Add Microsoft Teams chats to SharePoint

By João Ferreira Oct 25, 2023 Intranet 8 Comments

In today’s work environment, we’ve all witnessed the transformation of how we get things done. Work is all about collaboration, flexibility, and staying connected. Chances are you’ve heard that technology should be where you work, seamlessly integrated into your daily routine.

Microsoft understands this need and has made great improvements in that direction. While most applications were brought into Microsoft Teams, there is another exciting perspective worth exploring: bringing Microsoft Teams to your SharePoint intranet.

In this blog post, I’m showing you how to do just that. I’ll guide you through the process of integrating Microsoft Teams chats into your SharePoint intranet, including a custom solution that I developed for this purpose.

For a while, I’ve had the idea of creating an integrated chat for SharePoint using Microsoft Teams, like the one found on LinkedIn. However, this requires a substantial amount of work, and writing a Microsoft Teams custom application solely for this purpose seemed too much.

I’ve had this project idea bouncing around in my head for a while. But one day, as I was casually scrolling through the latest Microsoft Teams updates, I stumbled upon a new feature that makes links shared in Teams conversations open right next to the related website, giving you a better feel for the context.

This was the perfect solution to implement the Microsoft Teams chat inside SharePoint and after exploring it a bit I concluded that it was viable and built the extension you are now reading about in this post.

How to add Microsoft Teams chats to SharePoint sites

If you are willing to know more about the implementation details have a look to here where I explain how things were made.

Before we jump into the details of the installation process make sure you download the sppkg package from here.

1. Extract the zip file, inside you will find a sppkg to install the solution in your SharePoint tenant
2. Open the SharePoint app catalog and upload the chat-embedded.sppkg
   

   

3. Check the option Enable this app and it to all sites, this will make the app available in all modern SharePoint site for all the users
   
4. Click Enable app
5. Click Go to API access page, this step is required to see the profile picture of the user in the extension
   

   

6. Select the Read permission from the chat-embedded-client-side-solution and click Approve
   

Navigate to any page in your organization and you will see the extension at the bottom of the page. If you are not yet authenticated in Microsoft Teams in the browser you will have to do it the first time you use the extension, after it you will be able to simply have conversations from any SharePoint page as shown in the following animation.

Note this extension takes advantage of an integration made by Microsoft and it automatically gets the color of the theme from your operating system, so it automatically chooses the light or dark themes.

If you want to see it in action have a look to the video below, and make sure you follow me on social media and YouTube so you don’t miss future updates and cool integrations for your SharePoint intranet.

Download Solution
Explore on GitHub