Displaying your Microsoft Teams presence on Icon64, the ThingPulse LED matrix device, is a great way to let others around you know whether you are available or whether they would be interrupting your meeting.
We are pleased to announce a brand-new app for the Icon64 that allows you to broadcast your Microsoft Teams presence to
- your family or flat-mates in the home office
- your co-workers at the office
Use the coupon code ‘icon64-ms-teams’ to get 30% off the Icon64!
Just like Zoom an others, Microsoft 365 family member “Teams” offers a traffic-light style presence to announce your availability . You are either available, busy, away or offline (for real or fake). There are over a dozen different detail states but the traffic-light is usually what counts. Our Icon64 app does exactly this: mapping your presence to the three colors green, yellow, and red.
For once, we did not have to start from scratch when we set out to implement a new app for the Icon64. Instead, we forked the ESPTeamsPresence project by German maker Tobias Blum. While he 3D-printed the case for the electronics, we already had a device. Hence, we only needed to port the software. Thanks to ESPTeamsPresence’s modern foundation – Tobias used PlatformIO – and well-structured code, porting it to the Icon64 was fairly simple. However, while Tobias mapped the Microsoft Teams presence to eleven different color & animation combinations, we opted for sticking to the traffic-light. We felt that your family or co-workers should not have to remember all those eleven combinations to understand how available you are.
A note on security
Your Teams presence is not publicly available, it shouldn’t be. You need to grant the Icon64 presence app permission to access this information. You do so in a simple guided workflow in the browser. It is all described in our documentation. As you will most likely do this in the context of an organization that grants you access to Teams such as your employer or your school, they might want to have a say in this as well.
On the Microsoft side the device is represented by an Azure “application”. It is not an application in a traditional sense (source code and stuff) but a security element for consent management. The application manages the data privileges your device has. It needs access your profile and presence data – and nothing else. You can either use the multi-tenant application Tobias Blum set up, which is the default, or register your own application. Which ever way it is, your organization might have to whitelist that application. The authorization workflow cannot be completed otherwise.
