Rialto improves the experience of using Microsoft Teams for conferences by showing a curated view of real-time channel chat activity that is optimized for viewing on a large screen.

Some internal Microsoft conferences (WHiPS, O3) have adopted a format where a "side channel" of live chat activity is projected on screens to the sides of the main presentation content. This allows the audience to engage by posting questions, comments, snarky observations, semi-on-topic humor, etc.

In the past, the chat view would simply be a raw feed, updating whenever anything was posted. This proved to be a little too distracting and led to a low signal-to-noise ratio (especially when people got carried away with animated GIFs...). Also, once we switched from a custom chat solution to Microsoft Teams, its tendency to evict newer threads from view when a reply to an older thread is posted led to a very jumpy and hard-to-follow live view experience.

Rialto solves this by showing a semi-moderated view of chat activity that is easy to read in a conference setting. See public/howto.html for more detail.

Rialto is a Node.js application that implements a Microsoft Teams bot to listen to chat activity, and hosts a website to show the live view (along with some related stuff, like the conference agenda).

• The bot relies on the ability to receive messages even when not explicitly @-mentioned. This functionality is limited to internal Microsoft Teams only and requires you to contact the Teams team to enable this for your bot.
• Microsoft users must be aware of CELA policies regarding data storage. You are responsible for the data stored by this application.

Please contact [email protected] before deploying this for your conference.

1. Set up a Teams bot and add it to the team you want it to listen to. You will need the bot appId and password to proceed.
2. Set up Azure storage with tables named agenda, conversations, replies, and metadata. See state.js for schema details. You will need to pre-seed the agenda and metadata tables with some content (using Azure Storage Explorer, for example).
3. Deploy the application to a web site host of your choice. Azure App Services is recommended, but any Node.js host should do. You will need to make sure the following environment variables are set:
   • APPSETTING_BOT_APP_ID
   • CUSTOMCONNSTR_BOT_APP_PASSWORD
   • CUSTOMCONNSTR_TABLE_STORAGE

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.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., label, 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 [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.