Send direct message to a user via MS Teams programmatically

Question

Hi,

We are currently using teams web hooks extensively to send notifications to teams channels.

Sometimes we have situations where we need to send a teams message to a user directly, but have not found a way to accomplish this task using powershell.

Is it possible to make an Invoke-RestMethod PowerShell call to send a message to a user directly?

Thank you

Answer 1

It is not possible to send a direct message to a user using Teams Incoming Webhook. The Incoming Webhook is designed to post messages to a specific channel, not to individual users. However, you can achieve this by creating a Teams bot application. Teams bot applications can send messages to individual users, group chats, and public channels.

To send a message to a user directly, you would need to use the Microsoft Bot Framework and the Teams SDK. You would need to capture the user's Teams-specific identifiers, which you can do by fetching the roster or user profile data, subscribing to conversation events, or using Microsoft Graph.

var turnContext = new TurnContext(new AdapterWithErrorHandler(new ConfigurationCredentialProvider(Configuration)), activity);
var conversationParameters = new ConversationParameters
{
    IsGroup = false,
    Bot = turnContext.Activity.Recipient,
    Members = new ChannelAccount[] { new ChannelAccount(userId) },
    TenantId = tenantId
};

await ((BotFrameworkAdapter)turnContext.Adapter).CreateConversationAsync(
    channelId,
    serviceUrl,
    credentials,
    conversationParameters,
    async (t1, c1) =>
    {
        var reply = MessageFactory.Text("Hello, user!");
        await t1.SendActivityAsync(reply, c1);
    },
    cancellationToken);

Please refer to the Microsoft Bot Framework documentation and Teams SDK documentation for more detailed information on how to create a bot and send messages to users.

Thanks, 

Prasad Das

************************************************************************* 

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Answer 2

It is now possible to send messages to personal chat(1:1) or to group chat in Microsoft Teams using Microsoft Graph API. And yes, the messages will be displayed in the Teams application using Microsoft Graph API.

Please refer the "1:1 and group chat messages" section from the below microsoft documentation link:

chatMessage resource type

Also, below is the graph API to send a message to any conversation you want using Post HTTP method :

https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/users/{user-id}/chats/{chat-id}/messages

To fetch {user-id} and {chat-id}, please follow the below steps using Get HTTP method:

Fetch the user id of a logged-in user or user id of other user using below graph API's:

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users

Fetch the conversation/chat id of a user:

https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/me/chats
https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/users/{id}/chats

As of now, there is no graph API to reply to a personal chat but we can reply to any team's channel message using Microsoft Graph API.

If the response is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.