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• office-teams description: Group Connect is a custom Teams app that enables corporate teams to create and send messages intended for multiple teams or large number of employees over chat allowing organization to reach employees. urlFragment: microsoft-teams-apps-groupconnect

Group Connect

Engaged employees produce better business outcomes than other employees - across industry, company size and geography, and in good economic times and bad. Leaders are looking to technology to connect with employees and help employees connect with each other within Employee Groups.

There are various types of employee groups, all of which benefit from better connectivity:

• Employee resource groups
• Business resource groups
• Affinity groups
• Social cause groups
• Common interest groups
• Local interest groups
• Professional development groups

Teams provides amazing collaboration and communication platform, which is extensible for business purposes. For employees who already are spending much of their workday communicating and collaborating in Teams, the Group Connect App can help easily connect people with other employee with similar interests, and it can also help organization leaders communicate and reiterate strategic priorities.

Group Connect App is an open-source Teams app to help employees easily connect to community groups inside their company via Microsoft Teams. Group Connect App helps employees easily discover existing groups, create new ones which will help them to connect and collaborate with like-minded peers in the organization. The app can help an organization build a robust culture in their organization. Users can search for and discover related groups, learn about your organization's resources with a Q&A bot, build stronger bonds with other group members through weekly networking matching, and receive announcements from their leadership.

User personas

Employees or members

• Discover and join existing employee groups and create new ones in the personal tab.
• Navigate to a corresponding team in Microsoft Teams from the personal tab to collaborate on goals, events and initiatives and also as a platform to capture or record ideas.
• Get automatically paired with individuals from the same group to increase belonging.
• Ask questions to the bot and get them answered
• Receive Teams notifications on company news, newsletters, events , initiatives etc.

Team owners

• Ability to view self-created group details in a Teams team
• Configure group level settings like enabling member matching within the team and its notification frequency

Employee group leadership

• Get a snapshot of all the registered employee groups created in the organization.
• Broadcast information on company news, newsletters, events, initiatives to the selected audience
• Manage the groups and ability to override group level settings. Configure group level settings like enabling member matching within the team and its notification frequency

Here are some of the workflows in action:

1. Discover tab : Employees will be able to discover existing resource groups by using the app in the personal scope

2. Employees will be able to join any group that they wish and able to navigate to the corresponding Teams team for collaboration

3. Employees will be able to ask a question to the bot and get it answered

4. Get connected with team members through auto pairing notifications sent by the app

5. The leadership team will be able to broadcast information related to new initiatives, events etc.

Legal notice

This app template is provided under the MIT License terms. In addition to these terms, by using this app template you agree to the following:

• You, not Microsoft, will license the use of your app to users or organization.

• This app template is not intended to substitute your own regulatory due diligence or make you or your app compliant with respect to any applicable regulations, including but not limited to privacy, healthcare, employment, or financial regulations.

• You are responsible for complying with all applicable privacy and security regulations including those related to use, collection and handling of any personal data by your app. This includes complying with all internal privacy and security policies of your organization if your app is developed to be sideloaded internally within your organization. Where applicable, you may be responsible for data related incidents or data subject requests for data collected through your app.

• Any trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft in the United States and/or other countries and logos included in this repository are the property of Microsoft, and the license for this project does not grant you rights to use any Microsoft names, logos or trademarks outside of this repository. Microsoft’s general trademark guidelines can be found here.

• If the app template enables access to any Microsoft Internet-based services (e.g., Office365), use of those services will be subject to the separately-provided terms of use. In such cases, Microsoft may collect telemetry data related to app template usage and operation. Use and handling of telemetry data will be performed in accordance with such terms of use.

• Use of this template does not guarantee acceptance of your app to the Teams app store. To make this app available in the Teams app store, you will have to comply with the submission and validation process, and all associated requirements such as including your own privacy statement and terms of use for your app.

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.opensource.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., status check, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

Trademarks

This project may contain trademarks or logos for projects, products, or services. Authorized use of Microsoft trademarks or logos is subject to and must follow Microsoft's Trademark & Brand Guidelines. Use of Microsoft trademarks or logos in modified versions of this project must not cause confusion or imply Microsoft sponsorship. Any use of third-party trademarks or logos are subject to those third-party's policies.

Feedback

Thoughts? Questions? Ideas? Share them with us on Teams UserVoice!

Please report bugs and other code issues here.