Edit

Notification-only bots in Microsoft Teams

  • Article

Important

This article is based on the v3 Bot Framework SDK. If you are looking for current documentation version 4.6 or later of the SDK, see the conversational bots section.

If your bot's sole purpose is to deliver notification to users and isn't conversational, you can enable the isNotificationOnly field in your app manifest. This produces the following changes:

  • Users can't message your notification-only bot.
  • Users can't @mention the bot.

Note

The bot-only apps will surface in the personal app tray in both cases: isNotificationOnly: true or isNotificationOnly: false.

The tab naming convention for your installed bot depends on the isNotificationOnly manifest property setting:

When the isNotificationOnly manifest property is set to true, the tab for the installed bot app is named Activity.

Screenshot shows an example of **Activity** tab.

App manifest

To enable this, set isNotificationOnly to true.

Note

The value of isNotificationOnly is Boolean and not a string.

{
  ⋮
  "bots":[
    {
      "botId":"[Microsoft App ID for your bot]",
      "isNotificationOnly": true,
      "scopes": [
        "personal",
        "team"
      ],
    }
  ],
  ...
}

Best practices and limitations

Notification-only bots use proactive messaging to communicate with the user. For more information, see Proactive messaging for bots.