Building a Proactive Teams Notification Bot for Yokogawa Electric Corporation

Bot

Jul, 2023

Bahrain

Yokogawa Electric Corporation, a multinational electrical engineering and software company, required a solution to effectively communicate announcements to groups of employees. They wanted to build a Teams notification bot that could send proactive messages to employees who were part of Azure AD Distribution lists. The bot needed to have a user-friendly interface where administrators could input the notification details such as title, body, image URL, call-to-action button text, and links. Upon adding a notification, it should immediately start sending Teams bot notifications to all selected distribution list users. The system should support sending notifications to multiple distribution lists simultaneously. Additionally, any failed notification attempts should be logged in Azure table storage for later investigation. It was crucial that users could not reply to the bot, as the notifications were intended to be one-way communication.

IntelliScripts tackled this challenge by developing a robust and efficient solution using the following components:

1. NodeJS Bot: We built a bot using NodeJS, which served as the core component for handling the notification functionality. This bot was hosted as an HTTP-triggered Azure Function, ensuring scalability and reliability.

2. Teams Setup Policy: To ensure the bot was installed for every user in the tenant, we leveraged Teams Setup policy. This ensured that the bot was readily available to all users upon joining the tenant.

3. Azure Blob Storage: We stored the conversation references of users in Azure blob storage, enabling the bot to send proactive messages to the intended recipients.

4. SharePoint SPFx: We developed a custom Form customizer using SharePoint SPFx. When a new notification was added, it was saved in SharePoint, and an HTTP trigger endpoint was called to initiate the notification process.

5. Azure Function Responsiveness: The Azure function was responsible for retrieving the users from the distribution lists, sending proactive notifications to them, updating the progress in SharePoint using Graph API, and capturing any errors encountered during the process in Azure storage.

- NodeJS
- Azure Functions (HTTP-triggered)
- Azure Blob Storage
- SharePoint SPFx
- Microsoft Teams Setup Policy
- Azure Table Storage
- Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)
- Microsoft Graph API