System Complexity Guide: Robust Automation Systems with Copilot Studio

Intro:

With a lot of features pushed with Copilot Studio in Power Platform, transforming your automation ideas into reality has become easier. As the saying in the community goes, Co-Pilot/conversation is your UI/UX to improve productivity, whether it's personal productivity, business productivity, or adding an action based on your interaction. The idea of this blog is to understand the complexity while designing a solution considering the sensitivity of the process, how we are helping the end user, and the sensitivity of data. This blog focuses on designing secure and efficient automation systems, highlighting key elements like authentication and authorization, data storage and encryption, maintenance, and user design. We'll also present an interactive HTML interface that allows users to select their preferred information repository, response mechanism, and engagement platform. By analyzing these choices, the tool will recommend the optimal system design complexity, ensuring a seamless and productive automation experience.

Understanding System Design Complexity in Automation:

When we build automation, the system design becomes complex if you want to process data or if the automation we are trying to systematically solve needs more control from monitoring or the endpoint where the user can interact. The complexity arises from several factors:

Information Repository: Where data is stored, such as documents uploaded into Copilot Studio, simple tree-based conversations, SharePoint, or public websites.
Response Mechanism: How the system processes or responds, including generative AI content, generative AI to perform actions based on triggers, or topic navigation.
Engagement Platform: Where users interact with the system, such as Teams as an endpoint, SharePoint, external public channels, or triggered with no user interaction.

The complexity would come from how we are securing the data, capturing session logs, and whether we need a human in the loop to review the automation before actioning or performing a task. By understanding these elements, we can design more robust and secure automation systems that meet the needs of our users.

Conclusion: Estimating Time Investment in System Design
It's important to note that the complexity discussed here is just a thumb rule. With this rough idea, you can start thinking about how much time you need to invest in various system design topics, including:

Requirement gathering
System architecture
Data design
Domain design
Scalability
Reliability
Availability
Performance
Security
Maintainability
Testing
User experience design
Cost estimation
Documentation
Migration plan
By considering these factors, you can better estimate the time and resources needed to build a secure, efficient, and user-friendly automation system with Copilot Studio.