Send Microsoft Teams message from Application to User

RE: Send Microsoft Teams message from Application to User

marilub781042 — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 20:12:30 GMT

Hey! The main issue is that teams doesn’t let an app just send messages as a regular user without each person signing in. The usual workaround is to create a bot or service account in Teams and have your app send messages through that bot. That way, you can send 1:1 messages or chat messages without needing each user to authenticate.

If you don’t need full chat messages and just want to ping users with alerts, using the activity feed notifications API is a simpler and fully supported option. It won’t create a normal chat thread, but it’s perfect for sending system-to-user notifications.

So basically, for “real” messages, go bot route; for simple notifications, activity feed works great.

RE: Send Microsoft Teams message from Application to User

Jesse Knight — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 17:09:06 GMT

Hi Guy - With the ServicePrincipal context we have been able to do a directory search for users. I might wind up creating a sync'ed record for this purpose. I successfully tested the user search graph API using the service principal context from Appian.

For the interactivity, we just had a Service Account setup in AD that will act as a bot, as recommended by our MS365 team.

RE: Send Microsoft Teams message from Application to User

Guy — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 10:15:47 GMT

Thanks Jesse, that's helpful. Which Graph API are you planning to use to use?
I see for "Send chatMessage in a channel or a chat" (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/chatmessage-post?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http), Application permissions are only supported for migration.

This means you won't be able to send chat messages directly to users using this API. Have you found another way? The only other way I could see was creating a Teams App and either sending an activity notification or setting up a "Bot" and messaging through that.

RE: Send Microsoft Teams message from Application to User

Jesse Knight — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 15:55:29 GMT

Hey Guy,

There is some great information here - learn.microsoft.com/.../auth-v2-service

In order for Teams to generate chat messages based upon a system account, the term to research is "Service Principal". There's way more detail about that in the link above than I could accurately provide here.

We're still in the early stages of our API, so there may be additional hurdles. But here is what we have so far.

For the graph API, you might not need the plugin in all cases.

Create a HTTP Connected System
- Choose OAuth Client Credentials, input client id and secret
- Token Request Endpoint: As noted in the above link - login.microsoftonline.com/{Tenant_Id}/oauth2/v2.0/token
Create integration
- Use your connected system for authentication
- Use the graph API for the URL, then add the appropriate query parameters / body based upon what you're trying to do. Pay specific attention to the quotes in query parameters.

Also keep in mind that, functionally, a lot of the graph messaging API relies on Teams Id's, not email / names. We're still trying to solve that in a more fluid way.

I don't have experience with Activity Notifications, but they will likely be our fall back plan if our currently-designed Teams chat features are not approved for production by our security team. Lots of folks get involved when there is potential (even if mitigated) for a service account to act on behalf of a user.