AtBot November 2018 Update
November is a big month for AtBot, with two major enhancements to the platform and one minor enhancement to the functionality of bots served up over Direct Line.
Admin Portal Contributor Role
The first major enhancement is the introduction of the Contributor role within the AtBot Admin Portal. This role can be assigned to any user within your organization and will give them controlled access to only see and configure their own bots.
This update greatly increases the scale to which a large organization can utilize the AtBot platform. For detailed information, see the documentation about the Admin Portal Permissions
Adaptive Card Templates
The second major enhancement is a robust and intuitive system for integrating Adaptive Cards into your bots. An Adaptive Card is a UI component that can be used in your chat experience to provide stylized display as well as custom, multi-input forms.
The Adaptive Card designer that is used was developed by Microsoft and integrated — through a cooperative effort — into the AtBot Admin Portal. Once designed, these templates are then usable as cards to send to the user in your AtBot Skills in Power Automate.
At the time of this writing, the Power Automate actions supporting Adaptive Cards were only available in the Preview (First Release) Power Automate Environment. These actions are scheduled to be deployed across all regions by November 23, 2018.
New Power Automate Actions
Bot Scope in Direct Line
One minor update was made to allow the embed of a Direct Line bot to pass context information to any Skill initialization (Power Automate). This means that you can include information like what page the bot is on, what record in Dynamics they are looking at, etc.
See Test & Embed at the bottom of your custom bot page to see how this is implemented. Basically, you will implement a bot scope object that is pushed with all requests.
In Power Automate, you will see the Bot Scope property available as returned properties in all AtBot Logic triggers.
