Setting up Microsoft Teams Shifts Schedule Reminders

This article will help us to setup reminders for Shifts on Microsoft Teams using Power Automate. This will help to understand how shift reminders are triggered to shift owners a day before the shift schedules, as gentle reminders.

Before getting into implementation, we will see short introduction of Shifts app. Recently Microsoft has retired the Staffhub service, and Shift app is available as replacement and is available as an app on Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Team's Shifts App

Shifts App, as quoted on Microsoft documentations: The Shifts app in Microsoft Teams keeps Firstline Workers connected and in sync. It's built mobile first for fast and effective time management and communication for teams.

Shifts app lets users on Microsoft Teams to create necessary shift schedules, and assign/share the schedules with teams. Once the schedule is created and shared on Teams, users will be able to view the schedules on their Teams login.

• Currently, notifications are not working as expected. In my case, after sharing the schedule with a team, the notifications were not triggered to teams users. 
• The shift schedule is not currently synced up with calendars. 

Hope the above drawbacks would be addressed in the near future by Microsoft product team.

This article helps us to understand a reminder notification requirement, which I came across recently. Let us look at how to trigger reminder notifications to respective schedule owners a day before the shift schedule.

Create a necessary shift schedules and share it with teams on Microsoft Teams interface.

Microsoft Team Shifts App - Sample Shift Schedule

Office 365 SharePoint List Data - Represented as Accordion View on Power Apps

Power Apps provides multiple ways to represent data with just out of the box configurations, without writing any code. In my specific case, there is a requirement to get accordion view of list data on Power Apps. Let us understand, how this could be achieved with elements available on Power Apps.

Let us get the data from SharePoint list, and show the accordion view. The accordion view has to be created by grouping the list items.  In our case, we will show the jobs list in the accordion view, grouped under each business/technical group. The jobs list present on SharePoint data contains title and category, where category is grouping element.

After following the steps/configurations, the final accordion view will look like the following snapshot.

SharePoint list data - Accordion view with collapsible option

Let us look at the step by step approach to configure app to get the accordion experience.

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