Use Azure Boards with Microsoft Teams - Azure Boards (2024)

Azure DevOps Services

If you use Microsoft Teams, you can create work items and monitor work item activity in your Azure Boards project from your Teams channel. You accomplish this by adding the Azure Boards app for Microsoft Teams to your Teams channel.

The Azure Boards app for Microsoft Teams enables users to complete the following tasks:

• Set up and manage subscriptions for creating and updating work items
• Manage other work item events
• Receive and manage notifications for work item events in their Teams channel
• Create work items from conversations in the channel
• Search and share work items with other members in the channel using the messaging extension
• View work item previews from their URLs to start discussions and keep the conversations contextual.

Read this article to learn how to:

Prerequisites

• To create a work item, you must be a contributor to the Azure Boards project. If you don't have a project yet, you can sign up and create a project. For more information, see Start using Azure Boards.
• To create subscriptions in a Teams channel for work item events, you must be a member of the Azure Boards Project Administrators group or added to the team administrator role for the team. To get added, see Change project-level permissions or Add team administrator.
• To receive notifications, you must enable the Third-party application access via OAuth setting for the Azure DevOps organization. See Change application access policies for your organization.

Add the Azure Boards app to Microsoft Teams

You add the app to your Teams channel in Microsoft Teams.

1. Visit the App store in Microsoft Teams and search for the Azure Boards app. Upon installing, a welcome message from the app displays as shown in the following image.

   

2. Use the @azure boards handle to interact with the app. For a list of commands, see Command reference provided later in this article.

Link your Azure Boards project to the Azure Boards app

To use the app, you must first link your Azure Boards project to your Teams channel.

1. Once the app has been installed in your team, connect and authenticate yourself to Azure Boards. Use Sign in with different email if your Microsoft Teams and Azure Boards are in different tenants.

   

   

2. After signing in, use the following command inside a Teams channel to link to the Azure Boards project that you specify with the URL:

    @azure boards link [project url]

   For example:

   See Also

   The 5 phases of DevOps maturityIs the Scrum Master responsible for resolving all the issues of the Scrum Team?4 Advantages of Physical Task Boards | Agile VelocityBlockers in Agile, how to manage blockers & impediments - 2021 update

    @azure boards link https://dev.azure.com/myorg/myproject

Once the project is linked, you can create work items using @azure boards create command or use message actions.

Set up subscriptions

You can create subscriptions to monitor work items at any time using the @azure boards subscriptions command.

1. Select the area path you want and event that you're interested in. Use the associatedfilters to customize what you get notified on in your Teams channel. To help easily set up subscriptions, your recently accessed area paths are shown in the area path dropdown.

   

In case the area path you want doesn't appear in the Area path dropdown menu, follow the instructions mentioned in the next section, Add area paths. Area paths added using the @azure boards addAreapath command and area paths for which subscriptions are created in the channel always appear in the Area path dropdown along with recently accessed area paths.

Add area paths

You can add areas that your team works on to the channel so that they're always available for creating work items and subscriptions. This feature is useful for teams with more than 100 area paths in their project.

• Use the following command to add area paths from your project to the Teams channel.

   @azure boards addAreapath [area path] 

  For example:

   @azure boards addAreapath myproject\fabrikam

  

• If you choose project name as your area path, then you'll receive notifications for all the area paths in the project.

Create a work item with a command

With the Azure Boards app, you can create work items from your channel. The app supports custom work items as well.

• To create a work item, use @azure boards create.

  

Create a work item from message actions

Often, discussions in a channel require creation of work items. You can use message actions to create a work item. The selected message is pre-filled in the description section of the work item. The Discussion section of the newly added work item stores a link back to the conversation in the channel.

• To create work items using message actions

  

  

Manage Azure Boards subscriptions

1. To view, add and remove subscriptions for a channel, use the @azure boards subscriptions command:

    @azure boards subscriptions

This command lists all the current subscriptions for the channel and allows you to add new subscriptions and remove existing ones. As part of adding subscriptions, you can also customize what you get notified on by using various filters.

To help users search and share work items, the Azure Boards app for Microsoft Teams supports compose extension. You can search for work items by work item ID, title, or supported functional command. For a list of commands, see Functional work item search. To use the compose extension, users must sign in to Azure Boards app either by running @azure boards signin command or by signing into the compose extension directly.

Preview work item URLs

To support collaboration around work items discussed within a channel, the channel displays a preview of work items referenced. When a user pastes the work item URL, a preview is shown similar to the following image. This preview helps to keep work item-related conversations relevant and correct.

For this feature to work, users must be signed in. Once signed in, this feature works for all channels in a team in Microsoft Teams.

Unlink a project from a channel

A Teams channel can only link to one Azure Boards project at a time. To link to a different project, you must first unlink the current project using @azure boards unlink command.

Unlinking a project deletes all the subscriptions along with added area paths from the channel. If the channel has no subscriptions, any user can unlink a project. However if a channel has subscriptions, only project admins can unlink a project from a channel.

Threaded notifications to link and reduce notifications

The Teams channel threads notifications so as to logically link and reduce related notifications in the channel. All notifications linked to a particular work item are linked together.

Compact view of threaded notifications

Expanded view of threaded notifications

Azure Boards command reference

The following table lists all the @azure boards commands you can use in your Microsoft Teams channel.

Configure Azure DevOps Services tabs in Microsoft Teams

1. To bring your Kanban board or Dashboard into Microsoft Teams, select the '+' ('add new tab') button on the top nav of your team channel.

   The Add a tab dialog displays. Icons are arranged typically according to most recent access. You can select A-Z for an alphabetized list.

   

2. Choose the Azure DevOps icon and authenticate your identity. Optionally, you can choose the Website icon and add the URL of your Kanban board or dashboard to the channel.

3. Choose the organization whose board or dashboard you want to add.

4. Complete the form presented. For example, here we add a dashboard for the Azure DevOps team for the TechnicalContent project.

   

5. The Kanban board or dashboard you selected displays.

Multi-tenant support

In your organization if you're using a different email or tenant for Microsoft Teams and Azure DevOps, complete the following steps to sign in and connect based on your use case.

Troubleshoot errors

If you're experiencing the following errors when using the Azure Boards App for Microsoft Teams, follow the procedures in this section.

• Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.
• Configuration failed. Please make sure that the organization '{organization name}' exists and that you have sufficientpermissions.

Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.

The Azure Boards app uses the OAuth authentication protocol, and requires Third-party application access via OAuth for theorganization to be enabled.To enable this setting, go to Organization settings > Security > Policies, and set the Third-party application accessvia OAuth for the organization setting to On.

Configuration failed. Please make sure that the organization '{organization name}' exists and that you have sufficient permissions.

Sign out of Azure DevOps by going to https://aka.ms/VsSignout using your browser.

Open an In private or incognito browser window and go to https://aex.dev.azure.com/me and sign in. In the dropdown under the profileicon to the left, select the directory that contains the organization containing the project that you want to link.

In the same browser, start a new tab, go to https://teams.microsoft.com/. Run the @azure boards signout command and then run the @azure boards signin command in the channel where the Azure Boards app for Microsoft Teams is installed.

Select the Sign in button and you'll be redirected to a consent page like the one in the following example. Ensure that the directory shown beside the email is same as what was chosen in the previous step. Accept and complete the sign-in process.

If these steps don't resolve your authentication issue, reach out to us at Developer Community.

Related articles

• Define area paths and assign to a team
• Azure Pipelines with Microsoft Teams
• Azure Repos with Microsoft Teams