Think Adaptive Cards are just pretty dashboards? What if I told you they can capture real-time feedback, launch workflows, and even trigger bots—without needing the user to leave Teams?
If you’re tired of static cards that don’t do much, stick around. We’ll break down the core features that turn your cards into interactive experiences, with hands-on JSON examples and live demos. Ready to ditch boring notifications and actually engage your team?
Beyond Static: What Makes Adaptive Cards Worth Your Time
If you’ve ever posted a Teams Adaptive Card and called it good because it looked pretty, you’re not alone. Most Teams channels have at least a few notifications that were supposed to make life easier, but really just dress up plain information with a splash of color or the company logo. I get it—when you first land in the Adaptive Card playground, sticking an image on a card feels like a solid win. It looks official, maybe even a little more modern than the standard Teams post. The problem is, this is where most people stop. Behind the scenes, those cosmetic changes do very little to push your workflows forward or actually save time for people using Teams every day.
Now, let’s be honest—Teams is already full of noise. Channels get flooded with status updates, system alerts, and reminders. Slapping branding on static cards doesn’t make them more useful. You’re just adding to the pile. It’s no wonder that half the team ignores notifications the second they recognize that familiar rectangle crammed with nothing but text. Jump over to the next message; the card is just part of the background hum at this point. But when we talk about Adaptive Cards, there’s something everyone keeps missing: these things aren’t designed to just broadcast information. They’re built as connectors between Teams and your business processes. They’re not static dashboards to admire—they’re interactive containers that can actually do some of the heavy lifting for your team, if you use them the right way.
Microsoft actually measured the difference. Teams users interacting with cards that respond to their input engage up to three times more often than with cards that just display static content. You’d think that with engagement numbers like that, we’d see cards doing more than announcements and generic reminders. But for most organizations, building a card starts and stops with “how do I make it look like it came from our comms department?” That’s missing the entire point of why Adaptive Cards exist in the first place. The magic happens when those cards start talking to your systems and responding to your users—not just looking pretty in the feed.
Of course, there’s a reason a lot of us settle for bringing in images and calling it a day. Glance at an Adaptive Card’s JSON, and for a lot of people, that’s where the eyes start to glaze over. It doesn’t look inviting. But this is the foundation you need. Every Adaptive Card is just a JSON payload once you peel away the UI. There’s no way around that. If you can get comfortable reading and making small tweaks to that structure, suddenly you’re in total control—which is where things start to get interesting. You can swap in data, pull in images dynamically, and decide when a user should see a certain button or message.
There are three basic puzzle pieces to every Adaptive Card: type, body, and actions. Let’s break that down. The “type” tells Teams what it’s looking at—a card, or a specific element inside a card. The “body” is what people see: text, images, containers, columns, all laid out the way you want. And “actions” are what take your card from display-only to interactive. That’s where your buttons, submit actions, or links live. Get familiar with these parts, and suddenly you’re not stuck copying templates from Microsoft’s gallery. You can build cards that seem basic at first, but layer on real value as you iterate.
Let’s look at a quick before and after. Picture a plain card that just lists “Quarterly Policy Update.” No images, just text. Now, next to it, a card with your company branding, a friendly icon, and a highlighted title. Sure, the latter looks more professional. Maybe you swap the standard background for your corporate color. That’s fine, but it doesn’t really change how your team interacts with the information—people still see it as another item to scroll past.
But let’s be clear, cosmetic upgrades are only the first step. The real advantage with Adaptive Cards comes when you realize you’re holding a way to glue Teams directly onto your underlying business processes. These cards aren’t passive. They can kick off workflows, gather direct input, and feed information back to your apps with almost zero friction. As soon as you put a button or input field on the card, the game changes. Now, instead of someone reading and mentally filing away a policy update, you can ask for feedback, start an approval, or launch a support ticket, all in a single click without leaving the conversation.
That leads us to what really matters: once you understand the structure of a basic Adaptive Card, adding just a few building blocks can create a foundation for much richer interactivity. Every small feature you add—be it a text input, a simple button, or a drop-down—pulls your team one step closer to doing real work right inside Teams, not just monitoring a steady stream of announcements. The first step, though, is getting beyond just making things pretty. If you want Adaptive Cards that actually make a difference, you need to understand what’s possible underneath the surface.
Next, let’s start laying down some basics—how small elements like text, images, and thoughtful branding don’t just decorate the card, but actually pave the way for making Teams an interactive hub, not just another notification channel.
