Connectors or Bots: which one to use? - botframework

Connectors allow posting message to a specific channel. Bots allow posting proactive messages to a channel. I feel that if I am only posting notifications, Connectors should suffice. I would like to understand the use case for both a little better.

Find more on this conversation here:
Sharon Zhao MSFT Moderator posted:
"I feel that if I am only posting notifications, Connectors should
suffice"
You’re right.
For more information, please refer to the Bots for private chats and
channels and Custom connectors parts in this article.
My reply:
I would think that this depends on the availability of the update then
determine a correct way to deliver it i.e. if server doesn't push any
notifications then it would have to be a Bot.

Related

Microsoft Teams Voice Integration and Media Forking / CTI Events

I've invested time today, researching voice integration with Microsoft Teams, with the following requirements.
CTI type events when a user answers a call and hangs-up a call. Not much here, the webhook functionality, detailed here under webhooks and connectors, does not seem to apply to voice from what I can gather (it refers to channels) but it does potentially offer the mechanics I am looking for (where I get proactive notification of event changes), "allow users to subscribe to receive notifications and messages from your web services". Any suggestions on how to subscribe to specific Team Users voice events or alternate approaches? Also found the below documentation but still doesn't see to cover the specific call events?
Use the Microsoft Graph API to get change notifications
Is here a way to fork the media of a Teams call to another destination, to say allow further intelligent processing of the on-going conversation for real time analytics?
Thanks!
We don't have any event/subscription to specific Team Users voice events.
Please refer below documentation for supported list:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/subscription-post-subscriptions? view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http
You can raise a feedback request here: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/ad198462-1c1c-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472
As an alternative, we have "Azure Communication Services - Voice and video calling events" that you can utilize as per your need.
Reference doc: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-grid/communication-services-voice-video-events

Slack Outgoing Webhook to Incoming Webhook in MS Teams

I'm trying to connect a Slack channel to Teams and to forward all messages to teams. I thought it would be as easy as using an outgoing webhook in Slack and and incoming webhook in Teams. However nothing is ever sent to Teams. Is this even possible without the use of some automation tool like Zapier or IFTTT?
I think there are probably a bunch of reasons this is not working - I can imagine there could be authentication issues, and also that the structure of the data coming from slack is unlikely to be what Teams can consume 100% as is. Basically, you're going to need some kind of intermediary, like perhaps an Azure Function or AWS Lambda (unless Zapier/IFTTT can offer something out of the box for this). Power Automate could be another option, incidentally.
As another option, you could look to a 3rd party that does something like this already, like m.io (Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with them, or even experience with their platform, I'm just aware of the existence of their tool).
With regards docs, have a look at Outgoing Webhooks for Slack and Incoming Webhooks for Teams. Even from the docs, you can see the format/structure is very different, so it's just a case of a small Cloud function to map input <-> output.

How safe is DirectLine?

I have seen a number of posts where developers want to have their clients talk to their Bot directly without using DirectLine, or alternatively emulate DirectLine within their intranet. The most common reason is that their companies are not cloud-ready.
Instead of asking HOW, I want to ask for more information about DirectLine that I can present back to my technology committee. How is direct line secured? How are messages encrypted? Are messages logged anywhere? Are messages retained anywhere at rest?
Can someone point me to a good source of this type of information?

Chatbot handoff from Messenger to Zendesk

I am developing a customer service chatbot, using Azure's Bot Framework in .NET, using the the Messenger channel. I wanted to know if anyone knows what the best way to handle the handoff to a human on Zendesk (which my platform already uses as its CRM platform). I'm not looking for when to do the handoff, but how to manage what happens next.
What I would love to be able to do would be that so when handoff is needed, a ticket on Zendesk would be created, sending for example a file (the transcript of the conversation so far). Then the agent would be able to solve the customer's problem in that ticket, having a conversation with him, having the bot sending messages back and forth between zendesk and messenger.
I don't know if this has been done before, or if it's at all possible. And I'm free to other solutions to the problem of handling this kind of handoff, without having to create a separate "chat" for the customer service agents to use, like it's explained on the azure documentation.
Thank you for your patience while I researched this. I found this resource that I believe will meet your needs. This functionality is built off of the Bot Framework utilizing .NET (it's also available for Nodejs). There are two available methods to connect a client to an agent.
The first (which should apply to you) aggregates different channels into one allowing an agent to pickup in the same channel where the bot handed off. The second opens a new channel when an agent joins the conversation.
Intermediator Bot
I was able to spin up a bot using this and confirmed the bot was listening for outside traffic.
Hope this helps.
Steve.
One thing that I'm about to try is this:
Bot conversation ends.
Bot service calls an Azure Function, passing the conversation content.
The Azure Function integrates with Trello API, creating an entry on a Kanban board.
So, instead of Trello as I want to do, you can make a call to the Zendesk API.
I'm writing a few articles about developing Azure bots. The next two actually are dealing with these very things. You can find out more here. sign up if you'd like to get notified over the next week or so when the new tutorials are online.
Hope that helps!
Tim

US SMS transactional notification opt-out requirements

This is probably on the borderline of being a programming question, but this is really about technology choice at the end of the day.
I am trying to work out what functionality the system should support in the USA, distributing receipt notifications for payments via email and SMS, regarding SMS opt-out. Is it mandatory that for transactional SMSs the user should be able to 'unsubscribe from all communications'? To stress: this is ONLY transactional SMSs (receipts)
Twilio developer evangelist here.
If you're considering this because you are building a service using Twilio, then you need not worry about building this functionality. Twilio handles opt out messages for you.
If you are only delivering transactional SMS messages and think that opt outs should not apply, I encourage you to get in touch with Twilio support to discuss this in more detail.

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