Posey's Tips & Tricks
Build Your Own Custom Copilot, Part 2: Making the Connection
Now that you have a plan, it's time to create your personalized Copilot.
In my previous post in this series, I began showing you some of the various options that exist for building your own Copilot using Microsoft's Copilot Studio. Now I want to continue the discussion by walking you through the Copilot creation process.
Copilot works best when it has access to your data. As I mentioned in my previous post, the vast majority of my data resides on premises, not in Microsoft 365. That being the case, I want to start out by showing you how to create a connector.
From the Copilot Studio Home screen, click on Create and then click New Microsoft Copilot Action. From there, click Copilot for Microsoft 365 and then click Connector. The first thing that you will need to do is to choose the connector that you want to use. There are an absolutely mind boggling number of connectors to choose from. If you are trying to pull data from a Windows file server like I am, then choose the File System option, shown in Figure 1.
[Click on image for larger view.] Figure 1. Choose the connector that you want to use.
The exact steps that you will need to follow when creating a connector will vary depending on the connector type that you have selected. As a general rule, the process starts with you assigning a name and a description to the connector that you are building. From there, you will need to select an action. In other words, you need to tell Copilot what it will be doing when it accesses the data source. In my case, for example, Copilot will need to read data from a backend file server. I only want Copilot to read data, so I would not select actions such as Update File, Append File or Delete File. Instead, Get File Content might be a more appropriate action.
You will also generally have to provide access to the connector that you are creating. In the case of accessing a file system, this means providing the name of a gateway through which a connection can be made. You will also need to specify the authentication type and provide a set of credentials that can be used to access the file system.
Depending on how the connector will be used, it might also be important to point the connector toward a specific folder within the file system, as opposed to giving the connector blanket access to everything on the server. In my previous blog post for example, I mentioned the idea of creating a Copilot that can look at everything that I have written in the past to see if I have written about a particular topic before. Given that Copilot's scope of operation, it will of course need access to my writing archives. However, it does not need access to other things stored on the server, such as business records.
[Click on image for larger view.] Figure 2. You will need to provide credentials that the connector can use to authenticate into the resource that it is connecting to.
Once you have published a connector, you can go back to the Create screen and choose the option to create a new Copilot. You need only to describe the Copilot that you want to create and the connector that you want to use.
Before I wrap up this post, I want to mention that there is one more option for creating custom Copilots, and this option is potentially easier than what I just showed you. You might have noticed from the screen captures that creating a connector can be a somewhat complex process involving several steps. The good news however, is that depending on what you are trying to do, you might not actually need to build a connector.
When you arrive at the screen used to create a new Copilot, try clicking the Skip to Configure button rather than engaging with the chatbot. When you do, you will be taken to the screen shown in Figure 3. As you can see in the figure, this screen requires you to provide a name for your new Copilot. It also allows you to enter a description of the Copilot that you are creating as well as some instructions pertaining to what the Copilot is supposed to do.
[Click on image for larger view.] Figure 3. Clicking the Skip to Configure button causes this screen to be displayed.
Most of these options are similar to the ones found on the normal Copilot creation screen. However, the Knowledge section is where things get interesting. Clicking the Add Knowledge button takes you to a screen that lets you choose from available knowledge sources. As you can see in Figure 4,, for example, you can pull data from public Web sites, files that you upload and other sources. This makes for an easy way to get Copilot access to the data that it needs, without having to build a custom connector.
[Click on image for larger view.] Figure 4. You can add knowledge sources for your Copilot to use.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.