Installing the MS Teams Integration

To use the Reward Gateway & MS Teams integration, your company must be a Reward Gateway customer and provide our benefits technology to your employees or members. If you’d like to offer your employees exclusive benefits and engagement products, then click here to find out more!

Setting up the Connect+ integration in Microsoft Teams is a great way to make it easy for your users to send recognition messages within a communication channel they are already using daily! 

NOTE: the Microsoft Teams integration requires clients to have the Social Wall enabled on their platform. Clients who do not have this feature enabled will not be able to send recognition through Microsoft Teams.

What would installing the MS Teams Integration do?

• Give Reward Gateway the capability to send recognition alerts and blog posts to a channel of your choice as they happen on your platform
• Allows Reward Gateway to install a bot (Connect+ Bot) within your Microsoft Teams instance which your users can use to send out recognition to other users within your programme

Installation Guide

To begin, access your Reward Gateway programme's administration section (Reward Manager). Once logged into Reward Manager, you will need to access the Integration Dashboard section (Look for Integrations on the left sidebar panel). Here you should see a list of available integrations, so go ahead and scroll down to the FEEDS AND SHARING section, then pick Microsoft Teams. This will begin the setup process. 

Step 1: Give your new integration a name

Make sure to name it something you can identify with later.

Step 2: Authorize your Microsoft Access

For Reward Gateway to be able to send messages to Microsoft Teams and to allow the installation of the bot, you must link your Microsoft Azure Tenant to your Reward Gateway programme. Please note that this may require Administration privileges on your Microsoft Tenancy.

If you do have the necessary permissions, please go ahead and click on the Authorize Microsoft Teams button as shown on the screen.

This will redirect you to an Admin Consent screen within Microsoft that you must grant access to. The scopes requested by Reward Gateway to install the integration are listed below.

AppCatalog.Read.All - Allows Reward Gateway to access the App Catalog to verify that the Connect+ Bot is currently not installed.
Channel.ReadBasic.All - Allows Reward Gateway to read a list of channels needed during the integration setup
ChannelMessage.Send - Allows Reward Gateway to send a message in a channel (Recognition posts)
offline_access - Allows Reward Gateway access to the information previously granted but offline. This is needed so the Administrator does not have to keep re-authorising app each time to make changes within their Reward Manager setup.
openid - Allows Reward Gateway to sign in to the app with your work or school account and allows the app to read your basic profile information. 
Team.ReadBasic.All - Allows Reward Gateway to read the names of all available teams needed during the integration setup
TeamsAppInstallation.ReadWriteforTeam - Allows Reward Gateway to automatically install the application in the relevant team after the installation within Reward Manager is complete.
User.Read.All - Allows Reward Gateway to read information about users on the Teams instance

Step 3: Select a Trigger

Now you can select which trigger within your Reward Gateway programme will initiate an alert to Microsoft Teams. 

Select a trigger of your choice and continue. The drop-down menu will also provide you the choice to select a specific blog from which the information can be pulled. 

Step 4: Select a Team

Next, select which Microsoft Team you would want these alerts to go out to. Select the team of your choice, and continue.

Step 5: Select a Channel

Next, you can select which specific channel you want these alerts to go out to. Don't worry you can setup any amount of these integrations with your Reward Gateway programme, so you can send alerts out to any of your channels simultaneously.

Select the channel of your choice and continue.

Step 6: Review and Publish

You should now be fully set up to go. Ensure your changes are as you wanted them to be and once you are happy click Publish to Install your MS Teams integration.

Your setup on Reward Manager should now be complete! We hope that was a breeze and now its time to ensure your MS Teams integration was setup correctly by accessing your MS Teams account.

To do this, go to https://teams.microsoft.com/ and login to your MS Teams account.

Once logged in, access the team you installed the MS Teams integration on Step 4 above and click on the "..." next to the channel name.

From here select Manage Team and access the Apps tab.

Here you should see your newly installed Connect+ bot that is ready to be used by members within this Microsoft Team. 

Now for the fun part! To find out how to use the bot, please have a read of our User Guide: Sending Recognition using MS Teams.

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We hope the setup process was easy but if you did run into any issue please feel free to contact us via helpcenter@rewardgateway.com. We've also put together some FAQs around the Connect+ bot below, which you may find the answers to your questions. 

Can I install the Bot on another Team within my Microsoft Teams Tenant?

Yes of course and it's much easier now that you have already set it up on one team. To do this, simply go to your App Catalog  (The "..." on your left sidebar) and search for "Connect+". 

You should get Connect+ to come up as an option now.

Click on the App and select the "Add To Team" option using the arrow next to the Add button.

Select your Team of choice and install. That's it! Now your new Team can use the Connect+ bot the same way as your existing Team does. 

What does an Alert into a channel look like?

Based on your set up on Reward Manager, we will send real-time alerts to the team/channel of your choice. They would be sent as Adaptive Card on Microsoft Teams that include the image of the Recognition moment / Blog post and also a summary text. 

Here is an example:

Users can click the "View Recognition Moment" button to access the specific recognition moment and be able to interact with it. 

How can we remove the MS Teams Integration if we no longer want to use it?

This is very easy to do. Simple go to your App Catalog and remove the App from your MS Teams instance. This will revoke all access Reward Gateway has to your MS Teams account.

Alternatively to stop any alerts going into channels (Without removing the App completely), you can go to Reward Manager and select the integration from the "My Integrations" section on the Integration Dashboard and choose the option to Disable it.

What are some best practices to improve the usage of our newly installed MS Teams Integration?

Just as much as you, we would love for our Connect+ bot to be used heavily by your users. The main way to increase the usage of your integration is to make it visible for users at all times. Here are some ideas that you could explore;

• Communicate to all users around the new integration and a link to our User Guide: Sending Recognition using MS Teams .
• Install the MS Teams on a Team / Channel that is available to all users across your organisation.
• Ask someone with Administrative privileges on your MS Teams account to Pin the Connect+ bot to all users sidebar (This will increase the visibility of the integration across your organisation and is a great way to get more usage onto your platform). Here is how to do it.