How to Escalate Bot Conversation to Skype for Business Users - botframework

We have a publicly facing bot that is working well. However what we'd like to do is if the bot was not able to address the problem, escalate it to a real person. The first of those ways is to a person or (preferably) a group in skype for business. I'd like to have them be able to answer directly in skype.
We also need to able to have the bot be registered in our customer's skype for business tenant along with being able to communicate with ours.
Is this doable? If so, can someone point me to anything that will do it? The only documentation I could find says outbound is possible but gives no samples an seems to imply that it's either escalation or ability to register the bot in multiple tenants.

Related

How to host BF Skills in Teams App Store?

We have a bunch of Microsoft BF Bot Skills that we are using with our Virtual Assistants. Not all skills are applicable to all our users. Teams being our collaboration platform, I was thinking if we could host these skills in our Teams enterprise app store and then let our users dynamically add them to the VA as needed. Is this even possible? Has anyone tried something like this?
Unfortunately, I don't believe this would work as they are currently designed. The relationship from bot:skill is managed, primarily, by the bot via AppId's, keys, endpoints, etc., shared between the two. The issue is each skill uploaded into Teams would require it's own manifest whereas normally only one is promoted, the primary bot. By each skill having its own manifest, Teams is going to treat it as an individual app. I believe this would interfere with the bot and skill properly connecting.
That being said, you could forgo the current bot:skill design and create smaller independent bots. By using proactive messages, it is perfectly feasible to send messages between bots. As a user interacts with the HR bot and answers some question about payroll, that message is forwarded as a proactive message to the Payroll bot which does stuff and then returns a message back to the HR bot and, subsequently, to the user.
Hope of help!

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

Hand off bot to Skype for business agents - can it support 1:many?

I am following this example for agent-handoff: https://ankitbko.github.io/2017/03/human-handover-bot/
The Agent handoff via webchat is working as intended with the perk of being enhanced to let 1 agent talk to multiple customers at a time.
Now I want to know if the Agent role can use Skype for Business instead. The end goal is to allow 1:many parallel conversations; Agent on Skype for Business able to communicate to multiple customers regardless of Channel.
I was hoping someone could tell me if that is at all possible before starting (I have no admin rights in Skype for Business, will need permission, they want other things done, etc. etc.)
When I tried out Slack (with a different example) an Agent was only able to talk to 1 customer at a time because there was no way to make the Agent available for anyone else. Because Agent can only connect to MyBot once.
I am afraid that it is the same with Skype for Business where an Agent will only be able to make himself available to the AgentPool by connecting to the Bot (probably sending an explicit message like 'I am available' since there is no back channel). And he can only have 1 Bot connection at a time, thus only 1 customer connection at a time.

personal messaging service design a side service for a competition website where users can come ice for competition contestants?

i need to develop a personal messaging service for contestants of a racing competition . I need a cms(preferably free) which can do this.
The requirements are pretty basic .
1)when teams log in g\they can see inbox where they can see messages sent from administrators.
and reply to them or send new ones to administrators
2)they cant send messages to other teams.
3)attachments can also be sent in messages
4)when administrator is sending messages it can be sent to one ,or more or all of the teams(according to administrators wish)
5)more than one administrator accounts can also be created
6)Looks dont matter as this will just be a back end
P.S. if possible in joomla how can this be achieved
You should test messaging components (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/communication/pms) and define user groups with associated rights.

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