Send Proactive Messages

A proactive message is a message sent by a bot in response to simple commands sent in the chat from a user. The message response can be in one of the following formats:

• Welcome messages
• Scheduled messages
• Notifications

This step-by-step guide helps you to send a proactive message from a bot. You'll see the following output:

Prerequisites

• 9 minutes remaining

Ensure that you install the following tools for building and deploying your apps.

Prepare development environment

After you install the required tools, set up the development environment.

Install Teams Toolkit

Microsoft Teams Toolkit helps simplify the development process with tools to provision and deploy cloud resources for your app and publish to the Teams Store.

You can use Teams Toolkit with Visual Studio Code or a command-line interface called TeamsFx CLI.

npm install -g @microsoft/teamsfx-cli

sudo npm install -g --unsafe-perm @microsoft/teamsfx-cli

Set up your Teams development tenant

A tenant is a space or a container for your organization in Teams, where you chat, share files, and run meetings. This space is also where you upload and test your app. Let's verify if you're ready to develop with the tenant.

Check for upload an app option

After creating your custom app, you must upload your app to Teams with the Upload a custom app option. Sign in to your Microsoft 365 account to check if this option is enabled.

The following steps help you verify if you can upload apps in Teams:

1. In the Teams client, select the Apps icon.

2. Select Manage your apps.

3. Select Upload an app.

4. Look for the option to Upload a custom app. If the option is visible, you can upload custom apps.

   

   Note

   If you don't find the option to upload a custom app, contact your Teams administrator.

Create a free Teams developer tenant (optional)

If you don't have a Teams developer account, join the Microsoft 365 developer program.

1. Go to the Microsoft 365 developer program.

2. Select Join Now and follow the onscreen instructions.

3. In the welcome screen, select Set up E5 subscription.

4. Set up your administrator account. After you finish, the following screen appears:

   

5. Sign in to Teams using the administrator account you just set up. Verify that you have the Upload a custom app option in Teams.

Build Proactive Message bot

• 7 minutes remaining

To build proactive message bot using Visual Studio Code, follow these steps:

1. Open Visual Studio Code.

2. Select the Teams Toolkit icon in the Visual Studio Code Activity Bar.

3. In the left pane, select View Samples.

   

4. From the list of samples, select Proactive Messaging. A prebuilt sample that's ready for debugging opens.

   

5. Select Create.

   

6. Select Default folder to store your project root folder in the default location.

   

   If you want to change the default location, perform the following steps:

   1. Select Browse.

      

   2. Select the location for project workspace.

   3. Select Select Folder.

      

   The proactive message bot is created in a few seconds and displays the proactive message bot successful dialog in the lower-right corner with the option to debug:

   :::

7. Select Run and Debug icon from the top-left corner.

8. Select Debug (Edge) or Debug (Chrome) from the dropdown list.

   

   When debugging is successful, you'll be prompted to upload the proactive message bot to Teams on your local machine.

9. From the dropdown next to Add, select Add to a team or Add to a chat or Add to a meeting.

   

10. Enter the name of a chat or team in the search field and select Set up a bot.

    

    The proactive message bot app is uploaded to Teams client and the following message appears in response to the message sent.

    

11. Copy and paste the URL or navigate to the URL in browser. A proactive hello message is triggered and shared in the chat.

    

12. Go to Teams. You'll receive a proactive hello message from the bot.

    

Take a tour of the source code

Teams Toolkit provides components for building an app. After creating the project, you can view the project folders and files in the EXPLORER area of Visual Studio Code.

The new project folder contains the following content:

Deploy your Proactive message bot

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You've learnt to build and run Teams app with proactive message bot capability. Let's deploy the first app with proactive message bot capability on Azure using Teams Toolkit.

Sign in to your Azure account

Use your account to access the Microsoft Azure portal and provision new cloud resources to support your app.

1. Open Visual Studio Code.

2. Open the project folder where you created the proactive message bot app.

3. Select the Teams Toolkit icon in the Visual Studio Code Activity Bar.

4. Select Sign in to Azure using your credentials.

   Tip

   If you have the AZURE ACCOUNT extension installed and are using the same account, you can skip this step.

   Your default web browser opens to let you sign in to the account.

5. Close the browser when prompted and return to Visual Studio Code.

The ACCOUNTS section of the sidebar shows the two accounts separately. It also lists the number of usable Azure subscriptions available to you. Ensure that you have at least one usable Azure subscription available. If not, sign out and use a different account.

Deploy your app to Azure

Deployment consists of two steps. First, necessary cloud resources are created (also known as provisioning). Then, your app's code is copied into the created cloud resources. For this tutorial, you'll deploy the bot app.

Complete challenge

• 3 minutes remaining

Did you come up with something like this?

Congratulations!

• 100% complete!

You've completed the scenario.

• You can send notifications on a daily basis or request for feedback from users on a periodic basis.
• You can handle throttling limits to avoid multiple notifications.