Announcing Instant Chime for Microsoft Teams - Chat Support Desk using Microsoft Teams
Instant Chime has been a great ride- starting with an IBM Sametime deployment more than 10 years ago, we have developed Chime for Microsoft Lync, XMPP, Skype for Business, and Skype for Business 0365. This week, we are happy to announce that we have started to deploy the beta version of Chime for Microsoft Teams.
With the latest version, we are taking a step back and adding some functionality that we have heard across multiple production deployments.
In terms of high level goals, we are focusing on:
- Extending the core Chime UI and structure to integrate with MS Teams
- Using Microsoft Teams as an additional channel for employees to access their enterprise service desk (we also provide a web client)
- Using MS Teams for agent notification and conversation management
- Integration with a customer’s existing bot deployments (for employee self-service deflection)
- Using adaptive cards within text resources
On the technical side, we have included Microsoft's Monaco editor as our editor for text resources. The Monaco editor (https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/) provide some excellent support for JSON display\editing.
We have added the Monaco editor in order to support a more robust UI that will be necessary to edit and import adaptive cards. For years, we have been rather limited by HTML and basic text elements across IM systems the inclusion of adaptive cards is really exciting.
Here is a link to the adaptive card designer: https://adaptivecards.io/designer
We are also including the Razor template engine as part of our .NET version - which will allow text resources to include some nice conditional logic (including against cards).
Here is sample of an adaptive card - rendering a welcome message:
