Team Discussion Assistant

The Team Discussion Assistant in Unit4 Advanced Virtual Assistant (Ava) allows you to open discussion channels in Microsoft Teams from certain windows in Unit4 ERPx, in order to discuss tasks with colleagues. Currently this functionality is only available together with the PIM (Procurement Invoice Management) service.

System setup

To make the functional set up for the Team Discussion Assistant, someone with administrator permissions within the MS Teams organization needs to perform the following steps.

Required user delegated permissions within Microsoft Teams

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

Permission Microsoft Permission Description Ava's use of 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 a list of relevant people of the signed-in user.
Read presence information of all users in the organization (availability, status note, timezone, etc).
Read the profile of the signed-in user.
Read all users' basic profiles in the organization (display name, first and last name, email address, photo ,etc).		 Query users, as well as their presence and basic profiles when searching for colleagues within the customer user's organization to include in the discussion.
U4ava.collab.access N/A Create a new discussion.

Required application permissions within Microsoft Teams

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

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. We need the ChannelMessage.Read.All permission because Microsoft does not offer read access for specific channels. However, we will strictly limit our access to Ava-created discussion channels and will 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

All required permissions (both delegated and application permissions) can be granted in the different environments by the customer organization administrator by going to:

ERPx CSP

In order to ensure proper functioning of the Team Discussion Assistant, the following policies need to be added to ERPx CSP: