Chat for MS Teams - Configuration Problems

[Hendriekus Roux]

Having struggled with "Chat for Teams" (and watching this video) I realised my experience is very broken.  By default, I had to [request] the "Assist" app to be available, because it was not available from MS Teams, so the workflow did not whisk me from Jira Chat right into installing Assist, like in the video. 

After a process (with internal IT security), it became available and I added it to the channel by clicking the [add] button and specifying the channel.  It failed quite a few times with "something went wrong", but eventually it appeared in the [Manage your apps] section, but not as a tab on the channel, not posting any "get going" messages.

I do get a message "Some app features are not available in Teams preview yet" on the app dialog when linking it to a channel that may indicate something untoward.

☼ Incidentally, contrary to Atlassian's instructions, I cannot add Assist to a private channel.  Adding it to the General by clicking [Set up a bot] opens the General channel as expected.

However, expecting to see some messages in there, nothing appeared.  No configuration messages appear.  If I select Assist (from the Assist chat) this message appears: "No project configured. Please, connect a project to your team to continue." I suspect this is just saying to me that the chat in Jira isn't connected to MS Teams.

If I type @Assist, it responds with "Here is what I can do: Raise requests with Assist via the compose box, the message extension, or the message action capabilities."

It appears my configuration went awry inside MS Teams.  It might be that some permission is not set, but I stepped through the permissions with the SecOps people and we've been pretty liberal.  Maybe someone has scrutinous insight to help me out of this predicament.

[Jehan Bhathena · Accepted solution]

Hi @Hendriekus Roux 

I can second the pain that you've felt setting up Assist, the setting are non-intuitive, documentation doesn't seem to be inline with the UI either. Overall a good feature made too complex.

But the rant for later, to setup Assist try the  below steps:

• Remove the Chat connection from your Service project 
• Remove the app from teams
• Once both are clean, add "Teams" back to your JSM project, and click on the Organization that gets linked to it.
• Add the "Assist" app to your Teams but don't setup for any channel
• Create a new "Private Team" in Teams
• In the General (or default channel), tag Assist, this should take you to the further steps and setup

I'm not 100% sure this will work, it took a lot of trial and error to get to this, and I'm still uncertain of the steps. But I'm hoping this helps your use case.

[Hendriekus Roux]

@Jehan Bhathena I do thank you for the suggestion.

☼ I could have sworn to have done this before, but lo and behold, I got a different result this time.

Installing it from my Teams client provides the [Add to Team] option, which is what I have been using and which installs the app on a public channel line General.  When clicking [Set up a bot] it twirls and then creates a post type (In General) with a link back to the Assist app.

This is where the magic starts:

☼ clicking on that link posts a chat in the Assist chat window with the instructions on adding the JSM project to the channel and then configuring the request types allowed via this chat interface.

 Again, thanks for the help.

[Jehan Bhathena]

@Hendriekus Roux glad to know it works!!