MS Teams add-on now requires bot to be added to be used in channels and chats

The add in for Asana in Teams now requires a bot to be added to any chats or channels in order to use it to create tasks.

When did this change take place? It is a huge amount of manual work to have to go through and add the bot to every conversation or channel I need to create a task from. I realize this may have been done to minimize automatic messages from the bot, but is there any way to roll this back? The easy integration into Teams and the ability to create tasks without having to manually add a bot to each conversation or channel was a key feature of the Asana/Teams integration.

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hear hear! This change is contradicting a key promise of Asana - making your work more seamless, less manual and as easy as possible to centrally connect everything in 1 place.
Please undo!

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This change has rendered the app completely useless within Teams. I have dozens of colleagues, meetings, and group chats, all of which may require task creation at any time. I have reverted to the old ‘copy & paste’ from Teams to web, as it is more efficient than adding the bot to every single channel.

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Does anyone know how to add the BOT to private channels in team? We have Asana projects that tie to private teams channels and I am stumped on how to “add the bot”? The Asana project is in the tab….I would truly appreciate help.

Agreed - especially since I have no idea why the change was done!
It will make me switch away from Asana because of the added friction every time I want to create a task from a chat with someone.

+1. This is not a positive change, having to manually add Asana to every single chat conversation in Teams completely defeats the purpose of having a quick way to create an Asana task from a chat entry.

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This is a significant degradation in functionality for our Teams-heavy org.

Random chats get created constantly, and it was a life-saver to be able to add any of them to Asana as long as I had the bot loaded for me personally.

Having to add it via a multi-step process each and every time has rendered it nearly useless. At least the Outlook add-on still works correctly.

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Agree that this has become a problem for the users in our org. There should be a way for the O365 admin to globally enable the App for all of the Teams enviroment (chats & channels).

Hoping that Asana will reconsider how this app is currently implemented for Teams.

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Hello,

We used to be able to create an asana task from any chat message in Microsoft Teams. It was awesome!
Now you have to add the bot to every chat from which you want to assign a task…Is this for privacy reasons? I can’t imagine anything else because it adds a significant amount of busywork to get the same result we were getting before!

This may prove of assistance:

Hi @Rocky_5 , I’ve merged your post into this existing one that @ka_nishiyama referenced.

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Same, copy and paste has become faster

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Thanks for finding and merging. Will someone post here the reason for this change? (MS Teams restrictions? Privacy & security?) It was so obviously better before that there must be a reason this happened…

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I’m not sure, @Rocky_5 , I don’t work for Asana, just a volunteer here.
Pining @Forum-team for visibility, hoping they can respond.

I have heard that there appears to have been a change in the specifications on the Teams side.

No official word from Asana on this as far as I can tell, but you’re not alone — there’s a parallel thread in the Japanese forum reporting the same change.

Worth upvoting the thread to get more visibility from Asana.

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Hi everyone, thank you for the ping! We are looking into this and will report back once we have an update. Thank you!

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Hi everyone, jumping in to share an update on this.

As part of a recent update to Teams “Adaptive Cards” (designed to improve security and provide a more native experience), the Asana Bot is now required to be present in the specific conversation where you are working.

To get it working, you just need to @mention Asana in the chat or go to the Apps section of that specific channel to add it. Once the bot is present, everything should work as normal.

We are currently discussing this limitation with Microsoft to see if we can reduce this friction in the future. In the meantime, adding the bot is the required step to enable functionality. Thank you so much for your patience, and we’ll let you know here if there’s any update on the case!

We’ll keep this feedback topic open for future comments and votes.

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Hi @Vanessa_N,
Thank you for the information.
I did @mention Asana in a channel chat, but I am still required to add the bot to the channel.
When I don’t have permission to add tabs to a channel, how can I get it working?

Sorry to hear that, @Tetsuo_Kawakami. I’m sharing your question with our PMs and will get back to you shortly

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