MS Teams Stages

Ivanti Neurons Bots integrates with Microsoft Teams. This allows Ivanti Neurons to message a user via MS Teams using Neurons Bots. The message can contain action buttons for the user to interact with, to trigger next stage actions, or to provide feedback. Interacting with an end user is a great way to unlock more powerful remediation. For example, getting a user's permission before performing disruptive maintenance, as well as helping the user choose the most contextually appropriate remediation based on their circumstances. It can also be used as an orchestration tool to collect user input and sentiment.

The following are MS Teams stages currently available in Neurons Bots:

  • MS Teams Interaction: Use this stage to message and receive feedback from a user via MS Teams using a Neurons bot.
  • MS Teams Message: Use this stage to send a message to a user via MS Teams using a Neurons bot.
  • MS Teams Rating: Use this stage to capture quantitative sentiment responses.
    If you use the Survey Metadata stage, you can group and compare the survey data by the metadata. For example, you can analyze which service desk support provides the best lowest ratings.

All MS Teams stages have an Update Card option in the Stage settings. You can use this option to replace one bot-generated Teams card with another one, further down the bot. For example, if you want to provide progress updates of a bot using Teams, instead of sending out multiple messages to users, you can send a single message and update it by following these steps:

  1. In a bot, add and connect another Teams stage.
  2. Open the Stage settings.
  3. In the Update Card drop-down, select the stage that creates the card you want to replace.
  4. In the Message field, enter the new message that you want to update the card with.
  5. Run the bot.

When the bot is run, the existing Teams card is updated with the new message, rather than a new card and message being sent.
If you do not want to replace any cards, leave Update Card set to None, which is the default.

For the MS Teams Interaction stage, the MS Teams Message stage, and the MS Teams Rating stage additional settings are required:

  • Stage Timeout Setting: How long to wait for the end user to provide a response before the stage fails with a timeout. The maximum duration is 7 days. This is available in the MS Teams Interaction stage and the MS Teams Rating stage.

  • Recipient- You can set it to auto-detect users (send a message to the most recent user of the device determined in the latest inventory scan or certain connector runs), or the initiating user (the email address of the Neurons analyst that triggered the bot), or a fixed email address, which may be useful for approvals or testing. This is available in all MS Teams stages.

  • Title and Message- You can use CTRL + Space to insert the variables into the message such as values from upstream stages, bot variable, or defaults such as user name or display name to help make the message more personal. When inserting a token from a stage returning multiple results, the values will be comma-separated. To send separate messages instead, put the Teams stage in a for-each block. This is available in the MS Teams Interaction stage and the MS Teams Message stage.

  • Interaction type (buttons, free text input, or dynamic): Buttons let you add multiple buttons for the user to choose. Example: option A, option B, and option C. Free text lets you type something and submit it via a button. Example: a free text box where a user writes their feedback to a recent patch update and clicks the "Submit" button to send it off. Dynamic allows using list outputs from previous stages to dynamically create buttons. Example: If you have an upstream query stage "Installed Internet Browsers", you can pick the output of that stage, and this will generate a button for each browser a device has (Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome). This is available in the MS Teams Interaction stage.

  • Title, Questions, and Rating—The rating scale can be stars, radio buttons, emojis, or binary. Binary mode will create two buttons in Teams that correspond to 0% and 100% scores. The scale can be 1 or 0 to 3, 4, 5, or 10, and the scales can be labeled for additional context. This option is available in the MS Teams Rating stage.

Configuration requirements

To use the Neurons Bots MS Teams stages, deploy the Ivanti Neurons Bot app, appropriate for your tenant landscape, from the Microsoft Teams App Store, via the Microsoft Teams Admin Center.

Prerequisites to ensure MS Teams messages from the Entra ID tenant are trusted and processed:

Teams stages support auto detection of users. This works by first establishing the most recent user of the device, via the Inventory scan or Connector run. The email for that user is retrieved from the People record. The email is resolved to obtain the UserGID, which is then used to send the Teams message.
To see if the email address is included in the Connector data, go to the What data is imported section in the relevant Connector Help topic in Setting up connectors.

A fallback mechanism is configured to directly lookup the UserGID attribute from the device data. This is populated when a device is imported through the Entra ID connector. Additional permissions are required, refer to Entra ID connector setup. The initial connector setup permissions can be found here Microsoft Entra ID connector.

Environment checklist

  • Microsoft Office 365 subscription.
  • Ivanti Neurons Entra ID connector, configured with device permissions in Entra ID permissions assignment (per intune), and has been run, so it can pull in device/user information.

Setup Requirements

The following must be configured before using the MS Teams Stages:

  1. In https://admin.teams.microsoft.com, from the menu, select Teams apps > Setup policies.
  2. In the Add installed apps panel, locate the Ivanti Neurons Teams Bot, click Add.
  3. Once complete, click Save. The Ivanti Neurons Bot is now ready to deploy to users.
  • An endpoint can be on a local AD domain or a Workgroup.
  • Ivanti Neurons Entra ID connector required.
  • Supported on Windows 10.
  • At time of Microsoft Teams setup, the user must allow the organization to manage the device.
  1. Go to the Azure Portal.
  2. Follow the instructions at How to setup Active Directory AD Connector.
  3. On setup you must include the following device permissions so that the connector can populate the device view with the Teams user information:
    • DeviceManagementApps.Read.All: Read Microsoft Intune apps
    • DeviceManagementApps.ReadWrite.All: Read and write Microsoft Intune apps

    Remember to grant admin consent for the permissions to take effect.

  1. In the Ivanti Neurons platform; Add, Configure, Save, and Run the connector.

Testing Teams

Ivanti recommend having a test environment to test the MS Teams bot to a targeted group of user accounts and test devices.

  1. In the Ivanti Neurons platform go to Devices, add your test endpoint to a test public group.
  2. In the Ivanti Neurons platform go to Neurons Bots, build a simple bot including one of the MS Teams Stages.
  3. Assign the bot to a Target Group.
  4. Run the bot.