Skedda's official Microsoft Teams app puts your Skedda venue directly accessible in Teams! If your organization uses Microsoft Teams heavily, this is a significant convenience boost! Your users will be able to manage their bookings without having to leave Teams, and receive notifications (coming soon!) about their booking check-ins and visitor arrivals.
Check our FAQs as well, in case you have any further questions, or to see our publisher attestation!
Getting started with Skedda
Before you read further, make sure your organization has created its own Skedda venue account.
In order to get started with your own Skedda venue account:
Supported interfaces
The desktop, web, and mobile interfaces of Microsoft Teams are all supported. With your configured Skedda SSO connection (via Azure AD), the authentication process within Teams is automatic and seamless and requires just 4 simple steps.
Here is what it looks like on the desktop app and mobile:
Set-up in Skedda
Follow these 2 steps to configure your Skedda account for use with Microsoft Teams.
Note: there are no graph permissions required to use Skedda for Microsoft Teams in its current state.
Step 1: Have a venue account with SSO configured
Set up SSO with Azure AD in Skedda.
Step 2: Configure your venue account to 'allow embedding' (in Microsoft Teams)
Under the hood, Microsoft Teams uses so-called 'iframes' to embed Microsoft Teams apps inside the Microsoft Teams interface. By default, Skedda accounts aren't configured to permit embedding in this way. To support the embedding of your Skedda account within Microsoft Teams, you hence need to update your Skedda settings (in Settings > Integrations) to enable iframe embedding. See our support document for this here. The relevant option is shown in the screenshot below:
Set-up in Teams
Head over to Microsoft to continue the setup.
Step 3: Install the Skedda Microsoft Teams app!
You have 2 options, depending on how you want your users to be able to use Skedda inside Microsoft Teams.
Option 1: If you simply want to permit each user in your organization to manually install the Skedda app in their personal Microsoft Teams interface, log in to the Manage Apps page of your organization's Microsoft Teams Admin Center, search for 'Skedda' in the list of published apps, and change its status to 'Allowed' (video walkthrough here).
Why isn't it allowed by default, you ask? Well, Skedda has intentionally published its Microsoft Teams app using the 'default block until admin action' option, because it's usually not appropriate for end users to install an app like Skedda until the organization has properly configured it (i.e. following this support article).
Option 2: If you want the Skedda app to appear in the interface of your organization's users (or a set of them) by default, you can add the Skedda app to an appropriate App Setup Policy that you've created (video walkthrough here).
Step 4 (Optional): Tenant-Wide Consent to Permissions
By default, each end user needs to complete a one-time permission-approval step when they first open the Skedda app within Microsoft Teams (so that we can identify them). If you like, you can spare your end users from having to do this by having one of your Microsoft Teams admins consent to the relevant permissions on behalf of the entire tenant. See this video walkthrough for all the details.
Please note: If you don't see the permissions window, you probably already consented earlier just for yourself. If you wish to consent again on behalf of the entire tenant, you'll just need to remove the Skedda app from your Teams interface, clear all your browser cache/cookies (based on our testing, MS Teams can cache consent in the browser) and try again.
Additional Skedda-side step: Enable Notifications for MS Teams! (Coming soon!)
Once you've set up your basic MS Teams Skedda app, we highly recommend heading back over to your Skedda "Integrations" settings page to activate notifications for your users' booking check-ins and visitor arrivals!
Booking check-in reminders
When it's time for a user to check in to their booking, they'll receive a message in MS Teams that looks like this:
Clicking on the, "Check in via Skedda," button will take your user to a page where they can complete check-in in just a few clicks!
Visitor-arrival alerts
When a user's visitor arrives (who they're hosting), they'll receive a message in MS Teams that looks like this:
Guide for your teams
Looking for a guide to share with your team to help them get started? Check out the link below!
FAQs
We have multiple Skedda accounts and we'd like a separate Teams app for each, or we have other custom requirements for our Skedda Teams app. What are our options?