From Display to Dialogue: Capturing Input Right in Teams
You finally have a Teams Adaptive Card that actually looks like it belongs there—branding in place, layout on point, and the title doesn’t make anyone’s eyes glaze over. But then reality sets in. Most cards, even the decent-looking ones, just sit in a channel waiting for someone to read them and move on. There’s a reason people tune these out—because after that first glance, there’s nothing left for them to do. Static cards announce things. They don’t ask questions, collect insights, or give anyone a reason to engage. If you’ve been on the receiving end of a policy update from HR, you know what I mean. A wall of text, maybe an image, and zero opportunity to react beyond an emoji or a follow-up message buried in a thread.
Let’s say HR wants employee feedback on a new dress code. The update goes out, and you hope for replies. What you get is silence, maybe a stray “thumbs up” if you’re lucky. Static cards just echo through the channel. Now imagine instead that card includes a text box right inside the post—a simple question and a spot for employees to share real opinions. People don’t have to open another doc, switch over to a survey link, or keep track of some random Outlook thread. They just answer, right there. Suddenly, Teams feels like more than just a broadcast tool; it actually starts to listen.
There’s this myth floating around that adding input fields to Adaptive Cards is difficult. It’s the classic “too much JSON” problem, as if you’re about to rewrite the Windows registry every time you want to add a question. In reality, capturing input can be as simple as dropping in a new block to your card’s JSON. No huge learning curve, no massive payloads. Take a look at this basic snippet: just a few lines like `{ "type": "Input.Text", "id": "policyFeedback", "placeholder": "Share your thoughts..." }`. That’s it. You’re asking for input, and the card will grab whatever someone types in. Teams isn’t just pushing info out anymore; it’s actually holding a conversation with users and creating a direct channel for feedback.
And it’s not just about free text. Sometimes you need structured responses—maybe a rating, a number, or a specific date. Adaptive Cards support several different input types, each tailored for different needs. Want users to type out their ideas? Use Input.Text. If you need a headcount for an upcoming event or want to set a budget limit, switch to Input.Number. Dates are common for things like holiday requests or follow-ups, and Input.Date plugs right into Teams’ calendar experience, letting people pick without format errors or manual typing. The kicker? Each input type takes only a small tweak to your JSON. It’s all about knowing what business outcome you need and choosing the format that makes life easier for both sides.
Live, it’s actually smoother than people expect. Let’s say you add that text field for policy feedback and hit send. When your colleague types in their feedback and hits submit, the answer is captured instantly—no new tabs, no extra windows, and nothing lost in translation. Teams acts like the input layer for your apps, and you stay within the same conversation. The friction of hopping between tools or copying and pasting answers just disappears. People start responding more, too, because it’s the easiest route.
But smart as this all sounds, it’s easy to trip yourself up if you rush. Every input you build—text, number, or date—needs to be wired up with an “id” tag. This “id” is what lets your bot or backend grab the actual answer that comes back. Miss the “id” and the feedback vanishes into thin air, like an unfiled form. Another place people get stuck: combining different inputs and not matching the data types. If you gather an email but mark it as a number input, Teams isn’t going to guess your intentions. Mobile users add another layer of complexity, with some layouts crumpling on smaller screens. Always preview your cards on both desktop and mobile before rolling them out wide.
There’s one tool that can save you headaches early: the Adaptive Card Designer. It’s a web-based sandbox where you plug in your JSON, see the card rendered live, and spot errors before you ever bother with deployment. Not only does it catch syntax problems, but it also shows how the card responds on different platforms. For anyone making more than a handful of Adaptive Cards, it’s an essential part of the process. You wouldn’t push untested code to production—don’t do it with your cards, either.
Where you land is a workflow that finally captures structured, actionable data, right at the point where it matters—while people are reading and reacting in Teams. No more chasing answers across emails or Forms links, or piecing together Excel sheets from a half-hearted sample of the team. Your data is captured in context and ready to be plugged into whatever system needs it next.
Collecting input, though, is only half the game. The bigger win is what you do with that input once you have it in hand. The next step is connecting those responses to live actions—automating follow-ups, routing tickets, or kicking off more detailed tasks—all directly from inside your Teams card.
