Microsoft 365 Community Microsoft Teams, 20 Apr 2021

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From YouTube: Build your first Microsoft Teams Bot

Description

In this 16-minute Developer-focused demo, Stephan Bisser opens with the basics - Bots are used for Chat, Messaging Extensions, Task Modules, and more. There are 3 options for building Bots - Bot Framework SDK, Bot Framework Composer, and Power Virtual Agents. Same technology behind scenes, just matter of abstraction and options for extensibility. The recommended low code and very extensible option with templates containing triggers and dialogs for Microsoft Teams is Composer. Tour the latest Composer capabilities with installation, configuration and build tips. This PnP Community demo is taken from the Microsoft Teams community call – April 2021, recorded on April 20, 2021

Demo Presenter: Stephan Bisser (Solvion) | @stephanbisser

Supporting documents:
• Article - Bot Framework Composer Series - 1 - Use Adaptive Cards | https://bisser.io/bot-framework-composer-series-1-use-adaptive-cards/
• Repo - Microsoft Bot Framework Composer | https://github.com/Microsoft/BotFramework-Composer/
• Documentation - Bot Framework Composer documentation | https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/composer/
• Documentation - Azure Bot Service documentation | https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/?view=azure-bot-service-4.0

Learn more:
• Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/m365pnp-videos

A

I'll walk you through how to build a bot for microsoft teams or actually build your first spot for microsoft. Teams. um Kind of funny, as we are all of these demos today, are being done by a group of people who have actually founded a a thing called select text. So we have a youtube channel out there with a lot of stuff out there. You can see some expanded things on our youtube channel as well, if you'd like to. But what does a bot in teams actually offer or what features could a podbot potentially consist of?

A

When you build a bot for microsoft teams? What does it offer? What kind of features does a bot consist of? First, one is obvious chat: either one-on-one chat, group chat or uh you can actually add a bot to a team or respective channel. So you can have the conversation in that channel with the bot as well.

A

Then you've got messaging extensions, both search based and action based, which always consists of a bot in the back end, doing the logic stuff for you in most cases, or you could have a task module built using a bot using the bot framework, sdk and a lot of more stuff, and as you can imagine for all of that, you would need to at least write some code until now, because um there's a new feature or a new tool called programming composer, which is a kind of visual interface for building bots.

A

So you have basically two options to build: a bot um use or free mainly within the microsoft space, either go with the podramic sdk, go with power, virtual agents from the power platform respective or use spot member composer, which is kind of a visual interface for building bots using the sdk underneath without further ado, I'd like to jump into a little demo. I which I've prepared. So when you download the composer tool, it's a installable tool, so you can install it on whatever os you'd like to.

A

And if you open it up, you get a lot of choices for either grabbing resources, which are out there for published by the bottom extreme by the teams, platform team and whatever um peachy kind of does what stuff in the microsoft space. And then you have, as I have the most recent version installed, you have a lot of templates to be selected, so you could go with a really blank bot which basically consists of nothing up to.

A

You can have a enterprise assistant which already comes with a lot of business logic in there with a lot of dialogues in there and it's a kind of starting point which you can use to develop your own enterprise assistant. You can also make use of skills which are available and published by microsoft, like skill or calendaring skill, and both template versions are either available in c sharp or in node as a preview.

A

But I won't create a new one, because I've already prepared a bot for that session and that's what basically um was derived from the enterprise assistant template. So it comes with a lot of dialogues in there. It comes with a lot of triggers in there.

A

So, on the left hand side, you see your dialogues, you see your triggers, so if you would have to create a team spot in the past, you either had two options: either: go with first of q, a maker to establish a set of faq knowledge base where you have questions and answers and then create a bot from that knowledge base, which basically just does answering the questions you have in the knowledge base and the other option would be to develop your bot using code, um either c, sharp or or node, and all of the team specific functionalities like task modules like messaging extensions, and all of that you would need to write code to achieve that in the past, and this likely changed nowadays, as you can see here on on the left hand side where you have the option to do that without writing real code.

A

But I would like to just briefly demonstrate you what my bot consists of right now, as I've just created this enterprise assistant template and I've created the microsoft teams, application which you can find in the microsoft theme stocks or if you create a team spot that comes with that out of the box, and if I just start my bot um and say something um which it doesn't for richard should know like a question how to implement bot human handoff.

A

This would usually go to my q, a maker knowledge base and give me an answer. But, as I said, as I have just created an enterprise system template, it has no connection to either knowledge source. So I would need to actually implement that within composer, so to make your bot aware of any kind of knowledge base or language understanding piece.

A

You just enable the features within the app settings. So I've just prepared my q a app settings. You need to in insert your host name, your knowledge base id and, of course, the columns right and if I restart my bot and you'll, see how how fast and simple that kind of build process is because I just restart the bot here locally- have mg rock up and running, and if my bot will start, I can ask the same question.

A

How to implement human handoff, and now it should at least now it's finished, so I need to wait a little longer um now. If I go in here and or if I ask the question it still gives me sorry, I didn't find the answer, because what I didn't do yet is whenever the um let's say, user uterus isn't clear. It just gives me out the message.

A

Sorry, I didn't and find an answer to your question and we'll replace that, because we want to go to our q, a maker knowledge base to answer the user's questions right away and there's a pre-configured.

A

What composer calls action to that? So it just grabs the settings, file, grabs the q, a maker settings and just queries. The q a make the knowledge base with that and after the restart it should basically use the question. I asked the bot go to q, a maker to my knowledge base. Query my knowledge base. If there's any question in there which might be applicable and if so, it just gives it back to me in within the one-on-one chat in microsoft teams.

