Bring Your Agent to Teams
microsoft.github.io
microsoft.github.io
No, I assure you, we do not. Nobody wants to live in hell. Even at my current company, we are mandated solely to use Teams for meetings. But nobody uses it for chat.
Thankfully we have Slack to save us from that hell. Even if giphy is disabled because it might have R rated content whatever the hell that means.
I notice that ( still goes into emoji mode though.
So, the worst of both worlds. I should not be surprised. (And I am not.)
I’m in Linux with portal for teams (electron app)… and it’s fine. Like, we moved to it from slack and I just don’t see much of a difference. I type stuff, and people see it. I set up a call and people join, we talk.
What is it that is so broken, or is it just cool to hate?
I wish... I'm on Windows 11 Enterprise with corporate Teams, definitely 100% Microsoft approved combination and:
- on one channel my message never got sent, while on another channel it does work
- sometimes when I scrolled up the old messages doesn't show up, with a 'message removed by organization retention policy' text.. but those are messages from yesterday and sometimes when I restarted Teams it shows up again.. sometime it doesn't but when I opened web Teams it does show up
- sometime I can't connect to Teams for no reason, restarting Teams and computer doesn't help either, went to the IT helpdesk and they spent several minutes redoing what I did until they just googled it and delete the cookies or something
I also used slack and from my perspective its 100% reliable at delivering text messages
Slack is definitely better but I have had issues with message delivery and things especially across the "native" desktop application and the mobile app.
Ventrilo, teamspeak, discord, mumble, skype, teams, slack
And id say teams are okayish, nothing wrong about them
Discord is #1
On Slack I can just press command - <number> and I'm switching between client Slack accounts.
On Teams? Nope. Nope. Nope.
And since you can actually have a chat window open from a different tenant, there’s no reason why they should have you do this ridiculous dance.
If teams wasn’t so god-awful slow, and with an interface jumping around all the time, people would probably complain much less of having to select something in a dropdown.
What? https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/nonprofittechies/ho...
> Click the name of the org you want to switch to. Teams will reload in that environment.
or
> Open teams.microsoft.com in a browser for one org while using the desktop app for another.
How convenient! To check messages in a client Teams I just have to RELOAD THE WHOLE APPLICATION. Or just log in via multiple separate browsers or cereate a full-ass browser profile for each organisation.
That's a weee bit harder than hitting command-2...
It's a garbage fire, people only use it because it's "free" if you have a M365 subscription for the company, not because it's in any way good.
> To check messages in a client Teams I just have to RELOAD THE WHOLE APPLICATION
lol Where are you reading "reload the whole application"? It's literally a dropdown menu in the Teams application. It switches the tenant.
> That's a weee bit harder than hitting command-2...
Oh my god, clicking a single dropdown isn't a "weee bit harder". You're acting psychotic about this.
It cannot connect to two environments at the same time, it basically has to restart from scratch to swap environments. Whether it’s a drop down or not is irrelevant.
Their official instructions say “just use multiple browser profiles”. Not very multi-tenant of them.
Which is actually all the more infuriating to my eyes: this whole reload the app crap is obviously not necessary!
Sometimes I go to join a meeting and the join button is disabled, I have to get someone else to request me to join.
Occasionally my calendar just shows empty, lol.
Chat mostly works fine but meetings are weird.
Ever been forced to use production software with memory leaks in a corporate environment?
10s of thousands of employees needing to restart their computers every few hours or to live with sloggish computers, ruining so many billable hours, over a few years (this is only 1 company).
Hell, I still keep my restart teams.bat I build to single click kill/restart the process cause of the trauma received from the time spent telling everyone why their laptops were unusable without a reboot (or prices restart) during choppy voice and video calls..
It also doesn't help whatsoever that Microsoft did this a bunch of times over the years too with Lync, Communicator, skype, skype for business, MSN messenger (not in chronological order)...
