Post to channel allows you send a message to a Teams channel by triggering a message from a bot. This is a great way to get information submitted by a bot users into a channel where more people can review said info, for example escalating questions and queries, recognition messages or notifications that certain tasks have been completed.
How it works
1) Make sure you have a bot and channel set up
First things first, have your bot ready in The Bot Platform. Then go to Teams and set up your channel within a team (if you haven't done so already).
2) Go to Teams and search for your bot under apps
Click on the tile to bring up the channel configurations.
3) Add your bot (app) to your desired channel
Once you have clicked the arrow, choose a team and it will add the bot to all the channels within that particular team. Click on your bot, review your addition and click on "Add your bot". Your bot should now be able to post to this channel. Now head on over to The Bot Platform to finish configuring your message part.
Pro tip: if there is no down arrow next to 'Open', head over to our CMS and complete an authorisation flow—e.g., head to Customise bot, click "Save" without changing anything, select the Microsoft account, complete the flow. This will give the bot the right permission to set up app addition to the channel.
4) Build your trigger message and add your message part
Build out your trigger message. In this example, I have an Onboarding Bot, which will trigger a message from the bot user if they have come across an issue in their onboarding journey. The query will then be posted to my New Onboarders channel on Teams, where a member of the onboarding team can look into the query in more detail.
In the trigger message, make sure you build out the message that your bot users sees (as you can see in the text box below) before adding your Post to Channel message part.
5) Add your Post to Channel message part
In the message part menu, choose Post to Channel:
6) Configure your "Post to channel" settings
First add in your text - this will be the text that will be seen in the channel post, so for example:
Then configure your channel setting by clicking on "Configure settings". The channel you set up in the earlier steps should pull through.
7) Save your message and test your flow
Save your message, push your changes live and test your flow to make sure the bot is triggering the post to your channel. When the bot posts to a team, it will look like this.
8) Adding a image to your post
You can also add an image to your post by clicking on the camera icon in the Post to Group message part, and uploading an image from your drive:
The image will then pull through onto your post as a comment.