Navigated to Episode 408 – Model Context Protocol (MCP) Part 2: Getting the Most Out of MCP Servers - Transcript

Episode 408 – Model Context Protocol (MCP) Part 2: Getting the Most Out of MCP Servers

Episode Transcript

Welcome to episode 408 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on 07/25/2025.

This is a show about Microsoft three sixty five and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you.

In this episode, we'll move on to topics around where you can go to find various MCPs, what some of our favorite MCPs are, and how we've used these MCPs and tied them into various LLMs to help us get our work done.

We are back.

Part two of MCPs and the glorious functionality.

It's just beautiful.

Can I turn this into an Apple event and talk about how beautiful it is and magical and either that or Disney?

Beautiful, magical, glorious.

One big beautiful MCP?

Sorry.

I had to go there.

Yes.

You just had to.

Can I ask it?

Scott, no politics.

We avoid politics on the podcast.

Politics aside, if people are into comedy, the latest episode of South Park is absolutely glorious.

Absolutely, like, pure One big beautiful South Park episode?

Absolutely.

Plex friend that you are.

You know where to find such things if you want them.

Alright.

We're not appropriate for kids, but if you're in a mood and a vibe, oh.

Speaking of TV shows, have you ever gone back and watched some of the old Silicon Valley episodes now that AI is becoming more mainstream and how much funnier some of them are?

I just started revisiting that a couple months ago, so it's been good to go through.

Yes.

The Guilfoyle bot, like, the Guilfoyle bot is, like, actually could be a real thing now.

Absolutely, it could.

Alright.

Should we build an m c we should build an MCP server for TV shows.

Old if you could do that, like, build an MCP server as that ties into IMDB or something or speaking of use cases for MCP servers.

Speaking of?

Movie quotes, an MCP server for, like, pulling out good movie quotes.

Write an entire story or an entire book pulling movie quotes from so many different movies.

Yeah.

You could probably do it.

Should we talk about more practical use cases for MCP servers or how you get started?

Like, our last episode, we kinda talked about what MCP servers are, touched on different ways you can integrate them, touched on some security stuff a little bit.

We thought now it'd be fun.

I know you use MCP servers.

I've been using some MCP servers here in regular day to day life business use cases, and we're starting to see more and more MCP servers pop up from different companies as well, different services that allow you to start bringing that data in and bringing it together is kinda talking about what MCP servers maybe we use, how we've played with them, maybe even a little bit how you get them installed because different ones vary there and diving into more of the practical use of these MCP servers.

Absolutely.

So I think this conversation probably centers on our experimentation and kinda our experiences here.

Like we closed last episode, I'd be very interested in hearing what others are doing, what they're finding interesting, and what they're finding helps, like, augment their workflows and kinda get going with some of this stuff because everything's moving very fast.

There's new implementations.

There's new updates, functionality changes from day to day kinda thing.

So I'd be very keen to hear kinda others' experiences here and just what they've run into along the way.

So I think step one, and you've kinda got it up on the screen here, is you hear about MCP and you're like, oh, this all sounds great.

Like, how do I go and find out what servers are out there?

Well, there's no, like, one stop shopping, like, definitive catalog for these things, but there are a couple catalogs out there that can help you get going.

So the first one that you've got up on your screen, so this is from Anthropic.

They kinda maintain a GitHub repo of active MCP servers.

Funny enough, over time, these things haven't been around that long, and they're already hitting the point where they have an archived directory in there because some have come and gone already.

But if you're looking for a specific thing, often, like, one of these directories is a good place to start.

I think Anthropic's got a good one for that.

I think the other one that's out there that might be interesting to folks, especially the more kinda security focused isolated ones, is Docker's MCP catalog.

So Docker has an MCP catalog and they have an MCP toolkit.

We'll kind of ignore the toolkit for now.

But their catalog is really cool because it's integrated into the Docker desktop client.

So now you get this whole world of containerization, super easy, like, one click install, like, if you're just, like, a gooey person kind of thing, but you also get the added benefit of container isolation for these things.

So like we talked about in the last episode, you know, the these need to run either on a service as an HTTP endpoint or they need to run locally with an HTTP endpoint.

If they're running locally with an HTTP endpoint, well, that means they're often running through, like, an NPM server, so you'll see, like, a lot of, like, the server definitions or, like, MPX and this thing kind of thing.

