Bring your own Agent to MS Teams

GorsyGentle•about 1 hour ago

> Your users live in Teams.

No, I assure you, we do not. Nobody wants to live in hell. Even at my current company, we are mandated solely to use Teams for meetings. But nobody uses it for chat.

Thankfully we have Slack to save us from that hell. Even if giphy is disabled because it might have R rated content whatever the hell that means.

leosanchez•about 1 hour ago

IMO Only thing good about Teams is Emojis

Jedd•37 minutes ago

Do you mean the way that Microsoft hijacked open-parenthesis, and you can't choose a different character to trigger an emoji call?

biglyburrito•about 1 hour ago

And yet Slack still does it better

schmidtleonard•about 2 hours ago

Can all the king's agents and all the king's men stop Teams from frequent silent failures to deliver a short message in Year of the Lord 2026?

ukuina•about 2 hours ago

Why is there no Teams CLI?

SoftTalker•35 minutes ago

There's a libpurple plugin, so you can in theory use Teams chat from Pidgin, finch, or other clients. I tried it last year and it didn't work very well.

aliljet•about 2 hours ago

How many levels of agents are here. Agents riding code by agents in a system driven by agents vibed by one lonely engineer in Redmond?

walrus01•about 2 hours ago

Introducing Microsoft Teams Turducken 2026 (Enterprise AI Agent Edition) now with 17 layers

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/11/21/365509503/th...

thegagne•about 4 hours ago

If only it could fix the lag with Mac screen sharing in Teams.

codazoda•about 2 hours ago

I switched to the PWA to solve that.

gerdesj•about 3 hours ago

When I were a nipper lag/latency over 30ms was considered a bit crap for voice unless satellite links were involved. That's for circuit switched networks. Human conversation works best with a sub 25ms latency and you will start to notice lag at 30ms.

Nowadays with all our massively more powerful links (Gb vs Kb) but packet switched, we often end up resorting to a form of half duplex radio protocol. That's just voice, let alone video.

That's what you get when you abrogate your comms to a hyper scaler that will never scale to the point of what you would like because it will damage profits upstream.

Whilst your end will be a phone or laptop or whatever - with gobs of capacity, the hyper scaler bit will be woefully under powered for your call but just enough to keep comms going and your subscription dumping cash into the coffers.

You end up re-inventing how to talk to someone over a satellite link in the 1970-80s ... in 2026! I (UK, 55 y/o) can clearly remember my parents telling me how to talk to great aunt Maye in Australia on the blower. Nowadays we have the internet to packet switch instead of circuit switch which is generally capable of ~10-50ms latency nearly anywhere, where mostly copper is involved. However call quality seems to be shit!

simfree•about 1 hour ago

PCMU and PCMA voice frames are 20ms or 40ms, and no one is running with no jitter buffer, so your 30ms number doesn't make sense.

Even circuit switched networks are not often below 30ms, to hit that you'd need to make a local phone call on a fully analog circuit.

jillesvangurp•about 1 hour ago

I've been having a bit of success with using Matrix with OpenClaw. I've been playing with OpenClaw because our company is looking to help people get started with AI workflows. So, I've been experimenting a lot with different tools and technologies in this space.

I started like everybody else trying to do simple things via Whatsapp and Slack. Terrible experience. Both systems are pretty locked down and very inflexible and the OpenClaw integration is very limited. You need a phone number for each user in Whatsapp and if you don't have an extra one, you basically end up chatting with yourself. With Slack you end up in permission hell. And their UI for editing permissions is terrible. I never quite managed to make this work.

With Matrix, the experience massively improved. I self host it and I got codex to generate me a working setup that has been running on a cheap vm for a few weeks now. Backups and everything. Hooking that up to OpenClaw was pretty straightforward. You just get a user/password and it gets an access token and then you are good to go to do whatever via the REST API and CLI. So, the OpenClaw integration worked on the first try for me.

Then I had a nice idea and took this to the next level: I gave codex access to my vms with OpenClaw and Matrix stack (Synapse & Element) and I made it create an OpenClaw Admin agent for me, with its own matrix admin user. And then I "taught" it to create more rooms, agents, and bot users for me.

Now I can prompt "create an agent called Foo" via matrix and it will invite me and the rest of our team to the new room. And a minute later I can be chatting to my new agent via a freshly created bot user and model of my choice. Super simple.

We actually ditched Slack a week into this experiment. Because obviously I got the Admin agent to also invite the rest of the team to these rooms and everybody started engaging with agents. We made the admin agent recreate our dozens of slack channels we had as rooms from a screenshot. Migrating content from Slack is a bit meh so we just just skipped that. But Slack in general is a bit meh these days so we don't really miss it.

MS seems to be catching on to this with Teams. I still don't like it. But providing an SDK for it is the smart move. It's essential to enable doing stuff like this.

Is OpenClaw useful? It can be. But you need to solve a lot of plumbing issues like this. Getting the basic plumbing out of the way for setting up new agents with communication channels is a nice first step. We are currently experimenting with all sorts of simple use cases currently. They all require setting up a dedicated agent and having OpenClaw do that for us is both nice as a demo and something we now use a lot.

Bring your own Agent to MS Teams

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Discussion (14 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews