Role-based bot ownership with the Contributor role
AtBot admin gives you the ability to assign an owner to the various bots created in your organization. Why is this important? You create a bot, you get to decide how it works and not have to worry about other bot creating colleagues making unwanted changes to it — unless you as an owner give them permission.
With the Contributor role in AtBot, you can set certain users as owners of bots and categories, which means they can only affect and change the bots and skills that they own.
The AtBot administrator continues to have access to all bots and all skills, but ownership of individual bots becomes compartmentalized. This is a familiar feature to those who are used to the role-based permissions we have in Active Directory, Office 365, SharePoint, and many other Microsoft apps and services.
Here’s a video overview to get you going, or feel free to continue reading for specific instructions.
Contributor list
AtBot uses a central contributor list to track all the users who can be assigned as a contributor to a bot or category. This helps keep your list small and easy to work with when assigning roles. Promote a user to Contributor level before assigning them ownership of any bots or categories.
To add a new contributor, go to the Admin Portal > Tenant Management > Contributors. Click + Add Contributor and select a user. You can now assign this user to own bots and categories.
Contributors do not need to be licensed users to own a bot, but they do need to be licensed to use (even test) a bot.
Add a Contributor to a bot
Once you’re ready to assign ownership of a bot to your new Contributor, go to the Admin Portal > Bot Management > Enterprise Bots or Web Bots (depending on which type of bot you’re using) > [Bot Name], then add your Contributor in the Contributors field and click Save Bot in the lower-right corner of the page. Remember, if you haven’t added your user to the Contributors list, you won’t see them as an option.
Add a Contributor to a category
Once you’re ready to assign ownership of a category to your new Contributor, go to the Admin Portal > Skill Management > Categories > [Category Name], then add your Contributor in the Contributors field and click Update Category in the lower-right corner of the page. Remember, if you haven’t added your user to the Contributors list, you won’t see them as an option.
Bringing it all together
Most likely you’ll be assigning the same person (or group of people) as owners of both a bot and its categories. When the new Contributors open the list of categories, shared skills, and bots in the AtBot Admin Portal, they’ll only see the ones they have access to.
Now a group of owners from HR can own the HR bot and its category without the risk of them messing around with the Finance bot and the Finance category. It’s another level of protection to ensure your bot ecosystem remains robust, safe, and future-proof.
One additional thing to note is that if you author AtBot skills in Power Automate and you’re a Contributor on a bot or category (which means you have non-administrator access to the Admin Portal), you’ll still be able to see your skills in the Shared Skills list, regardless of whether you’re a Contributor on its categories. That said, it is not possible to set Contributors on individual skills.
AtBot brings AI within reach
AtBot is the premiere bot-as-a-service solution for the Microsoft cloud. Built completely within Azure, AtBot is your out-of-the-box, easy-to-configure bot for Teams, SharePoint, or the web. Teach AtBot tasks using Power Automate, make him your corporate source of knowledge with QnA Maker, help him understand almost anything your colleagues could ask thanks to LUIS, and manage his features with the AtBot Admin Portal. Get going with AtBot Free or start your free trial of AtBot Premium today.