MS Teams also updates every few days. A lot of it feels like someone is flinging features to the wall and see what sticks, but a lot of it is also just hoping that you get a working chat client that day.
You'd think their company would be able to retain some experience about relaunching a new cannabalistic product but no, this latest attempt to destroy a competitor with Teams has been the most painful out of them all.
Hate doesn't begin to explain my special relationship with this piece of software.
I suppose this is probably why MS seems intent on killing the app versions à la “New Outlook” and etc.
The most painful thing I can think of with Teams in years of Linux use has been I can’t upload more than 10 things at once, and notifications of meetings could be better.
This is just like the hate for paid databases, operating systems and big clouds. Easy targets that seem politically convenient to attack on statistical grounds ("I think most people here might agree with me"). It's ultimately childish behavior. Adults explore nuance and find compromise between competing ideas. I find myself constantly defending the proverbial empire around here because of the intense tribalism. If we were focused more on the customer and doing a good job, half of this nonsense would disappear overnight.
Microsoft makes some of the best software on earth. Teams is certainly not an example of that (yet), but it's also not the worst thing they've done. Not even close.
> No, I assure you, we do not
This absolutism is tiring. I can assure you there are plenty of companies who use teams as their sole messaging platform. My company uses slack, teams, and zoom. Which one you use the most depends on the person or the team they are on. (Although zoom is being phased out to the chagrin of some folks).
Teams isn't without it's issues, it's annoyingly slow, and startup takes so long I have missed a meeting or two because of it. But, the conferencing experience is pretty decent, and I think you're just being contrarian for the sake of it.
What is really tiring is using Teams as a tool to embed other websites. Because that's what "apps" and most other functionalities are.
Teams is just a very slow web browser with the worst possible way to manage bookmarks and tabs.
You clearly don't have an organization fully onboarded to Teams, as you yourself describe. You use it as a conferencing tool. When you add all the other bloat Teams promotes it becomes a burden that makes me want to come back to sorting thousands of emails with outlook rules.
Clearly? Because they don't feel as passionate about a chat app as you? That's your conclusion from that statement?
> Teams is just a very slow web browser with the worst possible way to manage bookmarks and tabs.
I honestly don't even know what this means. Do you have any experience onboarding a full organization? It sounds like you're just lifting stuff from HN.
> When you add all the other bloat Teams promotes
I've been managing a Teams organization for over 6 years now and the only issue we have is when people are on too many teams. And by too many, I mean 100s of Teams at once. We're a healthcare provider that auto-creates teams for each patient we see and assigns people to them and when managers want to be on all teams, it becomes difficult to use.
If you don't have the skills to manage it, maybe you should step let someone with more experience do it for you.
As for second - please don't assume who I am and what I do. I work with Teams daily in large org (>500k people). As a user. And as a user I see that I have plenty of apps integrated. It's absolutely idiotic how - they just take away my ability to use chat. Apps are pushed as tabs in group chat, as tabs in Teams teams (It's crazy that this is a thing, it's even worse translated), as icons in menu... And all of them take over the screen so I can't look at a file and chat at the same time. It's possible to open new windows, but you have to plan that in advance. And you can't do that when you have hundreds of chats and groups. And I do have a lot of them in such org, and all of them are large group chats. You can't just have a stable window with just text content. That's what I mean - teams enforces taking over the whole ui to have a look at something, then runs a huge webapp for me to look at it. And doesn't make it easy to come back to your previous context.
> If you don't have the skills to manage it (...)
Again, I don't know what do you reply to. I don't manage teams. I use it. And please don't try to insult like that, it's not cool, especially when you can't even direct your comments to the correct person. I talk of UI, you talk of managing teams as an operator... Maybe that's a teams habit of loosing track of the context, huh?
This sounds exhausting. This is the reason everyone should use one.
My single biggest pet peeve, how it handles chats from meetings when you are not in the meeting. I have lost so many chats (or never got responses) because they were hidden in meeting chats that for some reason don't appear in your normal chat list.
