Communicating from Teams with individuals not in Teams

[MCCLabelFlow]

TLDR - Trying to figure out a way in Teams to communicate with individuals that aren't a member of the Team.

So we wanted a simple workflow, an email comes in to a shared inbox, its generated as a Task in Planner in a dedicated Team, and also a Conversation is started in Teams.  But its HR-type data so we can't let everyone be a member of the Team.  All of that works flawlessly.  But, they also want to be able to communicate to the requestor and capture that communication thread as well, preferably within Teams, and we have all of the relevant info, task #, conversation#, sender email, etc. 

My preference is that all the capturing of the email replies happens as comments in the Planner Task, or I would also accept threading the conversation, but there doesn't seem to be any OOB ways to do either of those?  I guess I could also build a bot but that's a lot of hassle for this particular problem.   We could definitely use API's but I don't know what the trigger would be unless there are webhooks for either Task Comments or Conversation Replies?  Maybe there's something better to use than Planner (although I really don't want to build a powerapp for this either).

Anyone have any clever ideas?

[edgonzales]

@MCCLabelFlow 

Shot in the dark:  Are you using any kind of CRM?

[MCCLabelFlow]

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@edgonzales wrote:

@MCCLabelFlow 

Shot in the dark:  Are you using any kind of CRM?

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Not that's worth a **bleep**, but what are you thinking?  

[edgonzales]

So, that kind of "Track eMails" is out-of-the-box for Dynamics 365, and can probably be done with most CRM's.

That would manage permissions on its own, and you could probably work something to post in Teams when a relevant message came in.    The response part will get weird because now you're taking text and probably dropping it in an email, and you'll need a way to thread the emails with the chat in Teams.  That's why I was leaning on something that already has the functionality.

-Ed-

[MCCLabelFlow]

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@edgonzales wrote:

So, that kind of "Track eMails" is out-of-the-box for Dynamics 365, and can probably be done with most CRM's.

That would manage permissions on its own, and you could probably work something to post in Teams when a relevant message came in.    The response part will get weird because now you're taking text and probably dropping it in an email, and you'll need a way to thread the emails with the chat in Teams.  That's why I was leaning on something that already has the functionality.

-Ed-

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Gotcha - yeah unfortunately we don't have that.  At this point we are thinking a bot is our only option, I'll keep posting if we figure something out.