Team Discussion

The Team Discussion functionality in Unit4 Advanced Virtual Agent (Ava) allows you to open discussion channels in Microsoft Teams from certain windows in Unit4 ERPx to discuss tasks with colleagues. It is currently available only together with the Procurement Invoice Management (PIM) service. Team Discussion lets users set up discussions directly from ERPx, and Ava automatically archives those discussions for future reference.

How to use Team Discussion

You can access Team Discussion through the Discuss button in certain Unit4 ERPx windows.

Archival of team discussions

A team discussion is archived when it has been inactive for seven days. Ava notifies participants two days before a discussion is archived. To postpone archiving, continue the discussion as normal and Ava restarts the seven-day inactivity countdown. Team discussions are archived as PDF attachments to the item they were created from and stored in Document archive in ERPx.

Find out more about team discussions

See the Ava Help Center.

System setup

⚠️ Warning: To use the Team Discussion functionality, the corresponding feature flag must be enabled in your system configuration. This feature is not enabled by default. Contact Unit4 to request that the Team Discussion feature flag be enabled as part of your Ava setup.

To complete the functional setup for Team Discussion, an administrator in the Microsoft Teams organisation must perform the following steps.

Required delegated user permissions within Microsoft Teams

To start a discussion in Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Teams prompts the user to log in to their domain account. To select participants, the user must have the following permissions (defined in the customer's Microsoft Entra ID):

Permission Microsoft permission description How Ava uses the permission
Email, OpenID, Profile, Offline_access Minimum permissions needed to do basic sign-in. Sign in to the user account.
ChannelMessage.Send Send channel messages. Send messages in the Ava-created discussion channels on behalf of the user once the discussion is created.
People.Read, Presence.Read.All, User.Read, User.ReadBasic.All Read relevant people for the signed-in user; read presence information for all users in the organisation, including availability, status note and time zone; read the profile of the signed-in user; read the basic profiles of all users in the organisation, including display name, first and last name, email address and photo. Query users and their presence and basic profiles when searching for colleagues in the customer user's organisation to include in the discussion.
U4ava.collab.access Not applicable. Create a new discussion.

Required application permissions within Microsoft Teams

The Ava service requires additional permissions to create or manage teams and discussion channels in Microsoft Teams for the customer organisation.

The following permissions are needed.

Permission Microsoft permission description Ava's use of permission
AppCatalog.Read.All Read the apps in the app catalogs. Install the Ava app in Microsoft Teams for those users that use the discussion assistant but do not yet have the Ava app installed.
Channel.Create Create channels in any team. Create discussion channels in specific teams created by Ava.
Channel.ReadBasic.All Read the names and descriptions of all channels. Search for Ava-created discussion channels for archiving and storage in ERPx, and subsequently delete them in Microsoft Teams.
ChannelMessage.Read.All Read all channel messages. Read messages in Ava-created discussion channels for archiving and storage in ERPx. The ChannelMessage.Read.All permission is required because Microsoft does not offer read access for specific channels. Ava strictly limits access to Ava-created discussion channels and does not read the content of any other channels.
Group.ReadWrite.All Read and write all Microsoft 365 Groups (Groups control access to Microsoft Teams resources and APIs). Delete Ava-created teams.
Team.Create Create teams. Create teams.
Team.ReadBasic.All Get a list of all teams. Search for Ava-created teams for archiving and storage in ERPx, and subsequently delete them in Microsoft Teams.
TeamMember.ReadWrite.All Add and remove members from all teams. Include the selected users in Ava-created discussion channels.
TeamsAppInstallation.Read.All Read installed Teams apps for all installation scopes. Install the Ava app in Microsoft Teams for those users that use the discussion assistant but do not yet have the Ava app installed.
TeamsAppInstallation.ReadForUser.All Read installed Teams apps for all users. Install the Ava app in Microsoft Teams for those users that use the discussion assistant but do not yet have the Ava app installed.
TeamsAppInstallation.ReadWriteAndConsentForTeam.All Manage installation and permission grants of Teams apps for all teams. Install the Ava app in Microsoft Teams for those users that use the discussion assistant but do not yet have the Ava app installed.
TeamsAppInstallation.ReadWriteAndConsentForUser.All Manage installation and permission grants of Teams apps in a user account. Install the Ava app in Microsoft Teams for those users that use the discussion assistant but do not yet have the Ava app installed.
User.ReadBasic.All Read all users' basic profiles (display name, first and last name, email address, photo, etc). Read basic profiles of users belonging to Ava-created discussion channels.

Accepting permission requests

The customer organisation administrator can grant all required delegated and application permissions in non-production environments (NPEs) and production environments (PEs) by going to:

ERPx CSP

Add the following policies to ERPx CSP to ensure that Team Discussion functions correctly: