An automation action is a step that performs a task, activity, event, or change. Think of a action as:

When Something happens (the Trigger) and These Conditions are true, then This Event (the Action) occurs.

SmartSuite's Send a chat message and Send a message in a channel actions for Microsoft Teams allow you to easily communicate with your teammates within the Microsoft ecosystem. If you haven't already, we also recommend that you check our our articles on creating an automation and managing automations for more information about setting up new workflows.

To use the Microsoft Teams automation you will need to have an existing Microsoft Teams account. Teams actions are part of SmartSuite's automations system, which all account types have access to. Simply click the Automations option in the Solution drop-down menu (see image below).

To configure the Microsoft Teams automation you will need the following list of permissions:

Note

This action requires Solution Manager permissions or the Administrator role. To learn more, please see our article on roles and permissions.

Accessing the Automations configuration interface:

Once the Solution Automations dialog is displayed, click Add Automation to begin creating an automation that will interact with Jira Cloud.

You will need to set up a trigger to tell the Automation when to run and which record to use as the source of data for your Microsoft Teams action.

For example, you might be tracking user-submitted help requests in SmartSuite. If you wanted to send a message to a channel in Teams when a bug is created, you would select a When a Record is Created trigger to initiate the automation when the SmartSuite record is added.

After creating your automation and selecting your Trigger, you can select Microsoft Teams from the Integrations section of the Add Actions list. You can then select either the Send a chat message or Send a message in a channel action. It looks like this:
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Whenever your automation trigger fires and the conditions are met, the Microsoft Teams Send a chat message action will send a message directly to a specific user. Configuring it just requires a few clicks.

You will be prompted to select or connect your Microsoft Teams account (see note in prerequisites about required permissions).

Click Connect to get started:

If you are not authenticated you will be prompted to log in to your Microsoft Teams account. Provide the credentials you would like to use to connect to Microsoft Teams. Then accept the request to connect:

When your account is connected, you will be returned to the connection screen. Click on the X control to the left of the dialog to close it. Note: you can disconnect your account from the automation at any time by clicking the Disconnect button on this screen.

After this initial account configuration has been completed, you can then specify the details for the chat message you want to send. Customizable fields include:
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You can add either static values to each of these fields, or map values from the triggering record as their value. Continue adding fields until you have populated everything you need in the chat message. When you're done, click Save Automation at the bottom-right corner of the screen to save the automation and its configuration.

Note

You will be prompted to switch the automation on. If you click Yes, switch it on the automation will be active and will trigger when its criteria are met. You can also choose to keep it off if you're not yet ready to start sending chat messages.

To configure the Send a message in a channel action you will need to follow the steps described in the Add Issue action above to connect your Microsoft Teams account.

After this initial account configuration has been completed, you can then specify the details for the message you want to send. Customizable fields include:

As in sending chat messages you can add either static values to each of these fields or map values from the triggering record as their value. Continue adding fields until you have populated everything you need in the message. When you're done, click Save Automation at the bottom-right corner of the screen to save the automation and its configuration.