So you're running all those web servers locally, so you do have to kind of make this call about, like, do I wanna do that in isolation in something of the form of a container, or do I want to just, like, go and start spinning these things up all over the place and have multiple npm instances running with multiple servers, things like that?

That's a, like, you do you kinda thing, but I think it is a consideration.

And the Docker folks here, like, to their credit, they've done an amazing job with just, like, integrating this into the Docker desktop client, making it super turnkey, and providing some more of that, like, abstraction isolation that containers give you in that world.

So if you're running a local server, specifically a local MCP server, I really encourage folks to probably look at the Docker catalog first.

And then if your thing isn't in the Docker catalog or even if you found it in some other catalog, go see if it's in Docker.

And then if you really have to and you really wanna get hands on with it, then do that in a way that's safe for you to do.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of them here.

I don't know how many there are in Docker.

I should someone should ask AI how many there are here.

One, two, three, four, six pages with, like, one, two I think there's a couple 100 in there today already.

Yeah.

And that list grows over time.

Maybe one of the nice things about the Docker one too is it's not just like GitHub and a pull request away.

So there's a little bit of a, hey.

I want to submit my MCP server to your catalog kind of thing.

I don't know, like, on the back end if that comes with any kind of agreements or anything of saying, like, hey.

You'll maintain it or you'll let Docker know when it goes away, blah blah blah.

But I imagine because all these spin up in in containers and things like that and isolated that you're kinda also using Docker Hub, and folks can go out and look at the Docker files and see what all these are doing.

Yeah.

Look at here's a LinkedIn MCP server, Scott.

I might have to go try a new one.

I've not played with this one yet.

But a couple episodes ago, I talked about how I had used Researcher to go look up people that I may be meeting with or connecting with and have it looked at LinkedIn.

It would be interesting to try some of that with this LinkedIn MCP server, see what kind of fun details I can pull out.

So, yeah, these are, again, great resources when you're looking for MCP servers.

You can also just go out and search for them.

Like, when I started playing with them, there were some certain MCP servers.

I was like, oh, are there some MCP servers for this and for ClickUp, for Microsoft Sentinel for some of those?

So some of those, I just did a search for and found GitHub repos.

Obviously, word of caution, if you're just going out to some random GitHub repo to grab an MCP server, proceed with caution.

Like we mentioned in the last episode, MCP servers being the USB ports of AI, you don't necessarily wanna just plug in a random GitHub MCP server to your environment.

But there are lots and lots of options out here.

I would say the other thing I found before we get into some of those use cases when I was looking for MCP servers is I struggled a little bit where and this was ClickUp in particular.

ClickUp has AI built into ClickUp, and they are building in support for MCP servers to be able to have ClickUp AI go connect to whatever MCP server.

And I was like, no.

I don't want ClickUp to connect to an MCP server.

I want an MCP server to connect to ClickUp.

And some of the search engine right.

Like, some of the search engines were having problems, and I kept running into, here's how you add an MCP server into monday.com.

Here's how you add an MCP server into ClickUp.

Here's how you add an MCP server into Notion.

Here's how you it's like, no.

I want an MCP server for them to pull that data somewhere else.

So, yeah, that's it's new.

Everybody is trying to figure it out, and everybody wants you in their AI platform.

So they're trying to get you to go use theirs.

I had the same struggle with Notion going down that path the first time.

So I was very interested in I I think I talked about the use case before.

Like, I use, like, chat GPT and things like that or, like, Claude to create a recipe.

And I was very interested in this, like, hey.

Just pump it into my recipes database because I knew they had an MCP server that allowed for the ability to, like, create databases, update databases, all these things.

And it took me a while to find the right path to get there.

And then once you find the right path to get there, you also sometimes have to find, like, the right incantation of, hey, this is how I'm going to make it work kind of thing.

So, like, for Notion, like, it's got an update database thing.

Well, databases have columns, they have fields, they might have fixed data types, things like that.

So just figuring out even, like, what's the raw input you need from the LLM to push the LLM to the next step of insert into my Notion database can be a little bit weird.

But if you're a tinkerer, I think these things are, like, really fun.

And then once you figure them out, like, boom, the light goes off, and you kinda get to the next step from there.

