Copilot Cowork: Building Skills and Plugins

All right, everyone. A new one today.

So, we're going to talk about co-work as has been the fashion. Co-work is, of course, becoming the new normal for how we are interacting with all of these variety of co-pilot experiences. And so,

we want to talk about skills as well as the new options available for you in relation to plugins. So, let's start with skills first and then we'll get into the updates on plugins that were

just announced last week. As a quick introduction, my name is Nick Harris. I

am a senior co-pilot cloud solution architect with Microsoft. Welcome to the Microsoft 365 co-pilot connection. We're

very happy to have you here. So skills

you can really think of as like agents.

Agents have the ability to focus on particular forms of work or uh do particular tasks for you. Skills can be done in the same fashion. However,

skills are directly injected inside of the co-work experience. It's not a direct separate agent. And so along with this skills experience, you have the

ability to leverage a skill to manage your skills. If I click on the ability

your skills. If I click on the ability to add work context here, you'll notice I have an option for skills. And there

are a wide variety of skills that Microsoft makes available. You can see the ability to create Word, PDF documents PowerPoints schedule calendar functionality, and you see here at the bottom skill management. So what

I recommend you do is if you want to create your own custom skills, invoke this first, submit that off, let it process and run and then you can start working with this skills management

skill to build your own. And now you see any particular skill that co-work identifies and leverages is on the right hand side. And I have already built one

hand side. And I have already built one personal skill, a weekly status report.

Let's go ahead and build this live. Now

I'm going to be pretty basic here. I'm

just going to indicate create a skill that drafts my weekly status update.

Let's submit this off. And of course, if you have particular areas of focus like topics or people that you want to email or notify or document outputs that you require, indicate that in your prompt as

well. Now, because I already have a

well. Now, because I already have a weekly status skill, it's asking me, hey, you already have one built in. Do

you want to create a new one or just leverage what's already there? In this

case, let's just create a personal variant. All right, so we've skipped

variant. All right, so we've skipped ahead a little bit. I get a few additional questions. Now, the variant

additional questions. Now, the variant style. Let's say I want a longer, more

style. Let's say I want a longer, more detailed narrative version. And of

course, in any of these questions, you're going to see different questions.

Answer them appropriately to your personal context. So, there we go. We

personal context. So, there we go. We

have our skill. It provides us the associated markdown information. We have

the skill name, the descriptive information, when to use it, such as trigger phases. So, these are particular

trigger phases. So, these are particular phrases that I could indicate in order to have the skill invoked via a prompt.

Really nice. So again, we would evaluate all of this information. It gives us some output data and detail, maybe some guard rails and such too. And then of course, we can test it. So let's go

ahead and test. I do find it interesting that when I build these skills with the skill management skill, it does write these skill quality reports. It is a

direct HTML file. So I can review all the passes or the failures, any particular improvements or updates, all the data in detail there. It also did in line provide this information for me. I

thought that was pretty cool, too. So,

now there we go. If I go back to a new chat conversation with co-work and I open up that skills dialogue, I have my weekly status detailed skill along with my original weekly status skill. And so,

let's go ahead and click on this particular skill and let's submit it off. I could indicate other forms of

off. I could indicate other forms of information like particular context or detail, work that I'm performing, topics I want to focus on. And in this case, we're just going to have the skill look

at everything that involves my work within this particular demo tenant for the week and see what it gives us back.

Now, we see it's working through the plan. So, it's looking at last week's

plan. So, it's looking at last week's activities as well as the output of this would be a drafted email that's submitted to my drafts folder in Outlook

for my review. That should then allow me to email my manager Dai here with the weekly work that I perform. Now, I find this to be very interesting. I don't

have a lot of activity in this tenant and it is trying to get more information out of me like widen to two weeks or you know provide any additional context or

detail because this is supposed to be a weekly status detailed report right so it's trying to just grab as much out of me as it can uh it looks like it's now drafted the email it's submitted to our

draft folder so let's go ahead and check out the draft folder and there we go now we have this nice drafted email directly aligned to Daichi that I can review before directly sending. So I would

review all this information and then submit off as I require. However,

something to understand about this is a lot of people are wanting to really brand their emails and what I like to do is apply particular email templates to these to make them nice, neat, make them

look fancy a little bit, you know, and also, you know, if this is an update to my manager, probably don't want all of this descriptive information. I just

want key highlights and executive summary. So let's go ahead and modify

summary. So let's go ahead and modify the skill just a little bit and we'll go ahead and apply an HTML template to this email to brand it better. All right, so just a quick prompt. We're going to indicate update the weekly status

detailed skill to brand the output email with an HTML template. Also update the skill to focus the updates I provide to use more executive language. Provide an

executive summary at the top and short form bullets in the details. Color code

sections and ensure the email is accessible. And there we go. We have our

accessible. And there we go. We have our output. So now it's updated the skill to

output. So now it's updated the skill to pass in HTML templated email instead of plain text. We have the template

plain text. We have the template executive summary, the language, color-coded sections with the hexadesimal color values and just updates in relation to accessibility

needs. Let's go ahead and check out the

needs. Let's go ahead and check out the template here. Let's say uh submit a

template here. Let's say uh submit a test email. There we go. Now we have our

test email. There we go. Now we have our weekly status report and it looks much better. So we see there's some color

better. So we see there's some color coding, there's some branding. We can

see we have an executive summary, week in detail, all the updates. In this

case, shipped this week, what I did or any risks or blockers. So I have the ability to update these particular skills in any way that I deem fit and

automate what I'm doing with these skills. Consider the fact that if you're

skills. Consider the fact that if you're doing the same forms of work every week or you want to prep for your week or end your week off with all the core work that you performed, you can have

