Message extensions for Microsoft 365 Copilot
Message extensions are a powerful feature in Microsoft Teams and Outlook that are designed to facilitate user engagement with your web service. Additionally, they allow users to interact with your app directly from the chat interface.
These interactions are typically triggered via buttons and forms within Microsoft Teams and Outlook clients. This mechanism allows users to search or initiate actions in an external system, right from the compose message area, or even directly from a message. The outcomes of these interactions are delivered back to the client in the form of a richly formatted card.
Important
Message extensions are available in Government Community Cloud (GCC), GCC-High, and Department of Defense (DOD) environments.
Message extension with Copilot
With the introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot, the game has changed. Users can now use natural language input to invoke a message extension's search function, bypassing the need for specific UI commands. In essence, your users' words become the catalyst for Copilot's actions to call the appropriate plugin for their request.
Important
Message extensions as Copilot plugins are currently in public preview with limited functionality. Message extension plugins work as standalone experiences in Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams, Word, and PowerPoint; however, they can't be added from declarative agents.
The following illustration shows how a user interaction with a message extension differs in the Teams client and Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Your users can do much more than just search queries. With the integration of message extensions and Microsoft 365 Copilot, they can ask all sorts of follow-up questions. Because Copilot is powered by Generative AI, it can understand, summarize, predict, and generate content across many Microsoft 365 applications, thereby boosting user productivity and creativity.
A user can ask Copilot what products are in stock, and then, for example, she can also ask Copilot to populate a table with various products. She can then instruct Copilot to draft an email summarizing the inventory as a reminder for the supplier.
Build message extensions using Bot Framework
There are a few ways to build message extensions, but to extend the capabilities for Copilot, you need to build your extension with Bot Framework SDK, which is used to create various bots, including Teams bots.
For development, you can use Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code to build your message extensions. The toolkit helps you to create a project by scaffolding a template that suits your needs.