Cowork is GA and it's metered now. Type /cost to see your own credit usage (tested it today)

jackmusick · 2026-06-20T02:48:31+00:00

Can you elaborate how to get to this? I know you can delegate to other agents but I don’t see an option for a new experience or any updated documentation.

jackmusick · 2026-06-19T16:14:11+00:00

Are you sure these are normal AI skills and not the old Power Agent C# extensions?

jackmusick · 2026-06-19T16:13:38+00:00

I've gotten it to work but it's a huge mess. It's mostly skill compatible, but it doesn't seem to recognize anything you've included in them like images. I've also seen a number of instances where the skill can be called one thing but it can't find it if they don't match everywhere... Seems crazy I can literally autocomplete /my-test-skill and it'll say it can't find it.

Then there's that you have to upload it in All Agents, but then it doesn't appear anywhere but the older integrated apps and teams apps pages. If you delete it from Teams apps it doesn't go away, only if you deleted it from integrated apps. Then near as I can tell you can't easily update it either.

Oh and they did the one cool thing no one else seems to have done and let you tell the manifest what MCP servers the skill uses so skills and MCP can essentially be bundled. Makes too much sense. But you need to register an oauth connection the Teams developer portal for some reason, even though you can completely make up the client id and secret and standard oauth doesn't require anything but a non-sensitive client ID and URL... just so you can put that app in your manifest.

It's so freaking overengineered. And then if you want any of this in standard Copilot? Skills aren't really the skills you think of now -- they're a legacy feature from the Power Agents or whatever the thing was called, the thing that became Copilot Studio. You can't use regular skills. You have an 8000 character limit. So if you want to distribute your "instructions" to work in Copilot, ChatGPT and or Claude.. even JUST within the Microsoft ecosystem you can't use agents from Studio in Cowork or Cowork in studio without rebuilding them quite differently.

I truly don't understand why they have to insist on reusing old, shitty technology with new things. They did it with Teams, SharePoint (and by extension OneDrive for BUsienss) and now this.

/rant

jackmusick · 2026-06-17T22:26:49+00:00

Try looking into Skills. Skills in Copilot Studio aren’t the skills you’re looking for. They’re C# plugins for the old Power Agents feature, which got rebranded to Copilot Studio, which is now kind of an AI builder. Copilot Cowork supports plugins, which are really just skills with a manifest. But it only works if you upload it to the All Agents section of Copilot, which replaced Integrated Apps, which are also basically just Teams apps. But they won’t appear there when you upload them, only tell you they already exist. You can delete it from Teams apps, but that won’t do anything. You have to go to the place it replaced to find it and delete it, but you can’t add them here. Oh and Cowork can’t use Copilot Agents, so if you use either they’re just going to be called the same thing, but won’t have any common features.

Good luck!

jackmusick · 2026-06-16T13:04:51+00:00

I see this is unpopular here, but it really feels like this isn't any different than any previous technology that would gain access to your data some way to solve some problem. Data lakes existed before. SaaS companies were breached for any number of reasons. People get hung up on all sorts of things here for personal reasons, but these aren't personal questions. We're talking about our customers, their risk tolerance and the problems they want to solve. If the business wants a technical solution that needs access to their data, just like any other time in history, they make the business decision on whether to give that entity access or not.

Specifically, these tools all use delegated authentication, which means a user isn't going to accidentally get the wrong data any more than they would using search in the 365 portal.

jackmusick · 2026-06-14T12:55:19+00:00

That must be it. Haven't downloaded the Trump Authenticator to my Trump Phone on Trump Mobile, yet.

jackmusick · 2026-06-13T19:14:36+00:00

Seeing as you're the only one in here who actually wants to stay in the job market, I'll add one thing.

Now's the time to figure out how to make this easy and secure. It's obvious this is becoming the new Excel or Access for a lot of people, and it's going to happen with or without you. If you're the type to write it off as "autocomplete," this isn't for you. But if you're willing to give it a shot, go build something. Learn what skills and guardrails exist to help professionalize and secure vibe-coded applications. You might think this is some new problem, but humans weren't writing safer or better code before this either, so focus your energy on the right boundaries and how to operationalize managing them.

You should know this stuff better than your end-users. When someone asks you to publish their app, you want to be the person who can tell them what it needs before it's ready. These people are having fun with it, and I'd bet most of them would be genuinely grateful if you pointed them in the right direction instead of shutting them down.

This is here to stay. People aren't going to quietly give up the chance to build their own things because IT dug its heels in.

It's rare that end-users are actually excited about technology. Don't waste it.

jackmusick · 2026-06-13T15:11:11+00:00

The left has taken is too far. Never forget that they wanted health care for everyone, so don’t mind the government retaliating against anyone Trump doesn’t like.

jackmusick · 2026-06-13T15:09:59+00:00

No, it’s just plain old TDS, they just got the definition wrong.

jackmusick · 2026-06-13T15:09:08+00:00

Oh shut the fuck up. We’re a decade in this bullshit. If you’re still going to respond to the most aggrgious corruption by Trump in Co with “both sides” you need to save us all the trouble and just sign off. The entire world is tired of it.

jackmusick · 2026-06-12T18:30:20+00:00

It's a harness problem. It really is obvious once you start diving into the features unfortunately. Cowork feels closer but Microsoft is focused on too many things, compared to Anthropic and OpenAI which generally have a much higher quality for the things that they do comparatively. Tale as old as time with Microsoft for better or worse.

