CollabDays Finland 2025 was amazing! Here are the session materials

CollabDays Finland/Helsinki was last week, and boy was it an interesting trip! I feel super fortunate having the opportunity to do some fun traveling for work, and the privilege to speak and meet people at these community events.

I was presenting a session with Gautam Sheth, an old friend from the fabled Valo days. We talked about our experiences (and challenges) with the M365 Agents SDK, and how to build M365 Copilot extensions with it. And of course some select few "here's what we did and here's why you should NOT do the same"!

Before the event, we had a nice little get-together with some old Valo folks from the days gone by. I think it's remarkable how this many years after most of us left the company - and the company then got acquired and dismantled - we still have dozens of people from different countries and all across Finland ready to meet up and take a trip down the memory lane.

On Thursday, it was turn for the main event - CollabDays Finland 2025 - and it was a day full of learning, fun encounters and also about 45 minutes on stage. I'm terrified to stand in front of a crowd, but it's still always nice to talk about something that's near and dear to me - although I definitely have something of a love-hate -relationship with Copilot and the extensibility story thereof... 😅

Anyway - we ranted, we shared some laughs and some frustrations, and perhaps even a few tidbits of actual useful information. And as is unfortunately typical for yours truly, just barely ran out of time - even though we had timed the session beforehand! But live-coding is slower in reality than when you practice it...

This was personally my first event with a proper Madonna-style mic. Made me feel like a rockstar!

... and because we only had one mic like that, I ended up holding a regular mic for Gautam, when he was presenting the demos we had 😂

I really felt like I was very concretely adding value there...

Well, except when I got too excited, started explaining about something and stole Gautam's mic, too!

I wonder if I did as good a job holding the mic as Scott Guthrie for Scott Hanselman!

Anyway - fun times. A super well organized conference, great atmosphere, great crowd, and a very entertaining speaker dinner afterwards 😅 If any of the organizers happen to read this, great job! I'll be sure to submit something for the next year, too...

Baby Steps to Copilot Mastery: Leave the Training Wheels behind using M365 Agents Toolkit 🚲

Here's the materials I have to share!

Check out the slides below:

• Baby Steps to Copilot Mastery: Leave the Training Wheels behind using M365 Agents Toolkit 🚲

And the code samples:

• https://github.com/gautamdsheth/collabdayshelsinki2025
  • the most interesting part is probably this here: https://github.com/gautamdsheth/collabdayshelsinki2025/tree/main/Graph/src

And a shoutout for the photographer - CollabDays Finland 2025 Pictures by https://www.instagram.com/jouni_ranta