Installation
Microsoft Teams support is only available in our Scale tier. If you’d like to use our Teams integration to consolidate your support stack – you can book a demo now. We’d love to show you around.
Our Microsoft Teams integration lets you sync messages from selected Teams channels to Plain and respond directly to customers from the platform.
Prerequisites
For the integration you’ll need:
- A Teams account with at least one seat
- The installation of the app for Teams can only be performed by an admin as you may need to change settings to:
- Allow external apps to be installed
- Allow external users to be added as guests to be invited to Teams
Installation
Connect your Plain workspace to Teams
- In Plain, navigate to
Settings>Microsoft Teams. - Press
Connect to Teams. - Follow the instructions in the pop-up window to sign in to your Microsoft account, make sure you’ve selected the correct Microsoft account if you have multiple.
- Once the authorization is complete, you can download the Plain app for Teams (used in the next step).
- Optional: Authorize replies from your Teams profile to respond directly from Plain as yourself.
Add the Plain app to Teams
The method of installation here will depend on how Teams is set up for your organisation. If you are having trouble with setting this up, please get in touch so we can help!
Option 1 - Install via Teams App
- Navigate to the Apps tab
- Click Manage your apps
- Click Upload an app
- As a Teams admin, you should be able to Upload an app to your organization’s app catalogue and upload the .zip file you downloaded in the previous step
Option 2 - Install via the Teams Admin Dashboard
- In the left sidebar, navigate to Teams apps → Manage Apps
- Under Actions, click Upload new app
- Upload the .zip file you downloaded in the previous step
Using the Plain app in Microsoft Teams
The Plain app must be added to a Team and channel that allows guests where you can provide customer support. To start helping customers, you need to do a few things:
If the app was installed via the Teams admin dashboard, it can take upto 24 hours to appear in the Teams client
- Create a new Team in your Teams instance
- Create a new channel in the Team
- Add the Plain app to the Channel (see below)
- Invite guests to the channel as external guests
You must be the owner of the channel you want to add the Plain app to. Customers you are providing support to will be able to access this channel in your workspace. Currently, shared channels and B2B Direct connect channels are not supported.
Setting up the app:
How threads are created from Teams
You should now have a channel with the Plain app installed, with users and guests. The integration works as follows
- Only posts created by guests will create a new thread in Plain
- Reply messages to threads created by guests will be ingested by both users and guests
Responding to customers
To respond to customers, you can do so directly from the Plain app in Teams.
If the user has a personal Teams integration (see below) then the message will be sent as that user:
If the user does not have a personal Teams integration, we will send the message as the bot, impersonating the user, which will look like the below:
Authorize Teams users in Plain
Its recommended that anyone with a Teams seat follows the below steps to allow Plain to reply as their teams user. It also allows attributing any messages they send in the Teams channel to be associated with their Plain user.
To link a Teams account with a Plain user account, navigate to Settings > Microsoft Teams and click, Authorise replies to start the authorization flow.
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