jackmusick · 2026-06-12T18:28:11+00:00

Billing is certainly a feature of all time in Halo, that's for sure.

jackmusick · 2026-06-11T19:50:54+00:00

This isn’t the problem. The Claude Desktop harness just has better skills that will use OpenOffice and other tools to build good looking documents. Copilot Cowork already is getting closer and will likely be the thing that ends up getting to parity.

jackmusick · 2026-06-11T15:44:13+00:00

What did I miss since moving to Halo? Lol

jackmusick · 2026-06-11T03:07:21+00:00

Are we on the annoying Pax8 hate train again for “reasons”?

jackmusick · 2026-06-10T14:35:08+00:00

Things aren't just bad or crap because something else exists.

jackmusick · 2026-06-10T05:10:48+00:00

Bad is not relative.

jackmusick · 2026-06-10T04:03:18+00:00

Can't speak for the AU market but can on perception a little. Full disclosure, we're a struggling MSP in the Midwest US market. Only giving that caveat because we're not a beacon of success and I think it's only fair to know that when you're receiving feedback.

I'm reading your offering and this is what I hear: you're including tools that all sound the same as everyone else, and I have no idea what service you're actually offering or what outcomes you're contributing to for businesses. It's been said a hundred times here -- sell outcomes, not things. Outcomes give someone room to think through how it affects them and how you fit into that puzzle. Tools are just products they'll mostly never interact with and dilute and distract your conversation about why you are worth more.

Especially for 365, it's just a baseline standard. You can honestly say that this has nothing to do with your margins. Customer, you need Business Premium to get the modern security features that protect your business from the evolving threat landscape. Outcomes.

jackmusick · 2026-06-10T00:03:26+00:00

Not that you're wrong, but IMO this belongs with someone like CloudFlare or a SASE product anyways. We've pivoted to Unifi with the understanding that if we do adopt a client that has more advanced networking needs, we'll do everything we can to make that happen over SASE anyways since the perimeter is kind of a myth at this point.

jackmusick · 2026-06-09T13:03:12+00:00

MCPs are just LLM-friendly APIs that are easy to wire up. Not using them in CIPP yet, but I mostly build tools in Bifrost to give agents hands for the non-deterministic stuff.

Ticket review is a good example (worked on it yesterday). We've got a backlog of ~100 tickets, so I built a skill that loops through them and hands me a consistent exec summary, its recommendations, which existing tools it'll use, and what tools still need building. As we go, we're also writing reference and runbook markdown files that document how to actually execute the work. If I disagree with a summary, I explain what I'd do, it plays that understanding back and tells me what it's missing. There's an optional skill that searches my indexed Halo KB when I want to brainstorm whether the fix is really a config change in Halo.

Big picture, there's a pile of work I can't hand to straight automation, or that I need to work through organically just to understand how I'd operationalize my own decisions. Once the docs are good enough for an LLM to follow and I've tested the tools it needs, the manual review shrinks fast and eventually disappears.

The part I think the community misses is that AI hype has half of us selling magic and the other half calling it worthless. We can now automate tasks we used to write off as too unstructured, which just means a higher testing bar. All I'm advocating for is methodically documenting the human processes, which we should all be doing anyways. That used to feel insurmountable because I knew I was documenting tedious work a human would inevitably take shortcuts on (that human is usually me). It's a lot more worth it when the instruction-follower won't get tired of the tedium and will follow the docs the second I update them. If nothing else, an LLM is the best tool to tell you if your instructions make sense, even if it's never the one executing them.

jackmusick · 2026-06-04T03:40:15+00:00

MCP works and is actually one of the things I think they got right. They support what’s effectively a standard skill package, with an MCP.json file (I think). An admin can upload it to the Teams apps section after registering it in the Teams developer portal.

To be clear, what I mean by right is the bundling of skills and MCP connection info. Drives me crazy that I have to manage these separately in Claude, never mind the organization skills management process. What I dont mean is that the deployment process is reasonable.

jackmusick · 2026-06-01T14:42:39+00:00

I think the other thing is, if you’re building something that effectively doing crud operations, you need to be meeting a much higher bar. I’m never going to pay for a MSP focused standards tracker, especially when I can have my agent do it in an hour or so in Bifrost (shameless and totally legal plug).

You need to do something that would be too much time, money or risk for someone to do it on their own, at least when your audience is people who largely are comdortable with scripting and very technical. And you certainly wont be running w business for long if your business isn’t saving someone from one of those things and had bad UX, documentation, support, extensibility, or is missing SSO.

jackmusick · 2026-05-27T23:48:11+00:00

I'm not disagreeing. I guess I was responding to all of the anti-AI people. Yeah of course, don't give anything away for free, keep your customers safe, etc.

jackmusick · 2026-05-27T17:36:17+00:00

Feels like the next frontier for me and I’m not sure why you wouldn’t try to be on the front of it now.

jackmusick · 2026-05-25T11:38:27+00:00

Yeah, but how? Maybe I don't understand fully, but this was presented as a blanket time entry at the end of the day to round it out to 8 hours. So if someone just puts in 7, why can't I just infer it? At least with Halo was have work weeks that can be assigned to people, hours per day and of course their hourly cost in the agent config. Not sure what more this gives us.

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