Feature request

Hi Dan, thanks for the feedback! We would love to enable direct messaging, but the API for interacting with Teams makes it difficult to be able to search for all recipients in the Teams instance. We would need to be able to do this super fast in order to autocomplete the recipient field. We'll keep looking for ways this could be possible, but for now it's not something we can build in.

This is disappointing.  If there is any idea/workaround to tag individuals I would love to find a way.  That will make this feature AMAZING without it it's only OK.  

What about if it was a manual entry?  Without the ability to do direct side channel conversations in Teams, this integration is unfortunately of no value to us otherwise.  To create a Teams Channel for each and every user as I saw suggested somewhere else, is not an option for us-we have too many users and already have hundreds of Teams channels out there. 

The one way we've thought about how this could work would be if all the users who would be potential recipients authenticated their individual Teams account with the Zendesk app, which would enabled us to build up our own directory of individual users. Does that sound like something that would be feasible on your end?

Thanks Toby for the suggestion.  At this time, only full agents can use the Zendesk app and the ones we need side conversations are light agents, would you then open the Teams app to light agents in order for them to authenticate their Teams account?

Toby~ Yes!  Our plan was to eventually roll out the Teams Zendesk app to our end users anyways to make the content in Zendesk available to them there since many of our users "live" in Teams all day, so that absolutely would work.

@toby12 - would it be possible to generate a directory of Teams accounts based on existing users in Zendesk? In other words, for each user account in Zendesk, check Teams to see if there's a corresponding account, then add the corresponding accounts to the directory.

For us, the vast majority of people we need to reach out to will already have an account in Zendesk and, if they don't, it's trivial for an agent to add the person as an end user in Zendesk. Putting the power to initiate the Teams conversation entirely in the Zendesk Agent's hands (rather than requiring the recipient to register themselves first) would go a long way to making this a seamless integration.

I put a +1 in another feature request thread for direct messaging, and in that feature request I mentioned how we really don't use Channels at all in Teams as they just aren't very functional relative to the direct messaging function in a group.

The specific use case we wanted to use is opening up a Major Outage ticket (eg problem), and then using the Side Conversation to send updates from the agent who is managing the outage into a leadership chat.  That's just a group chat which has been renamed and is managed on a more permanent basis (because we can't get MSFT to make channels work more like team chats).

The other thing we haven't figured out yet is how you can do a side conversation to a channel that has been shared specifically rather than to the whole channel by default (we need to do this to share to people outside of the channel).  The shared channel doesn't show up in the search.  I assume that's because it's a private channel so we would have to share it to the Zendesk app somehow, but what's strange is that another private channel DOES appear.  The only thing I can think of is that it's somehow related to the underlying permissions of the admin accounts that were used to link Teams and Zendesk together?

This is the feature we would need to be able to use this! Could we maybe have something where we can flag users that can be used for Teams Chat side conversations? That way Zendesk doesn't have to check everything.

Most of our side conversations are either with a single internal user or with a bespoke group of internal users, so channels really don't fit our use case.