Put at bay the monster that Microsoft Teams has inside (Part 1)

Héctor (@guanberdolfo) and me (@VanesaGC_Flow), talk about how put at bay the monster that Microsoft Teams has inside.

Today, we use virtual assistents for turn on the lights, make orders and listen to music. Why we not use for keep a good structure on our Office 365 organization too?. Next, we show how put at bay the Microsoft Teams, using Bots Framework, with a natural language and good practices. We can put at bay the monster.

Before we began, we thought it appropriate to summarize in a few words the technologies we have used to dominate the beast.

Microsoft Flow

Microsoft Flow is now Power Automate. Power Automate is an online workflow service that automates actions across the most common apps and services. This allows you to receive notifications, copy documents from one site to another, collect data, and even go through an automated approval process. Read more here: «https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/getting-started«.

Microsoft Graph

Microsoft Graph is the gateway to data and intelligence in Microsoft 365. It provides a unified programmability model that you can use to access the tremendous amount of data in Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security. Use the wealth of data in Microsoft Graph to build apps for organizations and consumers that interact with millions of users.
Read more here: «https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/overview«

Microsoft Teams

Application designed from the Office 365 groups, Microsoft Graph and the same enterprise level of security, compliance and manageability as the rest of Office 365. Allowing a shared work area, where users can easily work in teams, sharing documents, chatting and working on their favorite applications. Learn more here: «https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/get-started-with-teams-quick-start«

Microsoft Bots Framework

Bot framework is a set of tools provided by Microsoft for the creation of chatbots with enough depth. Our chatbots will also benefit from the cognitive services available in Microsoft with which we can give intelligence to our chatbot.

Good practices with Teams

Before creating a Team, is necessary to think about the objective, the project and the work elements to be used. As well as the group of people who will contain it, taking into account the roles they will take during the project process. This is important when assigning several owners for each team.

Therefore, it is recommended to create a team gradually, thus avoiding the creation of different teams that have the same set of members. In this way, it would be possible to complete the project quickly.

It is important to create channels whose names contain the topic of conversation or work sequence. This would make it easier to understand the content of the conversation.

The use of the general channel is created by default, when a Team is created. It is recommended to use it as the starting channel of the project, where you can provide initial information, present new members, publish news and announcements.

Finally, another recommended point is moderation. Team owners can activate channel moderation to control who can start new posts and respond to channel entries. By default, owners are moderators of their own teams.