Step 3: Publish your bot for testing in MS Teams

We’re sort of skipping some steps but once you’ve created your bot, you can go straight to publishing it to MS Teams. This will allow you to see exactly what interaction with the bot will look like. The bot will not have much in the way of responses other than what it can get from the website you fed it (if any) but I felt like this step is important for visualizing the end result.

From the left menu, hit Publish. Then click the Publish button. This will “build” your bot.

After a publishing, click on the “Go to Channels” link on the same page:

From here, you’ll be presented with a page full of options. Hit the MS Teams icon:

The first time you do this, it may ask you to Turn on Teams – click the button to proceed. On the next screen, hit Open bot to launch a Teams link that will add the bot to your application.

Important: This step does not make the bot available to the rest of your organization. There is a future step that will allow you to roll this out to the rest of the company. For now, you can share the web address from the Open bot link with others who you want to try out the bot.

In MS Teams, you’ll be presented with the title and description of your bot. Hit Add and then pin the bot so you don’t have to keep searching for it:

Now, start chatting with your bot. You’ll quickly notice that it isn’t very useful. Keep following the steps to make this thing into a usable bot!


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