Secretary Bot

Inspiration

In the mobile first, cloud first world, users often use mobile phone with small window size. In the past era users always use PC with big screen and could easily superimpose calendar and arrange meeting. But now we don't have big screen and can't do so. In this situation Bot is great interface between users and Cloud. Users can communicate with bot simply in the phone and bot will fetch/post data through API with cloud! I believe it is wonderful matchmaking and will help users in many scenarios.

What it does

Now we only support arranging 1:1 meeting with attendee. If you input time, title, attendee's alias, bot will find some free time for owner and attendee. Then users select one of the free time, bot will send schedule request to owner's/attendee's calendar in Office 365!

How we built it

Build app with C# and Visual Studio. We developed app with Bot Framework.
To fetch/post data in uses' business tools, we used Microsoft Graph API.
We deployed app in Azure Web Apps.
For communicate with users, we try to use Microsoft Teams channel in Bot Framework.

Challenges we ran into

For using daily works, we try to use Office 365.

To get attendee candidate automatically, we use /people. The api will return well relation people.
To fetch free time for organizer and attendee, we use /findMeetingTimes
For sending schedule request using /events
Because we need timezone for using /findMeetingTimes and /events, we get user’s timezone with /mailboxSettings

And we want to make great bot, we try to use Microsoft Bot Framework. For making good communication, we try to use Diaglos, State service and Channels.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Users can easily arrange 1:1 meeting than other tools (Outlook, Google apps) with their mobile phone. It reduce their daily tasks and make time to do other things.

What we learned

Bot can increase our productivity and to be one of the important interface with apps.
In the mobile first world, users often uses phones and it is not have enough window size. In the past era, we can easily superimpose calendars and can find free time for attendees with big screen, but now some users don't have it because they use phone. In this world, bot is good interface to arrange schedule with Graph API (Cloud Power).