A

So, as it's finished, let's go back to teams how to implement human handoff and we okay, no human hand of question or answer for me, but we see at least it didn't give me the same answer in here and it gave me another one and the demo gods are not with me on that one. um It doesn't matter.

A

Let's switch to a more advanced scenario, because it's about matches of themes and q, a is just one part of it, but what I really wanted to show you is how easy it is with composer to use all of that team's functionality without actually writing code. So you can pretty easily these days build task modules or messaging extensions without the need of being a real developer these days or hardcore developers.

A

So what you need to do in order to make that work composer consists of a package management um solution where you can actually add packages to it, which are more or less nuget or no npm packages, and I've already installed the microsoft.components.teams package, and if you install that you get a lot of microsoft team, specific options either for trigger management.

A

So you have a a trigger type uh or category in there and then you can select which kind of teams event um should your bot listen to and, as you can see in here, there are a lot of events for messaging extensions, a lot of events for task modules, so either.

A

If the user wants to fetch the task module or if the user submits the task module, there is a certain event triggered, and I've already prepared that for my task modules. So I have three different triggers on task modules and, as you can see, in the condition each of those has a different condition. If I just switch back to my team's one-on-one chat- and I just insert help in there, we get three different options um which more or less all of them trigger certain or a specific task. Module help survey youtube going back to composer.

A

We have help in here and within help, there's a nice little game to fetch out certain teams, information without the need of actually writing or wrapping up to microsoft, graph or something like that. There are predefined actions in there for getting microsoft teams data either. The member of the conversation in a one-on-one chat would that be one or the members in a channel or in a group chat infos about the channels team, details and stuff like that which I'm using here is the get member.

A

So I can actually get user information whenever the user clicks on the help um button and after that I'll send a task module response in form of an adaptive card. So um the adaptive card is pretty basic, going back to the team's chat.

A

If I click help in here, I just get an adaptive card, but I don't get it directly within the chat window, I'll get it as an as a task module in here and in there. As you could imagine, you can basically show anything in here.

A

It doesn't have to be an adaptive card, because if I switch back and if I go to youtube, I can also include urls in there, so I can actually insert any url any type of web application in there, which basically fits the frame of microsoft teams, and I can then basically do whatever I want to within that task module. So it doesn't have to be an adaptive card, it could be, let's say, a web application, it could be a sharepoint framework web part or it could be anything else outside of the microsoft 365 ecosystem.

A

So we have really basic adaptive card, which is kind of static in that help option. But you can also do more dynamic content in here. Let's say we have a survey uh and which is also an adaptive card, and in there you have two options: how do you prefer to be developed bots? You can either choose from whatever sdk or composer.

A

I can I just choose composer and then click one of the two buttons in here and what it will do now. It will trigger the submit action because I have submitted the task module now and it will then respond with another message or response message within that task: module and all of that is possible without writing single line of code in there, because you can use the predefined options.

A

So I have the task: module fetch action, where I just show my my survey card, which is an adaptive card, and if the user submits that that action or that task module, we basically get the choices of the user, so we can actually read the data or the the the response value of the user within the task module and do certain things with that.

A

So, in my case, I just read the user's choice, data and then I'll, just um depending on what the user picks send out a message as a task module response which is kind of easy going compared to if you would need to use code for that. As I said, this is rather new. So if you, if you want to try it out, you need to install composers nightly build, so you need to enable the preview features in there.

A

You need to add the package in the package manager in there, so this package is built by microsoft, which comes along with all these actions and triggers for microsoft. Teams there's another one for graph. So if you want to combine them too, you can actually build pretty cool team spots without the need of using using code or or being a developer person, and if you want to have further resources, there are a lot of documentation out there on the bot framework docs, as well as on the microsoft team stocks for building bots.

A

So if you don't want to use composer, but you want to use or develop a bot using code, you can still do so. There are a lot of samples out there, as I already mentioned in the samples gallery, um so you can basically start with boilerplate code with samples and go from there back to you. Vessel.

B

Thank you thanks. Stefan, don't don't stop, don't stop sharing it. I will ask the question, because I know that you're specialist in here you wrote a few books about it and everything else and you've been working on a bot framework for many many years. But what about so? This feature, what we're showing in here versus the microsoft power, virtual agents, what's the dependency and and which one do you use, and why this one, rather than the other one.

A

um So power virtual agents is in terms of the functionality you get um rather limited because the composer tool itself is really extensible. So with that package management solution, you get packages built by microsoft, but you can also use packages built on your own. So if you have a certain need for, I don't know querying uh see some um in your bot, you can actually build a package um where you wrap all that content in in the back and then just provide actions for that.

A

So composer users can actually use those actions for you, whereas in pva you just have the options which pva offers to you. So composer is rather extensible in that way. Okay.

B

So you might kind of over simply say that the composer is then between the code option and then the microsoft power, virtual agents and the.

A

B

Agents is the the low code or the simplistic, the most easiest way to do things yeah sure.

A

So in pva you just start and if you for it, for some reason, um can't go any further with pva, you could just hand it off to composer and work along with composer.

B

Yeah, because behind of the scenes it's the same technology regardless so which is really cool so behind of the senses stillbot framework, it's the question is just the abstraction layers which we're adding on top of it, so to say so yeah. Thank you. Stefan on that, one really really cool.

A