Microsoft 365 Community Microsoft Teams, 25 Nov 2020

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From YouTube: Microsoft Teams and Flow - Demo

Description

In this demo, Vivek Bavishi shares how to use Microsoft Teams and Flow, including Power Automate app in Teams, trigger Flow from Teams messages and model Flows with Adaptive Cards.

Resources
New Power Automate App https://aka.ms/AAaf5x7
Trigger flow from Teams messages https://aka.ms/AAaf5x8
Model Flows with adaptive cards https://aka.ms/AAaelkt

This demo was taken from the November community call https://youtu.be/fG2_YDG5EDU

To attend the live, monthly community calls, download the series at
https://aka.ms/powerappscommunity call

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A

Just two days back, there was an announcement regarding this and that made and I had to change everything all my content because of it, because now uh power automate is more integrated within teams and I'll show you a bunch of things today on that. So so.

A

The three topics that I said we'll be covering uh one is the power, automated app and teams, um how to trigger flows from messages and teams and also I'll show some model flows, um kind of the adaptive cards, how you can use along with kind of power automate and teams together, and if we get the time I know I only have 10 minutes, but if we get a time I'll show you one of the use cases that I use in my organization and how that helps me um optimizing one of the processes.

A

So the first thing, let's jump into as you can see my screen here, it's uh the uh the flow or it's still called flow for some reason in my tenant, but I know in some and it should show power automate. But if you don't have it yet you should uh you should be able to find it from your teams.

A

Kind of this three dots here, search for power, automate or flow, and you should be able to get that app and once you get it just right, click on it and pin it so that you can use it as much as you want and it stays here on your navigation pane. So one thing that I'm going to try to do today is I'm not going to go to the browser to show anything about a flow I'll open all my flows right from here.

A

So, as you can see the home page, it shows you all the microsoft teams flows, so any flow that has a teams connector in a team section in it shows up in this section. I can always filter it to all flows, but if I just want to see the teams one it's by default, showing the teams flows.

A

So this is really good for you to kind of manage all your teams flows from teams rather than going to floor.microsoft.com.

A

Another cool thing is, you can create a flow from templates right from here so and it's not just a template very hard, but it opens the the flow and you add in details, but I'll show you one of the templates to create an approval and you'll see how easy it is to now create an approval flow right from teams.

A

So if I go to create click on approval on the categories, you have different categories of templates here and then I have a start: an approval for new documents in teams. So if I click on that, it gives me a name so I'll just option to edit the name so I'll just say demo, and it has all the connectors already. I've created the connection, so I don't need to create those. I can just click on continue and, as you can see, it asks me all these things right over here.

A

I don't have to open the floor or anything I I just choose my sharepoint site, the library name which I'll choose as documents I'll just keep it to documents. If I want to dig into a folder I could have, but I'm not going to do that here and then I'll just choose myself here to assign approval to so once I've selected these three or four inputs. I just click on, create flow and that's it. You have an approval flow now and when you add a document to that documents, folder it will run.

A

I didn't have to even go into the edit mode or anything it just runs and I'll just show you a quick example here uh yeah. So I've been doing some testing here, but basically this is the one. So so this flow ran when I had added a document on that documents folder. So if I want to, I can go back and edit it in advanced mode, but otherwise all these templates that you see here that are on 50 optimized templates that you can start using now.

A

But you just need to add a few inputs and it will create the flow for you. You don't even have to go into the editing mode to.

B

A

Of course, if you need to add some more custom stuff, you can always go into the advanced editing mode, but otherwise you need to create something simple. It's it's super easy to do it from here. So going ahead. uh Let's just look at how you can trigger flows from so this is one way I mean you can definitely create flows. You can manage flows from here, but what are the other ways that you can use teams and power automate together?

A

So if I go to um one of my channel here, I can choose one of these messages.

A

Click on three dots, click on more actions, and you can see there are two things that are that pop up, create a task and there's some other flows that I've created. So basically, I can trigger a flow from a message in teams, so I can click on create a task.