I I think they are really fun kind of things.

So there's tons of them on the consumer side.

I've been using mostly Azure focused things in my day to day.

Like, I spend a lot of time in Versus Code, either writing documentation for our platform, generating sample scripts, running running through and doing test cases and things for SDKs, clients, all that.

So that's a place that I was already living.

So having that as a client Versus code that is MCP capable and with the ability to integrate with MCP servers as client, access to all the chat models that are out there, things like that.

And being that I work for Microsoft and, I mean, Azure, I found a couple that are helpful to me.

So the two that I probably use the most are the Microsoft learn MCP server and then the Azure MCP server.

And this is, I I think, two good ones to talk about because they also bring us back to that distinction of remote server versus local server and some of the things that go on with setting them up and kinda how they wire up and how they come together.

So the Microsoft Learn MCP server is a remote server.

So the folks at Microsoft Learn actually have an API endpoint that's available to you as a customer that you can integrate with your MCP client, and you it's a very simple definition.

They've made this super turnkey for, like, Versus Code.

Like, if you scroll down a little bit on this page, like, installing these things, or maybe it's on this page, maybe it's on another page for it.

Yeah.

Maybe get started or something like that.

That's probably it.

Yeah.

So, like, right there, they've got configure Versus Code.

It's literally like a button, and it just opens Versus Code for you automatically, and it wires it up along the way.

Very similar to maybe installing extensions and things like that.

Oh, I guess we should have mentioned that, like, Versus Code.

Visual Studio Marketplace, they actually have an MCP catalog as well that's out there ready, raring to go, available, all that.

Yeah.

So so this is a remote one.

You install it, and you're kinda ready to go.

You do have to start MCP servers, particularly in Versus code.

I found this to confuse me.

Every time I close Versus code down and then reopen it, and I go back into my agent or my chat view, and I turn it to agent mode, and then it goes, oh, I don't know what to do because this thing isn't on.

Darn it.

I forgot.

Maybe there's a button or something I just haven't found yet linked to Versus Code configuration to to do that.

But, yeah, once once you got it up and running, then you just start chatting with it and ask it, like, hey.

How do I create an Azure VM based on docs?

And then just based on the context of having Azure and docs in the prompt, it knows to use that agent to reach out and do that.

You can even ground it, like I talked a little bit before, and I think we talked about this in the previous episode about grounding these things with instructions and kind of base prompts to start.

So in the case of Versus Code, you go in and basically you say, here's my instruction file.

And in your instruction file, you can tell your instruction file.

And I think if you scroll down in here to the bottom of this page, it's actually got a section here for set instructions.

Yeah.

Perfect.

So you can actually just tell it and ground it.

Like, anytime I ask a question about a Microsoft product, use this MCP server.

Like like, go out and use me to to get that information and pull it back.

So that that's one that I use all the time.

Like, it's just there, ready to go and available.

And then the other one that I use a bunch, which is a local server, is the Azure MCP server.

So this one is a single MCP server with a whole bunch of agents inside of it.

So when you're chatting with the Microsoft Learn MCP server, it's really just one agent that's going across all the learn docs and figuring things out.

The Azure MCP server has well, as of a couple days ago, it had, like, 72 or 73 agents in it.

They just collapsed it down to 28 because it was just, like, so a big list and gnarly to get a hold of.

But this one offers you a bunch of domain specific functionality around Azure.

So, like, list all my resource groups, list all my virtual machines, list my storage accounts.

And then it has even more domain specific functionality given the resource that you are interacting with.

So I work in Azure storage.

That's the place I've been playing around the most.

So that'll be, like, my example here.

They have the ability to go in and say, like, list all the containers in my storage account.

Give me the properties of my containers in my storage account.

Things like that.

And the docs for this one are pretty good.

Like, if you click through like, you've got on the side there, like, if you go into, like, the Azure storage one or the resource group one, either one of those, it'll tell you, like, hey.

Here's the types of domain specific knowledge that this MCP implementation and this particular agent can offer back to you as a customer.

There's a big distinction here between that whole local and remote server thing and what it goes to to get these things wired up and get them installed and get them all working.

So, like, the learn one, super easy.

Right?

Because it's a remote MCP server.

You're just pointing it at a resource and you go.

This one's local.

So you gotta run it.

