Installing Halp for Microsoft Teams

Updated 7 months ago by Grant Apodaca

Overview of Halp and key terms

Halp is meant to work with many different teams, each team may utilize a queue in order to segment their tickets from other teams. These queues have associated request teams and a single triage team (per queue). Requesters create requests via a request team and Agents respond to these requests via a triage team – both of which can be set within the Microsoft Teams application.

Key terms

Queues: Where tickets get submitted to for a given team. All queues have at least one request team and they must have one (and only one) triage team associated with them.

Triage teams: Where Agents can view and respond to all tickets in a queue within Microsoft Teams

Request teams: Where Requesters can go to make a ticket for a given queue.

Agents: Individuals responsible for responding to requests

Requesters: Individuals that have questions or issues that need to be addressed by Agents.

Installing Halp to Microsoft Teams

We recommend installing Halp via the Microsoft Teams personal context initially to get up and running with Halp properly. Once installed and set-up via the personal context, you may install Halp on other teams using the team context.

Step 1: Search for "Halp" in the App Store or in your Teams instance from the find an app tab.
Step 2: Once you are viewing the Halp app, click on the button "Add" to add Halp to your personal context.
Step 3: Once installed, you should receive a notification from Halp in your chat list. Go to your chat with the Halp bot and you should see a message indicating that you need admin approval to use Halp – if you are a Microsoft Azure admin, you should be able to go through and approve Halp, if not, get your Microsoft Azure admin to go through this flow by asking them to install Halp to their personal context.
Step 4: Once you click "View & approve" from the previous step, sign in with your Microsoft Teams username and password, and when prompted click “Accept” to the permissions requested by Halp (these are required in order for Halp to function correctly within Microsoft Teams).
Step 5: Once you click "Accept" from the previous step, you will receive a “Welcome to Halp!” message in your chat with the Halp bot (the same chat where you clicked "View & approve" for admin consent. From here, you will be guided through setting up your first triage request teams (via chats with the Halp bot) – please review the following section, "Adding Halp to your first triage team" for step-by-step directions on setting up your first triage team.

Adding Halp to your first triage team

Once you have gone through the initial installation process for Halp in Microsoft Teams (via personal context) and have granted Halp admin consent, you'll notice that Halp will instruct you to set-up your first triage team. We recommend setting up triage teams as private teams where your agents will receive requests from requesters, otherwise anyone from your organization might be able to find and join this team (and be considered an agent in Halp). Setting up your triage team as a private team helps prevent anyone from joining the team and being charged as a Halp agent.

Step 1: If you already have a private team to service requests, we recommend adding Halp to that team (if this is your use case, skip to step 5), but you can also create a new dedicated private team where all of your requests will come into.
Step 2: Create your new private team from scratch.
Step 3: Make sure it is private (just for your team of agents), you will be billed based off of how many agents are in this team.
Step 4: Make sure the team is named so your team can identify where your tickets will appear (we usually recommend appending or prepending "triage" to the team name in order for it to be easily identifiable. Once you have named your new private team, click "Create".
Step 5: Once your private team is created, add Halp to this team by selecting "Manage team" from the overflow menu icon (•••) that displays when hovering over the team name in the left sidebar.
Step 6: From the "Manage team" interface, select the "Apps" tab and then click the "More apps" button to the right.
Step 7: Once in the app store (after clicking "More apps"), use the search function to find "Halp", once you see the Halp app, click on it.
Step 8: To the right of the "Open" (or in some cases the button may read "Add") button Click on the drop down arrow to the right of the button and select “Add to a team”.
Step 9: The new private team should already be prefilled. Click “Set up a bot”.
Step 10: Halp will send a message to your dedicated triage channel letting you know it is set up.

Adding request teams

Once you have gone through and set-up your first triage team, you'll want to add Halp to another team, your first request team. As noted at the beginning of this article, request teams are where requesters can go to make a ticket for a given queue. We recommend these teams be a public team where anyone can join and make a ticket.

Step 1: Select (or create) a public team where you would like requesters to submit tickets and follow steps 5 through 9 above.
Step 2: Once your public request team has had Halp added to it, you will receive a chat notification from the Halp bot. This chat will instruct you to select how you would like to utilize this team – as a Queue (which will set the team that Halp was added to as a triage team), or for requests (which will set the team up as a request team where individuals may submit tickets to a triage team). For now, we'll focus on setting up a request team.
Step 3: Select "For Requests" from the drop down shown below.
Step 4: Click the "Save" button
Step 5: Another message will appear, asking you to select a queue for the tickets to route to. From this messages dropdown menu, select the queue you would like tickets created from this request team to route to, then click "Save".
Step 6: A final message will be sent letting you know the request team was successfully created.

Adding additional triage teams

Once you have your initial Halp configuration setup, other teams may want to use Halp to service requests directly from Microsoft Teams. If and when this happens, you will likely want to create another queue (and therefore triage and request teams) with Halp. In order to do this, follow the steps below.

Step 1: Select (or create) a private team where you would like agents to receive and triage tickets and follow steps 5 through 9 from the "Adding Halp to your first triage team" section above.
Step 2: Once you've added Halp to your designated triage team, there will be a chat notification from Halp (as seen below). From the dropdown menu, select "As a Queue" and click "Save".
Step 3: A final message will be sent letting you know that the new triage team and new queue was successfully created and configured. From here, if you'd like requests to route to this new triage team (and therefore queue), you'll want to go ahead and follow the instructions for "Adding request teams".