Identifying Microsoft Teams and the Classic SharePoint Team Site associations with Office 365 Groups: View on PowerApps

Let us see how to create a simple dashboard to identify if Office 365 group has been associated with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint modern team sites.

Office 365 Groups are created with various aspects. Microsoft Teams and Modern SharePoint team sites are created with/from Office 365 groups. Office 365 group is an object on Azure active directory, which will basically a collection of users.

PLEASE NOTE: Every Team created on Microsoft Teams, should have Team Site created and associated. This article only demonstrates the group and teams association, or group and sites association. The site which is not created manually/separately using group is not considered as association here, in this requirement/scenario.

To get the simple view for business users, Power Apps could be leveraged with custom connectors. There are other ways to achieve the same functionality like staging data on SharePoint with power automate and then representing the information on client apps, but I use the simple and straight forward to achieve the requirement.

Microsoft Graph API - Identify group associations

Office 365 groups data is exposed via Microsoft Graph APIs. The key parameters to be leveraged in the Graph API for this use case will be,

• Group display Name 
• ResourceProvisioningOptions - if MS team is created for the group, this property will have a value “Team” 
• CreationOptions – If modern team site has been created with the group, this property will have a value “SPSiteLanguage:1033” 

The following snapshot shows the graph API response showing if the group has Microsoft Teams and SharePoint modern team site associations.

MS Graph API - representing the associations

PowerApps - App to Show Microsoft Teams members using MS Graph API

Microsoft PowerApps helps business/teams in building quick OOB apps. This post helps understanding, how to get access to Microsoft Teams data from PowerApps using custom connectors.

Why there is a need for custom connector? Microsoft has introduced lot of connectors on PowerApps interface to get access to the data. The Office 365 connectors included in Microsoft PowerApps are office 365 users, mails, etc. The custom connectors are created for the data, which is not exposed as connectors readily. The custom connectors are common for both Flow and PowerApps.

We are leveraging Microsoft Graph API as data sources for this app, and to be connected as custom connectors on Microsoft PowerApps. 

The following snapshot shows the end result, showing data from MS Teams on MS PowerApps using MS Graph API.

Demo App to Show MS Teams Data

Let us look at step by step approach for achieving the functionality.

Surveys on Microsoft Teams with notifications using Microsoft Forms and Microsoft Flow

The objective of this article is to demonstrate the power of Microsoft services available to create survey/quiz and automate processes without using any code.

Let us first create a quiz/survey on Microsoft Form, and publish it on Microsoft Teams. Login to Microsoft Forms and create a new quiz with appropriate points. Click on Share to get the response link to the created quiz. This link is posted on Microsoft Teams to get responses (This is explained at the later point of this article).

Creating Quiz/Survey on Microsoft Forms

Analyse and Enable Users to Adopt to Microsoft Teams early

As we are marching towards the transition phase from Skype to Microsoft Teams, let us look how you could enable/advice users to adopt to new technology early. The article helps you understand how you could automate the process of identifying users who are not of Microsoft Teams system, and sending them reminders to adopt to the latest technology. The approach explained here is one way of identifying and enabling users to adopt to Teams sooner. There are multiple ways to enable such adoptions.

Scenario

Let us first see how technically you could identify users and notify users on the usage. For this process, we will leverage Azure Logic Apps to create automated flows to identify the user pattern (usage and reports). The usage reports will be available on the Office 365 user activity reports. To access and manipulate the user patterns, we could leverage Microsoft Graph with necessary permissions.

As an example, we will consider logged in date as a parameter for this process. We will initially analyse the Microsoft team’s usage statistics on Office 365 report center and look for user logged in activity. If there are no activity present for any user, we will trigger an automated email for earlier adoption. Let us create a flow to achieve the entire process.

The below picture depicts the high level flow. In the below section, we will see each and every action in detail.

