Microsoft 365 Community Microsoft Teams, 1 Jul 2021

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From YouTube: Getting started on using Time Clock Microsoft Graph APIs to clock in and out of a shift

Description

In this 17-minute developer-focused demo, Aarthi Kumar shows the time tracking component (Time Clock APIs) in the Teams Shifts Application that provides clock in / out, timesheet edit and more capabilities and that also auto-syncs to Payroll / T&A apps like Cronos, Workday, ADP, Ceridian SAP. Call the APIs to integrate with your customer’s payroll and T&A systems using Time Clock APIs (beta). Supports CRUD operations and WebHooks. Request handling guidance in the documentation. This PnP Community demo is taken from the General Microsoft 365 Development Special Interest Group (SIG) - Bi-weekly sync call recorded on June 10, 2021.

Demo Presenter: Aarthi Kumar (Microsoft)

Supporting materials:
• Documentation - shift resource type | https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/shift?view=graph-rest-1.0
• Documentation - timecard resource type | https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/timecard?view=graph-rest-beta
• Documentation – Webhook to Shifts changes | https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/workforceintegration?view=graph-rest-1.0

Learn more:
• Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/m365pnp-videos

A

Hi everyone, my name, is arthi kumar, I'm a product manager at microsoft, for the teams shifts application, and today we're going to talk about the time clock apis that we recently released, and so before I kind of go into the apis themselves.

A

You might be wondering what is time clock and what is shifts, and so I thought I'd give you a little contact setting over there um on what that is so shifts is a um if you're not aware it's a first party scheduling and time attendance, application on teams and it's mainly catered towards frontline workers, but we also do have um you know, workers uh that uh sit at uh primarily sit at a desk, uh so I t and information workers uh tend to use it mainly for if they're you know on on call schedules, but the primary use cases are for frontline workers that work on shifts shifts is catered towards.

A

The employees empowering them to manage their schedules on the go using our self-service tools shifts is available across all of the team's uh platforms, so it's available on web desktop, but it's also available on your mobile interfaces, which is where we find most of the frontline workers where they live and then for managers. It saves them a ton of time because we're giving them a lot of autonomy um to digitize a lot of these uh workflows that they traditionally might use pen and paper or excel spreadsheets to manage their schedules.

A

A lot of times, you'd still find that in a lot of big organizations, so this just provides them an easy way to automate all of that, um the time tracking uh component, which is the time clock module within the shifts application. That's the api that we've uh we're going to be talking about today and that we have shipped that provides employees, a quick clock in and clock out capabilities. So they can talk in and out of their chefs. They can add bricks.

A

They can go back in and edit their time cards and use. All of that, and then the manager can view that and then push that to their payroll system for payroll processing and with our apis. uh We have. uh We we've got a ton of uh already available uh released graph apis for most of the scheduling for all of the scheduling capabilities.

A

The time tracking component is the last one uh that we have released recently and uh usually we find that this to be um mostly an integration with a third-party workforce management system, so you may have your customers may be working on existing systems of records such as kronos or blue yonder reflexes, sap, adp, ceridian workday. I'm just throwing out a few of the big names.

A

We do support a few connectors uh for some of these um workforce management systems, uh but and all of them are powered through the graph apis themselves um that we're gonna talk about. uh But you know this is uh uh they're they're open apis for you to be able to uh to use to your needs, and, lastly, shifts is used by over millions of users today, um so we're seeing a lot of positive uh growth in the space.

A

I wanted to kind of quickly talk through what the shifts application itself looks like uh and maybe walk through some of the um time clock scenarios that you might want to enable when you use the basically, what does an integration look like when you use the time clock apis?

A

um I won't spend a lot of time on what the integration might look like for some of the scheduling capabilities just because the focus of today's demo is on the time clock component of the shifts application itself so for managers. um I have um an image over here that shows the desktop and the mobile view they can. uh You can, you know, let's say you're using an excel spreadsheet. You can import your schedules if you're using that and then export it back out.

