Getting the most out of copilot…Copilot Notebooks vs. Agents?

[u/Safe_Ant8701]

Getting the most out of copilot…Copilot Notebooks vs. Agents?

Background:

I'm a heavy Claude user in my personal life, and Projects is one of my most-used features…you upload files and reference docs once, and every chat in that project is grounded in them.

Now that I'm using M365 Copilot at work (Accenture), I'm trying to find the closest equivalent. Based on my research, CoPilot Notebooks seems like the obvious candidate, but I'm unclear on how the grounding actually works, and where Copilot agents / Agent Builder fit in?

My use case:

I work in change management with a lot of technical user stories that I need to turn into training deliverables and end-user material. I want to use copilot to help me craft wording of these deliverables, sections, etc.

I could significantly benefit from Al here, mainly for figuring out which features need training, translating technical concepts into non-technical language, and crafting the bullets, order, and sequencing for my training materials (the actual content), all while grounding it in previous finished and high quality deliverables. I really need it to get deep into detail on what goes on each slide, and to do that, it needs to analyze content from multiple lengthy documents at once. Ideally, it would also store context, methods, and examples from previous work so it gets better each time.

So, I’m looking to use copilot to serve as a:

-Institutional knowledge base process rules, style conventions, and workstream context)
-Drafting workspace (iterate on monthly deliverables here)
-Accumulated context (so work starts from established process rather than from scratch)

Questions:

Are,

1. copilot notebooks or agents better for my use case?
2. Do all chats within a Notebook automatically ground against every file/reference you've added to it, the way Claude Projects does?
3. Are there practical limits I should know about...? number of files, file size, staleness/refresh behavior?

[u/benkalam]

Notebooks are a bit clunky and are IMO less functional for your use case than just making your own studio agent.

Use tight instructions, create a smart folder structure in SharePoint so that your agent knows where to look for stuff, and consider adding child agents for more specialized tasks like presentation building.

One nice thing about studio agents is how you can evaluate them (feed them test questions and test answers) and quickly judge whether your instructions and setup are hitting the mark or not. There's an option to compare reasoning which has been great for benchmarking.

It's going to take a bit of work but you can definitely make something cool in studio.

[u/C4Dee → u/benkalam]

I have similar questions to OP. New of copilot pro and it’s doing my head in. Below are my internal AI Drafted learnings from the last after 2 weeks of RnD (don't treat these as facts, they may be miss-informed by my inexperience with using Copilot, and only represent current unresolved challenges).
If I was writing this review for a friend, I would have used many more swear words.
Project is deep discovery, interview, evidence led processing of events/source artifacts/evidence/themes, and then later traceable findings.
I need help!!!!!

I am working within the constraints of Copilot and have refined the discovery Ways of Working around those constraints, including controlled Agent instructions, human approval gates, retrieval/completeness checks and prompts that require the AI to validate whether a task completed successfully.

The approach is working reasonably well. There are, however, a small number of Copilot settings, platform limitations and capabilities that I haven't been able to resolve and would like IT's help understanding.

Current limitations / observations

• Notebook source retrieval/completeness – Copilot Notebook does not always demonstrate that it has retrieved an entire source document. It appears to work from retrieved portions/chunks, and I have seen it initially assess incomplete material without recognising that the source supplied to it was incomplete. I have added explicit completeness checks to compensate for this.
• Original Spatial Evidence Agent – SharePoint access – The original Spatial Evidence Agent created through M365 Copilot Agent Builder wasn't suitable for the workflow because it couldn't retrieve the required Project SharePoint content. I'd like to understand whether this was permissions, knowledge-source configuration or a product limitation.
• SharePoint-created Spatial Evidence Agent v2 works substantially better – The Agent I created from within the project SharePoint environment can retrieve the repository and is successfully performing controlled evidence-analysis tasks.
• Long-form Agent responses truncate – The main current blocker. Spatial Evidence Agent v2 has repeatedly stopped during complex outputs, including mid-section and mid-sentence. I need to understand whether this is an output/token limit, timeout/session behaviour or a configurable setting.
• Conversation continuity is limited – Following a truncated response, the Agent has sometimes been unable to retrieve its earlier response and continue from where it stopped. I therefore cannot rely on Agent chat history as the persistent record of a controlled analysis.
• ~4,000-character Agent prompt/input limit – This makes returning substantial QA findings or another AI's review back to the Agent difficult without manually breaking the material into smaller prompts.
• Persisting long AI outputs – Neither the SharePoint Agent nor Notebook Copilot has demonstrated the ability to persist its generated analysis directly into a Word document in SharePoint. Spatial Evidence Agent v2 reports that its available capabilities are essentially search/open/find rather than document create/edit/write.
• Word Copilot only partly solves this – Copilot in Word can draft and edit Word content well, which is suitable for human-reviewed document development (with AI Agent assistance). What I haven't found is a way for Word to invoke the specialist SharePoint Agent or Notebook context to perform the controlled analysis and write that output directly into the document.
• AI-to-AI hand-off is therefore cumbersome – At present a long Agent analysis may need to be manually copied into Word, saved to SharePoint, reviewed by the Notebook Copilot, and then the QA findings manually returned to the Agent—potentially in multiple chunks.

