Teams push notifications
This guide provides a complete overview of our Teams push notifications system.
Preliminary information
When you create a new team on Microsoft Teams, an Office365 group is also automatically generated. O365 groups can exist without an associated Team, but to which, at any time, the corresponding Team can be linked.
Membership management
It is important to remember that, unlike security groups, Office 365 groups cannot contain other groups.
If you try to do this, the users of the first group are brought back to the second group. Any subsequent changes to the membership of the first group are not reflected in the second.
There are four main ways of maintaining team members.
Creation of an Org-wide Team All tenant users are automatically added to the Team. More details: Creation of an org-wide team
Use of Office 365 Groups configured with Dynamic Membership You can define a query (for example on users' Active Directory attribute values), and all users who match the query are automatically added to the group. Anyone who no longer matches the query is automatically removed. For this functionality it is necessary to have an "Azure AD premium P1" license. More details: Groups dynamic membership
GroupsSync tool For those who do not have the "Azure AD premium P1" license we have implemented a tool that, when properly set, creates and maintains O365 groups based on certain values of Active Directory attributes. This tool is not part of the Intranet AI solution, therefore is usually sold separately.
Manual management The last possibility is the manual maintenance of Team members. It is entirely your IT’s responsibility to manually add/remove users from the group. These actions can be performed either by Teams itself or by managing the members of the related O365 group.
What to do in case of secondary sites associated with a hub?
In situations with secondary sites associated to a hub, we can find many options and make sure we choose the best solution to implement.
Case study:
Client X has the Global site and the Local (Italy) secondary site. Whoever connects from Italy sees everything, whoever is outside Italy will only see the Global contents. The two sites differ in some pages and apps, but above all in news, because some news is published exclusively on the Local site and only people from Italy will be able to read it. While the news published on the Global site will be readable by everyone on a global level.
Technically, the solutions can be two and both valid.
Option 1: Create two teams:
One team will include the users who must see the global news, the other team will include the users who must see the local news.
PROS
There are no special precautions when posting news on the two sites.
CONS
A user who is part of both teams will obviously have two different teams to see the notifications.
???
If a user has access to both SharePoint sites, they will be able to see all the news on both (from SharePoint) regardless of belonging to the Teams group, which at this point pilots only the notification on Teams.
Option 2: Create a single team with audience on the news
SharePoint includes the audience functionality.
The news that will be visible to everyone can be inserted normally. Regarding news that must be visible only to selected users, you need to add the correct AD group of users as an audience.
PROS
A single team.
CONS
Each time, you need to insert the group as the news audience.
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If a user has access to both SharePoint sites and news web parts are set to use the audience, on SharePoint they will see only the news without audience and the news with an audience they belong to. In practice, the audience can drive both the Teams notifications and the visibility on SharePoint.
NB: If a user has the Azure AD Free license, they don't have Azure dynamic groups.
Since both solutions involve the use of groups, it should be noted that:
groups are maintained manually
you purchase our group sync tool (at an annual cost, without user restrictions)
you purchase a higher Azure license (with cost per user added)
You need to have a way to recognize the types of users through Azure AD attributes.
How do Teams push notifications work?
Push notifications help promote news, corporate events, and important messages. This means that whenever you publish a news article, an event, or an alert, users will receive a notification through a bot. You can also choose to activate just one or two of these three features.
Creation of the Teams group and configuration of the chat bot
To configure our push notifications, it is necessary to create a new group in Microsoft Teams.
It is important to add one of our accounts as an owner of the group, so we can retrieve the team ID autonomously.
You can choose the name and the image of the group.
In addition, the following materials are required for the configuration of the chat bot:
The name of the bot. Users will see the bot name when they receive the notifications.
The image of the bot. The image must be in PNG format, with a maximum size of 30 KB, and a shape compatible with the available space (a square, round, or hexagonal picture). The optimal dimensions for the bot image are 192x192 with a logo centered at 96x96.
You can also use the same name and image for the Teams group and the bot.
Here are some examples of group/bot names: "Intranet Notifications", "Intranet Updates", "Intranet Alerts" "[Company Name] Comms" (e.g., "intranet.ai Comms")
Notifications
Users will receive notifications related to news, events, or alerts in three areas:
"Activity" section located in the Teams sidebar
The "Activity" button allows you to view a feed that includes all recent actions in Teams. The notifications sent by the bot appear in this area.
Notifications remain visible in the feed for 30 days; after this period, they expire and are no longer viewable.
By clicking on the notification, users can access the chat with the bot configured for the intranet.
Chat with the bot
Push notifications also appear in the chat with the bot. When a news item, an event or an alert is published on the intranet, users receive a message of this kind in the Chat section:
For news and events, the default text is "[Bot Name] sent a card". However, this text can be customized.
The notifications in the chat consist of cards with detailed information about the update. By clicking the dedicated button, users can open the intranet and read more. For example, a notification related to a news post consists of a card with the following elements:
The text “Here are the latest News published on the Intranet!” (which can be customized) (1)
The title of the news post (2)
The publication date (3)
The preview image (4)
The “Open News” button, to access the intranet and read the article (5)
“Updates” channel of the Teams group
Notifications will appear as posts in the "Updates" channel (which can also have a different name). We create this channel and configure it so that users cannot reply to posts; only the Teams group administrators have the ability to manage them.
The Disable Notification and Notification Date columns
By default, users receive a Teams notification just as a news item is published. However, if you don't want your audience to be notified, you have the possibility to disable notifications. Instead, if you do want to send a notification, but you don't want the notification date to coincide with the publication date, you can set a different notification date.
You can set these options while creating the news post, by filling in the Disable Notification and Notification Date fields. These fields are available only if the SitePages library includes the Disable Notification and Notification Date columns. The following sections explain the process to enable these columns on the main intranet site and on secondary sites.
How to enable the Disable Notification and Notification Date columns on the main site
To create the Disable Notification and Notification Date columns on the main intranet site, follow these steps:
Access the SitePages library.
Click on Library settings, and then on More library settings.
Under the Columns section, select Add from existing site columns.
You will land on the following interface, where you can add columns from site columns.
Select site columns from: select IAI Notifications from the drop-down menu.
Available site columns: you will see the two columns you need in this box. Select the first column and click on Add. Then, do the same for the second column.
Finally, click on OK.
How to enable the Disable Notification and Notification Date columns on secondary sites
To create the Disable Notification column on secondary sites, follow these steps:
Access the SitePages library.
Click on Library settings, and then on More library settings.
Under the Columns section, select Create column.
You will land on the following interface, where you can create a new column. Here, you need to enter information about the column, namely the column name, the column type and the default value.
Column name: write IAINoNotification. This must be the internal name of the column. Therefore, it is important that you write exactly this name at this stage. Then, at a later time, you may change the column name by making it more readable.
The type of information in this column is: select Yes/No (check box).
Default value: select No.This means that notifications will be enabled by default. To disable them for a specific news, you will need to activate the Disable Notification option while creating the news.
To create the Notification Date column on a secondary site, follow these steps:
Access the SitePages library.
Click on Library settings, and then on More library settings.
Under the Columns section, select Create column.
You will land on the following interface, where you can create a new column. Here, you need to enter information about the column, namely the column name, the column type and some additional column settings.
Column name: write IAINotificationDate. This must be the internal name of the column. Therefore, it is important that you write exactly this name at this stage. Then, at a later time, you may change the column name by making it more readable.
The type of information in this column is: select Date and Time.
Description: write "If not set, publish date is used".
Enforce unique values: select No.
Date and Time Format: select Date & Time.
Display Format: select Standard.
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