Introduction

Post messages to Office 365 groups or Microsoft Teams from Build & Release.

The message can be fully customized (title, summarytext,...) and you can optionally include a link go redirect user directly to the build/release where the message was sent from.

There is built in support in both Microsoft Teams and Visual Studio Team Services to make them work in a seamless way, this extension to be used in scenarios where the official functionality can't be used or if you want to fully customize the cards.

This extensions is not as integrated as the built-in functionality, it requires some manual configuration, but the process is very simple.

Configuration

After you install the extension in your account (see Get extensions for Visual Studio Team Services to learn how to install extensions) you are ready to use the task on your build or release defintions on the account(s) you have installed the extension into.

It may take a while until the tasks are available to be used.

Configuring an Office 365 Groups/Microsoft connector webhook

Before adding tasks to your builds/releases you have to configure one (or more) Office connector Webhooks. The process is quite simple and it's fully described on Get started with Office 365 Connector Cards in Outlook and Microsoft Teams

By now you should have at least on URL for an Office connector

Copy it and save it for a later.

Rooms/Group connector webhooks URL

You can use the URL directly in a task if your are just going to use the URL once or you can create a service endpoint to be reused by more than one task (recommended path)

If you just use the URL directly in tasks, skip to the next section, otherwise keep reading.

If you wish post messages to a given group from more than one task, they you should create a service point that can be referenced in any task from the team project where the service endpoint is configured.

Open the Services tab in the project admin page

on the New Service Endpoint dropdown, select the Generic Connection and give it a meangifull name and in the Server URL enter the conector webhook URL

Tasks

When you add a new step to your build or release template, you can chose the task from the Utility category, each task has a different set of purposes and parameters.

Post Message to O365 group/Microsoft Teams

Posts a message to either an Microsoft Office 365 group or a Microsoft Teams, the content of the message is customizable, you can provide a title, a summary the text, the text in the card (which can include formatting and links) and a link to the build/release detail if you want users to drill down on details.

It has the following parameters

• Address type - The type of connector webhook address. You have two choices
  • Store the webhook URL in a service endpoint. This will allow you to reuse the webhook url across several build or release definitions. If you have more than group/team this will also allow you to have all URLs stored in a central point instead of being scattered over several definitions.
  • Directly enter the URL for the connector webhook address directly in the task (very simple scenarios)
• Webhook url The webhook url (if you have chosen Service Endpoint in the Messsage type)
• Webhook endpoint The service endpoint name (if you have chosen Url in the Messsage type)
• Message Type The type of the message. For now only Message is supported, in the future other types will be supported
• Title The title of the message
• Summary A summary for your message. This field is mandatory if title is empty.
• Text The text of the message. Markdown can be used to format the message
• Include link to build/release detail Should a link to the build detail be automatically added to the message (message can be customized in parameter Build detail link text)
• Build/Release detail link text The text of the build detail link (or release if being used in a release)
• Theme color The theme's color. HTML code or HTML hexadecimal code
• Fail build/release on error Should the build be failed if the message posting fails.

In the fields you can use build or release variables depending on where the task is being used.

Note: Although for sake of brevity they have been documented as if there was only one, in fact there are two separate tasks. One for build and another for Release, they have practically the same parameters and same behaviour (they also share the same icon). Currently there is a bug that shows build tasks while editing a release definition, so you will see two tasks with same icon and similar description. Pick the task that has has [Release] before the name.

Support

If you find an issue, need help or have improvement suggestions you can do so by emailing [support@yodlabs.com](support@yodlabs.com?subject=Post Message to O365) with "Variable Tasks Pack" as a subject.