Going beyond text in Microsoft 365 Copilot - Introducing SharePoint Copilot Apps - Microsoft 365 Developer Blog

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Vesa Juvonen

Principal Program Manager

Microsoft 365 Copilot is brilliant at working with language. But work isn’t only words, sometimes you don’t want to describe what you need in a back-and-forth chat – you want to see it, touch it, and act on it right where you already are . Picture approving an expense, checking your remaining leave, or booking a desk – without ever leaving the chat to hunt for the right tool. That’s now possible with the UX components in the Copilot canvas using MCP apps model.

Today we’re excited to introduce SharePoint Copilot Apps – a new way to bring rich, interactive UX components directly into the Copilot canvas, powered by the SharePoint Framework (SPFx).

Chat and text are powerful – but not always enough

Think about how often a simple task turns into a longer conversation. You want to get something quickly reviewed. You need the latest tool – but is it on the intranet, or somewhere else entirely? Describing it all in text takes time you don’t have.

Every hop to a different app, portal, or tool breaks your focus and burns minutes that add up across thousands of people. The cost is the constant context-switching tax on your whole organization.

What if the experience you needed was simply there – directly in the flow of your work , inside the Copilot canvas? You ask to see or do something, and the right UX component appears, ready to use.

That’s exactly what SharePoint Copilot Apps deliver: purpose-built UX components that appear in Copilot at the moment they’re useful, so you can review, decide, and act without leaving the conversation.

For developers: just bring your component

Here’s the part developers will love. To create a Copilot UX component, you only have to focus on one thing – building your UX component.  Everything else is provided for you by the platform.

And you build it with the JavaScript stack you already know. SPFx supports any JavaScript library or framework you choose  – React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, or plain TypeScript. React is the most widely used, so you’ll see it in most of our examples, but it’s never a requirement. That flexibility is a real advantage: your team ships with the tools it’s already productive in, instead of being forced onto someone else’s stack.

That same standards-based foundation unlocks another advantage: your AI coding agents already know how to build this .  Because there’s no proprietary platform or bespoke runtime to learn first, tools like GitHub Copilot, Claude, and Codex – or any other coding agent your team prefers – can scaffold, generate, refactor, and debug these components right inside your IDE of choice. The same JavaScript skills that make these easy for humans also make them easy for coding agents, so you get the full productivity boost of AI-assisted development from day one, exactly where you build. In general, coding agents are already excellent at SPFx development – give it a try.

Web stack development  – use the skills and frameworks your team already knows. Any web developer can create these, with whatever JavaScript library or framework they prefer.

No proprietary development platforms – build on open, familiar web technologies. All based on industry standard patterns.

Automatic hosting – no figuring out where things get hosted, no external operations and management to stand up. Solutions hosted directly in the customer tenant.

No infrastructure complexity – nothing to build and run on top of Azure or any externally hosted platform.

Enterprise-grade security and governance – built on the SharePoint platform, so the security, compliance, and governance your organization already relies on come built in.

This is about extending your existing investments onto the Copilot canvas. The SPFx components and patterns your organization has already built carry forward – now reaching a brand-new surface. And this isn’t a new or unproven foundation: the SPFx ecosystem is already enormous, with tens of millions of end users relying on custom SPFx components every single day.

Better still, the same UX component isn’t tied to one surface. Write...