Deploy a custom copilot to SharePoint, with a seamless single sign-on experience appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Following this feedback, we’re thrilled to announce the Copilot Studio implementation guide. This detailed guide is designed to help customers, partners, and Microsoft teams review copilot projects and architectures for a smooth and effective implementation journey.

Get ready for a comprehensive review of your Copilot Studio project

The Copilot Studio implementation guide provides a framework to do a 360-degree review of your project. Through probing questions, it highlights potential risks and gaps, aims at aligning the project with the product roadmap, and shares guidance, best practices and reference architecture examples.

Users of the implementation review are guided at each step of the journey with the side pane that provides more context on the questions or features, shares best practices, and includes links to additional resources.

Inspired by the Success by Design framework – a tried and tested Microsoft methodology used for Business Applications implementations – this review aims to detect bad patterns, identify risks, share best practices, and showcase example implementations.

Key principles behind the review

The Success by Design framework, the backbone of this review process, is centered around three critical principles:

1. Early Discovery: Identifying and dealing with potential issues at the earliest stage.
2. Proactive Guidance: Giving robust advice ahead of issues emerging, preventing potential problems.
3. Predictable Success: Providing a roadmap for success, using tested strategies and methods, and avoiding common pitfalls and anti-patterns.

Areas covered by the review

The Copilot Studio implementation guide covers these chapters:

• An overview of the project
• Architecture overview
• Language
• AI functionalities
• Integrations & channels
• Security, monitoring & governance specifications
• Application lifecycle management
• Analytics & KPIs
• Gaps & top requests
• Dynamics 365 Omnichannel (optional)

How is the implementation review typically delivered?

While it was initially delivered by Microsoft, the Copilot Studio implementation guide can now be used autonomously by customers and partners. It is designed to be a living document that can be updated throughout the project lifecycle.

Get the Copilot Studio implementation review today!

Download the Copilot Studio implementation review and provide feedback directly on GitHub, using this issue template.

We are confident that this tool will be beneficial to those implementing Copilot Studio and eagerly anticipate your feedback. Here’s to empowering more successful transformations with Microsoft Copilot Studio!

The post New Microsoft Copilot Studio implementation guide appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

This involves testing user utterances to confirm that the bot understands them correctly and triggers the appropriate topics. It also entails verifying that the full conversation leads to the intended outcome, such as resolution or escalation. Customers might also want to ensure that their chatbots meet quality requirements before deploying to production, which can be done automatically using Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) approaches like Azure DevOps.

The Power Virtual Agents teams have recently released new code samples to help automate chatbot tests, including testing utterances, validating topic triggering, intent candidates (multiple topics matched), playback of full conversation transcripts, and integration into a CI/CD pipeline.

What can be tested with the PVA Test Framework sample solution?

The PVA Test Framework is a sample solution available on GitHub that showcases how to execute tests against a Power Virtual Agents chatbot through APIs, using the Direct Line channel. It verifies that the bot performs as expected in various scenarios, such as:

• Testing the Natural Language Understanding model (topic triggering)
• Validating the multiple topics matched options (“did you mean…”)
• Performing scale load testing
• Testing full end-to-end conversations
• Testing adaptive cards
• Including a CI/CD test step in the deployment pipeline to prevent deployment if tests fail

How does the PVA Test Framework sample solution work?

The PVA Test Framework tool is a console application that can run tests against the Power Virtual Agents Direct Line API. It uses JSON as the format to play conversations back and verify outcomes, and it enables you to connect to Dataverse to download past conversation transcripts to run them again.

How to use the PVA Test Framework tool

There are different ways you can use the PVA Test Framework sample solution. The easiest one is to run it locally with the Command Prompt in Windows.

You first need to download or build the PVATestFramework.Console.exe file.
It then works as a console application, with command lines.

To run tests, you need conversation files in a .JSON format. You can either easily create these files from scratch, by writing your test cases in a .CHAT file format and converting them to .JSON, or you can download conversation transcripts from Dataverse.

For Natural Language Understanding testing, where you test many user utterances and verify that the bot answers as expected, it’s usually easier to start from your own set of user and bot utterances in a .CHAT format.

