Microsoft Teams

To use Isolation from Microsoft Teams, you add the Isolation app in Teams and send the bot one code. No Azure setup: Isolation runs one bot for every customer, and the code tells it which organization your Microsoft tenant belongs to. After that a channel, a group chat or a direct chat with the bot is the same control surface Slack is.

Install

Two steps.

1. Add the Isolation app in Teams. Add it to yourself, and to any team whose channels you want to use.
2. Send the bot the code. An Owner or Admin opens the Apps page in Isolation, picks Microsoft Teams, and gets a code. Send it to the bot as /link <code>. The bot answers "Connected to your organization".

The code names an organization, never a person, which is what makes it safe to pass through a chat: the worst a leak can do is attach a tenant somebody does not recognize, undone with Disconnect. It expires in an hour and is spent on use.

The bot learns where to post from the first message it hears. Until somebody has said anything to it, an agent can answer but cannot open a conversation on its own, and the Apps card says "say hello to the bot in Teams to finish".

Connect as a member

Usually there is nothing to do. Teams asserts your email, and the first thing you say links you to the member of the claiming organization holding that address.

For the misses, a different work address or a guest account, send the bot /link in a direct chat. It answers with a signed link back into Isolation; open it while signed in and confirm. The link is a bearer credential naming your Teams account, lasts 20 minutes, and the bot refuses to post it in a channel. The two halves, install and identity, are on organizations install, members connect.

Commands

The grammar is the one every app shares, on the commands reference. In a channel or group chat, mention the bot: @Isolation /launch web. In a direct chat no mention is needed. In a channel connected to a session, a bare /agents or /views works without a mention. There is no /iso root on Teams: a command belongs to the bot you are talking to.

Everything above except /ask, and a plain message in a connected chat, is answered by Isolation itself without waking a sandbox. A launch in a conversation connects that conversation in the same act; in a channel, replies go under your message as a thread, and an agent picked inside a thread is picked for that thread. The connection outlives the session: after /stop, a mention gets "That session has ended", and the next /launch there reconnects it.

What is different from Slack

• No history. The Bot Framework lets a bot read a conversation's members, not its messages. So chat_history answers an agent with a sentence saying so, which it can act on. Paste what the agent needs, or let it use chat_members.
• Bold-name attribution. Teams has no per-message name, so each agent's reply starts with its name in bold on its own line. A room with three agents still reads as three colleagues, as on several agents in one session.
• Buttons are Adaptive Cards and need no configuration.
• The bot hears every message in a channel it sits in, but answers only mentions, direct chats and commands in connected channels.
• Identity is a signed link, not a sign-in redirect, handed over only in a direct chat.