Weekly Update 9 June 2025 – Copilot Studio Tips, Developer Agents, EWS help, Teams Phone CCaaS Public Preview, Copilot Studio May Updates

I’m never going to financially recover from this

Build like Microsoft: Developer agents in action

Exchange Web Services code analyzer and usage report

Public Preview of Teams Phone extensibility for CCaaS ISV solution developers

What’s new in Copilot Studio: May 2025 

You can also listen to the audio-only version: Thoughtstuff Podcast – Tom Morgan on Teams Dev: Weekly Update 9 June 2025.

Find all my videos at thoughtstuff.co.uk/videos. You can also subscribe to the audio-only version of these videos, either via iTunes, Spotify or your own podcasting tool.

Video Summary (AI generated):

Hello and welcome to another weekly update. Hope you’re doing well. A couple of interesting things to talk through this week – I’ll try and get them all done in the time, so let’s go for it.

First one – this is a slight departure, but it’s such a good blog post I had to include it. It’s by fellow MVP Luise Freese, who is an expert in the business application side of things like Power Platform. She’s part of the M365 PMP team, a Power Platform architect, and works with Azure as well.

She’s written a really great article about the licensing implications and some of the thinking that goes into licensing for Power Apps and Power Platform. I don’t often cover low-code, I tend to stick to pro-code, but this is a conversation I hear often. It’s a really thoughtful take on why licensing cost alone is not the full picture. Yes, it might look expensive initially, but you need to factor in everything you’re actually getting.

The article shifts focus from just cost to value. It walks through different considerations, goals, and avoids common traps where saving money results in achieving nothing—a poor trade. It’s a valuable perspective even for pro-code developers, reminding us to reevaluate tools we reach for, especially in light of modern capabilities in tools like Copilot Studio.

Speaking of building new things – Microsoft’s engineering team shared a excellent blog post about how they’re using agents and AI internally to improve their dev process. They’ve built something called Athena – an AI-powered, collaborative agent for developers. It’s boosting build speeds, PR completion times, and easing code reviews.

They’ve open-sourced much of it, so if you’re running a development team, you’ll want to check it out. The biggest win here is Microsoft is dogfooding. Their use of Athena means we all benefit – they find bugs and usability issues and fix them internally before we even hit those problems. That loop improves the whole ecosystem.

Stepping back a few years – remember Exchange Web Services (EWS)? We’re now 18 months away from its full retirement. Microsoft has released a new code analyzer and usage report to help you audit where you’re still using EWS calls so you can start migrating. Detailed warnings in the code even tell you what needs to change and how to do it. Combined with GitHub Copilot, this is a solid solution to get ahead of retirement.

Next, an update I originally mentioned back in March: the Azure Communication Services team teamed up with Microsoft Teams Phone to deliver a Contact Center as a Service solution for ISVs. It was all marketing slides back then, but now it’s in public preview. Blog post is live, and the platform is ready if you’ve been waiting to integrate Teams Phone with ISV solutions.

Finally, looping back to low-code again – there’s a comprehensive roundup blog from Build that captures all the new announcements for Copilot Studio. Even if you’re not actively using it now, you should be aware of what’s possible: live agent switching, better SDK and logic integration, and the ability to bridge pro and low-code solutions. You’ll get asked about it eventually, so better to stay ahead.

All right – enough from me. Have a great week, whatever you’re doing, and I’ll speak to you next time.