This command transforms a .CHAT file into a .JSON file:

.\PVATestFramework.exe convertChatFile --path test-set-sample.chat --outputFile test-set-sample.json

Here is what conversations look like a .CHAT format:

Each test conversation is separated by the <EOC> tag (end of conversation).
Messages following the user: tag are sent by the tool to the bot, and the messages received back from the bot are compared with the expected response, documented after the bot: tag, to determine if the test passes or fails.

user: Good morning
bot: Hello, how can I help you today?
<EOC>
user: When are you closed
bot: I'm happy to help with store hours.
<EOC>
user: Find me your nearest location
bot: I'd be glad to help find a store near you.
<EOC>
user: Where can I find your address?
bot: I'd be glad to help find a store near you.
<EOC>
user: I'd like to order a product
bot: I am happy to help you place your order.
<EOC>
user: what are you store hours and locations?
suggested: Lesson 2 - A simple topic with a condition and variable|Lesson 1 - A simple topic||None of these
bot: To clarify, did you mean:
user: Lesson 1 - A simple topic
bot: I'm happy to help with store hours.
<EOC>
user: What is weather today?
bot: I'm sorry, I'm not sure how to help with that. Can you try rephrasing?
<EOC>
user: What is weather today?
bot: I'm sorry, I'm not sure how to help with that. Can you try rephrasing?
<EOC>

Once converted to .JSON, you can run tests by using the below sample command. You can obtain the chatbot token endpoint from the Mobile app channel in Power Virtual Agents.

.\PVATestFramework.exe test --path test-set-sample.json --tokenEndpoint https://c53bf00279234d1cb5ae3265093d59.e1.environment.api.powerplatform.com/powervirtualagents/botsbyschema/cr507_testChatbot/directline/token?api-version=2022-03-01-preview --log --verbose

Test outcomes are then available in a CSV format that you can then use for further analysis.

Example analysis of the outputs of the PVA Test Framework:

You can learn more about the PVA Test Framework sample solution’s different settings and deployment options in the GitHub documentation.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the cost of using the PVA Test Framework sample solution?

Conversations generated using the PVA Test Framework sample solution would typically generate billed sessions. See: Power Virtual Agents pricing.

How is the PVA Test Framework supported by Microsoft?

Although the underlying features and components used to build the PVA Test Framework are fully supported, the code itself represents a sample implementation of these features.

Our customers and community can use and customize these features to meet their requirements. Any issue with the PVA Test Framework sample solution should be raised on the Power Virtual Agents Samples GitHub repository and not through Microsoft Support.

The post Automate testing of your Power Virtual Agents chatbots with the PVA Test Framework sample solution appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Bot builders now have two ways of utilizing the Azure OpenAI Service within Power Virtual Agents. First, out of the box within Power Virtual Agents (SaaS) with features like Generative Answers/Actions and Copilot. Secondly, configure your own Azure OpenAI Service from the Azure AI Studio (PaaS) and connect it to PVA.

Keep reading to learn more about the scenarios and use cases for each technology.

What was previously announced?

At Microsoft Build, Power Virtual Agents showcased its latest generative AI feature, Generative Actions, that chains together requests using the Azure OpenAI Service to automatically detect and use plugins to best answer the questions being asked, with no prior topic building. It doesn’t stop there; the feature can generate clarifying questions to ask a customer or employee for additional information where it is missing from the selected plugins.

Power Virtual Agents has two additional features that utilize the Azure OpenAI Service;  Generative Answers, which allows for boosted conversational coverage by dynamically generating multi-turn answers based on an organization’s content in real-time and Copilot, which helps build, design, and modify bot topics through natural language. With all three features, companies can leverage these technologies together with the brand-new authoring canvas in Power Virtual Agents to get started creating and authoring meaningful conversational experiences in days.

The Generative Answers, Generative Actions and Copilot features use the Azure OpenAI Service and come ready to use in Power Virtual Agents. Azure OpenAI Service (AOAI) is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering by Microsoft that is provisioned and hosted by Microsoft Azure. Power Virtual Agents is Microsoft’s SaaS offering that takes a dependency on AOAI and by doing so creates a layered, managed feature set that works seamlessly. Both features work collaboratively together to solve those problems to provide superior conversational experiences for customers, agents, and internal employees.

What do both products do?

Both Power Virtual Agents (PVA) and Azure OpenAI Service aim to solve key business problems such as increasing deflection and reducing the cost to serve, while still providing detailed and accurate responses and reducing development time to allow organizations to quickly iterate and adapt to customer’s needs.