Azure Logic Apps Flow - To Identify Users not using Teams and Send Automated Mails

Automate Microsoft Teams Channel Creation Process with No-Code Configurations

The channels creation could be automated with the help of Microsoft Flow actions, and that is without writing any custom code. Microsoft Teams itself could be leveraged as medium for necessary user approvals.

As the Skype is sooner going to be replaced with Microsoft Teams, the necessary processes should be setup wherever required to ease the user and admin relationships.

Why do you need to setup such process? Let us consider a scenario, where your organization needs a process to create and setup channels in your Microsoft Teams tenant. Giving permissions for users/groups to create channels will end up with so much of test groups created. Instead, an approval process could be set to automate this process, to get necessary approvals for creating channels.

Configured Components

The implementation idea is going to very simple, with SharePoint and Microsoft Flow being used to automate this process. The following tools are being used for this demonstration.

• Microsoft Teams – Medium where this logic being applied 
• SharePoint list - an intermediate store for holding new channel registration information.
• Microsoft Flow – Configured steps to automate, 
• Send out necessary notifications to admins for approvals
• Based on approval decisions, create the necessary channels under respective team
• Send out an notification on channel creation

SharePoint/Teams Configuration

Set up the preliminary steps on SharePoint, for storing the requests.

• Setup a SharePoint list to get input of channel details form users. The input could be team name and channel name.
• Configure the list on any of the default teams channel tab.

The overall process is depicted in this picture.

Automate the Channel Creation Process - with no-code steps

Restrict Permissions on Editing SharePoint SPFx Property Pane Configurations

Let us look, how the SPFx web part property configurations changes can be controlled by user permissions.

Let us assume a scenario, where administrators can only change the SPFx web part property values.

The following steps helps achieving the requirement.

• The permissions of logged in user details could be identified using the context/page context.
• While rendering the property pane configurations, the current user permissions could be checked.
• So the properties could be enabled based on the permissions, i.e., properties will be editable, if user has admin access to the site.

This could be achieved, using the WebpartContext property and SPPermission class.

The object is initialized, using the current user permission details, and then site permission is checked for user.
    let permission = new SPPermission(this.context.pageContext.web.permissions.value);
    let isAdmin = permission.hasPermission(SPPermission.manageWeb);

Using Azure Devops & Github to Automate SPFx solution Packaging Processes for MS Teams and SharePoint

In this article, we will understand how SPFx solutions built for MS Teams and SharePoint portals, could be automatically packaged and uploaded into app catalog portals. This automation is achieved with the help of Azure Devops and Github version control systems. Using devops ensures us the continuous delivery of changes onto the target platforms.

  

Remember, we will be targeting the webparts of this solution for SharePoint and as tabs for Microsoft Teams. Let us use github repositories as a version control tool for storing the solution. You will understand, how github could be easily integrated with Azure Devops for automating the packaging processes in this article. 

Create the SPFx solution, that is compatible for SharePoint online portals. The SPFx solution (available on the github https://github.com/nakkeerann/globalspfxsoln) contains, the azure-pipeline configuration file template for setting up the build pipelines. The following snapshot shows the configurations for creating SPFx solution. 

Push the code into Github using the git commands. For example, below commands are used for my repository.

git initgit add .git commit -m "first commit"git remote add origin https://github.com/nakkeerann/globalspfxsoln.gitgit push -f origin master

Install the Azure Pipelines to your Github account https://github.com/marketplace/azure-pipelines . Select the repositories required to install pipelines. Authorize azure pipelines. 

Using Webhooks for Posting SharePoint Items into MS Teams with Flows

In my previous post, you would have seen posting the items into Microsoft Teams Channels as conversations using Microsoft Flows. The respective channels will be chosen by selecting the Teams service in the flow configurations.

In this post, let us try to achieve similar kind of functionality, but with a little different approach. As we are all aware that Microsoft Teams will support incoming webhook requests, let us try configuring the webhook URLs.

Webhook:

What is webhook? The external system which posts messages whenever data is available using the endpoint APIs.

