I am working on a small project trying to control some steps of a workflow in a web application using MS teams. My idea is to use R as an intermediate step between the application (which has a number of API endpoints I can call from R) and Microsoft Teams chats (or channels). Users would then use a set of keywords in the chat to lead to an action in the application. For example they might use "publish ABC-123" in a specific chat and this would lead to the application publishing document ABC-123 somewhere via R which would orchestrate everything.
I have a couple of ideas but there are drawbacks:
- I thought originally about using microsoft365r. We have an app registered in Microsoft 365 which would allow us to monitor a specific chat for messages that trigger actions in R. The problem with this approach is that we would need to have the R code running and checking MS Teams every couple of minutes. It is certainly doable, but not very elegant.
- Another option could be setting up a plumber API and an outgoing webhook in MS Teams. This seems like the ideal way to do it, but webhooks in MS Teams require https and as far as I understand this is not straightforward to implement in plumber.
I would appreciate any ideas on how to do this. I know I am not very specific, but mostly looking for high level pointers of what I could look at. Many thanks!
You actually have a bunch of options for this:
Create a bot directly in code, e.g. per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/bots/what-are-bots . There's a bit of a learning curve of course, and it depends on whether you have development skills outside of r, e.g. python, .net, whatever. The bot would then call your code as needed.
Create a no-code bot using Power Virtual Agents. This is the equivalent, for bots, of Power Apps or Power Automate, if you're familiar with those.
Create a workflow, either in Power Automate or Azure Logic Apps, that can listen for and respond to messages. This is kind of similar to a bot, but with finer scope (and therefore less capability). If you want it to call out to your app, e.g. to an endpoint, you'd need a Premium Connecter for Power Automate, or you can use an Azure Logic App directly (uses the same engine, but the pricing model is different for these and Power Automate is a little easier to work with.
Outgoing webhook - you can implement these as standalone, but actually from your use case it sounds like a bot would be better anyway, and it's kind of what you need to build to make this kind of webhook work properly anyway.