· 4 min
This Month In Declarative Agents: The Runtime Grew Up
May traded splashy demos for real declarative agent infrastructure: evals landed, MCP got operational, and government cloud support started catching up.
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Blog
Guides, deep dives, and opinions on building declarative agents, API plugins, and everything M365 Copilot extensibility.
· 7 min
Editorial Answers Make Declarative Agents Predictable
Editorial answers in declarative agent manifest v1.7 let you reserve exact responses for known questions, with semantic matching catching natural language variations.
· 2 min
Advanced Manifest Capabilities for Declarative Agents
A video walkthrough of advanced manifest options: disclaimers, behavior overrides, and environment configuration for more polished, governed declarative agents.
· 2 min
Extending Declarative Agents with API Plugins and MCP
A video walkthrough of adding actions to a declarative agent with API plugins and MCP, moving beyond read-only answers to create, update, and retrieve data.
· 2 min
Grounding Declarative Agents with Microsoft 365 Data
A video walkthrough of grounding a declarative agent in real Microsoft 365 data: SharePoint, Teams conversations, email, and people knowledge.
· 8 min
Your M365 Developer Tenant and Licenses for Copilot Agents
Set up your first Microsoft 365 developer tenant and the minimum licenses you need to start building declarative agents for M365 Copilot today.
· 7 min
Shipping Declarative Agents Across Environments and Versions
How to use environment variables in the Agents Toolkit to target dev, staging, and prod tenants while running multiple agent versions side by side.
· 10 min
Agents Without Evals Are Just Vibes: Agents Evaluations CLI
The Agents Evaluations CLI turns declarative agent quality into repeatable tests, scored reports, and PR evidence using @microsoft/m365-copilot-eval.
· 12 min
Advanced Instruction Engineering for Declarative Agents
Go beyond basics with advanced patterns for persona engineering, scope boundaries, error handling, and iterative testing of declarative agent instructions.
· 12 min
Authentication Deep Dive for MCP Plugins in Declarative Agents
Configure OAuth, Entra ID SSO, and anonymous authentication for MCP plugins in declarative agents, including Teams Developer Portal setup and runtime flow.
· 4 min
This Month In Declarative Agents: MCP Apps Goes Live
April was the month MCP Apps stopped being a preview and started being a product. Here is what shipped, what landed in the docs, and what it means.
· 11 min
Authentication Deep Dive for API Plugins in Declarative Agents
Configure OAuth, API key, and anonymous authentication for API plugins in declarative agents, including Entra ID setup and runtime flow.