Learn from the community is a series of articles to highlight real-life project scenarios covered in Show & Tell interviews at Microsoft 365 Developer YouTube. It’s a great opportunity for me to inspire you with the end-to-end solutions built upon Microsoft Cloud and help you for your next project with useful resources.

A lot of us use many tools in our day-to-day work and these tools vary according to our job responsibilities. Microsoft AI MVP Stephan Bisser joins me in this interview to talk about how tools vary between departments to get a job done in a company. For example, when the Sales department uses CRM tool to track new customers, developers in the same company often use Azure DevOps to track their software development process on a day-to-day basis. Stephan explains how hopping between the internal tools became a challenge and how they decided to build Erdwin bot to solve the problem. Erdwin bot is designed to centralize tools across the company and help employees access the data they need through one single bot interface. There is something for every employee in this bot.

Erdwin bot is built using the Microsoft Bot Framework SDK and it is designed as a Microsoft Teams bot. It also leverages Microsoft Cognitive Services including:

• Language Understanding (LUIS) to enable intelligent understanding with natural language processing
• QnAMaker to create knowledgebases to handle user’s basic questions.

Erdwin bot connects to many tools that are used internally in Stephan’s company. It provides the following features and capabilities:

• Managing and gathering opportunities on Dynamics 365 CRM by using Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Rest APIs
• Handling task management on Microsoft Planner by using Microsoft Graph APIs
• Alerting employees about important news by connecting to the Intranet
• Helping employees’ onboarding with Q&A capability as single place of truth by using QnAMaker API
• Getting backlog items by using DevOps APIs

Erdwin bot is not an open-source project yet, but the solution architecture is shared in the Show & Tell video in details.

Useful links

• Microsoft Learn
  • Microsoft Graph Fundamentals
  • Develop apps with the Microsoft Graph Toolkit
  • Develop apps for Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Docs
  • Azure Bot Service Documentation
  • What is the Bot Framework SDK?

More articles in Learn from the community series

• Chatbot for Microsoft Teams personal and group chats 
• React web app and Azure QnA bot to centralize learning resources
• Microsoft Teams and Moodle online learning solution

Happy coding!