Power Virtual Agents is Microsoft’s modern and generative bot-building platform. Power Virtual Agents acts as a conversational and generative AI platform, making the process of creating, publishing and deploying a bot to any number of channels simple and accessible for every organization to use. From developers to business users, Microsoft Power Virtual Agents empowers everyone to create intelligent bots in a single experience.  Additionally, integration with over 1000+ Power Automate connectors makes integrating with your own enterprise services easy, including your own APIs, to provide contextual information within a bot experience. Power Virtual Agent utilizes the Azure OpenAI Services and provides extensive functionality in those features.

Azure OpenAI Service (including the new On Your Data feature) allows professionals to utilize a GPT model and to be used alongside existing business technology. Using Azure OpenAI Service on your data feature, organizations can target their organizational data and provide the same deployment experience as web app or API. Today, IKEA and Volvo are two Azure customers experimenting with the new feature in public preview. For both product types, more advanced configuration and customization can be done through fine tuning, prompt engineering and chunking.

Each of these technologies has distinct benefits based on the use cases, potential future needs and maintenance to support those use cases. Generative AI ‘question and answer’ scenarios, also referred to as ‘Retrieval Augmented Generation’ (RAG), leverages data sources to provide background context or in some cases domain specific knowledge to ‘ground’ the question being asked to increase the likelihood of a more accurate response. ‘Grounded’ data is a term used so that the question is grounded to the content and configuration you have provided, therefore more relevant to your organization.

Discovery Guidance

With that in mind, the following questions can help provide guidance to support determining a path based on what data you as a company want to use to ‘ground’ the question:

•   Security model: how is this data secured and protected?
•   What level of control do you require: How much control is needed over the searching of the data, prompts and output format? Additionally, consideration in this section includes the ability to manage and buy additional cloud services and data pipelines.

Both Power Virtual Agents and Azure OpenAI Service on your data provide the capabilities for ‘grounding’ your queries and customer data are not used for training, and it is not retained. 

The diagram below provides an overview of three core Conversational AI services by Microsoft and outlines a comparison of features focused on the three themes highlighted above to help support these discussions within your organization or with your customers.

To further support the discussion within your organization or with your customers, let’s review possible implementations where Power Virtual Agents is used with out-of-the-box features and then also extended with Azure OpenAI services.

Using PVA with Generative Answers (utilizing Azure Open AI)

•   Datastores :
  • Public Websites
  • Internal Documentation on SharePoint and OneDrive
  • Specific documents to be uploaded and
  • File Upload
  • 3^rd Party Data at runtime based on connectivity with Power Automate and using GPT answers at node level (see below)
•   For data elsewhere, it would depend on where that is, access and if that data is going to be moved. Added complexity occurs with multiple data stores. Azure OpenAI on your Data offers more flexibility for use cases where that is a requirement.

You can use PVA together with the Generative Answers and additionally use the Azure OpenAI Service:

•   Azure OpenAI Service APIs
  • Trained on the internet, can use any data and not specifically your company’s data.
  • Can include fine tuning etc.
  • Requires organizations to build and manage their own data pipelines & cloud services.

Azure OpenAI APIs can be used with Power Virtual Agents as an API and built into workflow logic and data architecture, for example, to be used as a plugin/action within specific topics using Power Automate.

•   Azure OpenAI Service On Your Data
  • Not trained on the internet and only on data you specify (‘grounded’)
  • Can include fine tuning etc.
  • Currently available using direct files, Blob storage and Azure Cognitive Search
  • Can be used as an API and built into your workflow logic and data architecture for example, to be used as a plugin/action within specific topics.

Azure OpenAI Service on your data can also be used with Power Virtual Agents as an API and provides a distinct experience of only utilizing the grounded data specialized. As with all implementations of AI, Responsible AI principles are important, and you can utilize Microsoft’s Responsible AI guidelines and tools here.

Extending the generative AI experience within Power Virtual Agents in scenarios where organizations require customization and fine tuning provides Bot Authors with the capabilities to use the low code authoring canvas in Power Virtual Agents, out of the box generative AI features, and where there are organizational requirements that require more customization, we are making it even easier to leverage Azure OpenAI on your data to meet those requirements with the ability to connect Azure on your Data directly by adding the connection string from Azure OpenAI on your data service within the node, providing the capability to ‘directly deploy’ from Azure OpenAI on your data to Power Virtual Agents from within the Azure OpenAI Studio.

Get started building your Conversational Experiences today!

