How to Deploy the Teams Service App

Updated by Stephen Boss

Overview

The Teams Service app is a white-labeled application designed for deployment in your customers' environments. This app seamlessly integrates Messenger as an iframe into Microsoft Teams, allowing customers to interact with your service team for real-time updates on their tickets and threads—right where they work!

Key Features:

  • White-Labeled: Customize the app with your branding. Create as many branded applications as you need, each tailored to a specific customer—putting the power of customization in your hands! Click here to learn more about customizing your app's design.
  • Messenger Integration: Embed Messenger (chat) within Microsoft Teams as an iframe.
  • Connect with Your Customers, Where They Work: Allows customers to connect with their service team and receive real-time updates on their tickets and threads.
  • And More!

Deploying the Teams Service App

Preliminary Steps

  1. Customize Messenger and Teams App:
    • Ensure you have completed the Messenger setup and customized the Teams app to your liking.
  2. Deploy Chat to Your Team First:
    • Deploy the service app internally to help your team learn the platform and provide a testing environment before deploying to customers.
    • If you don’t use Teams or can't deploy internally, check our guide on deploying to a sandbox environment.

Deployment Process

Remember, You can create multiple branded apps, each tailored to a specific customer, giving you full customization control. This process can be repeated for all your Teams customers, taking about 3 minutes per customer once you're familiar with it.
  1. Open a separate browser session in incognito mode to ensure you sign into the correct Microsoft Teams environment.
  2. Sign in to the Thread Admin Panel and Navigate to the Clients tab.
  3. Click the Magnifying Glass icon to search for the company you want to deploy to, then select it.
  4. After selecting the client, navigate to the App Deployment tab, choose Microsoft Teams, and click Continue.
  5. Select the Teams app you want to deploy to the customer's Microsoft 365 environment, then click Continue.
  6. On the following screen, you will see two options:
    Email Invite: Use this option if you don’t have admin access to the customer's Teams environment. Send the link to an administrator in the Microsoft 365 tenant (the account must have email set up). They will receive an email guiding them through the deployment steps.
    Magic Link: Use this option if you have administrative access to the Microsoft 365 environment you are deploying to.
    This guide follows the Magic Link option. The email invite process is similar but involves the user receiving a link via email.
  7. Click "Copy link" next to the Magic Link and paste it into a new tab in your current incognito browser session.
  8. When you navigate to the Magic Link, you'll be prompted to authenticate with an Administrator account in the customer's Microsoft 365 tenant. Enter the username for that account and click Next.
  9. Enter the password and complete any required MFA (multi-factor authentication).
    If you aren't already signed into Thread in your browser session, clicking on the Magic Link may prompt you to sign in to Thread before redirecting to the Microsoft login. Ensure you have admin access in Thread for this step to work. Note that the email link does not require Thread access.
  10. You will be prompted to grant permissions for the bot. Click Accept.
  11. If this step was successful, you should see a confirmation screen similar to the one below:
  12. Click the Download App link to download the custom Teams app that you are deploying to this customer.
  13. Navigate to the Teams Admin Center (https://admin.teams.microsoft.com) -> Teams apps -> Manage apps.
  14. Under the "Actions" dropdown in the top-right, click "Upload new app".
  15. Click Upload and in the file browser pop-up select the custom teams app .zip file you downloaded in step 12, then click Open.
  16. Now that the zip has been uploaded, you will want to set who in the tenant has access to the app. Navigate to Teams apps -> Setup policies.
  17. Click Global (Org-wide default).
    The Global policy will apply to all users in the environment, but if you want to limit who in your customer's environment can use and interact with the application, you can set up your own policy assignment here. Follow our guide on How to roll out the Teams Service app to specific users here.
  18. Under the Installed apps section, click the Add apps button
  19. An Add installed apps sidebar will appear. Search for the app based on the Teams app name you defined when building your custom teams app. Find the app, click Add and Add again at the bottom of the panel.
    To identify the name of your custom app, navigate to the Thread Admin panel (Messenger -> Teams Apps -> Edit -> Teams app name). The Teams app name is what you want to search for.
  20. Under the Pinned apps section, click the + Add apps button.
  21. Search for the app based on the Teams app name you defined when building your custom teams app. Find the app, click Add and Add again at the bottom of the panel.
  22. You should see the app under Pinned apps. If you want the app to feature prominently in your users Teams, you can move it up or down and click Save when done.
  23. Congrats you are all set up with your Teams app in your customer's Microsoft 365 tenant! After a short wait period, they should be ready to start using Messenger!
    It may take time for the app to show up in users' Teams environment, please reboot and/or allow up to 24 hours for the changes you just made to take effect.

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