Company Communicator New Features + Official v5

Hello everyone!

I am Aida Bayoumi, a Modern Work Customer Engineer at Microsoft. I’m taking over the blog for this specific post to share my experience on upgrading the official v5 version to the Company Communicator features.

The new company communicator features like uploading an image, adding more than one button, and many more are now requested frequently from customers.

Today’s article discusses the steps you would need to do to add these features on the current official version of CC on GitHub released in Nov 2021 (v5). The previous articles discussed how to have the new features if you have the v4 version of CC. But now, with the new update on CC that has different configurations, if you upgrade to Cristiano’s version, you are likely to have errors as what I have seen.

Error background and differences between the versions

Let me show you the context around the error that was shown, and that you are most likely to have:

Deployment steps that were done which led to the error:

1. Deployed the current release of Company Communicator in GitHub which is v5 and followed the deployment guide. This was released in November 2021. GitHub – OfficeDev/microsoft-teams-apps-company-communicator: Company Communicator app template Tested this app and it was working well as it should.
2. Upgraded to Cristiano Gonçalves new CC features as per the steps explained in previous articles and guides. New features got reflected; however, messages sent to groups failed and had the error shown below.

I dived deeper into the deployment guides of each version to realize the difference between each one in Azure. These are the following differences between v4 and v5 as per the deployment guide

Previous release v4 and Cristiano’s version:

Company communicator had the following app registrations created:

• Company Communicator Author
• Company Communicator User

The graph API permissions and the bot authentication is configured in the company communicator author app.

Current Release v5

The new deployment guide for v5 creates 3 app registrations:

• Company Communicator Author
• Company Communicator User
• Company Communicator Graph App (this is new)

The graph API permissions and the bot authentication is configured in the company communicator graph app.

When deploying official version of CC now, you need to create 3 app registrations and configure the authentication and permissions in the new app registration, which is not in v4 or Cristiano’s version. Cristiano’s version pulls the API permissions and authentication from the author app which is in this case empty.

Actions to be done to migrate from v5 to Cristiano’s version

If you currently have CC v5 or plan to deploy v5 first and want to migrate to Cristiano’s features, you should do the following:

Update

Update to Cristiano’s version using steps in the previous article Company Communicator Insights – The number one requested feature is now available! – techpeanuts (tech-peanuts.com)

Configuration

Configure the Graph API permissions and authentication in both app registrations: the author app and the graph app; the deployment guide has steps for only one app registration. This is to cater to both the v5 and Cristiano’s version that you have updated and to make sure that Cristiano’s version works with the new release v5.

Bot Authentication

Following the deployment guide in the official GitHub, set up the same authentication in graph app and author app as follows.

Graph API Permissions

After comparing the versions, app permissions are different in each deployment guide. Therefore, add all permissions as the image in both the graph app and the author app. After adding all permissions, click on “Grant admin consent”.

Consent Permissions and Restart App Service

1. Go to the Teams Admin Center
2. Click Manage Apps under Teams apps
3. Choose the Company Communicator Author App
4. Click Permissions section
5. Click “Review permissions and consent” and complete the consent.
6. Restart App Service and the prep-function in Azure Portal

Good luck! – Aida Bayoumi

Disclaimer – The information contained in this blog post doesn’t represent the official Microsoft guidance or best practices. It is just the view of the author on current alternatives, implementations and workarounds for common issues and/or business needs. Please refer to official Microsoft documentation and evaluate carefully any steps, code or procedures documented herein. The author doesn’t offer any warranty. Use this information at your own risk.