Bots on Microsoft Teams. Take advantage of their potential in remote working (of your team)

Microsoft Teams bot – an employee always ready to help

Bots have been an integral part of Microsoft Teams since its very beginning. They’re designed to make life easier for the companies and support their employees in the daily work. 

From the beginning Microsoft Teams provides Microsoft Bot Framework application for developing and integrating bots that make everyday work on the American giant’s platform easier and more varied.

The popularity of bots on Microsoft Teams has been growing ever since, which is also reflected in their number. Microsoft recognizes their effectiveness. It has its own bot: a virtual assistant named Who, which allows for searching employees responsible for a given area in the company. 

The ability to integrate a bot that naturally interacts with users via chat enhances the team’s communication capabilities, especially in the area of specific process automation.

Here are some examples of tasks successfully transferred to Microsoft Teams, which can be efficiently automated:

• Gathering experts, managers and executives in a single work area to create a virtual onboarding program for employees – onboarding itself can be automated and the bot can send a message about adding a new person to the team.
• Conducting meetings with employees from different cities and countries – the bot could be a basic source of information about issues raised, notify about setting up a special conversation channel, renaming or removing it.
• Collecting information about a new product from suppliers and all stakeholders involved in the production process: gathering specifications, features, manuals, update logs, etc. All of the process elements can be automated using short questions and answers.
• Planning a project, assigning tasks to team members, sharing an implementation schedule and keeping everyone informed of progress. The bot can be of use reminding everyone of the different stages of project implementation.
• Co-developing blog posts and planning content updates. The bot will serve as a tool reminding about the work progress and informing the team about the publication.
• Creating a knowledge base – the bot will help with document and FAQs search (if necessary, it will forward questions to a person in the organization).

The majority of tasks that fall under communication category in the context of using Microsoft Teams can be automated. This makes it easier for your team to set priorities, if you have a virtual assistant at hand, which will ease the workload of your employees and shorten the time spent on projects, allowing those responsible to focus on more important tasks.

Bots types and capabilities on Microsoft Teams: 

There are three types of conversations (also called scopes) in Teams:

• team – they participate in conversations on the channel and are visible to all channel members,
• private – these are conversations between bots and one user,
• group – a chat between a bot and at least two users. 

Bots on Microsoft Teams behave slightly differently depending on the type of conversation:

• In channels and group chats, they require the user to mention the bot in order to call it into a conversation.
• In one-on-one conversations they do not require to be mentioned and all messages sent by the user will be redirected to your bot.

They provide support for different messages types. This sets Microsoft Teams apart from the competition. They allow for adding media (photos, video, audio), carousels, lists or displaying a form directly in the application or using messages with their own layout (adaptive cards.) 

They also make it possible to ask questions on various systems and display the necessary information.