Can I set up Azure bot service within Azure VNET?

Question

I am developing a chatbot on Microsoft teams for internal use only, which needs to be deployed and hosted on the intranet. In order to NOT make the bot's APIs public I plan to use Azure VNET. Within this VNET how can I connect the azure bot service resource? Could someone please guide me on how to set this up? Also, direct me to any concepts that I need to understand, to tackle this problem.

Answer 1

I can't advise on the VNET side of things (hopefully the Microsoft Bot engineers here on the site can advise), but here some other things that might be of use/interest in securing your bot for on premises/internal company use:

1. Of course you'll side-load this app into the private company store, not the real Teams app store - do you need any info on how to do this?
2. I'd strongly suggest blocking access to your bot from tenant(s) other than your own - Microsoft have a sample middleware to do just this, but as per this link it's now been rolled into the core Bot Framework SDK . This means that even if someone from another tenant (ie company) tried to access your bot, it would reject their messages.
3. There are also mechanisms to sign users in, like using a signin card that could be applicable here, but I'm not sure you can lock users to a specific tenant this way. This would definitely be useful though if your bot is accessing any outside resources though, as it could be used to lock access to those.

Probably (2) above is your easiest and best bet, and it's pretty easy to implement.