How the webhook will help in Microsoft Teams? Take for an example, you are using Teams as a collaboration platform. You need to post data from multiple systems to the team channels for better collaboration. The webhook URL can be generated for a channel and can be shared with other external systems. Whenever the external system has the data for posting, the data will be sent to the teams using the API generated.

Working with Microsoft Teams from SharePoint Using Graph API

Let us see how to work with Microsoft teams from SharePoint programmatically using Graph APIs.

Microsoft has provided the Graph APIs to work with Microsoft Teams and its channels. Though, it is in a beta version. The graph APIs can be triggered from any of the portals. Here, let us only look at triggering the graph APIs from the SharePoint portals.

For example, the following graph API is used to get all the teams which you are part of.

• https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/me/joinedTeams

Application with Microsoft Teams Permissions 

First, you need to register the application in Microsoft dev portal, where you need to provide the necessary permissions for accessing the Microsoft Teams data from any portal.

• Login to the Microsoft applications portal https://apps.dev.microsoft.com
• Provide the name
• Copy the Application ID generated. (It will be used as client ID in the SharePoint code in the below section)
• Add the platform as web and then provide the redirect URL. In our sample, you need to provide the SharePoint page URL you will be using to test the functionality.
• In the Microsoft Graph Permissions, add User.ReadWrite.All and Group.ReadWrite.All permissions to the both the permissions (delegated and applications permissions).
• Then save and close the application.

Navigate to the SharePoint page, where you want to test the functionality. Add a content editor web part with jquery script reference.

Acquire Access Token​​ and Hit Microsoft Teams Graph API

Access Token to be acquired for getting the Microsoft Teams data. The request token will be generated by redirect URL. The redirect URL to be built with the help of authentication server URL, domain details, response type, client ID (generated above), resource URL (Graph API URL) and redirect URI (SharePoint Page where the functionality is tested). In the following script file, required logic to get the access token is written.

Once the page is redirected, the access token will be available in the redirected URL. We need to extract the token and the ajax call is made to the graph API using the access token.

Create a custom JavaScript file (teams.js) with the script content available in the below section.

Test

Test the functionality by hitting the SharePoint page URL. The snapshot shows the Microsoft Teams.

Post SharePoint Items into MS Teams using MS Flows

Posting SharePoint Items as Conversations in Microsoft Teams

Here let us see how to push the items from SharePoint into the Microsoft Teams Channels as conversations using Microsoft Flows. #MicrosoftTeams #MicrosoftFlow

This is simple, straight forward and out of the box approach. Microsoft Flow eases our job with out of the box configuration.

Consider a business scenario, whenever an item is created in the SharePoint repository, it has to be pushed into Microsoft Team’s channel for discussions. The following steps will helps you in configuring the flow out of the box.

Note: Assuming, the connections for teams and SharePoint services are being available in the Microsoft Flow portal. If not already created, you will be prompted to provide the account details when configuring the SharePoint or the Microsoft Teams components in the below steps. You can provide different or the same account details. The accounts to the SharePoint or Microsoft teams can also be configured on the Microsoft Flows portal by navigating to the connections component.

Steps Involved:

• Create a list in the SharePoint site.
• Create a channel in the Microsoft teams.
• Login to the Microsoft flows.
• Select the SharePoint service à "when an item is created" template.
• Provide the site details and list details.
• Click on New Step à Add an action option.
• Search for Microsoft teams and select it.
• Select Post Message option.
• From the drop down select the Microsoft Teams ID, Channel ID, and Message to be posted.
• Here, message to be posted can be customized. Click on the message text box and select the SharePoint item field by adding dynamic content. (picture shown below)

• Save the flow.

Test the Flow:

• Login to the SharePoint site and navigate to the list.
• Create an Item à Provide some data and save it.
• Login to the Microsoft Teams and navigate to the channel provided in the configuration.
• You can see the item created in the SharePoint list, posted as a conversation in the Team’s channel.