Microsoft Teams – Create your own apps!

Recently I’ve been looking into creating custom apps within Microsoft Teams. Within Microsoft Teams you can create different type of apps.

The option are:

• Bot
• Custom Bot
• App
• tab

In this post I’m going to create a simple bot.

Within Azure I’m now first creating a Bot Service. In my case I’m going to call this pvteamsapp.

So this means that the Url that I will run my app on:
https://pvteamsapp.azurewebsites.net

Once my bot service is created I will still need to select a template:

I’m going to select NodeJS and Basic as my template.

Then I’m creating an App ID and a password. As I was using Edge, I then tried IE, but I’m now finding that the button to generate the app doesn’t work. So I’m having to switch back to Chrome.

Chrome was happy to open a new tab. So I’m guessing that my browser settings in IE and Edge were ‘protecting’ me

Now click on the Generate an app password to continue button. Make sure that you take a copy of the password as you will not be able to collect this again.

Once you got the password the button will change into a “Finish and go back to Bot Framework button”. I’m sure that you can already guess the next step. Click that button!

Now paste that password to create the bot and click on the blue button:

The bot will now be created! That was easy, wasn’t it?

But we still don’t have the app in our Microsoft Teams solution.

Simply go to the following url.

https://dev.botframework.com

Then click on My bots in the top navigation and click on the Teams icon under Add a channel.

Ok, now we get all the help that we can get. Just click on the Microsoft Teams link next to the MS Teams icon.When prompted open teams and type any message in your bot window:

In one of my next posts I will look at the code editor that the azure bot services offer.