Developing an integration of my company's product with Microsoft Teams using connectors

Question

I am a Software Engineer and working on developing an integration of my company's product with Microsoft Teams. The idea is that the product will send messages/notifications/alerts to a chat channel in Microsoft Teams. At the moment we are only working towards developing this integration with Microsoft Teams and not other office 365 products.

After researching on MSDN, Microsoft developer platform, google etc. I came to know that I can set up an incoming webhook which gives me a URL against a channel in Microsoft Teams and I can send messages to it. However, I came across another method which is having a connector in the Microsoft store. I would like to add a connector because it provides a nice front end and also gives us a presence on the store for external users. I found out that I can register a connector from the connector developer dashboard. Here is the documentation link that I was referring to: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/concepts/connectors To test it out I referred to the following example on the MSDN blog: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mvpawardprogram/2017/01/24/part-3-office-365-groups/

However, I am unable to see Microsoft Teams groups in the drop down. I am the owner of these groups on Microsoft Teams side. At my organization only I am using Microsoft Teams to test this integration because I am the only developer working on this. Please, see the screenshot below:

Then I read about sideloading your connector to Microsoft Teams to test it out which meant uploading the manifest.json file from the connector developer dashboard. Please, see the below screenshot:

But, after I download the manifest file and follow the instructions mentioned on this link https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/concepts/apps/apps-package I am still running into problems testing the office 365 connector with Microsoft Teams when uploading the manifest file. This is the error that I get, please see the screenshot below:

Also, I do this from my developer trial account and this is because from my company's paid developer enterprise account I do not see an option to upload a custom app. Please, see the screenshot below:

This is a product issue and I have been in touch with the product support for the past three weeks. We have tried various things over this course of time and nothing has worked. They have also ran recovery diagnostics on my account as well but, I saw no changes. All they tell me is that "this is bizarre, this should not be happening and that maybe Teams is a fairly new product and nobody develops for it etc. etc. " Although I do feel many enterprises are using it. Please, see the screenshot below:

I have not heard back since then. Please, help me regarding this issue. I would really love to start developing the actual integration with our product since it would be of great value to our customers.

Thanks, Maria Shoaib.

Answer 1

Please use App Studio to create manifest file and test your connnector so that there are no errors while creating an app package. Also, please ask your tenant admin to enable the sideloading of external apps for Upload Custom App link to appear in Microsft Teams.