Explore new change notification API resources for your Microsoft Teams app

As we enter this new era of hybrid work, Microsoft Teams will be the organizing layer that keeps teammates, both in office and remote, collaborating effectively together. And with the rise in volume of teams being created, along with more information being passed along via chats and channels, business and IT managers are looking for automation opportunities and ways to safeguard data and enforce access control requirements.

That’s why earlier this year, we were excited to announce change notification APIs for Teams messages using Microsoft Graph – empowering developers like you to meet the automation needs that business and IT managers are seeking. Our initial release enabled subscription to messages with specific text or mentions of a given user – and so we are thrilled to announce that we are expanding support to additional Teams resources. You can now subscribe to all types of changes (create, update, and delete) to teams, channels, and team membership. You also have the option to request resource data when receiving the change notification itself. The expansion of support to these additional Teams resources will open even more scenarios that you can tap into and automate.

Use change notification APIs to automate a breadth of scenarios

Our initial release of change notification APIs focused on enabling you to subscribe to Teams messages in channels and chats for delegated scenarios, such as those containing certain text or mentions of a specific user. Now, you can use these new additional features to subscribe to the following:

Changes in any team at tenant level to know if a new team was created or if an existing team was updated or deleted.
Changes in a particular team to know if the team has been updated or deleted.
Changes in any channel at tenant level to know if a new channel was created or any existing channel was updated or deleted.
Changes in membership of a particular team to know if any member in the team was added or removed or if a member’s role was changed.

Now, you’re likely wondering what scenarios and use cases these features can help enable. Some of the most useful scenarios that can be enabled and automated with these features include:

Automating rules to enforce best practices for team naming conventions in your organization to ensure they are easy to discover; for example, Finance – Approvals, or Class of 2021 – 8th Grade Chemistry.
Automating new member onboarding, by granting access to resources and onboarding materials without human intervention.
Automating appropriate resource access, by revoking access to resources when someone leaves a team.
Periodically prompting guests to review and accept your organization-specific privacy and data compliance policies to continue their team membership.
Ensuring only users with certain clearance are part of a particular team.

These are just a few scenarios to illustrate what’s possible and help you start thinking about the scenarios that would be relevant for you and your stakeholders.

Next steps

We look forward to hearing about more scenarios and use cases you would like to enable and automate through these APIs. Please feel free to post any technical questions you have on Microsoft Q&A.

To learn more, see the following:

Happy coding!