Teams is a great way to share information within specific teams and we’ve been playing with it ourselves to better keep everyone in the loop with the latest updates from projects. Recently we’ve hooked up IT Glue workflows so that they post updates into teams channels. It’s been really useful to get visibility on all those things happening on the helpdesk so wanted to share with you how to set it up.
In this example i’m going to show you how to post an update into a Team channel when a domain is about to expire. Pretty simple thing but you can expand on this to include updates for new user guides that get created and just about anything else that triggers an event in IT Glue.
First we need to enable external apps to connect into Teams. Log into the Office 365 admin portal:
https://portal.office.com/AdminPortal
Navigate to Settings, Services & add-ins then Microsoft Teams.
Expand Apps and switch on ‘Allow external apps in Microsoft Teams’
Now lets create a new channel where we are going to post IT glue updates. You can use any existing channel you wish but for this example i’m going to keep everything in a separate channel.
Click on the three dot menu on any Team and click Add channel.
Give the channel a name and click Add.
Now click on the three dots for the channel and click on Connectors.
Connectors are where you can configure other applications to connect into your team channels. Lots of useful stuff in here but we need an Incoming Web hook. Search for web hook and click Configure.
Here we give the connector a name and specify a logo. This makes it easy to identify it later if you need to reconfigure the settings.
Next you will need to save the webhook URL for this new channel connector. We need to enter this into IT glue later and allows it to post updates to this specific channel connector. Save the URL and click Done.
Now lets configure the IT Glue side. Log in as an administrator Click on Account then Workflows.
Click New to create a new workflow.
In this example we are going to select a ‘Domain Expiration’ trigger but you can choose a Document, password update and SSL Expiration trigger to name a few. There are lots of different triggers to play with but basically when one of these events is triggered in IT Glue it will fire an update to the Teams connector.
Click Next once you have selected the trigger.
Next give the trigger a name and specify the number of days before the domain expires before this event will fire. Here I select 15 days and also specify a notification failure email address just in case there is a problem with the workflow.
Next we specify what happens when the trigger fires. We select a webhook and click Next.
Next we need to paste in the webhook URL we saved earlier from Teams.
The JSON payload allows you to define what text is pushed into Teams. Here a simple message stating that the Domain X for organisation X will expire in X days.
Use the help link to see a list of available variables you can use.
Once you have set your Action click Next.
Now you can test the action to check it all looks correct and once happy click Finish.
Now every time the IT Glue event fires it will call the Teams webhook and post the information into the channel!
Here you can see I’ve been playing with a number of document update alerts. Everyone in the team now has better visibility of things that are happening within IT glue.
Summary
Linking IT Glue to Teams is a great way to keep everyone in your Team update with the latest documents that have been written or alert them to up and coming domain or SSL certificate expiration’s.
