Teams Generic Chat

[Dale_LTU]

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 view and respond to that chat, preferably as the generic name, but they have said it doesn't matter too much if the response comes from an individuals name. It is however important that everyone in the team can access the whole chat, and it doesn't go to an individual person.

I've done some searching and not really come up with anything, my only thought is you could use a generic account that they can all login to Teams as, but generic accounts are a bit of a no no here, so I'd rather not go down that route.

Has anyone else come across anything that might work and is worth investigating for this purpose?

Thanks

[#2]

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.

[#3]

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.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

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=azu...

[#5]

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.