A

This will basically ask me for a subject and just say test and I'll choose a due date 19.. So this is an adaptive card that I I'll show you in a second here, how you can create it with uh with a flow.

A

If I click submit, recreate a task and that's it, I I mean it's as easy as that, and it will take a reference to the the task as well uh to the message so that I can go back and look at the tasks.

A

um So let me show you the flow that ran behind it, that we can have a quick look at that.

B

On that approvals flow, you created, who are the actual approvers.

A

I choose the approver as myself on that so.

B

Was one of your input fields.

A

Yeah, that was one of the input views yep. So the task one is this one so for the flow getting triggered from messages here, the trigger has to be for a selected message. So that's that is this one on that you have an option to edit adapter card, so this is really cool. You can click on an edit adapter card and I it opens up the adaptive card designer for me and if you have not used this yet adaptive cards, I'll definitely recommend you to check this out.

A

You can go to adaptivecards.io to check out this designer and some other samples as well, but I created a simple one with us and text input and a date input so that I can add a task. Subject, add a task view date and hit submit.

A

So I can add more fields here I can edit the whole adapter card, but let me show you what happens next. I have a create a task action uh which creates an outlook task, so subject is from that adaptive card. um So it gives me all the the inputs that I created in the adaptive card to use in the subsequent action. So I can see all those things here.

A

The other things it gives me is the link to message. So in my body of the task, I have added a link to message which will basically, if I click on that task, it will give me a link to open the message in teams so that I have a reference to go back and look at it. I can also include the message content itself. So if you're wondering why can't I just copy the team's message into the adaptive card, it will be there but it'll be there in this task body contact.

A

Another best practice would be to add another adaptive card and give a confirmation to the user, because right now, when I create submitted it, it didn't give me anything, but you could add another step there to to to give a confirmation to the user that the adaptive card was created. So I know I have. Maybe how am I doing on the time time.

B

I think you got about two left: okay,.

A

uh So I'll show you another one. Actually I wanted to so. There are some samples in here, so these references are there in the have added these in the resources, there are a bunch of model flows. Adaptive cards for like candidate feedback, lead collection, all those kind of things. So you can use these as well in your flows. If you wanted to either start from a message- or from I mean you could have any trigger here, but these are easy to use adaptive cards. You don't have to create the whole code yourself.

A

You can just copy paste from here and create it. So let me see if I can show that quickly. uh No, there was any elite collection, so we will run this. Let me just quickly check yep, so this one also can run from a message, so I've just used the trigger as message, so only if I can get it quickly.

A

Click on the three dots, more actions- lead collection flow. So here it asks me all these details.

A

I can add these and hit submit and well I mean right now, I'm adding it as a contact in my cds or database database, but you can add this to anywhere in your flow.

A

um So the last thing that I want to show was one of the flows that I use on a regular basis we create in our crm in our company.

A

We add new accounts almost every day, that's linked to our article, but one thing that we try to do is we add the latter altitude and long view information for these accounts, but if they don't have a I mean so, based on the address, we try to find that lat long and then we surface that in a canvas app for our sales people so that they can find nearby accounts.

A

So every time a new account is added, it triggers a flow to find the lat long base using a binx map api. If the confidence is low, it sends me a notification on teams like this one. As you can see, it shows me the account address and it also I've added an option to to show the google map kind of image so that I can kind of confirm if the location is right or not.

A

So it sends in a notification to the account manager on that account, so basically the owner of the account, and they can confirm that okay either approve it or reject it. uh They can also open the account and crm. So it's these are like urls uh to open the account in the model driven app. So this is another use case.

A

I just wanted to show how we are using teams with power automate so guys I covered everything, and I hope this helps in kind of understanding what all these teams and offer you together, and you should be able to use it more in more different ways. Thank.

B

You that was really nice there's a lot of chat about actionable cards inside of there in the chat. I expect you might get some follow-up questions there too. I think it opened up a lot of eyes on how you can extend those flows and using those cards really well done, thanks again for showing that to us, vivek.