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Quickstart: your first conversation

A five-minute walkthrough that takes you from sign-in to your first useful answer in Strata.

Before you start

You need:

  • A Microsoft work account that has been added to your organization's Strata tenant.
  • Pop-ups allowed for the Strata web app (sign-in opens in a pop-up).

You do not need a database, OneDrive, or Outlook connection to complete this walkthrough — no extensions are needed to hold a conversation. Strata works as a general-purpose AI assistant once your organization connects its own AI engine (Azure AI Foundry), a quick one-time setup, and you can add extensions later to unlock live data, files, and email.

1. Sign in

  1. Open the Strata web app.
  2. Click Continue with Microsoft.
  3. Complete Microsoft's sign-in flow in the pop-up.
  4. You land on the chat workspace with a fresh, empty conversation.

If anything goes wrong here, see Signing in.

2. Send your first message

The chat composer is the rounded panel at the bottom of the page. The placeholder text rotates through prompts such as Ask me anything..., Type / for skills, and Type @ for agents.

  1. Click the composer once to focus it.
  2. Type a question, for example: Give me three ideas for visualizing quarterly sales data.
  3. Press Enter to send. (Use Shift+Enter for a new line without sending.) You can also click the send button — the upward-arrow icon on the right side of the composer.

The AI response streams in token-by-token. While Strata is working, you may see an action-step trail above the answer — short status lines like Analyzing... or Building dashboard... — that tell you what the AI is doing behind the scenes. Each completed step collapses into the trail; the final answer renders beneath it.

To stop a response mid-stream, click the send button again — it switches to a square stop icon while the AI is generating.

3. Try something that produces rich output

Strata can answer with more than plain text. Try one of these:

  • A chart. Ask Make a sample bar chart comparing five product categories with made-up numbers. Strata renders an interactive Chart.js chart inline. See Special code blocks for the full list of rich blocks.
  • An Excel export. Ask Generate a sample monthly sales spreadsheet for me to download. Strata produces a styled Excel workbook and shows a download button at the bottom of the response.
  • A comparison card. Ask Compare side-by-side the pros and cons of bar charts vs line charts. Strata renders a comparison block — paired cards with their own headers and metrics.

These rich blocks always render as the last thing in a response, never inline within prose.

4. Start a new chat and find past ones

  • New chat. Click the New chat button in the main sidebar. You can also navigate to /chat/new directly.
  • Past chats. The sidebar lists your most recent conversations; click a row to open it. The URL becomes /chat/<conversation-id>, so you can bookmark or share the URL with yourself. Use Show all chats at the bottom of the list to open the full All Chats view.
  • Pin a conversation. Open a row's More (three-dots) menu and choose Pin chat — pinned chats float to a dedicated section at the top of the list. Use Unpin chat from the same menu to remove it.
  • Search. Click the search control (or press Cmd+K / Ctrl+K) to open search and filter by title and message content.

Conversations are retained by default. Your organization's admin controls this with the Save AI conversations setting in Admin -> Organization Settings — when it's off, your chat history is not stored at all.

5. Connect your first extension (optional)

To unlock live data, files, or email, connect an extension:

  1. Click your account row at the bottom of the sidebar, then Settings.
  2. In Settings, open the Extensions section.
  3. Pick the extension you want to connect — SQL Server, OneDrive, Outlook, or Atlassian — and follow the connection prompts. The Atlassian row is one connection for both Jira and Confluence, and it signs you in through Atlassian, so the pop-up that opens is Atlassian's rather than Microsoft's. If your organization connects Atlassian with a single service account, the row already reads Connected and there is nothing for you to connect — see Atlassian extensions.

Once an extension is connected, the AI gains the matching tools (SQL queries, file search, email operations, Jira issue and request search, Confluence page and space search). For SQL Server specifically, connecting a database also unlocks the Data sidebar group (Dashboard, Tables, Procedures, Explorer, Schema map).

What to try next

  • Read the interface tour: The Strata interface.
  • Pick the right model and mode: the model picker (the button showing the current model's name) lives on the composer toolbar; the conversation-mode picker lives inside the More options (plus) menu on the left of the composer, under Mode. Your last choice carries forward to new chats. The model picker offers whichever models your organization has enabled from Strata's curated catalog — see Choosing an AI model.
  • Customize defaults: set your theme and work style under Settings → General, and manage memory under Settings → Capabilities.
  • Browse special blocks: Special code blocks reference.
  • Get fluent on callouts: Callout reference.

What can go wrong

  • The send button does nothing. The composer rejects empty messages; type at least one non-whitespace character first. While a response is streaming, the send button becomes a stop button — click it once to abort generation, then the composer accepts new input.
  • The AI returns nothing visible. Very rarely the model returns only a code block or tool call without prose. Refresh the conversation or send a follow-up like Please summarize what you just did in plain text. If it keeps happening, try a different model from the model picker — the button showing the current model's name on the right side of the composer (to the left of the dictate, voice, and send buttons). See Choosing an AI model.
  • "Too many requests" (HTTP 429) when sending. You hit a per-user chat or token rate limit set by your administrator. The error includes the wait time; try again after the window resets, or ask your admin to raise the limit.
  • No active database connection. If you asked a question that requires SQL and got back a message about no database being connected, open Settings -> Extensions and connect SQL Server first.
  • The AI says an extension is disabled by your administrator. Your org has restricted that extension. Contact your admin to enable it under Admin -> Organization Settings.

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