Set up your plant
Microsoft Teams
What Started can post to channels in your company's Microsoft Teams, next to the alert emails. Everyone in the channel sees the posts, including people who do not have a What Started account, so a supervisor's channel or a maintenance channel hears about a stop where people already talk. Your plan sets how many channels a plant can have. An owner or admin sets them up under Settings → Microsoft Teams.
Get the link from Teams
Teams gives each channel its own link through a ready-made workflow. You need permission to add workflows to the channel; most Teams users have it.
- In Teams, go to the channel, click ⋯ next to its name and choose Workflows.
- Pick Send webhook alerts to a channel.
- Give it a name, check the team and channel, and click Add workflow.
- Teams shows a long link. Copy all of it.
Then in What Started, go to Settings → Microsoft Teams → Add a Teams channel, paste the link, and click Send a test message. A short card saying the channel is connected shows up in Teams within a few seconds. Pick what to post and click Add channel.
Treat the link like a password: anyone who has it can post to the channel. After you save, What Started only shows its start.
The older Teams "Incoming Webhook" connectors stopped working in May 2026, so links that end in webhook.office.com are refused. Use the workflow above instead.
What gets posted
| Post | When |
|---|---|
| An alert opens | A machine goes down, loses its signal, stops producing, or a metric leaves its normal range. You pick which. |
| The alert closes | That condition ends: "Press 3 is no longer down, after 14 minutes." Alert emails do not send this. |
| Daily summary | Early each morning, for the day before, with each shift. |
| Weekly summary | Monday morning, for the week before. |
| Monthly summary | On the first of the month, for the month before. |
Each post has a button that opens the machine, the board or the report in What Started.
- Several at once. When three or more machines raise the same kind of alert in the same minute, they go as one post that lists them. That usually means the network or a gateway PC dropped, not the machines.
- Blips. An alert that closes before its post goes out is not posted at all, the same as for emails.
- Areas. A channel can keep to some areas, so the press shop channel only hears about press shop machines. Summaries then cover those areas only.
- Language. Each channel has its own language, because a channel has no single person whose language to follow.
- Who posts. Posts show as "Workflows" or as the person who made the workflow. Teams does not let other apps change that name.
When a channel stops working
If Teams refuses five posts in a row, What Started stops posting to that channel, marks it Not working in Settings, and emails the plant's owners and admins once. This usually means the workflow was deleted or turned off in Teams. Add the workflow again, paste the new link into the channel in Settings, and save. Posting starts again right away.
A post that fails is tried again after 1, 5 and 15 minutes. After that it is dropped, because an alert hours late is no use in a chat.