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I think a lot of organisations are keen to start using custom applications to further boost staff productivity in Microsoft Teams but sometimes it’s difficult to know how to get started. One simple way is to take advantage of the App Templates that Microsoft publishes.

These are ready to use applications that adhere to security and infrastructure best practices, which can be deployed in Azure with no additional software development. Having said that all the source code is published, so the Templates can be customised and extended to meet specific customer requirements.

I recently attended an internal training event and part of the pre-work was to deploy the FAQ BOT Template. I’m definitely not a developer but I can follow instructions (available on GitHub), so I was able to deploy the BOT to Azure and configure it within Teams in about 2.5 hours.

Check out the result here:

Note: In a production environment you can control access to the FAQ BOT via Teams App Policies in the Teams Admin Centre.

In my opinion a Teams integrated FAQ BOT service has a huge number of use cases. As you know the same questions will always crop up. Collating the answers and adding them to a QnA Maker database is really easy. The answers are then available to every Microsoft Teams user through the BOT chat. If you stump the BOT, no worries, you can still reach a human colleague! The “Experts” can even add new Q&A pairs themselves, without the need to involve IT.

A FAQ BOT is an easy way to better assist end users and also give time back to help desk staff.