Today, we’re announcing full support for Microsoft Teams in Botkit, bringing the most comprehensive and widely adopted suite of bot development tools to this exciting enterprise platform.
Botkit already powers tens-of-thousands of bots and custom integrations. Our thriving open source library recently welcomed its 150th code contributor, and our community has created more than 40 plugins that connect developers and their bots to a wide network of NLP/NLU platforms, database systems, and other APIs.
When adding a new platform to Botkit, our goal is to make the process of building bots as friendly, straight-forward and fun as possible. We want the process of building bots to feel like you are teaching a helpful robot new tricks — not wrestling with a bunch internet protocols!
For this launch, we worked hard to align our familiar bot making tools to the inner workings of the Teams platform in order to build a tool for developers that offers a path to quick success while still delivering the full scope of functionality available in the Teams API to create unique and powerful applications.
The result? Using Botkit Studio, you will have a bot up and running on your team, with all the code you need, in just a few minutes. We’ll also hook you up with a full set of tools to customize and extend that bot to best serve your team. Don’t believe us? Watch the 3 minute video below!
Botkit for Microsoft Teams provides everything you need to get your bot up and running on your team, including:
- Support for designing and building conversations in Botkit Studio that take advantage of the rich card formats and interactive features offered by Teams
- App package builder — configure your application’s options and create the required app package without hacking your own JSON files
- An extensible starter kit project filled with examples and customizable features — not just a bot, but an integrated example tab application, compose extension, and code demonstrating all of the Teams platform features
- Botkit Core extensions, including a Teams connector, a fully featured API client, and a range of helper functions that makes building for Teams much easier — and tons and tons of documentation
Get Started with Botkit Studio
View code on Github
What’s COOL for Bots in Microsoft Teams
Teams has a few cool features for developers that make it stand out from the crowd of messaging platforms. These are some of my favorites:
- Compose extensions are custom additions to the message composer that enable users to create and send their own bot-powered messages with rich attachments and buttons. This is an awesome way to expose content and functionality outside of the traditional “bot” metaphor.
- Bot menus — Bots can provide a list of up to 10 shortcut commands that appear when a user starts to send a message. Cleverly implemented with keyboard shortcut support, this means users can explore and activate your bot’s features with just a few taps of the keyboard
- “imBack” buttons — Teams supports a special type of button that, when clicked, causes the user to say just the right thing back to the bot without having to type. Less typing = less user frustration
The sample application included in our starter kit for Teams implements a “note taking” bot that demonstrates all of these features in concert — you can add notes by talking to the bot, view them in an integrated tab application, and use a compose extension to share notes written in private with the rest of your team. We think developers will find this example a great starting point for developing custom integrations that get the most out of Microsoft Teams.
At Howdy, we spend our days immersed in a world of clever talking machines. We think that in the not too distant future, bots and other talking computers will be a part of everyday life. We can’t wait to be part of the future that people will build with this latest addition to Botkit!