Triggering Action: Buttons, Bot Conversations, and the Hidden Power of Actions
Once your Adaptive Card can grab an answer, the obvious next question is: what do you want to happen with that input? This is where most people either overcomplicate or underdeliver. They either try to plug in something fancy and wind up with a broken button, or they default to the easy route: slap an “OpenUrl” on a card and watch as everyone clicks out of Teams into some external survey or web app. It gets the job done, but you lose all the context and flow of the conversation. Someone fills out your form, maybe, but good luck pulling them back to Teams afterwards. The irony is, Adaptive Cards can do way more here, and most people never touch the features that let them keep users engaged.
Let’s take a step back and look at what actually happens when someone taps a button in a card. There are two primary actions most people use: “Action.OpenUrl” and “Action.Submit.” On paper, the JSON looks similar. “OpenUrl” has a target link—users click, a new browser tab opens, and Teams just handwaves that interaction away. You get to say you sent a link, and maybe your analytics platform logs a visit, but you’re not building real interactivity into Teams.
Here’s how that looks in the wild. The “OpenUrl” action might look like this:
`{ "type": "Action.OpenUrl", "title": "Learn More", "url": "https://contoso.com/policy" }`
When a user taps it, they leave the Teams client. It’s fast, but there’s zero way to collect a response or trigger Teams-native workflows.
Now compare it to:
`{ "type": "Action.Submit", "title": "Submit", "data": { "feedbackType": "policy" } }`
With “Action.Submit,” the card doesn’t just fire off a website—it packages up any data the user has provided in the card (inputs, dropdowns, selections), tags it with any hardcoded info you provide in the “data” property, and delivers it straight to whatever service is listening. This could be your Teams bot, a Power Automate flow, or even a custom endpoint. Suddenly, pressing a button isn’t just a dead end—it’s the start of a process.
That’s where the hidden power comes in. If your org already uses Power Automate or has bots registered in Teams, you can wire the submit action to trigger any flow you want. For feedback, you might log it in SharePoint, send a summary to a manager, or generate a task. For approvals, you can route an instant decision into your workflow software. The “Submit” action is effectively the glue between Teams and the rest of M365, and you don’t have to know any C# or Node.js to get started—most of this can be built visually or with low-code tools.
Now, Teams 2.0 and updated bots take it further with “Action.Execute.” Unlike the older “Submit,” this lets bots respond dynamically. Based on the context—who clicked, what they entered, even properties of their Teams environment—you can craft conditional actions right from a single button press. You could have a card that asks users to RSVP, then instantly shows updated info based on their response, offers next steps, or branches them into a separate extended convo with your bot.
The real-life effect? Imagine a support request comes in—user fills out the problem on a card, presses submit, and the card not only thanks them but asks a clarifying follow-up, all within the same Teams thread. Or a survey where the next question adjusts on the fly depending on the previous answer. That’s the kind of interactivity that keeps people in Teams, instead of shuffling them out to awkward secondary websites.
Of course, none of this works unless you wire up the backend logic. This is where people get tripped up. The “Action.Submit” hands off a payload of all card data, and your backend—bot, flow, or app—needs to be ready to accept, process, and respond. If you leave that piece undone, your button becomes an orphan, with nowhere to send the data. For bots, you’ll need to catch the activity, analyze the payload, and decide what message or card to serve up next. With Power Automate, you map the fields and build your automations from there. It’s not about fancy code, but about making sure that data has somewhere meaningful to land. That backend can then reply, update the card, or kick off new actions automatically.
Where cards really shine is in enabling multi-step business processes. Maybe it starts with a quick poll, but you use the data to drive a sequence—logging a request, creating an approval loop, or looping in additional reviewers as needed. All of it can stay inside Teams, which is where your users already spend their day. Over time, you move from using cards as fancy notifications to building real, workflow-driven interactivity. No more dead-end links—each click is a live part of your business logic.
Now, once your buttons start driving actual processes in the background, you’ll want to go a step further. How do you make sure the experience feels targeted—showing different content or actions based on who’s interacting, or on changing business rules? That’s where personalizing cards and layering in logic comes into play.
Personalized and Dynamic: Data Binding and Conditional Logic
If you’ve ever wondered why most Adaptive Cards end up looking and acting exactly the same for every user, it’s probably because they’re built with hardcoded content—whatever went into the payload when the card was created, that’s what shows up for everyone. It works fine if you’re just reminding an entire channel about a holiday party or sending a general notice. But let’s be honest: most real business scenarios need more nuance. Everyone’s workday is already jammed with notifications and status updates; one-size-fits-all messages just disappear into the flood. At some point, you want your cards to feel smarter—maybe greet people by name, only show approval options to the right folks, or even shift their look and feel based on updates in your backend system. Adaptive Cards were built to do all that, if you use data binding and conditional logic the right way.
