Microsoft Retires Twitter Connector for Teams and Office 365 Groups

Posted on by Tony Redmond

And Now for the Twitter Connector for Groups

This article originally covered the retirement of the Twitter connector for Teams. On March 23, 2020, Microsoft announced (MC207399) that they are also retiring the Twitter connector for Office 365 Groups (referred to in the notification as the Twitter Connector feature from Outlook, Yammer and Skype Consumer). Microsoft says they will begin retiring the connector on March 24 and complete the process by March 31. It remains a mystery as to why Microsoft wishes to retire a component that functions perfectly well and works better than its suggested replacement.

Tweets Keep on Flowing Into Teams

The decision to retire the Teams Twitter connector announced in Office 365 notification MC204830 on February 26 seems odd. It’s also a retrograde step.

Apparently, Microsoft retired the connector on February 21 without telling anyone (but they do apologize for the inconvenience). As I write this note on March 8, the connector is still working in the channels where it’s configured in my tenant (Figure 1) and tweets continue to flow in as normal. It must take as long to retire features in Office 365 as it does to deploy them. Or I’m just lucky…

A Twitter connector configured for a Teams channel
Figure 1: A Twitter connector configured for a Teams channel

Go to Power Automate to Flow Tweets into Teams

The announcement blithely says: “If your organization enjoyed using the Twitter connector, we recommend using Microsoft Power Automate to integrate Twitter with Microsoft Teams.” I’m not sure that the folks who wrote that text understand the difference between injecting tweets into Teams through the connector and using Power Automate (what used to be known as Flow) for the task.

Like other connectors, the Twitter connector injects content from a network data source into a channel to inform users and potentially spark conversations in the channel (Figure 2). Each tweet is captured as a conversation and comes complete with a set of actionable buttons to like or retweet the tweet without leaving Teams or going to Twitter to view the conversation there.

Tweets injected as conversations into a Teams Channel
Figure 2: Tweets injected as conversations into a Teams Channel

Power Automating Twitter

Following Microsoft’s advice, I went to Power Automate and attempted to create the functionality available through the Twitter connector. The “Post on Microsoft Teams when a new tweet matches the specified hashtag” template seemed like a good place to start, and I duly configured it to read from Twitter using my account and post to a target channel in Teams ((Figure 3).

Building a Flow to link Twitter to Teams
Figure 3: Building a Flow to link Twitter to Teams

Alas, the results weren’t as good as those products by the Twitter connector (Figure 4). Everything is posted as me rather than the eponymous Twitter connector. The actionable buttons have disappeared and the user photos for those who post tweets are not captured. All in all, it’s a poorer experience.

How Power Automate creates tweets in a Teams channel
Figure 4: How Power Automate creates tweets in a Teams channel

Odd Decision, Poor Results

I don’t know why Microsoft decided to retire the Twitter connector for Teams. The connector is also used in Office 365 Groups and there’s no mention of its retirement there. The connector is useful, does what you expect, has added functionality over time, and the items created in channels look good.

The decision is even harder to understand when viewed in the light of a lesser replacement, but that might also be because the Power Automate template that I selected wasn’t the best for the job. Perhaps the problem is the way that the connector fetches information. Like most social media companies, Twitter is tightening up its regulations about how processes access data, and it could be that Twitter doesn’t like this connector. If so, that’s a pity.

In my copious spare time, I need to do more research to see if I can discover how to make Power Automate be nicer to Teams. Or maybe one of the Power Automate gurus will come up with a nicer solution.

17 Replies to “Microsoft Retires Twitter Connector for Teams and Office 365 Groups”

  1. We engineer ai at our firm, and as such, twitter has really helped in the Deep Learning aspect of supplying our programs with organic human responses. We have recently started using MSTeams in our interactive parlance. Would be great if somehow, while we engineer AI, twitter could be live flashed across all our screens at the same time.

    Reply

  2. I once tried to do a flow with Twitter to forward to email and got millions of emails and couldn’t stop that flow for a while. Yeah, really easy and comparable.

    Reply

  3. I tried the twitter ‘experience’ using flow. Even if I specified ‘from:@microsoftTeams’ in the Flow, to get updates and news from Microsoft, it forwarded any old tweet that mentions @MicrosoftTeams. not just those from that account. Definietly not a positive step.

    Reply

    1. i tried it too, but not tweets will come to the teams channel. did anyone get this working?

      Reply

  6. i tried it too, but not tweets will come to the teams channel. did anyone get this working?

    Reply

    1. You mean using Power Automate to create a flow to import tweets into a Teams channel? If so, yes. It works.

      Reply

      1. I configured to follow “from:@MicrosoftTeams” and choose the team and channel, but nothing is posted. in my twitter app on my smartphone i got new tweets.
        the flow is activated, but in the execution history are no entries.
        is there anything else to do? i just connected my twitter account and created the flow and hoped it works.

      3. i just tested my flow, “getting a mail on new onedirve fileupload”. that works perfect…

  7. If finally figured out a way using Power Automate and Adaptive Cards. This must be a step backwards to solve a bigger implementation issue. But for this case it doesn’t make it any easier. The short version:

    1. Create the adaptive card and “tokenize the fields” and then copy the JSON code template.
    2. Create the power automate flow: When a new tweet is posted…
    3. Create the next step: Post your own adaptive card as the Flow bot to a channel (Preview).
    4. Paste in the JSON code template from above.
    5. Now look for your tokens and replace them with the correct value from the dynamic content.
    6. Save and test.

    Here’s and example of the JSON template. Note the ppp_* tokens.

    {
    “$schema”: “http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json”,
    “type”: “AdaptiveCard”,
    “version”: “1.0”,
    “body”: [
    {
    “type”: “TextBlock”,
    “text”: “NAIFA Mentioned in Tweet”,
    “weight”: “Bolder”,
    “size”: “Medium”
    },
    {
    “type”: “ColumnSet”,
    “columns”: [
    {
    “type”: “Column”,
    “width”: “auto”,
    “items”: [
    {
    “type”: “Image”,
    “url”: “ppp_tweet_profile_url”,
    “size”: “Small”,
    “style”: “Person”
    }
    ]
    },
    {
    “type”: “Column”,
    “width”: “stretch”,
    “items”: [
    {
    “type”: “TextBlock”,
    “text”: “ppp_tweet_author”,
    “weight”: “Bolder”,
    “wrap”: true
    },
    {
    “type”: “TextBlock”,
    “spacing”: “None”,
    “text”: “ppp_tweet_date”,
    “isSubtle”: true,
    “wrap”: true
    }
    ]
    }
    ]
    },
    {
    “type”: “TextBlock”,
    “text”: “ppp_tweet_content”,
    “wrap”: true
    },
    {
    “type”: “ActionSet”,
    “actions”: [
    {
    “type”: “Action.OpenUrl”,
    “title”: “View Tweet”,
    “url”: “ppp_tweet_url”
    }
    ]
    }
    ]
    }

    Reply
  8. Pingback: How to Mark an Obsolete Teams Channel as Defunct Before Removal - Office 365 for IT Pros
  9. Pingback: Connect Twitter with Microsoft Teams – TodoMigration

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