Review of the Microsoft Teams Adoption Bot

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Robot sat on a chair looking at a laptop

We've recently been looking at the different tools already available to aid organisations in their adoption journey. In my last post I reviewed the Champion Management Platform.  In this post I review another adoption tool called the Microsoft Teams Adoption Bot. 

What is the Adoption bot?

It is a Chatbot built using Power Virtual Agents and is a Microsoft open source tool available on GitHub. The bot can be deployed to your Teams environment and made accessible to the whole organisation to support adoption of the Microsoft tools.

Once deployed users can add it to their app bar in teams. From here anytime the user has a question relating to the Microsoft 365 tools, then can ask the chatbot.  The chatbot will then provide an answer or using Power Automate post feedback or questions to a designated Teams channel.

For a more detailed explanation and instructions on how to deploy take a look at the GitHub page here. There is also a short YouTube video by Matt Hickey one of the main contributors to the open source bot.

Getting Started

Prerequisites 

  • Before deploying to your environment you may need to setup a new Team to host Dataverse for teams if you do not already have a team for developing and managing the adoption bot.  
  • In the steps on GitHub you will also need to point the bot to channels for Submitting feedback and asking an expert. If you've already got a Champions team created in your environment you could use one of these channels.
  • A generic account. There are some flows involved in the bot, so you may want a generic account rather than a personal one for these (see steps 16-17).

Deploying the Chatbot

Preparing and deploying the bot into your environment is a relatively straight forward task and the instructions in the GitHub page will walk you through the steps.  For me it took no more than an hour to walk through all the steps and start using. I however deployed to my environment with only a few changes.  As you walk through the steps you may want to do a few more customisations.

I've created and deployed a handful of bots before so this was all fairly familiar territory for me. If you've not used Power Virtual Agent (PVA) before I would recommend investigating it further before following the steps on GitHub. If you're not in the IT team at your organisation it is probably worth discussing this with them beforehand.  

Helpful tip for step 33.

In step 33 you will be following the instructions for setting up the flow(s).  When you're asked to put the Team name, it didn't work for me but instead I had to use the Team's GUID. 

To find the GUID for the Team you are using:
  • In Microsoft Teams navigate to the team
  • Selecting the More options (...) 
  • Choose Get link to team.
  • Paste the link into a file and remove from Https to the first character after groupId=
  • The string of characters and numbers after the equals (=) up to the & is your GUID. Any characters after the & can be removed. 

Review

Like many of the over Power Platform tools, PVA makes creating a chatbot relatively simple to do and means you no longer necessarily need a developer to be contracted in to build a solution like this.  With that said creating a chatbot can be a time consuming task. 

The open source adoption bot on GitHub speeds up the process of creating a chatbot for end users to ask their questions around Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365. You could deploy it with very few changes and it might be ready to go within a day.  Personally I would do some more customisations before adding to the store for users to add to their Teams environment. 

When I deployed to my environment and tested I did find it didn't have an answer to some of my more common questions or didn't understand the way I phrased a question. But with some work you could improve upon the topics and responses in the background before deploying. Although this would take time. 

The team that have pulled this bot together have created a really powerful tool to assist organisations in driving adoption of Microsoft 365. This combined with other open source solutions like the Champion Management Platform and\or the Microsoft Learning Pathways solution, will help your organisations by saving you time and effort recreating tools, which already exist. It will also support your end users in adopting tools like Microsoft Teams.  However you will need to have a good comms campaign in place to promote adoption tools you plan to make available.

I would recommend having a look at this bot, even if only to test in a demo environment so you can assess its usefulness for your organisation in adopting Microsoft 365.

Location: United Kingdom

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