Microsoft Teams celebrated its 2-year birthday in March of this year. I really like Teams overall, but Microsoft has seriously slacked in some of the areas where it continues to need support. Whether these problems should be blamed on Teams or blamed on other products, they’re all still Microsoft.
Connectors for Flow are still in Preview?
One of Teams’ big selling points is integration with other apps. Above all else, I’d expect Microsoft’s own internal integrations to be fantastic and work flawlessly. Sadly, Microsoft has let me down in this regard. 2 years after general availability, the 11 actions that Flow can support when connecting to Teams are still listed as being in ‘Preview.’ Further, the capabilities that they give us are half-baked. I can’t use Flow to @mention a user unless it comes from the Flow bot? What?!
Hidden Annoyances – They Don’t Piss You Off Until You Find Them
For example: Cards are a great concept in Office 365, but they’re a real PITA to get working correctly. If you’ve ever tried to send more than the most basic Card to Teams you probably know what I mean. For instance, sending a card to Teams via Flow requires us to send a generic HTTP POST (see previous section – don’t get me started on why there isn’t native integration for this). This works, however it only works if you have the exact right template to use anything else just fails. MessageCardPlayground helps but still leaves a lot of usefulness to be desired. I haven’t tried AMDesigner yet but maybe it will help fill some of those Card-shaped holes in my heart?
Still on the subject of Cards, don’t go quickly thinking that you can easy POST back from Teams into Flow! No, that’d be too easy. For some reason Microsoft, in its ultimate wisdom, decided that when you click an action button in Teams that sends a POST back it will include a JSON Web Token (JWT) that completely breaks Flow’s ability to receive the message (it sounds like what technically happens is that Flow sees the JWT and then completely disregards the additional bearer token which is what it actually needs). Stack Overflow has a thread about this where it sounds like Microsoft is aware of the issue but really has no sense of urgency to make their products work well with each other. I’ve been forced to come up with a intermediary – a proxy of sorts – that my Card buttons can target, be stripped of the JWT, and then be sent to Flow for it to actually work properly.
Lack of Administrative Capabilities
Teams does offer more administrative capability that Skype ever did – but it still isn’t enough. Where is our ability to restrict posting permissions to individual channels within Teams? Sure we can do that for the General channel, but that isn’t enough. Where is our ability to have new Teams members auto-follow (not just auto-favorite) certain channels? Microsoft needs to remember that Teams is being used for organizations where people are not always (actually, are seldom) technically inclined – they don’t care to spend their time going into each channel and clicking “Follow this channel” even if it is something that would help them. PS – anyone reading this who wants to help get this changed, get on UserVoice and help bump it up!
