Enabling Power Virtual Agents Chatbots in Microsoft Teams allows your employees to help when someone isn’t available or at its best because they know how efficiently they can get their answers.
Learn to publish PVA Chatbots in Teams and everything you’ll need + a demo so you can see first hand in this video. However, if you really want to master this powerful duo, take the full course with the link below.
Video Summary
Here are the key points from the video:
- Publishing the Bot: The bot is initially blocked and needs to be published by the admin. Once published, it may take a few hours for the status to update and become visible to users.
- Copying the Link: After publishing, the bot’s link can be copied and shared. This allows users who didn’t have prior access to add the bot to their Teams.
- Testing the Bot: By pasting the copied link into a new tab, users can add the bot to Teams and start interacting with it. For example, asking about national holidays.
- Visibility in Teams: The bot will eventually appear under the “Built for your organization” section in Teams, making it accessible to all users in the organization.
- Final Steps: Once the bot is visible and added, all users in the organization can use it. The demo concludes with a reminder to monitor the bot’s performance and topics.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Video Transcript
Let’s start by learning how to publish a Power Virtual Agents chatbot. Before we go through the publishing steps, make sure that your chatbot is ready for prime time. This includes changing your bot icon, short and long descriptions, as well as other basics such as the developer name, which can be the name of your company, the website, the privacy statement, and the terms of use. This will ensure that the bot looks professional and production-ready for your users. Something that I always say is don’t hesitate to collaborate with your marketing and PR department on this, as they can really help make sure that everything shines.
Now that the bot is ready, under the publish tab in the navigation, we need to click on “Publish.” Before you start sharing the bot, you need to publish it at least once. Clicking the publish button for now simply ensures that the latest content of the bot, so the latest changes, are in the published version of the bot, which, for now, just your team has access to. This is also something that you will do every time you change your bot, even after you make it available for everyone. By doing this first publish, the users that currently have access to edit the bot will also be able to open the bot in Microsoft Teams and really test it out in the final user interface.
With our latest version of our chatbot published, we need to share it with our audience, and there are two ways to share a chatbot depending on what you want to achieve. The first option is to share it with a security group, and the second option is to share it with everybody in the organization. However, this requires approval by a Teams administrator before it’s really published. Something that many users, including myself, would probably want to do is to share it with specific users, but that is something that cannot be done at the time of recording this course in November 2021. You can only share with security groups. If you share your bot with a security group, your bot will show up in the Teams App Store under the “Built by your colleagues” category. It will not happen right away; it might take a few hours until it appears there, so you have to be patient. However, you do have the option of getting a direct link and sending it to them by email or a team chat, for example, and that can be done right away.
If you want to publish it to the whole organization, I highly recommend having a meeting with your IT department before you submit it for approval, especially with the Teams administrator. Depending on the size of your organization, if you have a change management team or an adoption team, make sure to get them in the loop as well to ensure a successful rollout. Remember that once you publish it to the whole organization, the bot will not be available right away. It will be blocked and shown as pending approval for a Teams administrator. Once you click publish again, the chatbot will show as an app in the Microsoft Teams admin center and will be shown as blocked. The admin will have the ability to either publish it or reject it, and that’s why I suggest informing your IT team before you click publish. This way, they know what it’s about and know to approve it. Administrators can also install it for everyone by default and pin it to the left sidebar for users. While we will not go into the details on how to do that in this course, I wanted you to know it’s possible. Again, there might be a few hours delay until it’s available for everyone.
