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What am I agreeing to when I turn on this integration?
To enable the integration, our application first needs permission from your Microsoft organization administrator to perform specific tasks. We request only the minimum data and permissions necessary to allow your contacts to receive notifications from The Receptionist in Microsoft Teams. These permissions enable our application to do the following:
Read all users' profiles: This permission allows our application to retrieve the Microsoft user IDs for your account's contacts.
Allow the app to manage itself for all users: This permission permits our application to install itself (and only itself) for your account's contacts, allowing them to receive visitor and delivery notifications from our notification bot.
Sign in and read user profiles: This permission allows our app to ensure only an administrator for your Microsoft organization consents to the previous two permissions and not an unauthorized user.
What happens during a sync?
After enabling the integration, your contacts will begin to sync. The sync process takes place in three steps:
We send Microsoft a list of your account's contacts' email addresses.
Microsoft returns a unique identifier for each user matching the sent email addresses.
Our server stores the unique identifier with the corresponding contact record.
We install The Receptionist app for each matched contact.
Microsoft returns another special identifier for the conversation between the Teams user and the notification bot.
We save that second special identifier and create a Teams notification preference for the matched contact.
This sync process runs each hour but only for contacts created or updated since the last sync.
Does the integration work for newly created and updated contacts?
Yes, if you create or update a contact in your account, the Microsoft Teams integration will attempt to set up a Microsoft Teams messaging rule for each of them when the sync process runs (hourly). To immediately create a Microsoft Teams messaging rule for new or updated contacts, you can remove and re-add the Microsoft Teams integration.
What information will this integration collect?
We collect your Microsoft organization's unique identifier (known as the Tenant ID), the unique identifiers of users (known as the AAD Object ID) matching your account's contacts (matched based on email address), and the unique conversation identifier that is created between our notification bot and the user.
Is my data secure with this integration?
We collect only the minimum data required for our notification bot to send messages to your contacts in Microsoft Teams. We cannot read any messages sent outside the one-on-one chat thread between our notification bot and your contact. The Receptionist is SOC-2 certified, so you can rest assured that this data is in safe hands.
Is the integration available for Government Community Cloud (GCC) Microsoft 365 environments?
Our integration for Microsoft Teams utilizes a bot to relay check-in notifications and messages. Currently, bots are available in GCC, but none are permitted for GCC-High or Department of Defense (DOD) environments. As such, the integration is available to general GCC customer, but not GCC-High or GCC-DOD customers.
Will accounts' contacts have a Microsoft Teams messaging rule created automatically?
Yes, the Microsoft Teams messaging rule will be automatically set up for all contacts with an email address corresponding to a user in your Microsoft organization.
I signed in with my Microsoft account but saw a message saying I needed to be an administrator. What does that mean?
A Global administrator of your Microsoft organization must consent to the permissions requested by our application. Please check in with your IT department to determine who in your organization has administrator privileges.
Do Quick Replies work in Microsoft Teams?
Yes, contacts can send your visitors Quick Replies from within Microsoft Teams.
Can I interact with The Receptionist bot in Microsoft Teams?
No, the bot is configured for notifications only. Except for Quick Replies, any messages sent to it will not be processed. If you click the "details" link in the notification, you will be taken to the Visit's Details page, where you can send messages back to the visitor if you have chat enabled and the chat is still active.
Why are Microsoft Teams notifications going to the wrong person?
It is possible the contact was synced when the email address corresponded to a different Microsoft Teams user. Delete the contact that should receive check-in notifications, and then re-create it with the correct email address. Our app will attempt to set up a new Teams messaging rule for that contact in the next hour.
I found The Receptionist app in the Teams store. Do I need to install it?
No, The Receptionist app in the Teams store is the notification bot that handles delivering visitor and delivery notifications and is automatically installed for your contacts.
Are you reading my messages?
No. Our one-on-one conversation bot cannot access any messages or files outside of the thread between a contact and the bot.
What do we need to do if our Microsoft environment prevents users from installing third-party Teams apps?
Please see the Troubleshooting section of our main Microsoft Teams article for steps to permit our app to be added to your organization's Teams app store.
Our Microsoft organization's users have a User Principal Name that differs from their email address. Which is used to synchronize contacts?
Our integration uses Azure Active Directory's email address field to match your contacts in The Receptionist to users in your Microsoft organization. Please check that your organization's users in the Azure Portal each have an email address entered in the Contact Info section.
Can The Receptionist support MS Teams distribution lists? Can I send Teams notifications to multiple Contacts at once?
Our integration does not currently support MS Teams distribution lists. We can, however, notify an entire channel rather than a single Contact.
Start by creating a channel containing the relevant contacts in MS Teams. Then click the (...) next to the channel name.
Click "Get Channel Email Address" and then enter that address in for a Contact's email on The Receptionist. For example, if you want everyone in that channel to be notified when someone checks in to see John Smith, you would replace John's email with the channel email.
For more information on sending messages to channels as an email, please see this article from Microsoft.
Do you have a question that we didn't answer?
Click on that orange chat button in the lower right corner to livechat with a member of The Receptionist team!