Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit, an evolution of Microsoft Teams Toolkit, is designed to help developers build agents and apps for Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365. Agents Toolkit is designed to help you create, build, debug, test, and deploy Microsoft 365 agents and apps. It can significantly simplify your development by providing integrated Microsoft 365 identity, cloud storage access, data from Microsoft Graph, and other services in Azure with a “zero-configuration” approach. Agents Toolkit is available for Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, and GitHub Copilot. Agent Toolkit is also available as a command line interface (CLI).
Key features
Simplify your code-first agent and app development end-to-end
Agents Toolkit supports the end-to-end agent and app development journey by providing:
- Support for extensibility solutions across Microsoft 365 surfaces, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365 apps.
- Seamless integration with Microsoft 365 Agents SDK to build self-hosted agents.
- Seamless integration with Teams AI Library to build agents in Teams.
- Project scaffolding to help you get started with common extensibility types like agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot and intelligent chatbots for multiple platforms.
- Rapid iteration with full stack debugging, live reloading, secure tunneling, and Microsoft 365 Agents Playground.
- Simplified SSO authentication.
- Integrated support for hosting, data storage, and serverless functions.
- CI/CD actions for GitHub and Azure DevOps for app delivery.
Customize your agents easily
When you build agents for Microsoft 365, you can bring additional knowledge, skills, and organizational data to Copilot. Agents Toolkit provides the ability to create agents from templates or scenario-based samples, add AI capabilities, and integrate with Microsoft 365 Agents SDK, Azure AI Foundry, Copilot Studio, and other AI services.
Integration with the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK
The Agents Toolkit ships with key templates that utilize the Agents SDK, supporting developers who want to host their own agent, bring their own AI & Orchestration and utilize core conversation management and channel management capabilities. The Agents Toolkit facilitates the development of these agents faster and easier, giving them the time to focus on the development of custom agentic solutions that meet their organizational and customer needs.
Integration with Teams AI Library
The Teams AI Library allows developers to expand upon the hundreds of millions of people who use Teams for collaboration, turning Teams into a hub for collaborating with agents. The Teams AI Library helps developers build agents for Teams chats, channels, and meetings.
Use AI to build agents faster
You can use Agents Toolkit with GitHub Copilot to take advantage of code completion and generation, AI-assisted scaffolding, automatic troubleshooting, deployment assistance, and direct access to supporting documentation. The toolkit offers an agentic and AI-native way to take app development to the next level of efficiency.
Accelerate publishing agents to multiple channels
With the toolkit, you can build once and publish to multiple channels via Microsoft 365 Agents SDK. You can publish agents across a variety of platforms, including:
- Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Teams
- Custom websites
- SMS
- And more
What can you build with Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit?
The Agents Toolkit provides support for multiple extensibility options, including:
- Declarative agents
- Custom engine agents
- Copilot connectors
- Conversational agents for Teams
- Teams bots
- Teams tabs
- Message extensions
- Office add-ins
When to use Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit?
Microsoft offers several agent development tools for you to choose from based on your skillset and agent development goals. The following image shows the offerings that are available based on whether the user takes a low-code or pro-code approach to building their agent.
Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit is for pro-code scenarios and supports the integration of agents with other existing apps or services.
Get started
To start building with Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit, install the version of the toolkit that’s right for you:
- For JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python developers, install Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.
- For .NET developers, install Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit for Visual Studio.
- For developers using command-line, install Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit CLI.
For more information to help you get started building agents and apps, see documentation.
We’re excited to see what you’ll build with Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit!
Well done, Zhidi