Exercise 03 - Run in Copilot.md

Building Message Extensions for Microsoft 365 Copilot

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Welcome
• Exercise 1 - Set up your development Environment
• Exercise 2 - Run the sample as a Message Extension
• Exercise 3 - Run the sample as a Copilot plugin (THIS PAGE)
• Exercise 4 - Add a new command
• Exercise 5 - Code tour

Exercise 2 - Run the sample as a Copilot plugin

Note

To perform the following exercise, your account must have a valid license for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Step 1 - Test in Microsoft 365 Copilot (single parameter)

Begin by clicking the "Try the new Teams" switch to move to the new Teams client application.

Important

Microsoft 365 Copilot only works in the "New" Teams. Please don't miss this step!

If you restart your debugger after switching to "New" teams, you may get an error message after the debugger starts. This is a known problem; please just close the error dialog and continue testing.

In the left navigation, click on "Copilot" to open Copilot.

Check the lower left of the chat user interface, below the compose box. You should see a plugin icon 1️⃣ . Click this and enable the Northwind Inventory plugin 2️⃣ .

For best results, start a new chat by typing "New chat" or by clicking on the New chat icon at the top right before each prompt or set of related prompts.

Here are some prompts to try that use only a single parameter of the message extension:

• "Find information about Chai in Northwind Inventory"

• "Find discounted seafood in Northwind. Show a table with the products, supplier names, average discount rate, and revenue per period."

See if this last one also locates any of the documents you uploaded to your OneDrive.

You may see citations of the Northwind data in 3 forms. If there's a single reference, Copilot may show the whole card.

If there are multiple references, Copilot may show a small number next to each. You can hover over these numbers to display the adaptive card. References will also be listed below the response.

Try using these adaptive cards to take action on the products. Notice that this doesn't affect earlier responses from Copilot.

Feel free to try making up your own prompts. You'll find that they only work if Copilot is able to query the plugin for the required information. This underscores the need to anticipate the kinds of prompts users will issue, and providing corresponding types of queries for each one. Having multiple parameters will make this more powerful!

Step 2 - Test in Microsoft 365 Copilot (multiple parameters)

In this exercise, you'll try some prompts that exercise the multi-parameter feature in the sample plugin. These prompts will request data that can be retrieved by name, category, inventory status, supplier city, and stock level, as defined in the manifest.

For example, try prompting "Find Northwind beverages with more than 100 items in stock". To respond, Copilot must identify products:

• where the category is "beverages"
• where inventory status is "in stock"
• where the stock level is more than 100

The plugin code applies all three filters, providing a result set of just 4 products. Using the information on the 4 resulting adaptive cards, Copilot renders a result similar to this:

By using this prompt, Copilot might look also in your OneDrive files to find the payment terms with each supplier's contract. In this case, you will notice that some of the references won't have the Northwind Inventory icon, but the Word one.

Here are some more prompts to try:

• "Find Northwind dairy products that are low on stock. Show me a table with the product, supplier, units in stock and on order."

• "We’ve been receiving partial orders for Tofu. Find the supplier in Northwind and draft an email summarizing our inventory and reminding them they should stop sending partial orders per our MOQ policy."

• "Northwind will have a booth at Microsoft Community Days in London. Find products with local suppliers and write a LinkedIn post to promote the booth and products."

  Request an enhancement by prompting,

  "Emphasize how delicious the products are and encourage people to attend our booth"

• "What beverage is high in demand due to social media that is low stock in Northwind in London. Reference the product details to update stock."

Which prompts work best for you? Try making up your own prompts and observe your log messages to see how Copilot accesses your plugin.

Troubleshooting tip

If you're facing challenges while testing your plugin, you can enable 'developer mode'. Developer mode provides information on the plugin selected by the Copilot orchestrator to respond to the prompt. It also shows the available functions in the plugin and the API call's status code.

To enable developer mode, type the following into Copilot:

-developer on

For additional information on common problems and how to fix them, see the troubleshooting guide.

Now just execute your prompt. This time, the output will look like this:

As you can notice, below the response generated by Copilot, we have a table that provides us insightful information about what happened behind the scenes:

• Under Enabled plugins, we can see that Copilot has identified that the Northwind Inventory plugin is enabled.
• Under Matched functions, we can see that Copilot has determined that the Northwind inventory plugin offers three functions: inventorySearch, discountSearch, and companySearch.
• Under Selected functions for execution, we can see that Copilot has selected the inventorySearch function to respond to the prompt.
• Under Function execution details, we can see some detailed information about the execution, like the HTTP response returned by the plugin to the Copilot engine.

Congratulations

You have completed Exercise 3. Please proceed to Exercise 4, in which you will add a new command to the messaging extension.