Get started today with Power Virtual Agents with generative AI experiences:

• Sign up for Power Virtual Agents
• Try Generative Answers directly in your browser!
• Review of the latest features in Power Virtual Agents in our latest training material
• Take a look at Azure on your Data in Microsoft Azure today here!
• Read how to connect Power Virtual Agents with Azure on your data.

Thank you to all the teams involved in making this interoperability possible between products to help drive positive customer outcomes including Jeff Derstadt, Jim Lewallen, Neta Haiby, Mai Nguyen, Jack Rowbotham, Andy Beatman, Pavan Li and Ben Ufuk Tezcan

The post Create Generative AI solutions with Power Virtual Agents and Azure OpenAI Services appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

We are happy to announce that the feature enabling Power Virtual Agents bots to be used as skills with Bot Framework bots has reached General Availability.

If you have Bot Framework bots deployed in your organization, you can now easily extend them with Power Virtual Agents functionality using this capability.

When you add a Power Virtual Agents bot as a skill, the Bot Framework bot will determine if anything the bot user says matches with any of the trigger phrases in the Power Virtual Agent’s bot.  If there is a match, the Bot Framework bot will automatically invoke the Power Virtual Agents bot and pass the entire user utterance to it to extract any entities and trigger a matching Power Virtual Agents topic.

Additionally, from a Bot Framework bot, you can invoke a Power Virtual Agents bot’s topic with inputs and utilize the outputs it returns.

With this new feature in Power Virtual Agents, you can:

• Explicitly control which Bot Framework bots are allowed to connect to your Power Virtual Agents bot.
  

  Control which Bot Framework bots are allowed to connect to your Power Virtual Agents bot

• Easily download Test or Published bot’s skill manifest, enabling you to test changes in your Power Virtual Agents skill bot before publishing them.
  

  Download Power Virtual Agents Test and Published bot skill manifests

• Connect to a Power Virtual Agents skill in Composer using Power Virtual Agents skill manifest.
  

  Add a Power Virtual Agents bot as a skill in Composer

• Call a specific Power Virtual Agents skill topic from a Composer bot.
  

  Use Activity to invoke a topic in a Power Virtual Agents skill.

• Pass an input variable to a Power Virtual Agents skill topic from Composer bot.
  

  Pass inputs to a Power Virtual Agents bot skill topic in Composer

• Receive an output variable from a Power Virtual Agents skill topic in Composer bot.
  

  Get outputs from a Power Virtual Agents bot skill’s topic in Composer

Learn more

For more information, visit the documentation on using a Power Virtual Agents bot as a skill.

Join our Power Virtual Agents community to share your ideas, provide your comments, and help drive the future direction of our product development.

The post Power Virtual Agents bots as skills with Bot Framework bots – General Availability appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

If a Bot Framework bot matches a user utterance to Power Virtual Agents bot skill’s trigger phrases at runtime, it will automatically pass this user utterance to the Power Virtual Agent bot to handle. The Power Virtual Agents bot will then evaluate the user utterance, extract the Entities for any slot-filling and kick off a matching Power Virtual Agents Topic.

Add your Bot Framework bot to Allowlist in Power Virtual Agents

All Bot Framework bots intending to use a Power Virtual Agents bot as a skill must be added to the Allowlist of this bot first. The Allowlist can be found under the Manage tab on Skills page in Power Virtual Agents:

Manage allowlist for Power Virtual Agents bot

By default, no Bot Framework bots can use your Power Virtual Agents bot as a skill. To enable some Bot Framework bots to establish a skill connection to your Power Virtual Agents bot , add them to your bot’s Allowlist by their App ID. 

Add Bot Framework bot’s App ID to the Allowlist

Download a Power Virtual Agents skill manifest

Every Power Virtual Agents bot now has a skill manifest, a JSON file that describes skill’s name, interface, and skill’s trigger phrases. Bot Framework bots will use this manifest to configure a skill connection to the bot. At runtime, the manifest data will be used to identify when a skill should be triggered in response to a user utterance.

All Power Virtual Agents skill manifests are automatically generated and updated according to version 2.2 skill manifest schema. A Virtual Agents bot has 2 different skill manifests, Test manifest and Published manifest.

Test manifest — allows to connect to the Test version of your Power Virtual Agents bot. The Test manifest is immediately available for every Power Virtual Agents bot. It is automatically updated every time you Save bot content. You can use the Test manifest to test out the changes in your skill  before Publishing them.

