The short answer
A Microsoft Teams integration either pushes information from your systems into Teams, or puts your application inside it as a tab or bot. AR Digital Solutions builds both, and will tell you which one your job needs before quoting the larger version.
What we build
- Alerts posted into channels as cards, driven by events in your systems.
- Approval cards that write the decision back to the source system.
- Tabs: your own application inside Teams, with sign in through Entra ID.
- Bots that answer questions and message people when something changes.
- Manifest, permissions and the packaging your IT admin has to approve.
- Monitoring, so a broken connection surfaces before someone asks why.
A webhook into a channel and a Teams app are different projects
The alert, which takes an afternoon
Posting into a channel is close to trivial. You create a workflow that gives you a URL, your system posts a card to it, and the message appears. No app registration, no admin approval, nothing to publish. For plenty of jobs that is the whole requirement: a new lead, a failed payment, a website form. Microsoft has been moving these from the older connectors across to workflows, so treat that URL as something to own rather than a fixture.
Two limits are worth knowing. It's one way, so nobody can act without leaving Teams, and it has no idea who is reading, so the card can't show anything specific to one person. It's also noisy by default. A channel taking 400 alerts a day gets muted inside a week, which is worse than never building it, so filter at the source.
The real app, which is a real build
A tab is your own application rendered inside Teams, with sign in through Entra ID so nobody logs in twice. A bot holds a conversation, can start one when something changes, and needs somewhere to keep the conversation reference. Both need a manifest, permissions, admin approval and a place in the organisation's app catalogue. Identity work sits with our Azure integration team, and the tenant side involves whoever runs your Microsoft 365.
How to tell which one you need
Ask what the person does with it. If they read it and then go somewhere else to act, a webhook is enough and anything more is decoration. If they need to act on it, if the action depends on who they are, and if the result has to persist, you need the app.
The tipping point is attention. A team that lives in Teams all day pays a real cost every time they leave it to open something else, and removing that switch is the point of the build. A team that opens Teams twice a day doesn't have that problem.
Approvals in Teams, the pattern that pays for itself
If you build one thing here, build approvals. A discount, a purchase order, a quote over a threshold: the card arrives with the detail and two buttons, the approver taps one, and the card updates in place to show who decided and when.
Three things separate that from a demo. Identity comes from Teams, so you know who pressed the button. The server re-checks the record before acting, because the request may have been withdrawn or approved by someone else since the card went out. And the decision writes back to the system that owns it with an audit trail, rather than living in a chat nobody can find in March. Get those right and the approval stops being the step everything waits on.
How the build runs
We work out which build you need
Usually smaller than expected.
Scope and price
Fixed scope, fixed number, dates in writing.
Build and package
Cards, actions and permissions, plus what your IT admin needs to approve it.
Launch and watch
Failures alert a person, and we tune the volume after a fortnight.
Who this suits, and who it doesn't
It suits organisations on Microsoft 365 whose team works in Teams all day and keeps leaving it to approve something.
It doesn't suit a business that uses Teams for the occasional video call.
Why build it with us
We'll talk you out of the big version.
If a webhook solves it, that's the quote you get.
Developers and IT support in one building.
Whoever writes the app can talk to whoever manages your tenant.
No lock in contracts.
Month to month on retainers, fixed scope on projects.
"Our IT provider has to approve anything installed."
Correct, and that's a good thing. We hand them the manifest and the permission list to review.