It requires if you're running it locally on your desktop, it requires Node.

If you're, like, a Windows customer and you're just doing Node for the first time and you just next, next, next to your way through the installation, Node does some weird stuff.

Like, it'll install Chocolatey and some other stuff along the way, but there's definitely like this dependency chain that isn't always clear until you start using it.

Thankfully, like the agent walks you through it pretty clearly, so like once you get the server started and you go run your first thing, like, hey, list my resource groups, then it'll say, oh, I wanna list your resource groups with the Azure CLI.

Do you have the Azure CLI installed?

Is it in your path?

Yes.

I'll go run that.

Oh, I see Azure CLI is not installed.

Let's go install that kind of thing.

So there can be a little bit more of, like, hurry up and wait, particularly when you're installing local servers that have dependencies on other tools or other tool chains that are out there along the way.

But once you get it all going, super turnkey.

Right?

Super easy.

You just kinda light it up and go.

Yeah.

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And I've been playing with this one too.

The other thing I would say is, well, the difference between Learn and Azure is, like, Learn is all just open to the public documentation.

Right?

Like, you don't need to authenticate to Learn to go pull stuff from it, so MCP server's there.

With the Azure one, you are connecting to your subscription, so there are dependencies there on you actually have access to your Azure subscription and your permissions to Azure and setting up that authentication piece between your local instance and Azure.

I've started playing with the learn one.

I've not used the learn one as much yet, but I do like it, and I have actually been using Claude for all my MCPs.

I went out and set up Claude locally.

I've been setting up a bunch of my MCPs in Claude.

I do not have the problem of having to start it.

I just go in and start chatting with Claude, and it pulls it all back.

But I like Have you been able to get the Azure MCP server going in, Claude?

I had a bunch of fits and starts there, particularly on my Mac.

Like, there was something so the Azure MCP server relies heavily on default Azure credential, which is, like, this internal class within things, and I've just had, like, a bear of a time get it going.

I could only get it going in Versus Code.

I could never get it going in I think it is.

Let me go ask in a minute.

Let's see if it can fix my spell check.

We'll let that go while we keep talking, but it wants a CLI.

Always allow.

But I like the fact, like, with learn, before if you would go out and do a if you're gonna go out and do a search, right, or if you're just using Claude or OpenAI or something to ask about certain Microsoft documentation, you do tend to I think I would say it can you don't always know that it's gonna pull it straight from learn.

Right?

It may pull up from some forums where people are giving incorrect answers.

It may pull it from all kinds of different places, blogs, YouTube.

You never really know where when you start doing the MCP, you're like, okay.

It's probably gonna tend to pull at least a little bit more accurate information from learn.

We could argue that learn always isn't accurate, but that's a whole another discussion.

Absolutely.

Discussion for another time.

In regard to that, so Claude presents it a little bit differently in the UI.

I think I'm, like, more immersed in that Versus Code world today for this stuff, at least for, like, my day to day job and role.

You can actually tell when it's reaching out to an agent, at least in, like, the internal, like, GitHub Copilot chat window.

So you do have that, like, that grounding that like, hey, this response is coming back from this MCP agent.

It's not coming back from, like you said, just the base LLM and what that's been trained on or anything like that along the way.

I'm gonna have to go revisit this.

Maybe they updated something in Claude because I just had a weird time getting it going last time.

But So this is fascinating too.

I don't know.

This is not pulling it from my subscription.

This is using another client's Azure account that I'm signed into somewhere.

So I don't know how it picked which credentials it was going to use when it went out and connected to Azure.

If it's the latest one that I've connected to with Azure CLI or how it shows which credentials it was gonna authenticate, but it did not use my my internal company credentials.

It used some credentials I'm signed into with the client subscription.

But it was at least able to connect and go pull all the resource groups across all the subscriptions that I'm currently signed into somewhere.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah.

That's another interesting thing too, like, Claude and Microsoft documentation for both Learn and the Azure MCP.

PurePoint gets a global just a click to install from the Visual Studio directory.

If you go use Claude, they do have guides for the directory install wherein opening a configuration policy, pasting in some JSON, you need to ensure you keep your JSON formatted because what I have found all this documentation assumes this is the only MCP you're installing in your configuration file.

If you take the raw JSON from all of these, you end up with malformed JSONs.

