Quality Of Life Improvements Ideas

[enridis]

After some internal testing, we found a few ideas that could make daily use much easier.

1. Ready-to-use guidance for email, calendar, Teams, etc.
2. Search Outlook folders (including subfolders) in one step
3. Get a person’s presence / availability info
4. Too many tools

This is a long post—sorry—but I think we should agree on the direction before we start opening issues.

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1. Ready-to-use guidance (templates)

Today, even simple tasks (for example, “make a recap of my day”) can trigger many tool calls. The model may also send invalid requests.

Strong models can fix mistakes, but it costs tokens and time, and sometimes the model still fails.

We created default prompts with a section called “## MS365 MCP implementation notes”. In that section we explain tool choices. For example:

• list-calendar-events should be used only in specific cases
• get-calendar-view is often the correct tool
  We added this because some models (for example, Gemini) often choose list-calendar-events and then miss recurring events.

We also noticed that, even with tool descriptions, we still need very clear rules:

• when to use select vs filter
• which filters to use in common scenarios

Suggestion:

• Ship the repo with simple “LLM guidelines” that users can copy into their agent prompt, or
• Improve tool and parameter descriptions so models don’t need “try and fail” to find the right options.

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2. Search Outlook folders in one step

If a user has subfolders like Inbox/Robots/GIT, then the task “review the latest update from Git” is very hard unless:

• the folder ID is already known, or
• the model is told to walk the folder tree step by step

Idea: extend the existing folder tool to support:

• searching folders by name/path
• expanding the folder hierarchy when needed

This would make folder-based scenarios much easier.

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3. Presence / availability info for a person

It looks like the MCP server does not support the Microsoft Graph Presence API yet.

A real use case we had: we wanted to draft an email about team schedule (who is on PTO and on which dates). In the end we had to collect this manually.

Idea:

• extend get-user to optionally include presence/availability data, or
• add a new tool for presence/status

This could reduce manual work and reduce the number of tool calls.

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4. Too many tools

In org-mode there are many tools exposed. Small local models fail quickly, and even strong models sometimes pick the wrong tool.

Splitting into multiple servers (email server, Teams server, etc.) may help a bit, but cross-scenario workflows still need multiple domains, for example:
“check my next meeting and help me prepare using my archived emails and the related Teams channel”.

Idea: provide a smaller, scenario-focused toolset.
Instead of exposing many Graph API-like tools, expose fewer tools that match user tasks.

Example: I’m not sure list-calendar-events is needed. If it didn’t exist, models might fail less often because there are fewer wrong choices.

Has anyone researched a “smaller tool list, focused on user scenarios” approach?

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Finally, thank you to the maintainer and all contributors for building and supporting this MCP Server. It has been a game changer for me, and I’m grateful for the project.

[eirikb]

Hi there. This was a lot of text. Just to be sure - you know about discovery mode right?

[enridis]

I've read about it in documentation but did not play tbh: documentation did not sell it too me :)

[eirikb]

Yeah it was made as a workaround and beta thing. Which is why it's not being sold.
But I think it might help you with some of the points above, especially point 4.
It could also help with things like 1 - but it depends on the LLM. And yeah we could start trying to explain to the LLM how it should use what tool when, but it easily becomes a prompt nightmare. I was hoping the LLMs would be smart enough, or becomes smart enough, to figure out these things themselves, buuuuut we might not be there yet.