Sure Slack had its own issues, but I don't remember ever feeling like I was actively fighting it and loosing.
Why do I have to create a weird "workflow" to receive webhooks in a chat channel? Why does it have such complicated ownership permissions? Why is it automatically deleted if it doesn't see "enough" use? Why do I need to send the message in some weird "adaptive card" format - for which there are barely any ready-made libraries? Heck, why can't I create a new chat channel on my own, but need to invite three other people into it? Why does chat have a completely separate "channels" functionality which act more like a forum?
Please, stop trying to reinvent the wheel! Just do exactly what all your competitors are doing and I'd be so much better. My company is already stuck with Teams due to M365 licensing, there is no need to make it "unique".
Compare to a sad websocket that just stays connected, you receive everything in order and you don't need an harness with tunnels every time you want to test something in dev.
Create the webhook in Microsoft Flow and connect it to Teams. You get observability and monitoring out-of-the-box.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/use-the-api
I've been using it recently and aside from some weirdness around permissions, it's decent.
If you need a CLI wrapper I'm sure an agent could make it for you in an hour or so.
The company I'm at has been been building call analytics for Teams since 2021 (QueueMetrics Live). A long-time customer migrated their entire phone system to Teams during the pandemic and asked my boss if we could follow them there. We said "in principle, yes": the Graph API exposes telephony events, so it seemed doable.
It was doable. It was also far harder than anybody expected. The Graph API gives you raw call records, but it doesn't model concepts like "wait time in queue" or "lost call" or "failed agent attempt", and whet it does, nowhere it written HOW. You have to reconstruct those from sequences of low-level events. We ended up building the whole processing pipeline in Elixir because we needed to handle the real-time stream reliably at scale. After a long beta and a few million calls processed, we got to GA. I was dabbling in Elixir at the time, I put it on my CV, and it was noted. In a sense, I owe Teams my current job (though I ended up on a different team, so I'm mostly referring coffee-mug lore here).
We set out to track queues and auto-attendants (that's our bread and butter from the Asterisk world), but we discovered we were seeing everything — inbound, outbound, Teams-to-Teams, even calls with other companies with their internal ids. You can get a complete picture of someone's telephony activity regardless of whether they work in a contact center or just use Teams as their phone. Most of the boring config (names, groups, codes) comes straight from Graph, which is nice.
Like it or not, a lot of enterprises are quietly moving their entire communications (including telephony) to Teams. When they do, they lose the monitoring and analytics they had with their old PBX. That's a real gap, and the Graph API — despite its limitations — gives you something to fill it. But I have a feeling that "3 lines of code" won't cut it. :-)
It's nice that they start the post with some sarcasm
I remember when we started working on our teams bot in 2023, Microsoft announced that they will stop supporting Python for the teams sdk, which felt super short sighted. Eventually they silently picked it up again and the old sdk never stopped working.
Kudos for turning it around. I believe it'll last this time as AI agents in communication tools are something a lot of people want. and unlike pre LLM chatbots and agents, they are so much more useful now.
Nowadays with all our massively more powerful links (Gb vs Kb) but packet switched, we often end up resorting to a form of half duplex radio protocol. That's just voice, let alone video.
That's what you get when you abrogate your comms to a hyper scaler that will never scale to the point of what you would like because it will damage profits upstream.
Whilst your end will be a phone or laptop or whatever - with gobs of capacity, the hyper scaler bit will be woefully under powered for your call but just enough to keep comms going and your subscription dumping cash into the coffers.
You end up re-inventing how to talk to someone over a satellite link in the 1970-80s ... in 2026! I (UK, 55 y/o) can clearly remember my parents telling me how to talk to great aunt Maye in Australia on the blower. Nowadays we have the internet to packet switch instead of circuit switch which is generally capable of ~10-50ms latency nearly anywhere, where mostly copper is involved. However call quality seems to be shit!
