After three months of pandemic, we consolidated communication into Teams. Most clients use Microsoft 365, so Teams was a logical choice. But without integrations, it would be just another chat.
Integration with development tools¶
To prevent developers from suffering during the transition from Slack, we had to get GitLab notifications, JIRA tickets, Grafana alerts and Jenkins build status into Teams. We solved most of it through Incoming Webhooks and native integrations.
Custom Teams bot¶
We wrote a bot using Bot Framework SDK on Azure:
- Creating JIRA tickets from conversations
- Production environment status
- Deploy to staging with approval workflow
- Searching Confluence documentation
Popular feature: @CoreBot deploy backend staging triggers
GitLab pipeline and reports results back to Teams after completion.
Power Automate for business team¶
Power Automate flows for non-developers: new lead → notification + Planner task, vacation approval through forms, data extraction from invoices. Debugging is painful, but for simple workflows significantly faster than custom code.
Channel discipline¶
Without clear rules, Teams turns into chaos. One team = one project, standard channels (General, Dev, Ops, Client). “Quiet” channels for automatic notifications, “loud” ones for human communication.
Teams as company operating system¶
Teams became more than chat — a place where deployments are approved, incidents are resolved and communication with clients happens. Investment in integrations paid off many times over.
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