In addition to Skedda's official Microsoft Teams App, Skedda provides a customizable version that can be installed 'locally' (i.e. not published on the Microsoft Teams store) by a Teams administrator. The benefits of using this customizable version include:
Support for organizations with multiple Skedda accounts:
Using the customizable app template, you can create a separate Teams app for each of your Skedda accounts, or ensure that the 'account switcher' control for switching between different 'venue' accounts is shown (it's hidden in the official app).
Ability to customize tabs:
You may wish to add multiple personal tabs and customize them with the predefined URLs for a particular Skedda account. For example, you might like to have a 'Skedda admin' version of the app that is available only to Skedda System users and includes tabs for managing users or viewing Insights in Skedda.
Ability to show the side navigation bar:
The official Skedda app doesn't show it because it's against the Microsoft style guide for apps. Using a customized app allows you to show it.
You can find Skedda's customizable app template here. Download it and follow the instructions in the README.md file, and let our support team know if you have any questions!
I see an error to the tune of 'Sorry, we couldn't identify you through Microsoft Teams' when I try to use the Skedda app in Microsoft Teams. What can I do?
Sometimes, these transient errors occur once as part of the first interaction with the Skedda app, and closing and reopening Microsoft Teams typically resolves it. Note that, if Microsoft Teams asks you if you want to 'approve' the Skedda app, you must do this in order for the app to work correctly. If errors continue to persist, please contact the Skedda support.
I'd like to use the Skedda app for Microsoft Teams, but my organization doesn't have a Skedda account. How does my organization sign up?
We invite a representative of your organization to sign up for a Skedda organizational ('venue') account from our main landing page here. After you've created your account, follow the instructions at the top of this article to configure your Skedda account for use with Microsoft Teams and add the Skedda app for Microsoft Teams to your Microsoft Teams tenant.
My organization has a Skedda account, but we don't have Single Sign-On (SSO) configured and I'm seeing a corresponding error message when trying to use the Skedda app for Microsoft Teams. How should I proceed?
Kindly ask the person in your organization who's responsible for the administration of your Skedda account to enable Single Sign-On for your Skedda account as discussed here (includes contact information for reaching out to the Skedda support team).
My organization has a Skedda account with Single Sign-On (SSO) configured, but I'm seeing an error saying that I'm not a user on Skedda or that I don't have SSO-login configured. How should I proceed?
Before you can use Skedda inside Microsoft Teams, you need to have logged in to Skedda once using a normal web browser tab so that you're provisioned correctly with Single Sign-On. Please navigate to the SSO login page to do your initial login and user-account provisioning, then try again inside Microsoft Teams.
Please note: The basic technical reason for requiring users to use a browser and go through a SAML-based authentication flow is that the correct provisioning of a user in Skedda depends in the general case on custom SAML attributes passed by the identity provider (i.e. Skedda can "auto-tag" new users based on custom SAML attribute rules). This isn't possible to do through the Teams authentication mechanisms directly.
What happens if we change/disable SSO after setting up Teams?
If your SSO configuration is disabled or changed, your Teams setup with Skedda will no longer operate correctly if you are using our MS Teams Notifications feature. MS Teams will stop working for your organization until you set SSO up again and remove and re-add Skedda to MS Teams.
Please ensure that you coordinate such an SSO change by reconfiguring your Teams / Skedda setup accordingly with any new SSO configuration you may set up thereafter!
My organization has a US Government Azure tenant. Can I use Teams on Skedda?
At this stage, the Skedda MS Teams app does not support the different authentication endpoints that Microsoft uses for US Government tenants, which means that you won't be able to use Skedda in Teams if your organization has a US Government tenant.
What happens if Skedda's MS Teams notifications "break"?
If something goes wrong with your Skedda MS Teams app (perhaps you, or your users, aren't receiving notifications as expected), please reach out to us! We'll be able to assist you with diagnosing the issue and getting you back up and running.
Does Skedda have Microsoft Publisher Attestation for Microsoft Teams?
Yes - we do! Please see here for more information.