If you are following up on my previous blog posts about Bots and integrating LUIS with them, you are almost done with building bots and already had some fun with it. Now it’s time to bring them to life and let internal or external users interact with Bot via some sort of front end channel accessible by them. If you haven’t read my previous posts on the subject yet, please give them a read at Creating a Bot and Creating a LUIS app before reading further.
In this blog post, we will be integrating our previously created intelligent Bots into Microsoft Teams channel. Following a step by step process, you can add your bot to MS Teams channel.

Bringing Bot to Life

  1. As a first step, you need to create a package as outlined here and build a manifest as per the schema listed here. This will include your Bot logos and a manifest file as shown below.
  2. Once manifest file is created, you need to zip it along with logos, as shown above, to make it a package with (*.zip)
  3. Open Microsoft team interface, select the particular team you want to add Bot to and go to Manage team section as highlighted below.
  4. Click on Bots tab, and then select Sideload a bot as highlighted and upload your previously created zip file
  5. Once successful, it will show the bot that you have just added to your selected team as shown below.
  6. If everything went well, your Bot is now ready and available in team’s conversation window to interact with. While addressing Bot, you need to start with symbol @BotName to direct messages to Bot as shown below.
  7. Based on the configuration you have done as part of the manifest file, your command list will be available against your Bot name.
  8. Now you can ask your Bot question that you have trained your LUIS app with and it will respond as programmed.
  9. You just need to ensure your Bot is programmed to respond possible questions your end user can ask it for.
  10. You can program a bot to acknowledge user first and then respond in detail on user’s question. If the response contains multiple records, you can represent it using cards as shown below.
  11. Or if a response requires some additional actions, you can have a link or a button to launch a URL directly from your team conversation.
  12. Besides adding Bot to teams, you can add tabs to a team as well which can show any SPA (single page application) or even a dashboard built as per your needs. Below is just an example of what can be achieved using tabs inside MS Teams.

As MS Teams is evolving as a group chat software, it can be leveraged to build useful integrations as a front face to many of the organisation’s needs capitalising on Bots as an example.

Category:
Azure Platform, Communication and Collaboration, Office 365, Technology
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