Telegram is a powerful, free, encrypted messaging system that works on practically all computing devices and mobiles. Telegram is not made by us. We have no connection with that company. If you plan to use Telegram, please install it on your devices by following the instructions at https://telegram.org
We have implemented a nifty feature when you are collaborating with others on the Internet. As you save the collaboration class assigned to you; TAD will silently send a notification to a special Telegram Channel. Provided that the project you are working on has set two special Project Properties
TEL_BOT_TOK and TEL_CHANNEL
One is called “TEL_BOT_TOK” That contains the Token for a bot that helps TAD transport the message to Telegram.
The other Project Property that is needed is called “TEL_CHANNEL” That contains the ID of the channel where the message would appear.
Both are explained below.
Creating a Telegram Bot
You can easily create a Bot for your office at Telegram, by “chatting” with a special bot there called botfather Once your office BOT has been created, it will give you a token. It is that token which you need to provide for this Project Property.
This is explained in a Microsoft Azure documention page here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-service-channel-connect-telegram?view=azure-bot-service-4.0 (Of course you do not need Azure, so you can skip the last part of those instructions which refer to Azure. You just need to read that article only upto the point where you get the BOT token)
Creating a Telegram Channel
Now you would also need a channel into which all these notifications will go. It is super easy to create a Telegram channel for you and other collaborators. Note that unlike Telegram groups a Telegram Channel is only readonly.
Only the creator (admin) of the channel; and a BOT (See below) enrolled into the same channel can send messges into the channel – others can just read.
Read about channels here: https://telegram.org/faq_channels
It is strongly suggested that you create the channel Private so that others do not get to see the activities going on there. It is up to you whether you want to create a channel for each collaborative project separately, or use the same channel for all your collaborations. Possibly making a new channel for each collaborative project is tidier.
If the channel is a private one (strongly recommended) then you must share the channel invite link to all the other collaborators; else they will not see the notification messages
Once you create a channel, you would need to know its ID. This can be done easily by simply typing a hello into your channel, and then forward that message to a special Telegram BOT called @getidsbot … That Bot will send a message that reveals the channel id for you. You need to see this part of the message, which says “Origin chat” whose type is: channel. The ID woud usually start with a minus sign.
💬 Origin chat
├ id: -111111111111
├ title: SomeChannel
└ type: channel
In the above example; the value of the Project Property named TEL_CHANNEL would be -111111111111
YOUR Bot must be subscribed to the channel
There is ONE last important step remaining: You must make the BOT you had created earlier (whose BOT token you had used) as a subscriber to your channel. If that is NOT done, then the BOT will not be able to send messages into that channel.
That's it! Enjoy!!
Once these two special properties (TEL_BOT_TOK) and (TEL_CHANNEL) are set in your TAD project; then whenever any collaborators saves his/her part of the work; a notification would be automagically sent to the Telegram channel of that project. That will help others refresh that branch which had got saved in their local copy of the TAD project they were collaborating on.
Read and understand how TAD does collaboration too.