Creating and updating a Teams channel

[Berto2002]

I can use the email external function in a node to start a Teams conversation.

What I REALLY want to be able to do is use Teams as the collaboration workspace and have subsequent updates during the lifecycle of my Change Request that ping updates to the SAME conversation within a Teams Channel.

Is there any way to do this?

This is what we want: The conversation started with a formatted entry which could be the one initiated by the email receipt from HBSM

Our people then REPLY to that thread through the lifecycle to keep the threads for each CR separate. I want HBSM to add to this thread. It should be possible because every Teams conversation has a unique link as per second screenshot.

[Guest Mary]

Hi @Berto2002

Is this what you are after?  https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php?title=Microsoft

[Steve G]

Hi @Berto2002,

Thank you for your suggestion. I've added it to our list, we intend to extend the Teams integrations now that their APIs are out of beta, and will include an operation to perform action. Will let you know once we've built these.

Cheers,

Steve

[Berto2002]

Hi @Steve G, are you saying that there is no facility at the moment (either through the email aspect or Cloud Automation) to do enable an update to an existing conversation and you will now consider developing that facility in the Cloud Automation piece? Although not promising, do you have a typical time period for this type of thing? I.e. should I forget about it for now or be kinda hopeful for something later this summer?

[Steve G]

Hi @Berto2002,

Quote

 are you saying that there is no facility at the moment (either through the email aspect or Cloud Automation) to do enable an update to an existing conversation and you will now consider developing that facility in the Cloud Automation piece?

Re: via email, I'm not sure, but I expect something could be done with Power Automate and the Teams connector. The cloud automation that we have will only create new messages in a channel, and not reply to existing messages, but we will certainly be adding a new cloud automation to perform that action. Typical timeframes usually lrun to weeks rather than months, but depend on the teams workload & other priorities.

Thanks,

Steve

[Steve G]

Hi @Berto2002,

I had a quick look and it was a 10 minute job, so I added a new operation to do what you need: 

The existing Post To Channel integration will now return the ID of the newly created message, and this ID can then be fed into the Message ID input of the new Reply To Channel Post integration, basic example: 

This message, and the reply, were both posted from this workflow:

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Steve

[Berto2002]

Hi Steve, it is excellent news that this feature is live!

Unfortunately I cannot piece together what is needed to get this to work. I am trying to do the first piece which is to create a conversation.

We have MS teams set-up in KeySafe.

I have a node that have ChannelID of  which I extracted from the Get Link and exchanged 19%3 with 19: and %40 with @

I have a Group ID also extracted from the Get Link in Teams but the HB automation is looking to search and gives the error below when I try to paste it in:

Does this indicate an issue with the KeySafe? Do we have that integration? Is there something else needed here?

 

[Berto2002]

Hi @Steve G. Could I please seek your reply to the above? Does this indicate something about my integration status? I guess I need to see the config of your "New Post" node above? Do you have Wiki resources as to how to extract the right Channel ID, Team Group ID from Teams?

[Steve G]

Hi @Berto2002,

The error suggests that the account being used to authenticate the requests doesn't have sufficient permissions to retrieve lists of Teams. Note, the above integration has been deprecated and replaced by Microsoft > Teams > Channel > Send Message, which requires significantly less rights that the old integration. 

There are a number of ways that you can retrieve Teams Group & Channel IDs, the easiest is probably by clicking the ellipses next to a channel in Teams, then Get link to channel, and copying the Channel ID and Group ID straight out of the link that Microsoft provides. You could also use the Get-Team and Get-TeamChannel cmdlets from the Microsoft Teams Powershell Module.

Hope this helps,

Steve

[Berto2002]

Hi @Steve G, we've got it working, kind of...

The problem that prevents us using this is that the connector is posting to the Teams Channel as the personal account of the admin person who gave the approval; in this case "James". How do we get the post to appear to come from either a generic account such as "Service Desk" or from the Owner of the Hornbill Request, for example? This is a bit of showstopper.

