Normally, such integration would be easily accomplished by leveraging Custom Integrations on the Meta-Workplace side and then using Page Webhook to connect to Amazon Lex. Your bot at Amazon Lex need to have Channel Integration configured to integrate with Facebook Messenger. In theory (as well as in practise at the time of writing) it all can be done through UI (admin panel) in a few clicks... however...
Your custom integration going to be flagged by Facebook/Meta-Workplace compliance team and they will shut it down as non-compliant. This is what they initially told me about it:
Date: 6 Jun 2022, 16:41
These integration has not passed our review process and has been removed from Workplace.
As of December 16th, 2019, third party developers will no longer be permitted to offer applications as “Custom Integrations”. Instead, developers will be required to offer these applications as Installable Applications though our App Directory. This requires developers to complete an application review process, which we have implemented to reinforce the security of our platform.
In order to better protect our customers and their data, we require Third Party Integrations to go through the Workplace app review process. A detailed description of this process can be found here
I was not acting as "third party", since I was developing it internally, for our own internal use. Moreover, I found this resource where it is clearly stated that custom in-house integrations are perfectly ok, as long as they are not offred as PaaS or SaaS solution to anyone else.
So, I decided to just go through that approval process anyway, since they would not badge and would not re-enable my integration. However, that approval process didn't work out either. In the end this is what they have replied:
Date: 10 Jun 2022, 14:24
Amazon Lex is a chatbot platform offered by Amazon as part of AWS. As this service is not "in a run-time environment exclusively under [the customer's] control (as per the Workplace Platform Terms: https://work.workplace.com/legal/WorkplacePlatformPolicy ), the integration needs to happen through a third party app which is under the control of the provider of the service, in this case, Amazon.
As a partnerships team, we have invited Amazon to participate in this programme, but as yet they have declined to do so. As a result, no customer can integrate Workplace directly with Amazon Lex, and the enforcement action being experienced here is a direct result of that policy.
The only way that Amazon Lex will be permitted on the Workplace platform is when the Amazon Lex team decide to create a third party app, as per our developer documentation. (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/third-party-apps/introduction). We'd be happy to hear from the Lex team about this. Unfortunately, there is no action that the customer can take directly to enable this Amazon Lex integration. I'd suggest that they raise the issue with their Amazon support team.
So, there you go...
Having Amazon Lex team to go through all that approvals and integrations just doesn't make any sense to me personally. If I can hook-up a bot via webhook and develop a logic myself whilst leveraging Lex AI - why would Lex team even need to be involved?! They already have done pretty outstanding work and they even developed a way to connect Lex to Facebook Messenger with few simple clicks.
At the time of writing you can setup custom integration at Meta/Workplace with page webhook to Lex's callback URL and it will work, but expect your integration to be removed pretty quick though. This is by far the most frustrating thing - you can still do it, and you can send few messages and even get intelligent responses back from Lex, but it all destined to die when they track you down ...
AWS OFFICIALUpdated 23 days ago
