Teams Setup
Connect Microsoft Teams with Herd to deliver trainings, reminders, and notifications, and sync your directory's users and groups.
Teams Setup Overview
The Teams Connection page lets you approve and manage the integration between Herd and your organization’s Microsoft Teams environment. Once connected, users sync automatically, keeping Herd aligned with your directory and enabling seamless communication and workflow integration.
Step 1: Once you sign into Herd, open Settings
Integration cards live under Settings → Integrations — find Microsoft Teams in the Messaging section.
Step 2: Click Connect
On the Teams integration, click Connect (or Reconnect if Teams is already installed).
Approve the Teams Connection between your company and Herd.
Syncing users should happen automatically after. You can also trigger it manually with the Sync Users button.
Step 3: (Recommended) Sync your directory's users and groups
To make it easier to assign access and manage permissions, we highly recommend syncing your identity provider's users and groups with Herd. This lets you assign trainings and campaigns to existing groups instead of individual users.
Most Microsoft Teams organizations sync from Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD). Follow the Azure Active Directory User and Group Sync guide to connect your directory under Settings.
If your organization uses a different identity provider, Herd also supports Okta and Google Workspace directory sync.
Step 4: Open the Herd app in Teams
During onboarding, Herd publishes its Teams app directly to your organization's app catalog via the Microsoft Graph API. It is not listed on the public Teams marketplace, so you won't find it by searching "Get more apps". Instead, look for it under your company's own apps:
Open Microsoft Teams.
Click the Apps icon (or the 3 dots ... to view more applications).
Go to Built for your org (sometimes shown as your company's name). The Herd app appears here once onboarding is complete.
Open the app — it will then show up in your sidebar.
From there, you can right-click on the application and select Pin to keep it easily accessible.
Choose who gets the Herd app in Teams
By default Herd installs its Teams app for everyone with an active Teams account, so the bot can start one-to-one conversations. Two pickers on the Microsoft Teams Integration tile (under Settings → Integrations) let you narrow that, using Herd groups. Because a Herd group can combine Okta, Entra ID, Google, and Slack groups plus individual users, this works the same whichever directory you sync from.
Install the Teams app for — pick one Herd group to limit installs to its members, for example while you pilot with one team. Clear it to install for everyone.
Never install for — pick one Herd group whose members are excluded from installs even when the group above includes them, for example holdouts or external contractors.
Beneath the pickers Herd shows how many active Teams users are eligible under the current settings, and how many are excluded by the exclusion group.
These settings only decide who gets the app:
Nobody is deactivated and no assignments change. People outside the scope keep their Herd account.
Anyone who already has the app keeps it.
If a scoped-out person is assigned a training, the Teams message cannot be delivered; Herd falls back to email for undelivered trainings after its usual delay of about three days.
A group used in either picker cannot be deleted (in Herd or through SCIM) until you unset it here.
Changing these settings requires the View groups and Integrations permissions; admins always have them.
Government Cloud (GCC High) Support
Herd can deliver Teams trainings and reminders to tenants on Azure US Government / Office 365 GCC High, in addition to standard Azure Commercial (Public) and GCC tenants.
Your Microsoft cloud is now resolved per organization — commercial and GCC High organizations are served side by side, so there's no separate deployment to point at. Once your organization is provisioned for GCC High, everything follows automatically: the Connect button sends admin consent to the US Government endpoints (login.microsoftonline.us), directory sync and messaging use graph.microsoft.us and the US Government Bot Framework, and your tenant's app catalog receives the dedicated Herd Security Training Bot (GCC High) Teams app.
The Herd app inside Teams
Once the Herd app is installed, your users get more than DMs:
Dashboard tab (formerly My Training) — a personal tab in the Herd Teams app showing the user's points, monthly points, rank, and training streak, plus every assigned training with its status (Completed, Queued, Overdue, Due soon, In progress), expandable View details per training, a My awards section, and an Open on web handoff. See Member Dashboard.
My AI activity tab — a personal tab where users can review their own AI Coach activity (when AI Coach is enabled).
Leaderboard channel tab — team owners can add the configurable Leaderboard tab to any channel to pin a live Training Leaderboard with All time and This month views.
Suggested prompts — the first time a user messages the Herd bot, a Herd Security Assistant card offers starting points: My training assignments, Phishing report, and Policy help.
Quiz retakes — when a training has a passing threshold and a learner falls short, the bot reports their score and offers a Retake Quiz button that clears their previous answers and restarts the quiz from the first question.
Teams Notifications
Once Teams is connected, Herd sends reminders and updates to your users as Teams messages. You can customize the copy of these notifications from the Notification templates page in your Herd settings (currently in beta).
Pick the Microsoft Teams channel tab to edit the message your team receives in Teams. (A Slack tab is available for the same events on Slack-connected workspaces.)
Templates are written in Slack-flavored mrkdwn and rendered to a Microsoft Teams adaptive card at send time, so the same template can drive both channels.
Each template has an optional Subject (shown as the bold Teams title) and a required Body.
Use the Insert variable buttons to drop in per-recipient values written in
{{double curly braces}}— these are filled in for each person when the message is sent.The Preview pane shows the message with sample values so you can see exactly what recipients will get.
Use Save template to apply your changes, or Reset to default to revert to Herd's built-in copy.
Conversational Training in Teams
When a training is delivered in conversational mode, Herd's assistant walks each user through the training as a back-and-forth chat in Teams rather than a static message.
Users can quote-reply to one of the assistant's earlier messages to ask about a specific step. Herd reads the quoted message as context for that turn, so the assistant understands exactly which part of the training the user is referring to — even when the user is quoting a card or an earlier step. The user's own message is still stored as sent; the quoted context is only used to inform the reply.
No extra setup is required — quote-reply context works automatically for conversational trainings delivered to your connected Teams tenant.
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