ScreenCloud Microsoft Teams App Guide

Organizations invest a great deal of commitment to fostering strong internal communication strategies and branding guidelines. Innovative solutions can encourage and support employee engagement, whether the focus is information-sharing, culture, management, or cross-functional projects, ScreenCloud’s digital signage can help bridge the gap in streamlining what’s most important for your teams.

The ScreenCloud Microsoft Teams app allows you to reach your workforce with branded engagements, personalized interactions, and key data. The app can share your Microsoft Teams posts as a plain text, video, image or an automatically generated QR code for documents or links. This will allow you to:

• Display you content quickly on your digital screens
• Run Teams channels along with other media, apps, and scheduled content
• Digitize your employee communications and experiences

Watch the video guide or follow the steps below

1. Select and install the Teams app

1.1. Get started by logging into your ScreenCloud account here and choosing the ScreenCloud App Store from the left-hand menu.

1.2. From the App Store, type in “Microsoft Teams” in the search bar to populate the Teams app.

1.3. Click on the app, then select the yellow “Install App” button to open the configuration window. To set up sign in, select 'new instance' and also rename the instance here.

2. Set up your Teams credentials

2.1. Your app configuration will begin by connecting a Microsoft account. Before proceeding, you can change the name of your app instance to easily find it later in your account. Select the “Create new connection” option and enter your connection name.

2.2. Select your Microsoft Teams Channel. Within Microsoft Teams, we advice that you set up a dedicated channel for digital signage and set this to private so they can control who sets content to screen

2.3. Select your display options and settings on the right. For example you can ensure that only posts from a month ago are displayed.

2.4. Click Save. Your posts will display in the app preview, if you have selected a channel that already contains posts. However, if not, please continue below to learn how to post your content to ScreenCloud with your Microsoft Teams app setup.

3. How to send Microsoft Teams posts to your screens

Submit a post with ScreenCloud Post To Screens app in Microsoft Teams

To send your Microsoft Teams posts to your screens, please first install the ScreenCloud Post To Screens extension in Microsoft Teams account.

3.1. In your team channel, click the More options button (three dots) and select Manage Team.

3.2. Next, head to Apps and click More Apps.

3.3. Search for the ScreenCloud Post To Screens app, and click the one that looks like the below image.

3.4. When adding the app, please make sure to instead click Add to a team. You can then select your team, and click Set up bot to add the app.

Any teams within the parent team will also have the app available to them.

When the app is added, you'll notice a welcome post which contains a quick example of how a post can be created.

3.5. In your team, when creating a New Conversation, you can simply find the Post to Screen app by writing "@ScreenCloud Post To Screens", or you can also find it by clicking the 3 dots button to view the apps library for this specific Microsoft Team.

3.6. Click + Create a Post to begin to create a digital signage friendly post!

3.7. When you've added your message and media, go ahead and click Submit Post - or have a quick peep of how the message will look by clicking Preview first.

Once done, a submitted post should appear after about 2 minutes in your Microsoft Teams app in ScreenCloud.

Tip: If you ever need to be reminded on how the Post To Screen app within Microsoft Teams works, you can simply use the command 'Help' while activating the app.

Simply type in "ScreenCloud Post To Screens Help" with the extension selected.

Please note: Currently the ScreenCloud Post To Screens app is only able to preview and add image, GIF and text posts. To display additional types of post, please continue below.

Submit a post without the ScreenCloud app in Microsoft Teams

When a Microsoft Channel is shared with our MS Teams app, each post will automatically convert to a digital signage format. You can view the outcome in your ScreenCloud Studio's preview of your app, playlists or channel. You are not able to preview the output as you can with the Post To Screen extension.

All of the supported post types are:

• Text
• Text with background image
• Image, GIF and video
• Link
• Attached file (for example a pdf)

Below are samples of how some of these posts may appear, according to what theme you have your screens set to. They can be set as standalone media or media combined with text.

You can see how three of the six post samples above appear in Microsoft Teams.

Any unsupported post types may not convert and display, so we would advise that you have a dedicated Microsoft Teams team for digital signage with ScreenCloud.

Frequently asked questions:

When are new posts from Microsoft Teams channel picked up by the app?

The Microsoft Teams app pulls new posts to your digital screens every 6 minutes.

In which order will the Microsoft Teams display its posts?

The app will display the most recent posts from the channel first, and then continue from there until the display timeline limit, where it will loop back and find the most recent post.

What is the max number of characters can a post contain?

The max number of characters that can be used in a post, after which the text is truncated, is 50 for a title and 150 for the text body

What are all the formats that the app supports?

Currently the app only supports posts with the following formats: Text, subject titles, images, videos, links and document files. A full list of supported content can be found here.

Can I target to display specific posts from my Microsoft Teams channel?

You can only select one of the expiry functions which are provided in our app. These settings will not display posts older than the set time frame.

My Microsoft Teams account is not connecting with ScreenCloud, how can I fix this?

This could be due to your networks security, and your company's security team may need to approve your Microsoft account to connect to our ScreenCloud app. Further information to resolve this can be found here.

Why can't I share my Microsoft Teams app between Spaces?

Unfortunately you cannot share Microsoft Teams between Studio spaces at this moment in time.

For further questions, please reach out to support@screencloud.com.