Employee Self-Service Agent Developer Kit

A monorepo of solutions, samples, and tooling for the Microsoft Employee Self-Service (ESS) agent built on Microsoft Copilot Studio.

This repo is intended as an example or learning tool. It is not a Microsoft product or a supported service. See SUPPORT.md for the support model and SECURITY.md for reporting security issues.

Getting started

This repo is a monorepo of solutions under solutions/. Each solution is a self-contained tool with its own purpose, dependencies, and instructions.

⚠️ Important: open the right folder in VS Code

The kit's slash-commands (/setup, /flightcheck, etc.) only appear when you open a specific solution folder as your VS Code workspace — not the top-level repo folder. If you open the wrong folder, Copilot Chat will not know about the kit and /setup will do nothing.

How to open ess-maker-skills as a workspace (no terminal needed)

1. Get the code. On the GitHub page, click the green < > Code button → Download ZIP. Unzip the file somewhere on your computer (for example, Documents\Employee-Self-Service-Agent-Developer-Kit). (Or, if you already use Git, clone the repo with your tool of choice — GitHub Desktop, Visual Studio, etc.)

2. Open VS Code.

3. Click File → Open Folder… (keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+K Ctrl+O).

4. Navigate INSIDE the unzipped folder, then INTO solutions, and select ess-maker-skills.

   The full path you select should look like:

   Employee-Self-Service-Agent-Developer-Kit\solutions\ess-maker-skills
   

   ✅ Correct — pick this:

   Employee-Self-Service-Agent-Developer-Kit\
     solutions\
       ess-maker-skills\    ← select this folder, then click "Select Folder"
   

   ❌ Wrong — do NOT pick the top-level folder:

   Employee-Self-Service-Agent-Developer-Kit\    ← do NOT pick this
   

5. Click Select Folder. VS Code will open with ess-maker-skills as your workspace root.

6. Open Copilot Chat. Click the chat icon in the left sidebar (or press Ctrl+Alt+I).

7. Type /setup and press Enter. The kit will guide you from there.

"I opened the wrong folder — now what?"

If you typed /setup and nothing happened, you probably opened the top-level repo folder. Check the file Explorer in VS Code's left sidebar:

• If you see solutions, samples, LICENSE, CONTRIBUTING.md — you're at the wrong level.
• If you see .github, scripts, src, workspace — you're in the right place.

To fix it: File → Open Folder... again, this time double-click into solutions, click on ess-maker-skills once to select it, then click Select Folder.

Solutions

Folder	What it does	How to use
solutions/ess-maker-skills/	Customize your ESS agent using GitHub Copilot in VS Code — no deep platform knowledge required.	Open the folder in VS Code, then type /setup in Copilot Chat.
solutions/ess-flightcheck/ (planned — see #69)	Validate your ESS deployment readiness. Runs licensing, identity, integration, and configuration checks against your live environment.	Open the folder in VS Code and type /flightcheck in Copilot Chat — or run python cli.py --scope full standalone (no LLM needed).

Additional solutions will be added under solutions/ over time.

Getting Started

There are several ways to set up your environment depending on your needs:

Option	Best for	Guide
One-shot installer (Windows)	Full maker kit — installs VS Code, Python, Git, and all dependencies	Setup README
One-shot installer (macOS)	Same as above, using Homebrew	Setup README
GitHub Codespaces	Browser-based development — no local install required (free tier available)	Setup README
FlightCheck only	Pre-deployment validation without the full ADK install	Setup README
Manual setup	Clone the repo and configure your own environment	Maker Kit README

GitHub Copilot subscription is required for the in-editor maker experience.

Samples

Reference content used directly by customers — topic YAMLs, template-config XMLs, evaluation test sets, and integration walkthroughs — lives at the root under samples/, peer to solutions/. Samples are first-class reference resources, not implementation details of any single solution.

Repository structure

.github/                Repo-level CI, CodeQL, Dependabot, issue templates, labels
solutions/
  ess-maker-skills/     Maker kit — customize your ESS agent in VS Code with Copilot
  ess-flightcheck/      (planned) Standalone deployment-readiness validator
samples/                Reference topics, template configs, evaluation test sets (peer to solutions/)
LICENSE                 MIT
SECURITY.md             Microsoft MSRC reporting path
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md      Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct
CONTRIBUTING.md         Contribution guide, maintenance, privacy posture, validation
SUPPORT.md              Support model

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.

Please read our Contributing Guide for the full contribution model, security maintenance commitments, scope management policy, privacy posture, and validation guide.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Trademarks

This project may contain trademarks or logos for projects, products, or services. Authorized use of Microsoft trademarks or logos is subject to and must follow Microsoft's Trademark & Brand Guidelines. Use of Microsoft trademarks or logos in modified versions of this project must not cause confusion or imply Microsoft sponsorship. Any use of third-party trademarks or logos are subject to those third-party's policies.