This blog post was also released on my personal blog.
Microsoft’s Yammer has been around for a while and people who are part of one or more networks will agree that Yammer can turn into Spammer.
For each new conversation & comment, Yammer will send you an email resulting in mail floods. The easy fix would be to disable the notification email but then you risk the chance to miss out on interesting/important discussions.
At our current project we use Slack to communicate with each other and it’s a really nice tool – Nice & clean just how I like it.
So lets get rid of the notification emails and notify your team when someone starts a new conversation on Yammer! This is where Microsoft Azure App Services come in, more specifically Microsoft Azure API & Logic Apps.
With Azure Logic apps I’ve created a flow where I have one API app listening on a Yammer group for new conversations while another Slack API App will notify us in a channel when something pops-up.
How does that look?!
When I create a new conversation in Yammer i.e. “We’re ready to go in production” –
The Yammer API App in my Logic App will notice that there is a new conversation and will send a message to my team’s Slack channel as the Project Announcements-bot.
Want it yourself? Here’s how!
Before getting our hands dirty let’s summarize what’s on today’s schedule.
We will start with provisioning our API apps that we will use from the Azure Marketplace. After that we will create a new Logic app that will describe the flow of our app.
Provisioning the API Apps
As of today you have two options for provisioning your API Apps – One is to provision them upfront where you have more control on naming and such. Second is provision them while you are designing your Logic app and let Azure take care of the naming. Be aware: Azure uses names like YammerConnector1431593752292 that doesn’t really say where they’re being used.
Since I always want to name my components as self-describing as possible we will provision two API apps up front :
- A Yammer App that will trigger our Logic app when a new conversation is posted
- A Slack App that will send a message to Slack as a Bot
Provisioning an API App is super simple : Browse to the new Azure Portal > Click New > Select Web + Mobile > Browse the Azure Marketplace > Select the API Apps section > Select the API App you want.
After you’ve selected your API App you basically you give it a Name, assign the App Plan & Resource Group :
Azure will start provisioning the API App for you in the background, while they are doing that let’s have a look at the Connector Info.
Before actually provisioning the App you see that each API App or Connector gives you an overview of it’s capabilities in a Logic App. Here you can see that the Slack Connector will only be able to act in a Logic app.
Now when we look at the Yammer Connector Info we see that it can act withing a Logic App but also Trigger it on a certain condition.
Defining the flow in a Logic App
Before we can start defining our flow we need to create a new Logic App.
In the Azure Portal click New > Select Web + Mobile > Logic App. Give it a self-describing name and add it to the same App Plan as your provisioned API Apps.
Once it is configured, open it and click Triggers and Actions.
We will define our flow by defining the sequence of connectors. You can find our provisioned connectors on the side, click on your Yammer connector to add it.
After that, the default card will be replaced with your Yammer connector. As you can see we first need to authenticate with Yammer. Click Authorize.
A pop-up will show to do the OAuth dancing with Yammer. After you’ve logged in you will see need to grant access to your Logic App.
Read the statement carefully and click Allow if you agree.
(In order to complete the following steps you need to allow access)
Now that you’ve allowed access to your Yammer account it’s interesting to know that the authentication token will be stored in the secure store of the Gateway (A Gateway is used by API Connectors to communicate with each other and outbound services). This is because the gateway will handle all the authentication with Yammer for us.
Once that’s done you get an overview of all the triggers the Yammer connector has. Luckily the only one that is available is the one we need, click New Message.
Configuring the trigger is fairly easy – We define the trigger frequency in which the connector will look for new messages. Next to that we assign the Group Id of our Yammer Group that we are interested in. The granularity of your trigger frequency depends on the hosting App Plan. In my example I’m using 1 minute which requires me to use a Standard-tier App Plan.
You can find the group Id by browsing to your group and copying the Feed Id.
https://www.yammer.com/Your-Network/#/threads/inGroup?type=in_group&feedId=579250
Click the checkmark to save your configuration.
Go back to the side bar and click on your Slack Connector to add it to the pane. Here we need to authenticate with our Slack by clicking Authorize.
Just like with Yammer, Azure will request access to your Slack account to post messages.
Our last step is to configure the Slack connector.
What we will do is send the original message as a quote along with who posted it and a link to the conversation. In Slack that results in the following markup statement –
>>> _”Original-Message”_ by *User* _(Url)_
To achieve this we will use the @concat function to assign the Text value –
@concat(‘>>> _”‘, triggers().outputs.body.MessageText, ‘”_ by *’, triggers().outputs.body.SenderName, ‘* _(‘, triggers().outputs.body.WebUrl, ‘)_’)
This statement is retrieving some of the output values of the Yammer connector.
We will also configure to which Slack channel you want to send it. Optionally you can assign a name to the Slack bot and give it a icon. Here I gave the name of my Yammer group as Slack bot name.
Click the checkmark to save your configuration & save the flow of your logic app.
After a few seconds/minutes, depending on your trigger configuration, you will see that the Yammer connector picked up your new message and triggered your Logic App.
Now you should see a new message in your Slack channel!
Ship it!
That’s it – we’re done!
Your Yammer connector will now poll for new conversations in your Yammer group every cycle you’ve defined in its configuration. If there are new ones, your Logic App will start processing it and you will be notified in Slack!
Wrapping up
As you can see, you can very easily use Azure API & Logic Apps to create small IFTT-like flows. Nevertheless you can even build more full-blown integration scenarios by using the more advanced BizTalk API Apps!
If you want you can even expand this demo and add support for multiple Yammer groups. To do so you’ll need to open the Code View and copy additional triggers in the JSON file (Thank you Sam Vanhoutte for the tip on how to create multiple trigger).
Keep in mind that the Slack bot’s name that is posting is currently hardcoded, unfortunately the Yammer app doesn’t expose the name of the group so this is something you’ll have to work around.
Can’t get enough of this? You can build your own API App or read Sam Vanhoutte his initial thoughts on Azure App Services!
Thanks for reading,
Tom Kerkhove
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