Partner Center and the Bot Framework

The Microsoft Bot Framework is a comprehensive offering that is utilized to build and deploy high quality bots for users to enjoy. It provides just what is needed to build, connect, manage and publish intelligent bots that interact naturally wherever users are talking – from text/SMS to Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Office 365 mail and other popular services. The framework consists of the Bot Builder SDK, Bot Connector, Developer Portal, and Bot Directory. This framework can be leveraged to create a chat bot that can augment a partner’s support organization and provide customers with a mechanism to perform various self-service operations.

The open source project, Partner Center Bot, demonstrates how to leverage the Microsoft Bot Framework to construct a bot that interacts with the Partner Center API. Most customers want the ability to resolve issues on their own, and this project provides a tool that can help fulfill that desire. The intent of this project is not to provide a fully functional bot, but rather to demonstrate how this technology can be utilized to support customers. This initial release has limited features such as the ability to list customers and subscriptions, and answer commonly asked questions through integration with the QnA Maker service. Additional abilities will be added over time. It is worth mentioning that this project includes a framework that makes it simple to add additional features in a secure manner.

In the event there is a feature you would like to see added to the project then please log a feature request here. If you are interested in learning more I would recommend that you check out Deploying and Adding New Features to the bot.