scheduled skills running inside of co-work and have it output all of this data to you automatically. So, some

great ways that you can create even more automation in your work. Let's go ahead and talk about the brand new option now on plugins. So, we just released a brand

on plugins. So, we just released a brand new blog article on May 5th. The ability

to now create and provide your user base plugins. Enterprises can now directly

plugins. Enterprises can now directly generate multiple skills as well as data connectors all a part of a single plugin that they provide to the user

experience. Plugins is really a package

experience. Plugins is really a package of a wide variety of options available to you. I will have a link to this blog

to you. I will have a link to this blog post in the description below if you want to take a look. Let's go create a custom plugin. All right. So, I have a

custom plugin. All right. So, I have a really long prompt here. I've created

this from a previous conversation I had with Co-work and I will have available to you linked in the description below.

What this particular plugin will do is it will directly leverage seven different skills to perform financial data analysis. It will also provide a

data analysis. It will also provide a connector to the SEC Edgar website to pull data such as 10K reports based on company financial data. So, we have that

MCP server-based connection also included as a part of this package. So,

let's go ahead and submit this off and have Cowwork generate the plug-in material for us. Yo, have you hit that thumbs up button yet? If you like this stuff, give me a thumbs up. I appreciate

the support. All right, so there we go.

It's now provided us that zip file with all of the skills and data connections directly inside. And all we have to do

directly inside. And all we have to do is upload this to our organizational agent store. General note for everyone,

agent store. General note for everyone, this is an administrative action. So we

have to ensure that an enterprise admin adds the plugin to be available inside of the user experience. Users themselves

only have the ability to create skills.

Admins have the ability to ship plugins.

So let's go ahead as an admin and let's upload this particular plugin. All

right, so we're inside of agent 365.

We're going to navigate to the three ellipses on the right hand side and click on add agent. We'll then upload that particular zip file. And then we're brought to the screen where we can

publish to individual users, groups of users, or all users within our organization based on who we want to access. And we can auto install this as

access. And we can auto install this as well if we require. In this case, I'll just make it available to all users. and

I'll install for all users automatically. I'll click next. We're

automatically. I'll click next. We're

then brought to a screen where we can apply particular template policies that our organization has available. This is

really in relation to the security controls that we can put into place.

Things like, as you see, conditional access or access packages or custom security attributes we want to tie to these particular components. In my case, I'm just going to leave it as the

default particular policies that I have applied via intra ID perview defender and shareepoint. Let's click next. If

and shareepoint. Let's click next. If

the plug-in components do require any special permissions, we would also have to approve here. In this case, I don't have any particular permissions. I'm

providing the plugin. This is really just going to the MCP server that's on the SEC Edgar website. It's open, easy to access. Everyone here should have

to access. Everyone here should have access as well. We'll go ahead and click next and then finally review and finish. And

after this we can directly publish this out and after a few moments the plugin should then be available in the end user experience. So now we're back inside of

experience. So now we're back inside of co-work. How do we access plugins? Well,

co-work. How do we access plugins? Well,

plugins are available via the skills and plugins section in the prompting box.

And you can see here I have already installed that financial research plugin that's custom to us. I can also directly browse any plugins that are made

available by Microsoft or directly from our organization. I have my plugins as

our organization. I have my plugins as well. So you can see a few here for the

well. So you can see a few here for the ones that I have installed. And I can go into these and I can remove these or I can go into the discover section for the others that are available. I can click

in those. I can add them. It's up to me

in those. I can add them. It's up to me what plugins that I want in my experience.

Now all I need to do is toggle financial research on and let's research a company. So our prompt is perform

company. So our prompt is perform financial research on Microsoft and we see already the financial research plugin has now been enabled. Now what's

interesting is I have seven skills as a part of this plugin and what it's directly starting with is the company snapshot skill. I can see a portion of

snapshot skill. I can see a portion of the text here that's directly cut off.

General note as well is if I go into my skills section, I can also see all of the particular individual skills that is a part of this plugin. So we see there's

company snapshot, financial trends, peer comparison, risk factor analysis, earnings deep dive, executive research, and filing search directly via the SEC

Edgar filings. So invoke any of those

Edgar filings. So invoke any of those directly to your need or let co-work decide which ones to invoke for you. And

there we go. Based on the company snapshot skill, we now have an initial snapshot that aligns to our latest financials, recent filings, and any headline risks that the particular skill

has found. We can invoke a few other

has found. We can invoke a few other ones as well. So let's go ahead and invoke a few more.

There we go. We see our risk factor analysis has completed between Microsoft Alphabet and Meta and we have the

financial research risk factor analysis skill that was invoked. We get this initial competitive analysis regulatory analysis

any particular analysis areas per each individual customer or organization.

Comparative down at the bottom as well.

risks, any signals. So again, we can have all these built-in skills to do particular forms of work, all packaged a part of plugins.

It's also important to note that co-work is now officially available via the Microsoft 365 co-pilot mobile application experience. So try it while

application experience. So try it while you're on the go. So there are some great new capabilities that Microsoft is rolling out with the co-work experience.

General note, co-work is still a part of the Frontier program and still does require a Microsoft 365 co-pilot license. So that's it for me for today

license. So that's it for me for today everyone. I appreciate your support as

everyone. I appreciate your support as always. Again, if you like the content,

always. Again, if you like the content, give me a thumbs up. If you want to stay updated on the latest and greatest, subscribe to the channel. Leave a

comment in the comment section below if you have any questions or thoughts. And

we'll see you in the next one. Have a

good one everybody.