A

We also have the ability for you to directly build your schedules within the shifts app, um but of course we have graph apis as well, where you can import it and sync any scheduling information. If you already using it in another system of record, you can as a manager you can. Let's say you need extra shifts for the day uh that you need some employees to come in and cover you can create open shifts. uh You can also manage all of your employee requests within the application for the frontline worker.

A

You, um the the mobile interface, is a little bit more catered towards towards the front line worker um and their experience, mostly because uh you know they're on the either on the shop floor or on the um on the you know, processing lines so they're, typically on the go and they're usually on some sort of mobile interface.

A

You can view your own schedules. You know, what's upcoming, let's say you're working across multiple locations, you work for a retail store and there are multiple branches that you work across. You can see all of your shifts across those different store locations. um You can see any you know. If you want to make a few extra bucks, you can pick up extra open shifts.

A

You can manage your requests. You can request time off or uh if you want to swap your shift, you can make your shift. uh You want to swap out with another employee and make sure that you know you give up your shift, but it's also being covered by someone who can take up that shift, based on whatever skills that are required for the shift or making sure that they don't go over time.

A

uh You can do all of that within the shifts, app um and then the time clock component is um is the other part um that facilitates an employee to be able to clock in and clock out. So you can. uh You can start your. You know you can start your shift, basically clock in and clock out. You can also start a break.

A

You can start multiple breaks um and stop them, and then let's say that you forgot to you know you worked today from eight to five, but you took a a couple of short coffee breaks and you forgot to punch in for one of them.

A

You can go back in the next day or you know, even after you clock out and go back and edit your uh time cards and then eventually, once you're happy with your timesheet, you can confirm that so that the manager will then be able to process that from payroll timeclock is available on on the mobile interface, as well as on the desktop in some. uh In some industries uh they don't or even some organizations do not provide employees.

A

um You know work tools on their personal devices or they don't provide them with any shared devices, and so a lot of times. Employees need to come in uh to clock into their shift, and so there was asks on. You know. We need to support this on on desktop as well and- um and so we did recently last year shook the time clock capabilities within the the desktop and web view.

A

So what does it look like to integrate your payroll and time and attendance system, so your sap or ceridians of the world, um with shifts being the front-end application within teams where your employees would clock in and clock out and manage their time and attendance?

A

I'm going to walk you through a few uh scenarios, um things that we find most common commonly um used, but that isn't to say that you can't expand this to uh other scenarios that you see fit so um a typical scenario. You know worker um comes into their shift.

A

uh They they pull up the team's application um scroll to the shifts app within that, um and then I've highlighted over here uh the time clock component within the shifts, application, and so, let's say, you've already integrated shifts using our now our time clock apis um to your payroll system.

A

When the when the worker clocks in if you've registered to the web hook api shifts, will then automatically sync that back to the payroll system via your application. So we do support real-time synchronous, changes on or notifications on any changes that are made within shifts.

A

Similarly, let's say that um a worker goes back in and needs to edit their time card, um so they go back into the time clock module uh they'll, find the time card that they uh want to edit they'll go ahead and make all the edits, and then um all of that, so we we support for every action within the within just really but but specifically within time clock.

A

In this specific scenario, um we support um we, we support the crowd operations, but we also support those uh web hooks so that so that any changes that are made by the user in real time you'll get notified um and gets auto synced and.

B

A

In fact, we've had customers who uh waited uh for that webhook component uh to be released before they could. They could start integrating the time clock um capabilities with their payroll system.

A

Simply because you know what we've heard is that you know it's a lot of manual work for an employee to have to clock in and clock out uh in one system, and then the manager needs to keep track of what they uh clocked and dropped out um and kind of have that communication with the with the user offline um and ensure all of their timesheets are accurate and then go in and manually punch it versus um having this automated right. So there's no confusion.

A

um There's no room for human error. um I mean there's room for, I guess technical errors, but um it so. You know that that just automates it and makes everyone's life a lot easier.