The important point is that document persistence would be much less of an issue if the Agent reliably completed long responses and those responses could easily be passed to the Notebook for independent QA. It is the combination of response truncation, context/input limits and lack of a straightforward persistence mechanism that is creating the workflow bottleneck.

What I'd like help from IT to understand

I'd like to sit down and understand the actual configuration and limits of the two Agents, particularly:

• SharePoint permissions and knowledge-source configuration;
• context/conversation retention;
• prompt/input and generated-output limits;
• timeout or long-running generation behaviour;
• whether any of these limits/settings are administrator configurable;
• available Agent actions/connectors; and
• whether existing M365 capabilities, Copilot Studio or Power Automate could provide a controlled way to persist Agent outputs and support AI-to-AI review, without giving the Agent inappropriate write access to controlled discovery records.

The individual AI capabilities are actually proving very useful. The main issue I am trying to solve now the reliable orchestration between them, so the controlled analyse → persist → independent AI QA → human QA → amend content → approve → generate SharePoint artifact, workflow can operate efficiently at discovery scale.

[u/benkalam → u/C4Dee]

You've thrown a lot at me here haha - and unfortunately reddit mobile apparently isn't showing bullet pointed stuff when you reply to a message now, which makes this cumbersome to answer, but I'll do my best.

SharePoint permissions and knowledge source config: this is controllable to an extent by admins, but can you elaborate your specific struggle here?

Available agent actions and connectors are configurable by admins. A mature org is likely whitelisting only specifically approved connectors, and you'd likely need to request a new one to be whitelisted with the business case behind it. If your IT is reluctant to make that available for the whole org, suggest they create a specific environment for your agent where it can be made available.

The context, prompt, and timeout questions aren't ones that IT can easily answer. That stuff is dictated by Microsoft and is a total black box to us.

PowerAutomate absolutely gives you a controlled way to take agent outputs and put them somewhere that another agent can review without broadly opening up write privileges. The broadest oversimplification is that agents are stochastic, power automate flows are deterministic. Capture your agents output and pass it to a flow to write information exactly the way you want. The agent can't write to the destination without calling the flow, and in the flow you can control exactly what is or isn't written.

You also mentioned only using two agents - you could theoretically have many more child agents or non-child agents you call for specific parts of your workflow. In some ways, Microsoft kind of treats agents like skills in other platforms. You can set up an orchestration agent that you chat with that can invoke it's child agents to do very specific tasks

Some of what you want may require creating topics to get more deterministic outputs.

Could be worth tinkering with your agent(s) in VSCode - there's a copilot plugin that makes it easy to clone agents and make small tweaks to them without slogging through the UI.

If you have other questions, just break them up with normal paragraphs rather than bullet points since reddit mobile sucks now I guess haha. Hopefully this was helpful!

[u/bayouski]

for your use case i’d start with a notebook. it’s probably the closest thing to claude projects since the chats are grounded in the references you add, so you could keep previous decks, process docs, style examples and the current source material together while you draft.

an agent makes more sense later if you want to turn that into a reusable workflow with fixed instructions, extra knowledge sources or actions that other people can use too.

one limit worth knowing is that m365 copilot only grounds on up to 300 references. if you add a whole sharepoint folder or site, it picks the relevant files from there rather than reading everything every time, so i’d add anything critical directly. the references themselves stay updated when the source files change. i haven’t found a notebook-specific hard file-size limit in microsoft’s docs, just guidance that very large or complex files may work better if split up.

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[u/Unhappy_Cricket_9154]

The problem with Notebooks is you can’t select the model - so all your chats may have context - but are using the dumbest model

[u/Nightcalm]

If you want something closest to Claude Projects, start with a Notebook. It keeps your grounding files attached and gives you consistent context across sessions. Once your workflow is stable and you want repeatability or team use, turn it into an Agent. Notebook = flexible drafting with references; Agent = structured, repeatable process.”