Your First No Code Bot for Microsoft Teams - Part 1 #MicrosoftTeams #MsTeams

Microsoft Teams is a chat-based collaboration tool that is part of the Office 365 suite of services. Teams enables local and co-workers to work together and collaborate through a common work-space, using features such as team chat, one-on-one chat and document collaboration.

One way for people to interact with Microsoft Teams is through Bots.  Most non programmers think creating a Bot for Teams/Skype/Facebook etc is beyond their capability.  To be honest creating a Bot with the Bot Framework is not hello world, it's not something a user with no programming experience is going to do easily.  Enter Microsoft's Q and A maker.

The idea behind the Q and A maker is to take an existing knowledge-base website, and turn it into a responsive Bot you can interact with in your favorite applications.  There are 2 ways to get started with it, you can have it try to import a website and build the questions or answers.  This doesn't work all that well in my experience.  The 2nd way is to create question and answer pairs in the portal, retrain, and publish changes, which will flow instantly into your Bot.

Step 1.  Go to the website and sign in.

https://qnamaker.ai

Step 2.  Create a service.

Step 3.  Enter some questions and answers

When you are done click "Save and Retrain", then click "Publish".  Next week I'll show you how to create the actual Bot in Azure and select the QandAMaker template, which will do all the coding for you, and have your bot up and running in less than a minute.

Doug Routledge Teams, Skype for Business, SQL, Exchange, UC, Full Stack Developer Doug is the co-found of Bridge Communications, and also leads the development team. Bridge Communications