You have to figure out these all go inside of the servers with the commas in the right places and squiggly brackets and all of that.

Claude for me was a little bit trickier, and every once in a while, I'll see weird errors pop up in Claude with formatting issues.

It seems to work.

We talked about it last episode.

MCPs are new.

There's still some WIMM every once in a while, but I've got both Learn and the Azure one working well in my instance of Claude locally.

Claude's been a bit of a weird one.

You kinda get into that world of editing JSON and all that stuff locally.

So, yeah, it's kinda hit or miss.

And it depends on your level of, I think, like, just not, like, technical acumen, like your ability to, I think, deal with some of the friction that Yes.

That comes with these things.

So Versus Code, I like I said, like, they've made it super turnkey.

Like, I I would have to guess the folks at Anthropic aren't really happy.

Like, Microsoft's out here with, like, this whole ecosystem as well that's disintegrating and doing these things, but I will say, like, the folks at GitHub have done a very good job with that.

So for the learn one, does that still require you to have GitHub Copilot as well in Visual Studio Code or because it's using the web version?

I didn't look at that.

I don't believe so.

I I haven't tried to integrate that one with Cloud yet, but it should have to stay a local definition as well.

Do you wanna talk about learn or Azure anymore?

Let's get into some of your list.

This is the one I've been playing with a lot lately is Loca, and this is from our good friend, Merrill, who we've had on the podcast before.

He went out and created a Loca agent tool.

And did you read?

He posted the story because everybody asked him why he named this MCP Loca.

I did not.

Yeah.

I don't know the background there.

It was because he was in front of a food truck or a coffee truck, and the name of the food truck was named Loca when he came up with the idea.

So he named the MCP after that.

He has a little bit of that backstory out on LinkedIn.

But this is an MCP that runs locally using Node, so you need to have and he guides you through the Cloud desktop.

He also has instructions on here for doing it with Visual Studio Code, but MCP that runs in Node, so Node is also a prerequisite there, to connect to the Microsoft three sixty five graph.

So this will go in in query whatever graph access you care to give it.

So part of the configuration here, going into a little bit more of the JSON and development aspect of it, is not only do you have to put the JSON in there to configure the MCP, but you need to make sure you authenticate to Microsoft three sixty five Graph with an originally, this again, these are all new.

It was by putting your client ID and your app ID and your app secret in the JSON file, like, in plain text so anybody could have seen it.

It has since been updated, so there's a few different methods now that you can use to connect to Microsoft three sixty five graph.

But then with those app permissions, you do have to go in and, grant that app the appropriate access to the Microsoft three sixty five graph.

If you want it to be able to go look at SharePoint sites, files, audit logs, Purview, there's not a specific Purview endpoint, but all those graph endpoints, you can kinda control the access.

You give this MCP to the graph by going in and configuring those endpoints.

This one for me, Scott, has been it's been really interesting, and I think one aspect of it that's been fascinating for me is comparing it with the the Security Copilot.

So, like, Security Copilot, we've talked about before, Copilot for security.

If you give it the wrong name, Microsoft gets mad at you.

We've talked about it.

The base entry point for that is, like, $3 a month, $30 a year.

I can go out and pay for Claude for, like, $20 a month, connect this MCP server, and get to a lot of the same stuff.

There's differences, and I'm actually working on some sessions for some conferences this fall where I might highlight some of those differences and where, Copilot for security excels or security Copilot excels versus this MCP.

But once you connect it to the graph, I've done things like go pull I've gone in, asked it to go pull sign in logs, analyze the sign in logs for a particular user, or give me all the users and what licenses they have in my tenant and pull back reports on users and licenses or sign in logs.

Are there any anomalies in the sign in logs?

Go look at the this UPN and look at where they've signed in from and what IP addresses they've signed in from.

As long as you open it up to that data for the Graph API, it's able to go pull all of that.

I was playing with one where I asked it to, like, go look at my conditional access policies, go analyze conditional access policies in Entra and how those are configured or who those are applied to.

Another use case was the Defender.

Like, you get your incidents in Defender.

You get incidents and alerts.

I actually went in and found looked at my security dashboard, grabbed the incident ID, and asked Claude to go in and look at that particular incident and analyze that incident and give me a full incident response.

You were showing me this report earlier.

