Replacing email notifications with Microsoft Teams messages

It's quite common to be notified by email almost in real-time when something happens on different platforms. This is great until your inbox is cluttered with hundreds of emails. Even if you add rules and folders, at the end of the day you just have a lot of unread and systematically ignored emails.

There is a recent (or maybe not that recent) trend of using webhooks to enable communication between systems. These webhooks provide internet-facing endpoints that can be called by anybody (or just by those allowed if secured with a secret). Many modern systems are implementing these webhooks, either to receive content or to send content.

Microsoft Teams has embraced this pattern and any channel of any team can be configured with a webhook to receive messages.

Initially, we may think that as long as our application is able to send notifications to webhooks, we should be able to send them to Microsoft Teams, so why don't we just organise our Teams and channels properly and start sending all these notifications there? 

I really like this idea and I am currently implementing it wherever I can because:

• It simplifies the distribution of notifications, as everybody in the Team/channel has access to them without having to add rules at email server level to manage distribution lists, shared inboxes etc.
• It also helps unifying the different data silos, as all the information about a project/system/client can be organised with teams, now also including notifications.
• Improves communications. Anybody can reply to the message, tag colleagues and continue the conversation, directly in Teams, instead of having to forward the original email to everybody, etc.
• Reduces noise. Using the channel notifications settings and some governance we can decide when Teams have to show the emerging message to members
• Unified notifications improves the correct reactions. Having only one system trusted by users sending notifications directly to users avoid chances of ignoring important notifications.
• Improves governance. The set up is done once at Channel level, instead of leaving up to individual users to configure how to handle these emails.

Unfortunately, it isn't that easy. With webhooks we enable both ends to talk to each other, but as usual, it doesn't mean they understand each other. In our case, Teams is expecting the message in a specific format, and the source platform doesn't necessarily use it; by default, these providers publish their information based on their own needs.

Does it mean we can't integrate Microsoft Teams with any other platform using webhooks? No, It is still possible, it's just not always possible to do it with a couple of clicks.

There are many platforms  that have already implemented integration with Microsoft Teams and can be configured to send notifications to Microsoft Teams (see table at the bottom). However, if we are unlucky and our platform is not among the below list, we have to wait until the platform implements an option specifically for Teams, or if we have Azure and some development skills, we could introduce a "man in the middle" to do the translation.

The idea is quite simple: We just need to create a webhook that understands the message sent by the source platform, translate it into "something" that Microsoft Teams understand and sends it back to Teams; easy! In this blog I explain how to Integrate MongoDB notifications into Microsoft Teams. You can use this example as a starting point to build your own (hopefully temporary) integration.

List with available connectors on Microsoft Teams