How to build a chatbot for Microsoft Teams, Part 1: Create a MS Teams account

Contents

• Why this and not jumping into coding?
• Create and Setup the Office 365 account (This is abbreviated by Microsoft as “O365” in all their documentation online)
• Create and Setup the first actual test user account within the O365 account

Why this and not jumping into code?

We write software in the open-source world against other extremely “open systems”. Writing software that works with Microsoft is a much more involved process from the start.

This article goes over the “real step 1” of working with Microsoft: actually signing up for a developer account.

Creating an account to hold the licenses and another account for actual testing

We have to create an account that has all the test licenses available, so we can create a test user account that will allow us to login to MS Teams. Read that again: you have to create an account to get issued licenses and then create a user account from that.

When contacting anyone on the Microsoft Teams for help, they will direct you to the following link (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/overview) to get started. You can use that document to follow along with if you want.

If you want to develop a bot for MS Teams I’d say this documentation goes out-of-date quickly and is not correct at giving you the details to get you up and going quick, which brings us to this article.

1. Create and Setup the Office 365 account

First, you need to signup for an account that holds all the ‘licenses’ that you’re going to need to use. (For the record, there is no equivalent to this when developing a bot for Slack, you just signup for an account and you start setting up your bot). The Microsoft Documentation calls this part, “sign up for the O365 developer program”.

Step 1: Sign up for a Developer Account, to hold all your licenses

The link is https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev-program , clicking that you will be able to “Join Now”. So go do that now.

Create account button

Verify the account you just signed up for

Microsoft is going to email a verification email, it should/will have a few numbers in it, so you’ll want to go check your email and then enter that number to move on

Update your first and last name in your profile

..because Microsoft hasn’t fixed this buggy webpage bullshit of theirs yet as of this writing..

The error.

This is a bug apparently at the moment in Microsoft’s website. This messed me up for a few minutes. The screenshot below will show an error message saying “Please add your first and last name to your Microsoft Account”.

Update your name in your Profile

The fix, is to navigate up to your account, enter your information and then LOG OUT AND RE-LOG BACK IN to https://developer.microsoft.com

Now you can proceed!

Actually “Join” the developer program, since that hasn’t happened yet

Once you get through the hoops of just signing up and entering your First and Last name, you can finally join the developer program. There are a few screens that are basically just collecting data to understand your business so Microsoft can market everything they think you’ll need (this is why they are the most profitable software company in the world).

Click the “Join Now” button to start the process

And then, fill out your company information

Enter your company name and region

and after that, fill out a little questionnaire

Questionnaire for better targeted marketing Microsoft can send you

Hurray, you’re done with that part, but you’re not done yet creating an account. The next screenshot shows you need to go ahead and click “Close” and then move on to setting up the “subscription”. This is the license part and probably where everyone gets messed up trying to build a bot.

Finish that part

2. Create and Setup the first actual test user account within the O365 account

This is the part that messed me up. This probably stops a lot of other developers that have never developed for Microsoft. Microsoft requires all these licenses and jazz, so this account manages those licenses.

Below, we fill out the information for the Administrator user of this entire account. This Administrator user will be able to create other test users (which we will need to, for testing) etc…

Take note of the user account name (highlighted in red). This is what you’ll use to login to the services with. It’s created based off the username you enter and the domain you’re setting up.

When you create more users later on to test with for this domain, they will have the suffix as below (example: SomeNewUser1@sofetchblogpost.onmicrosoft.com, SomeNewUser2@sofetchblogpost.onmicrosoft.com, etc…)

Create the Administrator user (the first user) for your Organization

Once you enter that information, go to the next step to verify your account again by using their 2-Factor Authentication.

Setup your actual subscription

Now that you’ve set up the subscription and first user, you need to setup the subscription itself, so you have to click on the “Go to your subscription” link

Go to your subscription now

And then once you get through all the windows telling you about the products, and you land on your dashboard, click on “All Apps” to access Teams. (The blurred out icon is Teams, but I accidentally clicked on it before taking the screenshot for this post, so now it’s on my dashboard).

Once you see all the available apps, click on “Teams”, like below

Teams! Yay!

You’re now setup on Teams with a developer account!

Finally.

Finally, logging into Teams

You can signout if you want. But now that you have activated teams, you can go straight to MS Teams in your browser by going to https://teams.microsoft.com

Read Part 2! (Coming soon)

Part 2 will show how to setup MS Teams to start using a bot you are building