Up until now, we have been using the feature to email new conversations to the Channel and these have been coming-in with the Summary as a formatted header to the conversation (blue below). By moving to the new connector to start and reply to conversations we would lose that by the looks of things. I tried using Wiki markup in the Content of the Teams node but it's not worked (Pink below) Are there any options for formatting available or could you look into that for development?

The other issue is that the status code is showing as "Failed" in the Timeline update but the Conversation is being initiated and an ID returned:

Overall, exciting to get this working but...

[Berto2002]

The final feedback point is that we are used to having multiple pieces of information in the first post (as above in blue) but the existing facility does not take into account the line breaks I put in the box.

[Berto2002]

@Steve G, we had our customer success call last week and I undertook to review all those pain areas where we are really hoping to move on and better use functionality but we're held back. This is one example.

1) The 'showstopper' is that the connector is posting to the Teams Channel as the personal account of the admin person who gave the approval; in our case "James". How do we get the post to appear to come from either a generic account such as "Service Desk" or from the Owner of the Hornbill Request (like Change Requester), for example?

The subsidiary issues are:

2) The "Content" box has a multi-line editing window but the end-result does not respect carriage returns meaning we can only post very short sequences of text; not quite the 'grand' conversation header for a new Change Request we have at the moment with the email-created Conversation. We would very much like the new lines and Wiki mark-up to be effective here.

3) Teams Conversations can have formatted (bold) headers but the current feature set does nto allow us to configure the content of the header and body to achieve this "stand-out" approach.

PS another way to achieve 2 and 3 above would be to receive back the Message ID created when the workflow starts a Conversation by email; and then use that Message ID to make replies.

Should I re-log this as an Enhancement Request to make it stand-out?

[Steve G]

Hi @Berto2002,

1. The new Teams integrations that post to chats or channels in Teams do not require Azure/Office 365 admin access, so you can create a generic Service Desk account and use that account against the keysafe key that is performing your post operations. The required rights are: ChannelMessage.Send, User.Read, Chat.ReadWrite. And the iBridge operations that require these basic rights are: 
   1. Channel
      1. Reply to Message
      2. Send Message
   2. Chat
      1. Create Chat
      2. Send Message
2. As per the description against the content box, HTML formatting tags are supported by the API that we use to make the calls into Teams so you should be able to format those messages as required: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/channel-post-messages?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http
3. See 2 above, same formatting restrictions apply

A very basic example of formatting:

Hope this helps,

Steve 

[Berto2002]

I'll get on to it, thanks.

[Berto2002]

I confirm the formatting works, thank you.

We're looking at the perms and account now.

[Berto2002]

@Steve G. Hooray, we made it. Tested ok. Will be implemented in my next release for Change and Major Incident processes; both of which need Teams channels created immediately on logging and to be updated throughout the lifecycle. Thank you.

[Steve G]

@Berto2002 Excellent  

[lee mcdermott]

@Steve G @Berto2002

 

Hi I am also trying to setup a connection to post to a Teams Channel. I've setup myself (for now) with the API key and created a key safe which seems to have created ok.

My Node is as below. I cannot get it to populate the Team Group ID and the request credential drop down is always blank?

 

Any ideas? Ive copied the Team channel direct from the Teams and picked out what i think are the corret parts as below (replaced with x'x ). The X parts are what ive used as the channel ID and the Group ID ? is this correct?

and how do you populate the credentials?

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx%40thread.skype/conversations?groupId=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx&tenantId=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

 

 

thanks

 

lee

[Berto2002]

Your KeySafe entry needs to be named "microsoft" as per the prompt under Request Credentials. They you should see it available for selection. Set-up a new one named like that. You have to manually enter the Team Group ID as extracted from the link to the Channel that you can get from Teams.

[lee mcdermott]

@Berto2002

 

thanks for that. i didnt realise it had to be named the same. ive now changed it but still get the same issue.

 

looks like i was using the correct group id, but when i copy it in it just disappears and the filed remains blank? and the authentication field is still blank with no drop down options - i see yours says ms teams?