When we login to any portal, suddenly the bot pops up in the corner and asks us “May I help you?” or “What are you looking for?” etc. Here the bot is not expecting to know who you are and anybody can type hello to the bot. However when you get into the conversation and go in specific questions, it asks you your name and email/phone number to identify you. In another case sometimes the bot asks to login first to identify you. Internal bots, the bit automatically recognizes and greets you.
When you are asking generic questions to bot, it can provide you generic answers, however when your bot is intended to answer very specific questions like what is my leave balance, what is the location of my parcel or even the status of the issue raised in the customer care. then bot needs to identify you. There are scenarios where the bot is restricted to only specific group of users. In all such scenarios user authentication in the bot implementation comes in picture. Unlike any other application access, to access the bot, we don’t need to assign any license to these users. Anybody who has the link of the bot can access the bot provided the bot is set to be authenticated.
To enable the bot authentication, there are some settings to be in the bot. If we go to Manage – Security, we can see three options:
- No Authentication – Anybody who has the link of the bot can access the bot
- Only for Teams- this bot is available for access only through the Microsoft Teams app
- Manual (For any channel including Teams)-supports AAD or Auth2 identity provider
We can also check the checkbox to “Require users to sign in” which will immediately prompt the users to sign in as soon as they interact with bot.
In case you select only for Teams options , rest of the channels are disabled for the bot and bot can be only accessible via Teams.
Here are the steps
You can refer detailed documentation and steps in Microsoft Documentation link
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