Teams Adaptive Cards

Adaptive Cards are the primary rich-message surface for Microsoft Teams. Always choose the transport first, because the same card JSON is wrapped differently for bots, Workflows webhooks, and Microsoft Graph — most broken Teams cards are wrapper mistakes, not card mistakes.

Quick Decision Trees

"Should I use a card?"

Response type?
|-- Short conversational reply, <3 lines        -> text only; use $teams-message-formatting
|-- Status notification with facts/actions      -> Adaptive Card
|-- Approval, form, or data collection          -> Adaptive Card through bot/Universal Actions
|-- Search result or message extension response -> Adaptive Card
|-- Service alert to a channel                  -> Workflows webhook or notification bot card
|-- Delegated Graph message with attachment     -> Graph chatMessage card wrapper
`-- Legacy connector/MessageCard payload        -> migrate to Workflows + Adaptive Card
                                                   (O365 connectors stopped working May 2026)