🔥Building a Teams Bot with AI Capabilities - Part 1 - Azure Bot + App Registration w/ Delegated OAuth2 Token Support🔥

aka, the points don't matter and all the documentation is wrong

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!

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This article is part of a series of articles, because 1 article would be absolutely massive.

• Part 1 (this article!): Create an Azure Bot and App Registration

• Part 2: Register Bot in Teams with Teams Developer Portal

Hey all!

Now that the Slack “Vera” bot is about done, I’m looking for a big meaty new project. And one just so happened to land on my desk - bringing Vera to Teams. I assumed this project would only take a couple of hours - after all, how hard could it be to bring something I’ve already built and know well to Teams?

LOL

Turns out, the permissions in Teams are, um… lets go with INCREDIBLY CHALLENGING. Not to mention our admin insists on using Delegated Permissions rather than direct “Application” permissions, meaning we’re relying on Oauth2 tokens across 2 different calls, meaning we need to establish some state for our previously entirely stateless application (I built this with DynamoDB tables, and it’s working great!).

There’s a lot going on here! We’re just going to get a bot registered in Teams for now. The other stuff will be next.

There is a LOT to cover, even if you’ve already read the entire “Slack Bot” series. Much of it will be similar later on, but these earlier pieces where we’re directly interfacing with Teams will be entirely different.

In case you haven’t the point of this series is to establish how to build an entirely private GenAI tool in your Teams instance. Because you don’t want your users uploading your sensitive corporate docs to ChatGPT so they can write their summary emails faster, right?

Okay, I really really want to talk about all the cool API stuff I built, and the DynamoDB tables I built to establish stateful behavior across an entirely lambda-based stateless app, but we need to start at the beginning, not least because the process is unintuitive and the documentation is largely incorrect.

Lets do it.

If you don’t care about reading how we built it, and would rather just read the code, it’s open-sourced here. Happy building!

https://github.com/KyMidd/TeamsAIBot