Have you ever wished Microsoft Teams worked just a little better for the way your business operates? Maybe you've thought:

“It would be great if Teams could do this…”

“This workflow would be so much simpler if…”

“Why isn’t there a feature for…?”

Now’s your chance to directly influence what comes next.

Microsoft is inviting Small and Medium Business (SMB) customers and partners to join our Customer Advisory Board (CAB) and Partner Advisory Council (PAC) for Microsoft Teams SMB. These groups give you a simple, low-effort way to share real-world feedback with the product team — and help guide the Teams roadmap for SMBs.

What are CAB and PAC?

Our SMB advisory programs bring together a small group of customers and partners who:

• Use Teams in their day-to-day business operations
• Work with SMB customers implementing Teams
• Have insights into the challenges SMBs face when adopting collaboration tools
• Want to help improve the products they rely on

Through monthly virtual sessions, participants get the opportunity to:

✅ Preview upcoming features and improvements
✅ Provide feedback during early stages of product development
✅ Share what’s working well — and what isn’t
✅ Highlight real-world business scenarios that should be better supported
✅ Influence priorities for SMB-focused innovation in Teams

This isn’t a sales call or a support channel — it’s a direct line to the Teams product team.

What’s the Commitment?

We know SMB leaders, IT decision-makers, and partners are busy.

That’s why participation is designed to be:

• Flexible – Virtual meetings combined with async conversation
• Low effort – No prep required for most sessions
• Conversational – Small-group discussions, not presentations

Most sessions are informal conversations focused on understanding your business needs and how Teams can better support them.

Your input helps us build features that actually reflect how SMBs work — not just how software thinks they should.

Why Join?

Participants often tell us that one of the biggest benefits of joining CAB or PAC is the opportunity to:

• Get early visibility into what’s coming next
• Understand where Teams development is headed
• Provide feedback that directly reaches the team building the product
• Help shape experiences that impact SMB customers worldwide

Whether you're an SMB customer using Teams internally or a partner working with SMB clients, your perspective matters.

Interested in Participating?

If you'd like to be considered for the Microsoft Teams SMB Customer Advisory Board or Partner Advisory Council, simply fill out this short interest form: 👉 Express your interest to join the Teams SMB Advisory Board

Once submitted, our team will review your response and follow up with more information on next steps.

Today we’re announcing the public preview of the Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Evaluations tool. The Agent Evaluations CLI tool helps developers measure and improve the quality of agents they build for Microsoft 365 Copilot. The tool provides a command-line interface that sends prompts to a deployed agent, captures responses, and scores them with the help of Azure OpenAI LLM models. It produces structured reports developers can use in their inner loop of development and in CI/CD pipelines. 

This release is a step toward making rigorous, repeatable evaluation a standard part of how developers build for Microsoft 365 Copilot, alongside the broader work happening across the platform, from Work IQ to agent creation with the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit. 

Why evaluations matter now 

Our mission is to enable Microsoft partners, ISVs, and enterprise developers to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot with custom agents, actions, and knowledge so Copilot can reason over any data and take action across any system. 

As agents move from demos into core business workflows, the bar for shipping rises with them. Customers expect agents that are accurate, grounded, and consistent across the breadth of real-world prompts they receive. Meeting that bar requires more than manual testing. It requires an evaluation framework that is objective, repeatable, and integrated into the developer workflow. The Agent Evaluations tool is designed to make that practical. 

What’s in the public preview 

The public preview brings the full evaluation loop into a simple command-line workflow. The CLI is designed to fit naturally into the way Microsoft 365 developers already build agents. Developers can invoke the CLI to evaluate declarative agents right inside the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit.

• The tool supports evaluation of single-turn or multi-turn conversations to make it possible to test how an agent retains context, handles follow-ups, and completes end-to-end tasks the way real users actually interact with it.  

• The tool offers an easy experience to select which agent to run an evaluation against. The interactive agent picker ensures that testing teams alongside development teams can evaluate the agents.  

• Responses are then scored automatically against evaluators like Coherence, Groundedness (LLM based) or ExactMatch /PartialMatch (Code based), and more evaluators.

