This article is for IT and security reviewers who must approve the Cinode Chat Assistant for Microsoft Teams before it is enabled. It lists every permission the Cinode Teams app requests, what each permission is used for, which administrator roles are needed, where data travels, what Cinode stores, and how to revoke access.

For what the assistant does for end users, read Meet the Chat Assistant.

The Cinode Teams app is a bot application published by Cinode AB. Cinode owns and operates one multi-tenant bot registration that serves all customers. You do not create your own bot registration or app secret.

The app package you upload contains the manifest. It contains no executable code. All processing happens in Cinode's own service.

These are the identifying values in the current app package. Reviewers usually want both IDs, because the Teams app ID and the bot application ID are different objects.

The app declares no tabs, no message extensions, no connectors, and no meeting extensions. In the manifest it explicitly sets calling, video, and file support to false, so it cannot start calls, join meetings, or upload and download files. The only device permission it requests is notifications.

Enabling the Chat Assistant needs several administrator roles, each for one step. No role is granted to Cinode; these are roles your own staff use during setup.

The Cinode Teams app requests resource-specific consent (RSC) permissions. RSC permissions are scoped to the single team, channel, or chat where the app is installed. They do not apply tenant-wide. If the app is installed in one team, it has no access to any other team.

This table lists every RSC permission in the manifest and what the assistant uses it for.

What Cinode does with those messages is the part that matters for your review, so it is stated precisely here. The assistant processes a message only in a conversation it has already been brought into: a direct message, or a thread where somebody @-mentioned it. Once it has been mentioned in a thread, it follows that thread and may answer later messages in it without a new mention, which is what makes follow-up questions work. Messages in channels and threads where nobody has mentioned it are not processed and are not sent to the language model.

If your security policy does not allow the app to receive channel messages at all, install it for personal (1:1) use only and do not add it to any team or channel. The assistant then works in direct messages, and these two permissions never apply to your shared channels.

Separately from the RSC permissions above, setup includes a Microsoft sign-in in the Cinode configuration wizard. This sign-in identifies your Microsoft 365 tenant, so that Cinode routes messages to the correct organisation.

Beyond that sign-in, one permission is optional:

You grant this consent yourself, in your own tenant, and you can withdraw it at any time. Review the exact permission list on the Microsoft consent screen before you approve it, and contact Cinode Support if anything shown there is not explained in this article.

Because the app declares no permissions beyond those listed above, it has no access to the following, in Teams or anywhere else in Microsoft 365:

Understanding the data path helps you judge what leaves your tenant. A message reaches Cinode through the standard Microsoft Bot Framework path, then Cinode processes it and replies.

An answer is always posted back into the conversation the question came from. The assistant cannot redirect an answer to a different channel or a different person. Scheduled alerts and reminders are separate from answers, and they go only to the destination the person who created the alert chose.

Cinode stores a small amount of state so that alerts, reminders, and preferences keep working between conversations. What is stored is limited to the following:

Cinode does not keep your Teams conversations as a stored transcript. When the assistant needs the thread to answer a follow-up question, it reads that thread from Teams at the moment it answers.

Authorisation is the part of the design most security reviews ask about, so it works on two independent checks.

First, identity comes only from the verified Microsoft account attached to the message, never from text inside the message. Nobody can type "act as the CEO" and be treated as a different person.

Second, every answer is filtered through that person's own Cinode permission level, their managed teams, and their managed customers. If a person cannot see something in Cinode, the assistant will not show it to them in Teams either. Sensitive employment fields are withheld from the assistant entirely. Asking the assistant in a shared channel does not widen anyone's access, because the answer is scoped to the person who asked.

If a person has no Cinode account at all, the assistant tells them it cannot find their account and answers nothing.

You keep full control of the app in your own tenant and can reverse the installation at any time. Access can be limited or removed in four independent ways.

Disabling the integration in Cinode Flows also stops all processing, independently of anything you change in Microsoft 365.