Microsoft® Teams is a chat-based tool that provides a common platform for remote teams to share information and work together. Described as a “hub for teamwork” it provides chats, video meetings, application integration (for instance with Trello or GitHub), and file storage. You can also access all the familiar Office 365 apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint within the Microsoft Teams application.
Using Microsoft Teams with App Connect
You can use App Connect to perform actions on the following objects:
- Teams
- Channels
- Message replies
- Messages
- Chats
- Chat messages
- Groups
- Members
- Owners
- Users
To use App Connect to integrate Microsoft Teams with your other applications, you need to connect App Connect to your Microsoft Teams account. Microsoft Teams supports OAuth 2.0 authentication for App Connect deployments in container environments and basic authentication for App Connect deployments in IBM Cloud.
For App Connect deployments in container environments the following properties are required to connect to Microsoft Teams:
- Access token: An access token is generated by sending a POST request to the Microsoft identity platform endpoint. It is generated by using the client ID, tenant ID, client secret, scope, grant type, username, and password values for an App Connect app that was registered in the Microsoft Azure app registration portal.
- Refresh token: A refresh token is returned from the POST request to the Microsoft identity platform endpoint.
- Client ID: The Application (client) ID value that is generated for an App Connect app that was registered in the Microsoft Azure app registration portal. It is displayed on the Overview page for the registered app.
- Client secret: The client secret that is generated for an App Connect app that was registered in the Microsoft Azure app registration portal. It is generated under 'Certificates & secrets' for the registered app.
For App Connect deployments in IBM Cloud you simply need to sign into your Microsoft Teams account when prompted.
For more information about other supported connectors, see Connectors.
Scenario: Retrieve incidents from ServiceNow based on the severity level and push incident details to a Microsoft Teams channel
As an example, consider this scenario, you can use App Connect to create a flow for an API that, when called, retrieves incidents from ServiceNow and sends those incidents along with incident details to a channel in Microsoft Teams.
In this scenario, the Request node retrieves incidents from ServiceNow through the Retrieve incidents action.
The Retrieve incidents action retrieves active and other incidents based on their severity level. You need to use a For each node from the Toolbox to process each incident so that you can configure the flow to retrieve all the incidents.
Active incidents are pushed to the Microsoft Teams ‘Support Managers’ channel. A message gets created in the ‘Support Managers’ channel that specifies the incident ID, severity level, status of the incidence (Active = True), along with other details. The inactive incidents are pushed to the Microsoft Teams ‘Closed tickets for the week’ channel. A message gets created in the ‘Closed tickets for the week’ channel that specifies the incident ID, severity level, along with other details.
The Response node contains an example of the output mapping of the incidents.
Figure 1: Flow for an API to retrieve incidents from ServiceNow and create a message in a Microsoft Teams channel.#AppConnect#Microsoft-Teams#ServiceNow#APIflow