• Results are emitted in an HTML scorecard report. Developers can use the scorecard as a sharable artifact that captures objective evidence of agent quality across their inner loop, code reviews, and CI/CD pipelines.  

You can also access the evaluation skill wherever you vibe-code with your coding agents.

Get started 

The preview tool is free to install during public preview. You’ll need a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, an agent deployed to your tenant, Node.js 24.12.0+, admin consent to run the tool in your tenant, and an Azure OpenAI endpoint for the LLM-judge evaluators. Ask your admin to enable the tool for your tenant today.

Get started: Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Evaluations CLI overview 

Source & samples (GitHub): github.com/microsoft/m365-copilot-eval 

Agents Toolkit: Create declarative agents using Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit | Microsoft Learn 

Agent evaluation skill – Use the microsoft-365-agents-toolkit@workiq skill for Claude Code and Copilot to create and evaluate agents using Agents Toolkit and Agents Evaluation Tool.

We want your feedback 

During the preview period, we need your voice. Try the tool against your agents, file issues in the GitHub repo, and tell us which evaluators, integrations, and workflows make the biggest difference for your team. Your feedback will directly shape the path to general availability (GA). 

We can’t wait to see the high-quality, trustworthy agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot you’ll ship next. 

The post Announcing the public preview of the Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Evaluations tool appeared first on Microsoft 365 Developer Blog.

2026-05-08

• Path completion in /add-dir no longer flickers or gets intercepted by @ and # pickers
• Slash commands can now appear mid-input, and multiple skills can be invoked in a single message
• userPromptSubmitted hooks can now handle requests directly, bypassing the LLM and returning a response without making a model call
• Faster /user list and /user switch for multi-account users
• Add optional prerelease argument to copilot update and /update to fetch the latest prerelease build
• Shell commands via ! prefix work correctly with all shell configurations
• Shell aliases and rc file settings now work in ! commands
• Quota display correctly shows remaining usage for Free users instead of always showing 100% used
• Tool permissions granted in autopilot mode are preserved after /clear
• Effort level applies correctly when switching models via the /model picker
• Pressing Ctrl+C while a permission prompt is pending no longer causes the CLI to hang
• Project info remains visible in slash command picker when no results match
• Invalid URL entries in settings.json no longer crash CLI startup and are skipped with a warning
• Timeline shows the resolved model for rubber-duck sub-agents (e.g. Rubber-duck(claude-opus-4.7))

Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML

Thought-provoking piece by Thariq Shihipar (on the Claude Code team at Anthropic) advocating for HTML over Markdown as an output format to request from Claude.

The article is crammed with interesting examples (collected on this site) and prompt suggestions like this one:

Help me review this PR by creating an HTML artifact that describes it. I'm not very familiar with the streaming/backpressure logic so focus on that. Render the actual diff with inline margin annotations, color-code findings by severity and whatever else might be needed to convey the concept well.

I've been defaulting to asking for most things in Markdown since the GPT-4 days, when the 8,192 token limit meant that Markdown's token-efficiency over HTML was extremely worthwhile.

Thariq's piece here has caused me to reconsider that, especially for output. Asking Claude for an explanation in HTML means it can drop in SVG diagrams, interactive widgets, in-page navigation and all sorts of other neat ways of making the information more pleasant to navigate.

I wrote about Useful patterns for building HTML tools last December, but that was focused very much on interactive utilities like the ones on my tools.simonwillison.net site. I'm excited to start experimenting more with rich HTML explanations in response to ad-hoc prompts.

Trying this out on copy.fail

copy.fail describes a recently discovered Linux security exploit, including a proof of concept distributed as obfuscated Python.

I tried having GPT-5.5 create an HTML explanation of the exploit like this:

curl https://copy.fail/exp | llm -m gpt-5.5 -s 'Explain this code in detail. Reformat it, expand out any confusing bits and go deep into what it does and how it works. Output HTML, neatly styled and using capabilities of HTML and CSS and JavaScript to make the explanation rich and interactive and as clear as possible'

Here's the resulting HTML page. It's pretty good, though I should have emphasized explaining the exploit over the Python harness around it.

Tags: html, security, markdown, ai, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, llms, llm, claude-code

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