MS Teams Bridge

Communicating and collaborating with MS Teams users is complicated because you must either install MS Teams or rely on email communication. More tools equals more data silos. Sometimes, it’s difficult to remember where a specific conversation thread can be found. Also, the project’s leadership will want a bird’s-eye view of everything that is going on. However, there is no unified view of how the project is progressing if you communicate about it in multiple places across Rocket.Chat and MS Teams. You may also occasionally fail to communicate something from one tool to another, causing information to fall through the cracks. 

‍

Furthermore, you must constantly juggle tools in order to complete tasks. Assuming you are using Rocket.Chat for internal communication and MS Teams for external communication, you will find yourself switching tools to communicate with internal teams and external collaborators about a single topic. Needless to say, context switching is the number one drainer of productivity.

‍

Integrating Rocket.Chat with MS Teams Bridge enables your business to embrace message interoperability by connecting users and channels on both platforms and allowing them to send messages from their preferred app. Messaging should be quick, reliable and seamless regardless of which app you use. Keep work connected without having to think about which app to use for communicating. Embrace cross-platform messaging if you want to stay at the forefront of communication with your potential prospects and customers who use MS Teams. It makes it simple to communicate with customers and share information across both platforms. 

Note: Microsoft has chosen to rebrand the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and given it a fresh new name - Microsoft Entra ID. To learn more about this exciting change, be sure to check out the official announcement from Microsoft.

This integration supports:

• Rich interactions such as DMs, emojis, embedded graphics, links, and files
• Messaging options such as editing and deleting 
• Creating discussions and group chat

‍

Refer to our technical documentation for a step-by-step guide on how to install the app and start collaborating with MS Teams users.

‍

Note: The app will only work in Rocket.Chat 6.1 and later versions. It was built in partnership with Yuquin Bin through the GSoC 2022 program.

‍

API limitation

The MS Teams Bridge app is available for free. You can exchange up to 500 messages per month across Rocket.Chat and MS Teams, at no additional cost. Please keep in mind that if you surpass this limit, you will no longer be able to exchange messages between Rocket.Chat and MS Teams.

If you intend to exchange more than 500 messages, please read the following (applicable only to MS Teams users): 

‍

• Verify if the API being accessed is metered, because MS Teams offers APIs that are free with user subscription license, as well as metered APIs and services. Metered APIs will be billed based on API consumption. Make sure you understand the metering unit so you can estimate the costs associated with a specific API.  In this case, there is a seeded capacity of 500 messages per month. Once you exceed this limit, messages can still be sent from Rocket.Chat, but the messages sent from MS Teams will not be reflected in Rocket.Chat. Read the documentation to learn more about the pricing models and licensing requirements. 
• To proactively monitor the number of messages exchanged, create a budget in the Azure portal to keep tabs on the number of messages sent against the threshold. To ensure you stay well within the organizational spending limit, configure alerts depending on the budget threshold — in this situation, your organizational spending limit is 500 messages per month. Email notifications will be sent if the budget threshold is exceeded. For a step-by-step guide on creating and managing Azure budgets, refer to MS Teams technical documentation.  

‍