Think about a card welcoming new team members. Hardcoded, it might say, “Welcome to the team!” and leave it at that. Now imagine something that pulls in information directly from Teams, like a personal welcome: “Welcome, Priya!” or “Glad you’re here, Alex.” It’s a small tweak, but it makes the message land a little better. That’s data binding in action. Instead of locking yourself into static values, you drop placeholders—little template tags—in your JSON. For Teams, that might look like `"text": "Hello, ${user.name}!"`. At runtime, Teams swaps in the actual username, so every person gets a card that feels like it was written for them, not just a generic template reused for every new hire.
The same logic extends to just about any data point you can get into your card payload. Task lists, deadlines, project names—if your backend can pass it, you can display it. Approvals are a classic example where dynamic cards make sense. Picture a card that needs to check if a user’s task is complete before showing them a button to send a reminder. If you hardcode that button, everyone sees it—even those who finished their work three days ago. But with conditional logic, you can tune the visibility of elements based on the data in your payload. In practice, it might look like adding a property to an action or container: {
"type": "Action.Submit",
"title": "Remind",
"isVisible": "${task.status !== 'completed'}"
}
Now, only users who still have open tasks will see the “Remind” button. Everyone else gets a cleaner, less cluttered card. Simple, but it makes a difference—especially once your organization expects personalized workflows inside Teams.
This is where cards go from being digital flyers to something closer to dynamic web apps. You’re not just dropping in strings and images; you’re letting the entire card react to real-world updates. A hiring manager might see a card with a summary of outstanding candidates, while a new employee sees a checklist of onboarding tasks—same underlying card, but the payload changes everything. And because Teams passes context about the user, the team, and sometimes even specific message threads, you can get creative about which data shows up, and when.
One demo a lot of folks find useful is watching a card update in real time as the underlying data changes. Imagine a status board where project progress bars fill up without anyone hitting Refresh, or a poll that only allows responses until the end of the week—after that, the input fields disappear, and a “Thank you for voting” message takes their place. No more one-size-fits-all notifications. Suddenly, the card matches the real workflow, not just the intent.
The trick to making all this work is keeping your logic readable and your data sources reliable. Overcomplicated bindings can make life miserable when it’s time to troubleshoot. If there’s one pattern that leads to headaches, it’s splicing together complex conditional statements for every single element. Start simple: show or hide elements based on easily understood fields, sync up what you send in your payloads and what you reference in the card’s template, and always test edge cases—like what happens if a field is missing or null. And never, ever skip mobile testing. The number of cards that break or render poorly on a phone is still way too high. Use the Adaptive Card Designer to preview your JSON and make sure it lands right on both desktop and mobile.
Here’s a pro tip that’ll save you hours: split your layout from your logic with templating. Adaptive Cards support templates, where one file describes how your card should look, and another pushes in the unique data for each user or situation. It’s cleaner, easier to maintain, and, down the line, far simpler to update. When you get a request to change a headline or add a field, you’re just updating the data or template—no need to rework the whole card. It’s the IT equivalent of decoupling the front end from the backend, and it keeps your card logic from spiraling into maintenance debt.
What you end up with is more than notifications wearing a new coat of paint. You get cards that act as true interactive panels—always personalized, actionable, and hooked into live business context. Your Teams experience grows into something that serves different needs automatically: approvals, feedback, updates, and tasks—all formatted and filtered so users only see what matters to them.
Once you see what’s possible, the last question is how to keep experimenting—pushing your cards further, validating new interactive ideas, and using Adaptive Cards to actually drive change across your Teams environment.
If you've ever posted a Teams update and wondered if anyone even saw it, Adaptive Cards offer a better way. They move beyond posters—becoming real tools for input, approvals, and personal feedback. Once you start layering buttons, logic, and data bindings, Teams can finally match the workflows you build outside meetings. It’s not about showing off a fancy card; it’s about getting real responses, kicking off backend automation, and serving useful context to each user. The more you experiment with new card features, the closer Teams gets to feeling like a workspace that adapts to your team.
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