Automated/Bot message posting to Microsoft-Teams chat room

Question

How can I automatically post messages to chat rooms in Microsoft-Teams? This is for one-way messaging: i.e. posting messages, not reading messages.

The big picture here is we are evaluating different Group Chat solutions, and one requirement is to post error messages to chat rooms from various services & programs.

A sensible approach seems to be to build a Bot using the REST API however just the authentication seems crazy complex, even then I can't work out how to just post a message. We're looking for a general solution that can be used simply in different scripting languages (Perl, Python, shell scripts, etc), so we don't want to use the .NET SDK or Node.js SDK.

We've already looked at Slack and Cisco Spark. Posting messages in both of these is super simple, so I'm hoping there's a similarly simple solution for Microsoft-Teams?!

For example:

In Slack you can use incoming webhooks to post messages. You use the web interface to get a unique webhook URL for each chat room, and then do simple HTTP POST to that URL (with a JSON message payload) to post to that chat room as the Bot. I had it working in 10 minutes.

In Cisco Spark you create a Bot which gives you a unique Access Token. You then get a room_id for the chat room and use those together to do an HTTP POST (again with a JSON payload) to create a message in the chat room.

So how do you programmatically post/create/send messages to a chat room in Microsoft-Teams?

Thanks! Justin

Answer 1

The simplest way to do what you want is to post a message to a channel using an "Incoming Webhook" connector. For more information, see here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/connectors?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396#setting-up-a-custom-incoming-webhook

Answer 2

What you're describing is precisely how the Office 365 Connectors work. A Connector allows you to post messages into a Group or Team using web-hooks and a simple JSON payload.

There is a playground for playing with these that is super helpful. One note however, there is a bug in the playground's webhook implementation, so for testing purposes, I would stick to the Send via Email option. This doesn't affect how these work in production, the bug is isolated to the Playground app itself.