User Attribution by Bots in Teams

Today when a bot sends a message, the sender name is always displayed to be the bot name. However, in several scenarios bots send on behalf of a user. Showing a user name as the sender increases engagement. This feature allows you to send messages on behalf of a user who is sending the message.

In the screenshots below, the left side is the card how a message sent by a bot looks like without this feature. On the right is how the message sender looks like with user attribution.

To use user attribution in teams, you need to add one OnBehalfOf mention entity to ChannelData in your Activity payload that is sent to Teams.

This is how a sample Activity JSON with user attribution would look like -

{
    "text": "Hello World!",
    "ChannelData": {       
        "OnBehalfOf": [{
            "itemid": 0,
            "mentionType": "person",
            "mri": "29:orgid:89e6508d-6c0f-4ffe-9f6a-b58416d965ae",
            "displayName": "Sowrabh N R S"
        }]
    }
}

As you can see in the sample JSON OnBehalfOfis of Array type. Each entity of the array is of below type.

Details of OnBehalfOf entity schema

Field	Type	Description
itemId	Integer	Should be 0
mentionType	String	Should be "person"
mri	String	MRI of the person on behalf of who the message is sent. Message sender name would appear as " via ".
displayName	String	Name of the person. Used as fallback in case name resolution is unavailable