Like, it was actually pretty cool.

Like, you need some formatting help and, like, less AI driven emoji happiness BS that they tend to spin up.

But outside of that, yeah, like, pretty cool.

Yeah.

It wrote, like, an entire document with the incident details.

It gave me a a table with the attack timeline of in this particular one, it was an email delivered to two different email addresses.

Then Defender created an incident.

Then alerts were generated for unremoved messages.

Then some emails were automatically removed to quarantine.

Then it found alerts for malicious URL detection.

And then there was the last incident update.

And it gave me that whole timeline, gave me a technical analysis of it, what the URLs were that were in the email, different risk factors, gave me an highlight of investigation findings and what those containment and eradication steps should be.

It, yeah, it wrote up the whole thing and then recommendations for the next twenty four hours, the next seven days, the next thirty days based on this incident.

You should show it on your screen over here.

Yeah.

I can throw it up here.

I was trying to avoid some of the user details in there.

I saw you, like, eye scrolling.

So, yeah, it has I can get up partway here, like, up in here, but it has, frankly, a lot more details than what Security Copilot gave me when I asked it about the same incident.

Where I found some of the niceties with Security Copilot is some of the integrations.

But, again, you're looking for, like, a poor man's, not even a poor man's, a whole lot cheaper version of AI to be able to ask about some of these things as long as you're okay giving those graph permissions to Claude or to if you wanna use GitHub Copilot still using Claude or one of the other AI engines on the background or one of the other LLMs on the background, you can get a lot of information, and get really close to a lot of the Security Copilot stuff just using this particular MCP from Merrill.

Super nifty.

Like, I think this stuff is just, like, so turnkey.

I don't know.

I feel like it's gonna drive me down a path of trying to build one of these things on my own, and I'm just gonna turn into, like, one of the Vibe coders or something.

We should create an MCP for the podcast.

Should we, though?

Ben and Scott's podcast brain MCP or something like that.

I did tie an agent to it.

Not an MCP, but I did tie a Copilot agent in the tenant.

If you wanna go play with it in our tenant.

I did create one that I pointed it at the podcast website for a podcast agent.

Yeah.

So I've been playing around with the Claude Azure thing because it was annoying me that it was working for you and not for me.

Yep.

Where I had given up is when you're in Versus Code, the first time you install this and you start it, it will authenticate you.

So it'll actually drive you through, like, the device login flow, like pop up a web browser, things like that.

Cloud doesn't do that by default, so you have to go and you have to actually log in to, to, like, Azure CLI, which is what it's using under the hood.

And then once you've pre authenticated to Azure CLI, then you go back, run your prompt, and it works just perfectly.

So that must be what it was picking up as I must have logged into a client's tenant with Azure CLI, or I wonder if it would even pick up Azure Graph or PowerShell connections.

Yeah.

Re reuse any of those things.

That was my issue.

So if anybody else using Claude on the desktop and you're like, oh, I can't use an Azure thing.

Yeah.

You can.

Alright.

Any other MCPs you wanna talk about?

I know we kinda hinted at some.

There's a bunch out there.

There's a whole bunch out there.

So, like, I would encourage folks, I think, to and I've been thinking about this more, how you combine the local tools you use day to day or the parts of the stack that you use day to day along with your other tasks.

So these things, like, go and list my resource groups, list my configuration for these resources, things like that.

Like, it doesn't have to be a stop there kinda thing.

It could also be a, hey.

Take that and then pump it out here over to this other thing or format it in this way.

Right?

Like, you have to create a report for your boss that says, here's the current configuration of all our VMs and which ones are using straight public IPs, which ones are behind bash and things like that.

Like, you could totally output that report, have it formatted, and put into a great format for, like, an email for you.

Right?

Or go save it as a CSV because maybe you install an MCP agent that or an MCP server that allows you for, like, local file system access, things like that.

There there's a whole ton, I think, of chained interactions that you can do.

Like, if you start to think about having multiple of these things and being able to tie them together and then integrate them back because they're all integrated in that, like, overarching LLM ecosystem.

So I think that's, like, the next step or next thing to think about or kinda where I'm going with it.

Yeah.

And this is where it would be interesting too.

Like, I would love to see MCPs tied into Copilot.

