Using the Bot Framework to post to a Microsoft Teams channel with NodeJS

Question

Is there a way to send proactive cards from a bot to a Teams channel? The use case is a channel for service tickets. Once they get posted, a user will be able to interact with them with a few actions.

I’m looking at the documentation here for sending proactive messages. At the bottom, there’s a section for ”Creating channel conversations”, with a small reference to the startReplyChain(). However, the actual code and sample on GitHub still seem to reference a conversation with a member rather than sending something proactive to a channel.

There does appear to be documentation for incoming and outgoing webhooks, which is what I may end up doing. My only real concern is that it requires using Actionable Cards, which it references as legacy everywhere. This is despite saying that you can’t send Adaptive Cards with them. Perhaps they intend to enable these connectors to send Adaptive Cards, it’s not just very clear to me if this is a long-term solution I should be focusing on.

Answer 1

This is definitely possible, and it's important to note that you can even send from another process/application (e.g. on a schedule from an AWS Lamba). You can see a sample here for this.

The process of sending the message is just part of the story though - you need to have certain information already saved (e.g. in your database) to know how to contact the right user, group chat, or channel conversation, but there are a few ways to get that information. The most common is, when you bot is added to the conversation, to get it from the conversationUpdate event. You'll need conversation id, service url, tenant id, and your bot's App Id (what you get in the Azure portal for your bot, and which you're using already in your app's configuration, teams manifest, etc.). You can read more about the topic here and here.

Another option, if you don't have access to conversationUpdate (e.g. the user hasn't installed your app) is to call the Graph API to install your app. It's only possible to do this to a channel (on the v1 or beta api) (see here) or to a user (see here), but on the beta api only, and not (yet?) for a group chat.