A

So, like I like I mentioned, we already have a full suite of graph apis, supported for all of your shifts, scheduling, capabilities and I have a snapshot over here. I actually couldn't get the full snapshot because I had to scroll.

A

um But basically, if you go to the the graph document, um the docs page um and you look at the v1 uh version, when you scroll down to teams under teams, there will be shifts and that's basically, your repertoire of all of the shifts apis that we support and you can see all the different entities that we support and if you, if you expand on each of those you'll, see all of the different apis that we support for each of those entities and um for the time clock component of it.

A

um So just like you see, on the left hand, side shift schedule, scheduling, group so on and so forth. If you scroll down past time off, um you'll see what I show on the right hand, side, which is the time card um entity and then that that's the expanded view where you're you're seeing the time time card resource um and then all the different apis and operations that we support on that entity. So we do support.

A

um You know your basic uh crud operations, read, writes, deletes list views, but we also support specific actions that you can. You can perform on behalf of that user. So you can clock in you, can pop out start and stop a break uh and you can confirm the timesheet.

A

So I wanted to give a quick view of uh what the time card resource would look like. uh So you know I'm not going to read through all the properties, but you can kind of see um that we do support all of the all of the fields that you would see and it's basically a represent representation of what you would of what a user would see on the user interface. So um it's fully supported that way. We also on all of our apis, but I wanted to specifically call this out.

A

We do support both uh user delegated permissions as well as app permissions um and- and so this is also on the uh documentation page, uh which, if you scroll you'll, see um and for the for for the application permissions, we do require uh you to pass in a header, um and I have it at the bottom over here. um It's the ms app acts as header and uh what you would pass over.

A

There is the user id uh on behalf of whom the application is uh making this request, without which you will you will get thrown an error, and so I just wanted to make that call off. So so that's something that you don't miss and lastly, like I mentioned the web hook, capabilities.

A

uh There's a so it's it's a web hook api that you can register uh against um and it's specific to the shift application. So this is only within the shift's capabilities that you would get notified of any changes that a user makes.

A

um It's the it's called the workforce integration api, it's a bit of a confusing name, if you're not fully in, uh if you're, not aware of what a workforce workforce system is, but the name, the reason we gave. That is basically because you can register your application as an integration between two workforce systems um shifts being one and um what we would imagine that you're integrating with is another workforce management system.

B

A

Why it's called the workforce integration api um and so that this api is exclusively a web hook api? Where you can register your integration? You'll get back like a a uh integration id for for that specific instance of the integration. But let's say that you have, you know two um instances of kronos one in europe where your customers, um you know the customer- has one region in europe, one region in the u.s, and they have two different instances of chronos they're running against and they have different configurations.

A

You know the europeans, maybe don't really care about, swap requests and the u.s do, and so you can have two sets of integrations that are configured slightly differently, and so you would use the workforce integration api to register your integration twice as two separate instances, even though they're running basically on the same code, and you would just configure it a little differently and um the the supports property on the workforce integration uh api um there is so there's a there's, a lot of different values that we support.

A

um Basically, all the different entities that you can listen for changes on um and the most recent one that we have added uh is the time card uh that I've highlighted over there.

A

That is specifically the uh the value that you would use when you want to um listen for any changes that are made within the shifts app uh on the time clock module, and then I have a screenshot of um you know the uh of an example of what the call would look like from shifts when you've when you've registered with the workforce integration um four-time card. So any clock can clock out changes that a user makes. um There's there's request uh examples of what that would look like from shifts.

A

So you know um how you need to receive that that request and handle it appropriately, and I think that's all I had um I don't. I don't know where, if we're at time or if we have something.

B

For catholics, we are fine, but if there's any questions, people can ask them in a chat, and you can we can follow up on that. But let me then thank you, rt really good coverage and I like the fact that we showed some business scenarios what we can build using this and because that always helps on people understanding not just the technical api, but rather okay. What can I do with the api, which is a really really big part of that? Thank you for that.

B