Summary

Completed

In this module, you built the foundation for designing deliberate integration strategies for Copilot Studio agents by learning how to map enterprise requirements to the right integration patterns.

What you learned

• Three integration categories (tools, knowledge sources, and agents) form the foundation of every Copilot Studio integration strategy. Each category serves a distinct purpose: tools enable agents to act on external systems, knowledge sources ground responses in authoritative content, and connected agents let you delegate specialized tasks to purpose-built agents.
• Action integration patterns (prebuilt connectors, custom connectors, REST API tools, agent flows, and MCP) each come with different trade-offs in scope, reusability, and development effort. MCP in particular opens access to Microsoft-published prebuilt servers like Work IQ, which connect agents to real-time Microsoft 365 context across email, calendar, and Teams without custom infrastructure. Matching the right pattern to each use case keeps your integration strategy maintainable and efficient.
• Authentication models and DLP policies govern how agents connect to external systems and what integrations are available in your environment. Understanding these constraints before you build prevents costly rework.
• Selection reasoning across categories gives you a consistent approach for mapping each integration point to the right pattern: start from purpose, then narrow by the key factors for each category.

Learn more

To continue building on what you learned in this module, explore the following resources:

• Plan and design integration strategies
• Add tools to custom agents
• Copilot connectors versus Power Platform connectors as knowledge sources
• Configure data policies for agents
• Extend your agents with Work IQ MCP tools