Now that we have seen the theory, let’s go to the demo environment and publish our bot in Microsoft Teams. We are now in the demo environment. Let me open up Microsoft Teams again, where I went back to being logged in as Vanessa, and I’m already in our Global Mantics HR bot. So, I will go under “Publish” here, and the first thing that I need to do is publish my bot. This just publishes the latest content. Again, we haven’t shared it with anybody yet, but we need to publish it at least once before we actually share it. After we do the initial publish, we can now set the availability options. In addition to that, you can also go to “Edit Details” here, change the icon, and change the background color, for example. Let me pick a Pluralsight orange here. I can, of course, add an icon, maybe some HR bot text. I really recommend you work with your marketing and PR teams on making this happen because if it’s professionally done, it will give a much better experience and first impression to your users. You can also change the short description, the long description, as well as the information about, for example, the privacy statement and terms of use. Again, you don’t have to, but if you’re going to publish it to production, make it user-friendly. This way, users know exactly what the bot is about, and they don’t feel like it’s a test. They feel like, “Hey, this is a bot created by my company that I can use, and it looks professional.” Awesome. Now I will click on “Save” here, so we just changed the color to orange, not a lot. Now let’s go under “Availability Options.” What I can do, first of all, is I can show it to my teammates and shared users, and here I can add, for example, let’s say we had a security group. I can simply search for HR bot testers, so I can add the security group, and they would be able to test the bot directly in Microsoft Teams. Something else that you can do is show it to everybody in your organization. You can publish it now. Another option, if you don’t want to go through publishing it and as an approval, you can download the zip file and then send it to your administrator, and they will know what to do with it. This is not a Teams admin course, so I will not dive too deep into this, but if your Teams admin asks you for your bot as a custom app, this is where you can download it as a zip file. But what I will do is I will simply go to “Show to everybody in my organization.” It tells me to make sure that it gives me a bit of an introduction message about what we talked about, make sure your bot is ready for release, follows your company compliance standards, coordinates with your teammates and everything. But now we will just submit it for approval. Yes, if I share it with my organization, everybody needs access to my bot, so it will do this automatically. So let’s send the bot to our administrator. It will take between a few seconds and a few minutes. You can see how we got “Your request has been completed successfully.” So what I will do now is I will go into the Teams admin center as Vlad, who is a Teams admin, so we can take a look at what the admin will see. I refreshed just so it shows up, and actually, you can see right away at the top, as an admin, I see I have one submitted custom app pending approval. So what I will do is I will search for Global Mantics. You see I have the Global Mantics HR bot with the orange background that we just submitted. By default, it’s blocked. I will click on it, and what I can do is under “Publishing Status,” because Vanessa told me about it before, I had a chance to test it, so I feel confident publishing it. So I will publish it, and after that, again, it will take a few hours, and we even get it at the top here. It may take a few hours before the status will be updated, so it’s normal for us to not see it right away. But let’s take our chance, and I will go back into Teams now. I will go back, and what I will do, is let me go to “Availability Options” again, and I will use the “Copy Link” functionality. It copied the link to my bot in my clipboard, and now, a while ago, as a third user here, I’m logged in as John Smith, which, as you can see, John Smith is not part of the bot builders team, so John didn’t have access to this bot previously. If I go under “Apps,” let’s see if we got lucky. If I go on the “Built for your organization,” I do not see it. However, let me open up a new tab and paste the link that I had before. I will cancel this just because we’re logged in as three different users. I want to use the web app, but a user could, of course, open it in the Teams application as well. If everything goes well, we can see the Global Mantics HR bot over here. I can add it to Teams. Again, it might take a few hours until everything works, so don’t worry if it doesn’t work right away. Now let’s type to our bot. Let’s go here and say “National holiday days,” and let’s see what the bot will tell us. You see, it says, “Hello, John Smith. I can help with questions related to time off. Here are the national holidays.” Isn’t this awesome? We just published our bot. Everybody in the organization can now see the bot, and they can add it. Of course, again, it might take some time. If I go under “Built for your organization,” you see I see the Global Mantics HR bot here. It seems to have actually refreshed, and I see another one of my bots here as well. But I have it here, I can add it, and now every user in my organization can use that bot. This is it for this demo on how to publish your bot in Microsoft Teams. Now let’s head back to the slides and talk about monitoring your bot and topic performance.
