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Teams Generic Chat
We have a request from one of our support teams for a way for students to send a chat to a generic name - E.G: Student Support, they want anyone in their team depending who is on duty to be able to v...
- Without going into too many technicalities, what we do, and I often also see other companies do, is use a bot for this, which then supports handing off the conversation to a "real operator". More info can be found at the link below, but then, you'd need to either purchase such a bot or get one that's perhaps integrated with the helpdesk solution you may already be using. Either way, I expect this to be an expensive project 😉 That's why for simple use, it might be best to see if you can get an exception and process in place for using a generic account and the Teams web app for the operators.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-service-design-pattern-handoff-human?view=azure-bot-service-4.0
If such chat messages need to remain "confidential" (eg. you cannot use a public team for this as everyone can see what's being discussed), the only realistic option you have that works out of the box would be to use a generic account and have people sign into the Teams web app. I'm positive there are fancier solutions available, but I guess those come as integrations into various other products like helpdesk tooling and so on.
- Thanks for your reply pvanberlo - yes, we wouldn't want other Students been able to view others chats, they would need to remain confidential, which rules out using a Public Team. As you say I suspect that this functionality may be part of some other solution, such as Helpdesk. I have tried to see if there's maybe something that provides just Chat that might work for us, but so far I'm drawing a blank.
- Without going into too many technicalities, what we do, and I often also see other companies do, is use a bot for this, which then supports handing off the conversation to a "real operator". More info can be found at the link below, but then, you'd need to either purchase such a bot or get one that's perhaps integrated with the helpdesk solution you may already be using. Either way, I expect this to be an expensive project 😉 That's why for simple use, it might be best to see if you can get an exception and process in place for using a generic account and the Teams web app for the operators.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-service-design-pattern-handoff-human?view=azure-bot-service-4.0- Thanks for your assistance Pvanberlo, I basically went back to my manager and advised that the only practical solution at the moment is a Generic Account, that everyone in that team can login to Teams with. It's been put on hold for now, we'll revisit it in a few months when we have more to to investigate things like Bots etc.
