Development of a Vacation Chatbot for a SharePoint Intranet

Summary

An international professional services company relied on an on-premises SharePoint intranet for daily work, but its vacation scheduling was cumbersome — multiple intranet actions, an HR consultation, and a manager's approval. INNERLUXES built an intelligent, multilingual vacation chatbot that replaces the manual process entirely: trained on Dialogflow, integrated with the SharePoint calendar and the manager-approval flow, and available on the intranet homepage as well as Skype and Telegram. Employees now check and book vacations through a simple conversation.

About the Client

The Client is an international professional services company headquartered in Texas, US. The company serves enterprise and middle-market customers across many domains and industries, including healthcare, banking, retail, manufacturing, and telecom.

Vacation Booking Took Too Many Steps

The Client runs an on-premises SharePoint intranet that hosts departmental sites (HR, Marketing, Sales, ICT, and more) and business solutions such as quality and document management, and supports enterprise-wide collaboration. Employees use it daily to work, collaborate, manage documents and personal information, and track their working time and vacations. Vacation scheduling, however, was inconvenient: to check available time or book it, an employee had to perform multiple actions on the intranet, consult an HR manager, and communicate with a line or project manager for approval. The company wanted to simplify the process and minimize that effort, and turned to INNERLUXES for a solution.

An AI Vacation Chatbot Trained on Dialogflow and Wired to SharePoint

After analyzing the existing booking process, INNERLUXES proposed a dedicated intelligent vacation chatbot to assist employees in checking and booking vacations, replacing the multistage human interaction completely.

Bot training. To achieve human-like conversation, the developers evaluated several bot-training services and chose Dialogflow (formerly API.ai) as the best fit. The bot was taught with a large set of conversational phrases:

• Intent phrases — welcome, capability, bookVacation, showVacation, deleteVacation, cancel, balance, and exit.
• Default response phrases available in Dialogflow.
• Custom response phrases to ensure adequate replies to complex or unexpected input.

Bot capabilities. The bot uses AI to understand users and respond like a person, and SharePoint developers integrated it with the intranet so it can pull data from the calendar and display the relevant vacation periods. It can:

• Display available vacation days.
• Show a booked vacation.
• Book new vacations.
• Delete vacations.

When an employee books a vacation through the chatbot, the request goes directly to a line or project manager to approve or decline; if changes are needed, the employee simply restarts the conversation to pick another period. INNERLUXES also integrated the bot with the company's most-used messengers, Skype and Telegram, so employees can consult it even outside the intranet, and the bot supports several languages to cover the needs of local offices.

Vacation Booking in a Simple Conversation

• INNERLUXES successfully developed, trained, implemented, and tested the vacation chatbot.
• Employees can reach the bot from the intranet homepage and from desktop and mobile messengers (Skype, Telegram).
• The bot substantially simplified the vacation process — employees now check and book vacations through a simple online conversation.
• INNERLUXES continues to collaborate with the Client, collecting end-user feedback to detect any unnatural behavior and retrain the bot for an excellent user experience.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft SharePoint 2013, .NET, C#, Microsoft Bot Framework, ASP.NET Web API, Google Dialogflow, Visual Studio 2017.