By allowing bots which are hosted "on premise" (behind a company firewall), one allow to access systems from that company.
This is the situation for many companies where the infrastructure or services which need to be reachable by bots is not on the public internet.

Some scenarios:
- A bot is running behind a company firewall
- The bot connects to MS teams, joins a channel, and "listens" to conversations (outbound connection to the internet)

This enables interactions like:
- @bot, list defects (from an in-house issue tracker)
- @bot, add capacity to applicationx (after an authorization phase, on-prem application gets more servers for more capacity)
- [bot]> caution! applicationx experiences a 20% performance hit

It seems as though currently all bots only work if you @mention them, so my assumption is that this is a requirement of the api used to develop the bots.

Many people from my organization are used to IRC/Slack style bots where an explicit @mention isn't required for bots to parse a message and respond.

Sometimes there is fun functionality that can be added for a lot of bots and having to @mention a bot really detracts from the user experience of some bots.

I can also see this getting out of hand when using a lot of bots, so this would probably be something that would go well in tandem with this suggestion: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/18646108-bot-permissions-contract

It would be great if you could build in your QnA bot into Teams and have it digest the channels SharePoint (files) for Questions and Answers?

I'm thinking something like.

1. I ask a question.
2. It returns results
3. I say "not found"
4. It posts it to channel as a Question that needs answering
5. Once answered Bot asks requester if it answers question
6. If so answer added to share point as something (word doc? excel? List? I don't know.

Also some options to update/expand answers, or mark them as needing to be re-answered?

https://qnamaker.ai/

Then you can build up a corproate QandA site. Maybe keep track of answers/rank by user like StackOverflow?

It turns out that when using the Polly bot one has to press tab after typing "@polly". I can kinda see why this is necessary but I didn't figure this out for myself, I had to email Polly support who kindly replied (very quickly, within a couple of minutes) and pointed me to this article: https://www.polly.ai/help/msteams/author-poll-not-working.html which states

"If you tried something like @polly "Your poll in quotes" "voting option" "another voting option" but nothing is happening, then you’re likely not tagging Polly correctly. In Microsoft Teams, you need to hit tab after typing @polly in order for us to regonize (sic) the mention"

Its not a good experience. I originally thought it was Polly's fault but its totally not, and that's unfair on Polly.

Please change this behaviour. If I @ mention polly then this should work, I shouldn't have to press the tab button.

Thoughts? Comments? Please put them below.

I'm looking at the new integration with 3rd party Bots. At the moment I am not adding any bots because of the permissions they require.

This bot has the following permissions:
Receive messages and data that I provide to it.
Send me messages and notifications.
Receive messages and data that team members provide to it in a channel.
Send messages and notifications in a channel.
Access my profile information such as my name, email address, company name, and preferred language.
Access this team's information such as team name, channel list and roster (including team member's names and email addresses) - and use this to contact them​.

In particular is the last one where they require acces to the team's information and channels list.

This means we need to be really careful when adding information and channel names to make sure it doesn't have any sensitive information. Or we need to create a new Team with nothing interesting in it and then add a bot. Or just use it in private chats.