Published manifest — allows to connect to the Published version of your Power Virtual Agents bot. The Published manifest is only available for Power Virtual Agents bots that have been Published at least once. It is automatically updated every time you Publish your bot.

Both Power Virtual Agents bot’s skill manifests can be found on Manage allowlist panel and will be downloaded as .zip archives.

Download Power Virtual Agents skill manifests

Connect to a Power Virtual Agents skill bot in Bot Framework Composer

You can use the Power Virtual Agents bot skill Test manifest or Published manifest to create a skill connection for your Bot Framework bot in Composer.

In Bot Framework Composer project, use + Add button and choose Connect to a skill menu option.

Connect to a skill in Composer

On Add a skill screen in Composer, select a Power Virtual Agents manifest .zip archive and follow the Skill connection wizard in Composer:

Select manifest .zip archive in Composer

Your Power Visual Agents bot is added as a skill in Composer and now your Bot Framework bot is extended with Power Virtual Agents Topics:

Power Virtual Agents bot added as a skill in Composer

Current limitations – Public Preview

• This feature is not available to users who only have the Teams Power Virtual Agents license. You must have a trial or full Power Virtual Agents license.
• Power Virtual Agents bot skill Topics can only be invoked by a user utterance from a Bot Framework bot. Invoking Power Virtual Agents Topics as skill Actions is not supported in Public Preview.
• Only the Bot Framework bots that are deployed in the same tenant as the Power Virtual Agents bots can be added to the Allowlist.
• Power Virtual Agents cannot act as a skill for other Power Virtual Agents bots. Only Bot Framework bots can be added to Power Virtual Agents Allowlist. Trying to add a bot App ID that belongs to a Power Virtual Agent bot will result in error.
• Only user-created Topics and Composer intent triggers added to the bot will be added to Power Virtual Agents bot skill manifest. System Topics and Composer dialogs added to Power Virtual Agents bot will not be included in skill manifest.

Learn more

For more information, visit the documentation on using a Power Virtual Agents bot as a skill.

Join our Power Virtual Agents community to share your ideas, provide your comments, and help drive the future direction of our product development.

The post Power Virtual Agents bots as skills with Bot Framework bots – Public Preview appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Regular expression (regex) entities let you define logical patterns that you can use to match and extract information from an input. Regex entities are great for complex pattern matching against a user’s input, or if you need to allow for specific variations in how a user might format or enter their input in a conversation. For example, you could use a regex entity to identify items such as a tracking ID, a license number, a credit card number, or an IP address from a string the user enters into the bot.

For more information on using entities in Power Virtual Agents, refer to documentation here:  Use entities and slot filling.

Go ahead and try this feature at powerva.microsoft.com. Your feedback will help us continue to build on and improve the functionality. We want to hear from you!

Thank you,

Jeff

The post Regex (regular expression) entity support in Power Virtual Agents appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

I’m thrilled to announce the long-anticipated Topic overlap detection and Topic suggestions from chat transcripts AI features that are now available in public preview.

To use the features, simply go to Manage > AI capabilities, and turn these two features on.

Watch the below video to understand more on how to use the AI-assisted bot authoring features to optimize your chatbot.

Note: These features are currently in public preview, only available in English language PVA bots. 

The post AI-assisted authoring: detect topic overlaps and get topic suggestions from bot sessions appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

One of the most commonly asked best practice question is how to publish bot for users in Microsoft Teams.  Power Virtual Agents allows bot author to easily share the bot with their teammates directly in Microsoft Teams app store Built by your colleague section (learn more here) or partner with their Microsoft Teams admin to roll out the bot to broader audience.

Depending on the bot’s business scenario, partnering with your Microsoft Teams admin could be the best way to roll out your bot.  Many customers are delighted to learn how seamless it is to submit their Power Virtual Agents bot for Microsoft Teams admin approval.  We are sharing the learnings and best practice guidance here so you can easily partner with your admin on this journey.

Admin partnership scenarios

Partnering with your admin on bot roll out is a great option if your scenarios matches one or more of below:

1. You want to distribute the bot broadly across the organization and different teams.
   1. 1. The bot is intended for company wide or majority of the users in the organization.  This is a common trend for HR, IT, Facility or other bots that are managed by a department with the intention to reach broad audience.
      2. The bot is intended to be used by a group of users across different teams that have specific roles in the organization.  For example, a Front line worker assistant to look up product information during service appointments.
2. Pre-pin the bot for users who need to find the bot easily and consistently use it as part of a routine workflow.  For example, pre-pin HR bot for all employees or only pre-pin Front line worker assistant for the front line workers.
3. Your organization requires all bot roll out to go through the admin managed process.

