There are two ways to connect your bot up to your Teams tenant:
Ready to launch:
This grabs your tenant ID & name so you can use your bot on Teams. The bot won't be fully installed - you won't be able to use most features on the platform i.e. broadcasts. However, it does enable you to build your bot and then test it in your tenant if you're waiting for your Teams admin to complete full installation.
Full installation
A Teams admin can complete a full bot installation - whether automatically, by granting us AppCatalog.ReadWrite.All permission, or manually, by uploading a manifest file.
Ready to Launch
1) Log in to The Bot Platform
First things first, log into The Bot Platform. If you don’t have a login for The Bot Platform, make sure you contact our sales team sales@thebotplatform.com.
Select the bot you want to connect to Teams or click 'Create a new bot'. When you're ready to connect your bot to Teams, click the 'Connect to Teams' button in the big orange banner displayed at the top of your dashboard.
2. Customise your bot
Next, you can customise your bot name, icon and description. You can come back and do this later but be warned it can take a few days for Microsoft to update this in Teams.
When you're happy with your settings, click the "Continue" button.
3. Privacy statement and Services agreement
You need to include a Privacy statement and Services agreement - this will be shown to each user of the bot if they hover over the bot name in Teams or when the bot is added for them. You can download our templates for these, edit them and then re-upload them or add a link to your own statements for these.
Please note - if you host these documents online and provide us with the URL, your bot users will be taken to that URL. If you upload a document, that will be downloaded for a user if they select the option in Teams.
Once you've uploaded your documents, click the "Save" button.
4. Log into Teams
Once name, icon, description, accent colour have been set, and privacy statement & service agreement have been added, you will then be asked to log in to your Teams account:
By logging into your account at this point, you are:
giving The Bot Platform the tenant ID & name
granting us no permissions
connecting the bot to your Teams as a Ready to launch app, meaning it can be used on Teams by users that have the bot URL only
5. Prepare for installation
The Bot Platform will then prepare your bot for installation:
Once installation is complete, you will be shown a connection conformation message:
6. Ready to launch
The bot is officially Ready to launch. This means:
It can be built and tested on Teams
It can be used by any member of your Teams tenant who has been provided with the link
It cannot be used to proactively reach out to every member of your team
It cannot be found under "Built for your org" apps
It cannot leverage profile attributes
This information will be available in the bot dashboard, alongside a link to complete A full installation:
You can now start building and testing your bot. If you want to complete a full installation, then please follow the instructions below.
Completing Full Installation
The Teams bot installation flow lets us fully install the bot on Teams either automatically or manually:
Automatically means we need permission AppCatalog.ReadWrite.All to create, read, update, and delete apps in the app catalog.
Manually means the user needs to download the Bot Manifest file, upload it in the Teams Admin panel, and complete the required steps both on Teams Admin and on our platform.
This step will have to be completed by your Teams admin.
Automatically installing bot
Your Teams admin can click 'Sign in with Microsoft' and we will install the bot for you.
Manually installing bot
To install the bot manually, your Teams admin will need to follow the steps listed on this page:
Post-Installation
Once your bot has been successfully installed, you will be taken to the Broadcast Setup page:
This allows you to choose which teams can be broadcast to. You can choose to do this later, and configure settings under "Broadcast setup" in the left hand menu of the platform:
And that's it - you'll be taken back to the dashboard and see a success message so you can now start using your bot in Teams. To start triggering your bot messages, first allocate a keyword to the Welcome Message in the keyword section of the platform. We recommend terms such as "start" or "hello". Once you've done that, push your changes live and use this trigger word in your bot in Teams to launch your Welcome Message.
We'd also recommend adding in a Default Reply, so you can instruct users how to use the bot if they don't know the trigger word. To create a default reply, first create the message you want to show the user - this could be a set of instructions on how to use the bot, or a simple text box and button to launch the Welcome Message. Then head on over the Default Reply section in the left hand column of the platform and choose this message from the dropdown list. Push your changes live, and the Default Reply should be ready to go.