And I think I mentioned that on the last episode because when I'm maybe when I'm querying all my graph data, if I give this MCP access to a whole bunch of Microsoft three sixty five graph data where it's looking at users and conditional access policies and IP addresses and incident reports.

If I'm being honest, I would prefer all of that to stay inside the Microsoft three sixty five tenant, not necessarily come all the way out into my local machine and come out to MCP servers that I'm again, we know Merrill.

I trust Merrill, but it's his code that he wrote for this local MCP server.

Having it live in my Microsoft three sixty five bubble would make me a little bit more comfortable with it.

Then I could also do things like take this incident report and create a PowerPoint presentation from it a little bit easier or a Word document because of some of those other Microsoft three sixty five integrations with the Office tools and some of that.

So I am.

I'm really hoping that even if it's inside and I know you can do it in Visual Studio Code today or not Visual Studio Code.

Sorry.

Copilot Studio, it's not nearly as simple and straightforward as it is integrating it into Code or Visuals Claude or Visual Studio Code or some of those.

I wanna see this a whole lot simpler in Copilot.

I think that would be really cool from my perspective.

Yeah.

I think over time, it probably gets there.

I can also see a world where you might end up with either specific forks of these tools, or things that bring those integrations together.

So, like, if you think about like Cursor and all the popularity of Cursor and using it for like AI coding with LLMs and all that, Cursor's just a fork of Versus Code, right?

And I mean, at the end of the day, like, it's got a bunch of, like, domain specific functionality, but ultimately, it's built on that base of Versus Code.

So there's this world where somebody could just totally take, like, a prepackaged Versus Code with a bunch of MCPs already installed in it, already ready to go, think things like that.

Over time, you might see people, like, spin up, like, super do do do.

Like, we've got these one clicks for these installs.

I over time, those probably turned into, like, bundled installers and other kinds of things.

So it's all moving rapidly.

Like I said, I I kinda like it because at least I don't know about you, but, like, for my day to day job, like, sometimes some of the things I work on take, like, years to manifest and come to fruition.

And this is one of those places where I can just, like, oh, kid in a candy shop, go be super inquisitive, play around, stuff breaks all the time, and you're like, oh, yep.

That that that broke.

I'm okay with it.

Move on to the next step kind of thing.

Awesome.

Well, thanks, Scott.

Excited to see where these MCP servers go.

Fun to talk about how you're using them.

Would love to hear about other MCPs, again, that all the listeners have used, that you all have installed, how you're using MCPs, concerns you have about MCPs from some of that security standpoint.

So feel free to reach out.

Let us know your thoughts on MCPs, how you're using them.

If you wanna come talk on the podcast about how you're using MCPs.

We'd love to have you.

Yeah.

Contact us through the website.

Reach out via LinkedIn, come find me at a conference, Scott.

I got a bunch of conferences.

I was looking down.

I'm, like, at a conference a month now through the end of the year.

So if you're gonna be Atlanta, I'm gonna be at TechCon three sixty five in Atlanta here in a couple weeks.

That'll actually probably be before this podcast episode even airs.

Going out to Branson again to the North American collaboration summit out in Branson.

That's September.

October might be dev intersections, cybersecurity intersections in Orlando.

November, hopefully, we'll both be out at Ignite.

And then December, I'm doing Workplace Ninjas, which is a security conference in Dallas, Texas.

You've got, like, quite the list.

Yeah.

I might be at storage developer conference in September.

That's about it for me.

And then like you said Hopefully, night.

Hopefully, podcast stuff out at Ignite again this year in San Francisco.

Could be fun.

Could be fun.

Will be fun.

Assuming we get to go.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Alright.

So, yes, if you're gonna be at a conference, reach out.

Love to chat with you.

If you wanna be on the podcast, talk about MCP servers, let us know.

But for now, enjoy your weekend, Scott.

Enjoy the 100 and whatever degree weather we're gonna be having these next few days.

As I said, it's only a 106 now.

It it it can only get hotter is what it feels like.

And it's 5PM.

A 106 at 5PM is just not right.

It's got me all ready to go back to the Pacific Northwest.

70 degrees, like I said, it just it it hit a little bit different without the humidity too.

That was the key part in there.

Alright.

Well, as always, Ben, thanks for the conversation.

Much appreciated, it, and we'll see you for the next one.

Alright.

Thank you.

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