Power Virtual Agents makes it super easy for bot author to partner with admin to roll out bots quickly and confidently.  We will show you how easy it is in the next 3 steps!

Step 1 – Submit your bot for admin approval

Once you are satisfied with your bot’s quality, it is time to work with your admin on the approval process.  Go to the bot’s publish page to publish it.  Once the bot is published, select Share the bot and choose to Submit for admin approval.  Make sure you provide a good bot icon, description and other relevant information so your admin knows what the bot is about and its value to end user.

Figure 1 – Submit for admin approval in Power Virtual Agents

Once you have completed the submission, you will now see the bot is pending approval from the admin.  The bot is now available in Microsoft Teams admin center for admin’s review.  You can refresh to check on the latest status.

Figure 2 – Waiting for admin approval

Step 2 – Admin approving the submission

Microsoft Teams admin will see your submission in Microsoft Teams admin center’s Manage app under the Teams apps section.  After reviewing the information you provided, the admin can approve and publish the app.

Figure 3 – Admin approve bot in Microsoft Teams Admin Center

This will result in the app becoming visible in Microsoft Teams app store Built by your org section.  It is also searchable via app store’s search bar.

Figure 4 – Bot is available in Microsoft Teams app store

Depending on the business scenario, the bot could be made only available to a selected set of users in the organization.  Admin can configure who the bot audience will be via the Permission policies in Microsoft Teams admin center.  You can learn more on how to create custom policies for app permissions here.

Step 3 – Partner with admin to pre-pin the bot for users

Having the bot in app store is a good first step!  Many customers partner with admins to pre-pin the bot in app bar for users and push the bot to them so they don’t need to find and install the bot for themselves.  This is a great way to ensure your audience knows the bot is available to them.  With the bot pre-pinned on app bar, users will always have the bot at their fingertips.

Figure 5 – Pre-pin bot in Microsoft Teams app bar

Admin can pre-pin the bot with Setup policies under Teams apps section in Microsoft Teams admin center by selecting the bot in the pre-pinned list.  It can be pre-pinned for everyone via the Global policy or for a group of users via custom policies.

Figure 6 – App setup policy to pre-pin bot for users

Other best practices

In this blog, we showed how easy it is to submit the bot as a bot author and partner with your admin to approve it.  You can learn more with the detail step by step guide in our documentation here.

In addition, we are sharing the best practices from our customer’s success:

1. Partner with your admin early on in the bot building journey to review the bot content and best strategy for adoption in your organization.
2. Each organization may have different approval process.  Work with your admin to see if the Microsoft Teams admin center approval process in this blog applies to your organization or not.
3. If your organization have not adopted the approval process here, you can always download the app manifest file via instruction here for the bot to go through the custom approval process for your organization.

We hope you find this blog helpful and we are excited to learn more on all the great innovations and success you have with Power Virtual Agents in Teams.  Happy bot building!

The post Partner with admin to roll out bot in Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Custom bot content created in Bot Framework Composer is directly embeddable and executable from inside Power Virtual Agents. This new feature provides a simpler way to extend your bots that does not require additional Azure hosting, deployment or billing complexities.

Power Virtual Agents is Microsoft’s intuitive, graphical, fully-hosted chatbot platform that empowers users to easily create and maintain chatbots. As part of Microsoft’s low-code Power Platform, Power Virtual Agents already comes with hundreds of pre-built Power Automate connectors to common back-end systems, enabling quick integrations. And, of course, you can also easily call custom APIs and actions as well.

Now, Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Bot Framework Composer can also work seamlessly together. Customers have access to an intuitive SaaS bot building experience in Power Virtual Agents, and can easily enhance their bots with Bot Framework custom content when needed. The result: a bot building experience that truly empowers everyone – from subject matter experts to professional developers – to collaboratively build intelligent, powerful bots.

Check out our session at Microsoft Ignite to find out more: Building Bots with Power Virtual Agents and extending them with Microsoft Bot Framework
For more information on Power Virtual Agents integration with Bot Framework Composer, please refer to documentation.

Be sure to join our Community to share your ideas, provide your comments, and help drive the future direction of our product development.

Happy bot building!

The post Power Virtual Agents integration with Bot Framework Composer is available in Public Preview appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.