Even circuit switched networks are not often below 30ms, to hit that you'd need to make a local phone call on a fully analog circuit.
You cannot use terms such as "PCMU and PCMA voice frames are 20ms or 40ms" because that makes no sense whatsoever. PCMU and PCMA are protocols that traverse a network - they do not define it.
I'm old enough to have used circuit switched telephony for some years and perhaps you are too. I recall it as being largely latency free, in that a call never sounded weird unless a satellite was involved, in which case the call costs were horrific and you ended up doing a sort of informal form of radio protocol to talk, which generally ended up in a rather scrambled mess of a conversation.
I can remember amassing a stack of 20 10p coins and calling my mum from the UK to West Germany in the '80s and having to feed the coins faster than I could talk. I sent an aerogram later.
The modern experience is not perfect but audio is usually far better than the 70's and 80's, video is often an option, and in general the experience is orders of magnitude cheaper.
I think around £5 per minute or more. A quick search found this: https://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/tia/576_image.html#Table%... so my memory is not too far off and that is the other way. Bear in mind that a squid (£1) was worth rather more in the '70s, than now.
A circuit switched call in the '70s - '90s (at least) within the UK was nigh on perfect. There was no noticeable latency. Call quality was way better than a modern Teams or Zoom call (with no video). Your £500 laptop has shit microphones and speakers but you do insist on not using them like a "dog and bone" but instead as a "comms solution".
Teams / IDE / Harnass / Router / Agent
Apparently not.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/11/21/365509503/th...
gtfo.. this can't possibly be written by claude, someone thinks this!
… and Teams is where it will stay! Microsoft’s piss-poor integrability across its productivity suite is the single biggest reason agentic AI will fail to deliver its promised productivity benefits. You probably could build an agent to do a lot of people’s jobs, provided it had unfettered access to Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PPT. But I can’t think of an organization who would want to grant that access today, and even if they wanted to, the solution here is to expose a self-managed HTTP endpoint for all your Teams traffic? Seriously?
I started like everybody else trying to do simple things via Whatsapp and Slack. Terrible experience. Both systems are pretty locked down and very inflexible and the OpenClaw integration is very limited. You need a phone number for each user in Whatsapp and if you don't have an extra one, you basically end up chatting with yourself. With Slack you end up in permission hell. And their UI for editing permissions is terrible. I never quite managed to make this work.
With Matrix, the experience massively improved. I self host it and I got codex to generate me a working setup that has been running on a cheap vm for a few weeks now. Backups and everything. Hooking that up to OpenClaw was pretty straightforward. You just get a user/password and it gets an access token and then you are good to go to do whatever via the REST API and CLI. So, the OpenClaw integration worked on the first try for me.
Then I had a nice idea and took this to the next level: I gave codex access to my vms with OpenClaw and Matrix stack (Synapse & Element) and I made it create an OpenClaw Admin agent for me, with its own matrix admin user. And then I "taught" it to create more rooms, agents, and bot users for me.
Now I can prompt "create an agent called Foo" via matrix and it will invite me and the rest of our team to the new room. And a minute later I can be chatting to my new agent via a freshly created bot user and model of my choice. Super simple.
We actually ditched Slack a week into this experiment. Because obviously I got the Admin agent to also invite the rest of the team to these rooms and everybody started engaging with agents. We made the admin agent recreate our dozens of slack channels we had as rooms from a screenshot. Migrating content from Slack is a bit meh so we just just skipped that. But Slack in general is a bit meh these days so we don't really miss it.
MS seems to be catching on to this with Teams. I still don't like it. But providing an SDK for it is the smart move. It's essential to enable doing stuff like this.
Is OpenClaw useful? It can be. But you need to solve a lot of plumbing issues like this. Getting the basic plumbing out of the way for setting up new agents with communication channels is a nice first step. We are currently experimenting with all sorts of simple use cases currently. They all require setting up a dedicated agent and having OpenClaw do that for us is both nice as a demo and something we now use a lot.