How to integrate Virtual Agent with Teams without Teams Admin

[chadlockwood]

We are preparing to deploy the Virtual Agent and integrate with MS Teams. I have the ServiceNow admin role but I do not have an admin role in Teams/Azure. Can anyone describe the process for accomplishing this? Or is it actually a requirement to be both a ServiceNow admin and a Teams/Azure admin?

[Nya Valdez]

Hello Chad, 

You will actually need to engage with whomever in your organization is a global Azure admin and also the admin for MS Teams (if they are managed separately) without someone with those credentials, you will be unable to complete the integration. 

*Please mark my answer helpful or Correct if applicable so that others may also benefit*

[Lynda1]

When we integrated ServiceNow Virtual Agent with Teams, we had the Azure global admin and the ServiceNow Admin work together. The Azure global Admin temporarily gave the ServiceNow Admin, Azure Global Admin rights only during the integration setup. Once the setup was completed, the ServiceNow admin Azure global admins rights was taken away.

Whoever is doing the connection in ServiceNow, that account requires Azure global admin just during the integration setup.

[Chris D]

When you first install/setup the Azure app(s)* - before installing the Teams app - you (ServiceNow admin) will need to setup time with somebody with with Azure/Teams admin. If you're co-located, great. If you gotta meet virtually, you will need to click the "Install" button in ServiceNow then grant remote access because that's gonna take you to Azure where they will need to login with their admin credentials. I suppose you can try to share the URL with them to do on their end - we didn't even try that though, it was easy enough to screenshare/remote control. You may need to repeat if you're installing multiple apps*. Don't forget to log out of their Azure account when they finish granting the access needed!).

*For basic VA usage in Teams, you'll just need to install the "SSO" app. "Request based Chats" just integrates with Teams to start conversations externally and import chats - doesn't use VA at all. And neither does "Notify", which is similar, but used for starting meetings.

The Teams app (ServiceNow for Teams - though you can rename it) install is separate and can be done afterwards. In ServiceNow, get the app manifest created - it'll export a .zip file - and then (presuming non-admins can't install Teams apps themselves) send that zip file to your Teams admin and ask them to install it for you. I don't think there's anything particularly special about the Teams app - the user access was granted via the Azure app previously installed.

The only extra step we requested of the Teams admins was to pin our app to the Teams sidebar for all users which makes our VA most easily accessible.

[Muralidharan BS]

As everyone said you need people from the Azure team to integrate it.

We granted them "external_app_install_admin" to help in installing the MS teams, this worked perfectly.