How is Arist for Teams Changing From Arist (Legacy)?

Arist for Teams introduces design improvements that simplify the user and admin experiences. You can expect three main sets of improvements, outlined as follows. For instructions on how to transition to the current Arist app, see Transitioning from Arist (Legacy) to Current Arist Teams App

1. UI Simplification

Where Arist Teams (Legacy) had both Courses and Chat sections, the current Teams app simplifies this to be a single view of all the learner's enrollments.

This also means that the 'Welcome to the Arist App' and help cards are going away. They are replaced with a simple 'Teams help message' that, when enabled by your Arist Customer Success Manager, can be customized under your Arist Organization Settings' System Messages section. Now, when a user asks for help, they will see the help message like so:

Lastly, messages from Arist will no longer appear under the official "Chat" section in your Teams application, but rather as Activity notifications, like this:

Just like with Arist (Legacy), the messages will always be available via the Arist app in the sidebar, which can be whitelabeled for your organization.

2. Automatic User Syncing

Arist (Legacy) relied on install events sent by Microsoft through https://smba.trafficmanager.net to retrieve your users' Microsoft User Object IDs.

While Arist for Teams still requires the app to already be installed for the necessary users, it is now also smart enough to automatically sync users into Arist from your Teams tenant using the Microsoft Graph API!

To enable it:

1. As an Arist and Teams administrator, go to your Arist organization settings > choose Delivery Methods.

2. Under the Teams delivery method, you can enable syncing by clicking the enable toggle and logging in with your Teams email address.

3. You can now choose to sync all Teams users, or just some specific groups.
   
   

Once enabled, Arist will sync the appropriate users about once an hour. You will see these users synced into the Teams Tenant cohort:

3. Uploading Teams Addresses

Some organizations may prefer to manually upload Teams addresses instead of using the automatic sync. Arist is now able to accept manually uploaded Teams email addresses and find the correct users in Teams for you!

In the Arist app, this is available under "Cohorts" by looking for the automatically created Teams tenant cohort. When you select "Add learners", the upload screen appears:

Format your CSV like this for the manual upload of Microsoft Teams email addresses:

Arist will auto-map the columns for you like so:

4. Clearer Permissions Granting Flow

In the current Arist app for Teams, your Teams administrator can instantly grant permissions on behalf of their tenant seamlessly within the Teams app itself. The prompt will appear as soon as the user opens the app in Teams.

Please note that granting permissions is only one part of the install flow. The rest of the flow is described in the main Arist Teams Step by Step Guide, which should be followed because the current app is published separately from Arist (Legacy).